By Ella Davies, Reporter,
BBC Nature
Woolly monkeys
can identify human hunters by their behaviour, research has revealed.
Poeppig's
woolly monkeys live in the rainforests of Ecuador ,
Peru and Brazil but are
vulnerable to hunting by the local Amazonian people.
Scientists
investigating how the monkeys respond to threats found that they acted
differently depending on the behaviour of humans in the forest.
The results
are published in the online journal PLoS One.
Woolly monkeys
are named for their thick covering of fur and are found in the rainforests of South America .
According to
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, all four species are
hunted for food.
To understand
how the monkeys responded to this threat, researchers from Imperial College ,
London , UK
travelled to Ecuador
to study the behaviour of Poeppig's woolly monkeys.
"We
worked with wild woolly monkeys [and] presented them with a person behaving as
a hunter, gatherer or researcher at two sites with differing hunting
pressure," explained PhD student Sarah Papworth, co-author of the paper.
Read on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/22128404
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!