Other Animal (But Non-Buggy) Crackers

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Simians and Water

Documented: Certain tribes of Japanese macaques learned to wash their food in the sea.

In 1953, a Japanese macaque apparently discovered independently that she could wash sand off her food before eating it. The rest of her social group gradually learned the practice. Later, the same inventive macaque learned to use seawater to sift the sand out of wheat grains, with similar results.

Cite: Kawai, M. Newly-acquired pre-cultural behavior of the natural troop of Japanese monkeys on Koshima Islet. Primates, 6 (1965), 1-30.

There's a related myth about the "hundredth monkey" effect, the story being that the knowledge of how to wash food somehow spread to other monkeys with no contact after a certain "critical mass" of monkeys had learned it in the usual way. This is complete bunk.

In Dispute: The University of Toronto had a research subject called "Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey", who breathed through a regulator while swimming and was monitored by a computer (to study the effects of different gas mixtures); she died when a field-service engineer interfered with her hardware.

The "Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey" story was widely vectored by the Jargon File (and its print version, the New Hacker's Dictionary), in the entry for "scratch monkey". At this writing, the Jargon File claims the incident actually happened, at Toronto in 1979 or 1980, and that the sysadmin on duty was actually interviewed. The account doesn't provide enough details to track down an independent account, however.

Current University of Toronto sysadmins have expressed skepticism. For one thing, in almost all versions of the story, including the ostensibly documented one in the Jargon File, the computer is a VAX; at the time a VAX would have been a very unusual platform for this kind of data acquisition (they used PDP-11s). The Toronto zoology department has never been licensed to work with primates; the only section of the university that could have done experiments of this nature was the School of Medicine. Investigation continues.

References:

• AFU post on food-washing macaques.
• http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/scratch-monkey.html