At this tourist haven, a monkey mafia will steal your stuff and sell it back for food
It’s one of the oldest rackets in the book: stealing someone’s stuff and then selling it back to them.
And four groups of monkeys in Indonesia have learned how to execute this shakedown with just about anything they can get their hands on, according to a new study.
Tourists to the Uluwatu Temple on the island of Bali have recounted anecdotes for years now about the behavior of local macaques monkeys, who often grab valuables when humans aren’t looking and then drop them once they are offered food, according to New Scientist.
But no scientist had ever taken the time to study and analyze this behavior before Fany Brotcorne, a primatologist at the University of Liège in Belgium, and her team.
In a study published in the academic journal “Primates,” Brotcorne and her fellow researchers detailed the results of four months of study of the local monkey population.
What the researchers found were four distinct groups of monkeys on the island near the temple. The two that most commonly interacted with tourists had the highest rates of theft. Overall, over the course of four months there were 201 instances of theft and re-sale, or more than 1.5 per day. The monkeys most commonly stole glasses, but also took hats, shoes, phones, cameras and even the researchers’ pens and notes, according to The Independent.
But what most interested the researchers was the fact that the monkeys’ behavior wasn’t instinctive or natural: It was learned and passed on from generation to generation, and different groups and individuals were more likely to embrace the technique, according to Gizmodo. It’s also unique to this one location in the world.
As it turns, however, these four crime families have company. According to New Scientist, a fifth group of macaques have recently moved into the area and have started to learn the “bartering” trick, so it seems as though a turf war is imminent.
This story was originally published June 1, 2017 at 10:32 PM with the headline "At this tourist haven, a monkey mafia will steal your stuff and sell it back for food."