BET YER GOIN' FISHIN' ALL OF THE TIME . . .

Yer baby's goin' fishin', too
You can bet your life
Your sweet wife's
Gonna catch more fish than you . . .

A barrel full of monkeys? Shootin' fish in a barrel? Macques in Indonesia have been found fishing.

Indonesia. Long-Tailed Macaques Spotted Catching Fish.

By Lauren Miura

Long-tailed macaques eat mostly fruit ?- but when resources are scarce, they've been known to get creative with their cuisine. When living near humans, they raid gardens and learn to beg for food. Sometimes they even steal food from inside houses.

Now, for the first time, scientists have observed long-tailed macaques fishing with their bare hands.

Nature Conservancy scientist Erik Meijaard and other researchers are the first to scientifically document this rare conduct. In a recent article published in the International Journal of Primatology, Meijaard and his coauthors say that, while conducting field studies in Indonesia, they have repeatedly observed long-tailed macaques catching fish from fast-flowing rivers.

"This is interesting behavior and some of the first observations of primates catching fish," says Meijaard, the Conservancy's senior ecologist in Indonesia.
A Very Hungry Monkey?

In the first sighting back in 1998, researchers describe seeing five female macaques sitting alongside the Ketambe River in the Indonesian province of North Sumatra.

The macaques' eyes scanned the water. After about three minutes, one of the macaques reached into the river. With her bare hands, she pulled out a fish and quickly ate it. Other macaques watched her ?- and one even tried unsuccessfully to catch a fish herself.

"Clearly it may raise the question of whether there is some sort of learning going on," says Meijaard. "If perhaps a couple of generations back, one primate caught a fish and it was subsequently copied."

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This caught my eye for another reason than simply that these macaques were fishing. It was the comment that this might be learned behavior. On the large northern island of Japan, Hokkaido, there are bands of macaques which the Japanese have been studying for many of these monkeys generations. Macaques there were seen to bask in pools from local hot springs during the cold, snowy weather of northern Japan, and it was speculated that this were learned behavior which had become common among them.



One band of macaques has been fed for a long time by scientists so that they will remain in the same locale where they can be minutely observed. The scientists leave yams and rice in the husk for them. One young female (at that time, unmated) began "washing" her yams in the surf (the local was at the seaside), and taking handfuls of unhusked rice to tide pools, where she could rinse off the sand from the beach. She would throw the unhusked rice into a pool, and it would float, while the sand from the beach which had stuck to the rice would sink--effectively rinsing the sand from the rice before she ate it. It was noted that other young macaques who were, as she was, as yet unmated, would copy her behavior. Older, mated macaques did not imitate the behavior, and would pointedly ignore her, turning their backs so that they would not see this "non-traditional" behavior.

Naturally i was interested when i saw this story about the "fishing monkeys," with its speculation that this could be learned behavior.