Howler monkeys navigate using adaptable mental maps, just like humans

A black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra)

Shutterstock / Ethan Daniels

Black howler monkeys transfer by their surroundings using mental maps that they modify and adapt because the panorama adjustments – a ability beforehand seen solely in humans.

In 2016, Miguel de Guinea at Oxford Brookes University, UK, spent a year in Palenque National Park, Mexico, monitoring teams of black howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra) to watch how the primates traverse the advanced rainforest panorama.

Tagging the monkeys with GPS monitoring technology would have been too invasive, so de Guinea and a gaggle of volunteers needed to observe them on foot. “It was a bit exhausting at times,” he says. Tracking the monkeys steadily required the researchers to cross rivers and to climb to the pinnacles of historic Mayan temples. But the outcomes of their endeavours have been shocking.

“We found that the monkeys follow certain routes,” says de Guinea, “but they structure and combine those routes in an efficient, human-like way.”

While most animals transfer by an surroundings semi-randomly or by intuition, humans are completely different. We are likely to observe acquainted routes encoded in mental maps. We even have a spatial sense of how places are organized within the panorama. This implies that if an impediment blocks a well-recognized path, we will change course – maybe briefly switching to a different acquainted route heading in a distinct path – to navigate the impediment and nonetheless attain our desired vacation spot. As de Guinea’s group studied the black howler monkeys, they realised the primates do that too.

For instance, the monkeys within the research would at all times strategy favorite fruit bushes from the identical path. What’s extra, whereas the monkeys would hardly ever deviate from established routes, they’d no drawback doing so if, as an illustration, a tree forming a part of a route had fallen down. In such instances, the monkeys shortly labored out join the damaged route to a different acquainted route, so they might navigate the impediment and nonetheless attain their goal.

They may additionally join sure routes finish to finish to be able to journey lengthy distances, or they might take shortcuts from one route to a different. The manner the monkeys would bounce from one route to a different means that they’ve some idea of how these routes relate to one another in bodily space, say the researchers.

In different phrases, the monkeys can simply amend their route-based view of the world with some information of path and geography, a lot like humans do. “It was a big effort,” says de Guinea, “but it was worth it to understand the fascinating cognitive skills that black howler monkeys demonstrate in the wild.”

Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.242430


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