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Sometimes when monkey Where monkey infants die, their mothers continue to groom and hold the tiny corpses for days, weeks or months, even as babies’ bodies decompose or mummify. This distressing behavior is more prevalent than previously thought, according to a new study.
Researchers recently conducted the first analysis to compare more than 400 documented cases of primate mothers interacting with their dead infants, collecting examples from more than a century of sightings spanning 50 primate species. The scientists then created “the largest database of primate mothers’ responses to the death of their infants,” they wrote in a new study.
They also found that factors such as the age of mother and child, and the suddenness of the child’s death could shape a mother’s actions towards her child after her death.
Related: In photos: a macaque mother takes care of the mummified corpse of her daughter
Scientists have published descriptions of the corpses of children carrying primates since the beginning of the 20th century; one of the first accounts dates from 1915, appearing in the Journal of Animal Behaviorsaid lead study author Elisa Fernández-Fueyo, a primatologist and graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL) in the UK.
In the 1915 study, primatologist and psychologist Robert Yerkes “reported the case of a captive rhesus macaque mother who carried her dead child for five weeks,” and he suggested in the study that the mother’s behavior was a manifestation of maternal instinct, Fernández-Fueyo told Live Science in an email.
For the new study, the authors analyzed reports dating from 1915 to 2020 of monkeys, great apes, bushbabies and lemurs who took care of their deceased children. About 80% of the species they examined exhibited cadaver-carrying behavior. However, this activity has been most commonly reported in great apes – our closest primate relatives – and Old World monkeys. These two groups of primates “also carry their babies after death for the longest periods of time,” Fernández-Fueyo said.
For example, in March 2020, researchers described 12 cases of baboon mothers in the wild carrying their dead babies for 10 days. In 2017, a female macaque (a kind of Old World monkey) in an Italian animal park carried her dead child for four weeks, eventually cannibalizing the mummified corpse. And in 2003, after two baby chimpanzees died of respiratory illnesses, their mothers carried the babies’ corpses for months, Previously reported live science.
Express grief
Lemurs, which diverged from other primate groups over 60 million years ago, were an exception in the new analysis, and they were not carrying dead infants, Fernández-Fueyo said. However, mother lemurs “always express their grief through other behaviors, like returning to the corpse or calling mother-infant contact,” Fernández-Fueyo said.
In species that were reluctant to abandon their dead infants, the transport of corpses may occur because the cause of the baby’s death is not visibly obvious (for example, when the baby dies from an illness rather than a disease. traumatic injury), or when the mother is young and has less direct experience of death than an older woman might have, according to the study.
And the length of time the women carried the corpses could indicate the strength of the emotional bond between mother and child, the authors suggested.
“The mother-child bond is known to be emotionally regulated in primates – for example, mother’s separation from living children causes anxiety in the mother,” Fernández-Fueyo said. In other words, separation anxiety could be a trigger for the transport of cadavers from infants to primates, and this could explain why the corpses of very young unweaned infants were generally carried longer than older babies, scientists reported.
In fact, some primate mothers who carried their dead babies would cry out alarm bells – a sign of stress – if they lost the corpse or if it was taken from them, “suggesting that carrying the corpse may be a way to cope. stress related to stress.with defeat, ”said Fernández-Fueyo. “More data is needed to further develop our understanding of this, and how primate death-related behaviors can not only be explained by connections but also by associated emotions – and, thus, resemble human grief. “
The results were published on September 15 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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