Chimp Devises Increasingly Complex Attacks Against Zoo Visitors

And so the ape uprising has begun.

Researchers discovered that a male chimp at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden named Santino has been devising increasingly complex attacks against zoo visitors:

At first Santino was famous for throwing rocks and other projectiles at visitors who annoyed him. Now he has improved his technique, which requires spontaneous innovation for future deception. Researcher Mathias Osvath, lead author of a paper about Santino in PLoS ONE, explained what the clever chimp did:
"After a visitor group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor's section, and immediately after that he put stones under it," Osvath said.

"He also appeared to have placed projectiles behind, just before he went in after the hay. After this, he sat down beside the hay and waited. When the visitors came back, he waited until they were close by and, without any preceding display, he threw stones at the crowd." [...]

The calculated surprise attacks on visitors demonstrate very advanced thinking usually only associated with humans.

Link


According to some intelligence evolved as a need for deception and deception-detection. (See for example; The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deception and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers).
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