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A new study suggests monkeys can identify snakes by their scales, and know to fear them, even when those scales aren’t on a snake.
Published in the journal Scientific Reports in November, the study pitted a trio of Japanese monkeys – Pero, Ume and Shiba – against a battery of tests designed to measure their reaction time.
In each experiment, study author Nobuyuki Kawai presented the monkeys with a grid of nine black-and-white images of animals. Initial tests challenged the monkeys to pick out a single snake from eight harmless salamanders, and vice versa — a task they performed both quickly and nearly without mistakes, the study found.
The monkeys showed an “immediate response to images of snakes but not to images of salamanders, implying a specific fear of snakes,” a release announcing the …
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