Candid camera reactions from wild apes • Earth.com

Candid camera reactions from wild apes

03-14-2019


Today’s Video of the Day from Ammie Kalan shows the candid responses of wild apes as they noticed cameras traps in the middle of the forest.

Ammie Kalan is a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

“Our goal was to see how chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas react to unfamiliar objects in the wild, mostly to determine if the presence of research equipment, like camera traps, has any effect on their behavior and if there were any differences among the three great apes,” said Kalan. “We were specifically surprised by the differences in reactions we observed between the chimps and bonobos. Since they’re sister species and share a lot of the same genetic makeup, we expected them to react similarly to the camera, but this wasn’t the case.”

The study is published in the journal Current Biology.

By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer

Video Credit: Ammie Kalan

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