The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Brown Capuchin Monkey - Issue Thirteen
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The Tantalus Monkey, photo from Christian ArtusoThe Brown Capuchin Monkey is a New World primate who lives in the northern Amazon rainforest of the Guyanas, Venezuela and Brazil. They are also found in eastern Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, including the upper Andean Magdalena valley in Colombia, and a population was established in the Republic of "Trinidad and Tobago". The capuchin has a head-body length of 32 to 57 centimetres and a weight of 1.9 to 4.8 kilograms and mostly eats fruit, insects, larvae, eggs, young birds, frogs, lizards, and even bats. They are also known to chase cats. They can be found in many different kinds of environment, including moist tropical and subtropical forest, dry forest, and disturbed or secondary forest. They are social, and form groups of 8 to 15 individuals that are led by an alpha male. Important natural enemies of the capuchin are large birds of prey who they are so afraid of that they even become alarmed when a harmless bird flies over. The capuchin rubs urine on its hands and feet in order to attract mates and reduce stress. They also use stones and sticks as tools. One population of this species uses stones as a tool to open hard nuts. The monkey lays the nut on a large, flat rock or fallen tree, hammering the nut with a suitable stone until the nut cracks. The anvil rock is often pock-marked with hollows as a result of repeated use. They have also been observed using containers to hold water, using sticks (to dig nuts, to dip for syrup, and to catch ants), using sponges to absorb juice, using stones as hammer and chisel to penetrate a barrier, and using stones as hammer and anvil to crack nuts. Some of these tasks seem relatively simple by cognitive standards, but others, like cracking nuts with hammer and anvil, are only exceeded in complexity by chimpanzees and some humans.

   


Swisher Sweets - James Valvis An insight into another person's life is rare; more commonly, we struggle as with strangers

The Market - Ken Poyner Business proposals take little into account except the bottom line, but we rarely explore the implications of that blindness

The Flames of Freedom - Iftekhar Sayeed The hot and steamy intrigues of the tropics can have far-reaching effects. (Note: this is the first installment of a two part story)

Homophobia - Paul Hostovsky Gender politics is not the lonely business that it seems to be, at first glance at least

Sniff This! - Raud Kennedy Often inversions of society's power struggles do little more than mirror our social problems, but as we find out in this story, there exist other points of view

Fantasy Football and the Mistake of Unity - C.D. Carter The many scandals which surround a presidential election cannot compare to what we are facing in the near future

Try a Little Tenderness: Lessons from Bolivia - Diane Lefer The proposal may seem too simple to work, but all of us who have tried a bit of compassion as versus anger know its power

Juries - Jessica Morey-Collins A telling portrait of our justice system, in the many forms of its jury members

When Autism Had No Name - Donal Mahoney A rather sweet portrait that will have you wondering about this almost ubiquitous diagnosis

Four Fifteen - Tracy Hauser We talk about how disconnected our society is in the same breath that we exclaim about the anonymity of serial killers

International Relations - Joseph Engar This paean to the internet reaches even into the afterlife to explain how machinery and psychology intersect

The Old Ward - Frederick Pollack Those wavering bodies, half in life, are easily forgotten, unless we look at them more closely

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