Manipulative Monkeys: The Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal

by Susan Perry, Joseph H. Manson (Contributor)

With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other's shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another's noses. They often nurse--but sometimes kill--each other's offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic account of the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, their world is as complex, ritualistic, and structured as any society. Manipulative Monkeys takes us into a Costa Rican forest teeming with simian drama, where since 1990 primatologists Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson have followed the lives of four generations of capuchins. What the authors describe is behavior as entertaining--and occasionally as alarming--as it is the competition and cooperation, the jockeying for position and status, the peaceful years under an alpha male devolving into bloody chaos, and the complex traditions passed from one generation to the next. Interspersed with their observations of the monkeys' lives are the authors' colorful tales of the challenges of tropical fieldwork--a mixture so rich that by the book's end we know what it is to be a wild capuchin monkey or a field primatologist. And we are left with a clear sense of the importance of these endangered monkeys for understanding human behavioral evolution.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Popular Science, Animals, Nature

368 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2008

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dr Susan Perry is an amazing primatology researcher! This book is an excellent introduction into the world of primatological research, and it's written to be easily accessible and understandable to anyone interested in primate behavior. It's filled with scientific and anecdotal information on the history of the research carried out by Dr Perry and her team on the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal that began in 1990.

[Alexa Duchesneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously, I adore this book. I read it whenever I’m missing the forest, the monkeys and the lifestyle. This is one of the longest periods I’ve gone through without being in the field, and I needed this book to make me feel like I took a trip home 💕 I also do think other people would love this book, though they may get lost by the cast of characters and intricacies of data collection

[Georgia Rainey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read it cover to cover for class so trust it’s gonna count towards my reading goal.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The white-faced capuchins (Cebus capuchinus) are in many respects at the opposite end of the spectrum, both in terms of descent and behavior, to the muriqui monkeys I read about in my last book; the capuchins (there are at least seven other species) are the most similar of New World Monkeys to the general pattern of the Old World Monkeys in their social organization, with philopatric females and emigrating males, and a polygynous mating structure with a single dominant alpha male. They also have the largest brains relative to body size outside the apes; and this is one of the things that attracted Perry and her husband/co-author to study them, since they evolved large brain size independently of our direct lineage and therefore may cast some light on what ecological and behavioral factors led to our own large brains.

Her studies at Lomas Barbudal, in Costa Rica, are among the longest and most complete for any primate species, and were designed to investigate various aspects of the monkey's lives with special attention to various theoretical models of behavioral evolution and possible cultural differences (i.e. intra-species population differences due to social learning rather than genetics.) The book was extremely interesting.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book written by my boss when I lived in Costa Rica, you all can learn about the actual monkeys (and people, ugh) I worked with!