Friday, March 14, 2008

My Favorite Paragraph of the Week, Complete with Monkeys!


Apropos of exactly nothing, I read a paragraph this week that had everything, and I mean everything -- monkeys, leopard suits, alarm shouts, and a disrobing scientist -- that you could want in a paragraph. Here it is:

"To study alarm-calling behavior, I once dressed up as a leopard and approached a group of sooty mangabeys," recalled psychologist and primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "The monkeys detected me, got very agitated, alarm-called at high rates, and a number of males approached in the low canopy ... aggressively displaying their large canines. At this point I was glad to be able to change species (by taking off my costume) and reveal myself. They looked at me with puzzlement, and then ran away silently. It felt good to be a human!"

I mean...sooty mangabeys! It doesn't get better than this! This amazing account is from the LiveScience.com article "Monkeys Shout Complex Thoughts" and you can read the whole thing on their great website, plus you can subscribe and get their daily newsletter. Plus I agree with Zuberbuhler -- it feels great to be a human when you can read something wonderful like that paragraph!

1 comment:

Jane said...

Without question, the cutest Nose-Post ever. It feels good to be Flaming Nose fan when I read a funny item like this. I think we should always be prepared to ponder non-TV news at all times. I was going to write a post about the new Robot on the Space Station and robots in general. There was a study that said nursing home residents benefitted just as much from robot dogs as from real dogs. Well, I know when my GPS car robot Lizzie talks to me, I don't feel so alone in a traffic jam!