TIL: Male Rhesus Macaques Pay To Watch Porn

Ok, ok, I admit it! The title is a bit misleading. They don't pay to watch porn, or at least the hardcore kind. 

But, they probably would as in one experiment they glad-fully paid to just view the faces and bottoms of " high-status " females... Which reminds of my early years on the internet, when all I had was a 56k modem. Those were the days! Slow internet and a lack of free porn sites made you appreciate the smalls things in life! Kids get everything so easy these days! 

But we are not here to talk about my early days on the internet! Not that much has changed since...

We are here to talk about a really cool experiment by Michael Platt and Robert Deaner from the Duke University, where they explored the viewing habits of male rhesus monkeys.

During the test, the monkeys had the option to look in one out of two directions. If a monkey looked to one direction it would get a squirt of cherry juice.  But if it looked to the other, it would get a slightly larger or smaller squirt along with an image to look at. 

In the latter case, the size of the squirt varied in order to establish a method of "payment". Images shown included:

• The ass of a female Macaque
• Faces of higher-status monkeys from both sexes, with a smaller squirt 
• Faces of lower-status monkeys from both sexe,s with a more generous squirt 

And surprise surprise!  The male Macaques acted like pigs and were willing to pay to have a look at all those juicy bottoms. But let's be honest, who can resist this?

The monkeys were shown a similar looking booty (credit, CC-BY)

The results were quite consistent. The male monkeys were willing to pay something extra, again and again to look at that hot booty! They also seemed to have a preference for high status monkeys, although they didn't seem to have a clear preference for sex. And of course, they required payment to view low-ranking monkeys'!

On a serious note, the study did provide some insight on the behavior of rhesus macaques:

This study demonstrates that monkeys assess visual information by its social value and provides the first experimental evidence that they spontaneously discriminate between images of others based on the social rank or classification of individuals. [source]

Ok, that was a fun and interesting post. But not as funny as this clumsy seal:

And definitely not as interesting as this assassin bug that wears its victims' carcasses as camouflage:

Oh, yeah. Here's a link to the paper if you want to learn more. No academic access required :)

See ya tommorow!