At the Uluwatu temple in Bali, monkeys mean business. The long-tailed macaques that roam the old site are notorious for stealing careless tourists and holding on to their belongings until food is offered as payment. Counterfeit money.
Researchers have found that they are also skilled at judging what victims value most and using this information to maximize their profit.
Shrewd macaques prefer to focus on items that people are more likely to exchange for food, such as electronics, rather than low-tourist items, such as hair bags or empty camera bags, said Dr. Jean-Baptiste Leca , associate professor of departmental psychology at Lethbridge University in Canada and lead author of the study.
Mobile phones, wallets and goggles are among the high-value properties that the monkeys are aiming to steal. “These monkeys have become experts captured by absent-minded tourists who have not listened to the temple staff’s suggestions to keep the valuables inside zip handbags tied tightly around their necks. and the back, ”said Leca.
After spending more than 273 days filming interactions between the animals and the temple visitors, researchers found that the macaques would want better rewards – such as more food – for higher value products.
Negotiations between a monkey robber, a tourist and a temple worker often took several minutes. The maximum time before an item was returned was 25 minutes, including 17 minutes of compromise. For lower value items, monkeys were more likely to complete successful partying sessions by accepting a smaller prize.
Unlike many previous studies that have examined similar behaviors, the macaques at Uluwatu, a Hindu temple, are cheap animals and have not been observed in a laboratory setting.
Such behavior is learned by the monkeys throughout adolescence, up to the age of four, according to the research, which was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Gambling Research Institute Alberta (AGRI) and published in the Philosophical Acts of the Royal Society.
Theft and robbery are a way to expose cultural information to monkeys, Leca said. “These behaviors are socially learned and have been maintained over generations of monkeys for at least 30 years in this population.”
While temple workers at Uluwatu are on hand to facilitate monkey-tourism friendships, animal management is a challenge in many other regions of the world. Sea monkeys are notorious for causing trouble all over India – eating farmers’ crops, looting homes in towns and cities, and even moving a health worker and making off with blood samples from coronavirus tests.
There are concerns that, in many areas, monkeys have become more aggressive as the pandemic has left them with little to eat. In Thailand, officials began sterilizing monkeys in Lopburi, a city famous for its macaque population, last year. There is a lack of tourists during the pandemic on the hungry animals, and increasingly difficult to live together.