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A Bar Drink Called the Spider Monkey?

7/9/2013

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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff  http://www.amcostarica.com/

There may not yet be a drunken monkey on the bar menu, but there is a spider monkey, a  drink made with creme de banana, Kahlua and ice cream.

But this is about real drunken monkeys, the kind that are presumed to lurch through the forest after eating certain fermenting fruits.

A University of California at Berkeley professor has advanced what is being called the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis in which he suggests that humans are genetically disposed to ethanol.  Fruit, particularly in the tropics, frequently ferments and produces ethanol, a  type of drinking alcohol.

The professor, Robert Dudley, outlined his  ideas in a 2004 academic article and a 2005 book.

But no one has really  discussed the topic with monkeys.

The health benefits of low-level  alcohol consumption are consistent with an ancient and potentially adaptive  exposure to this common, psychoactive substance, suggests the Smithsonian  Tropical Research Institute. The institute is where another California professor and a graduate student are testing this hypothesis.

The institute  identified her as Christina Campbell, associate professor of anthropology at  California State University Northridge.
She has been studying spider monkeys  since 1996 and will be checking the alcohol content of Spondias mombin, a  mango relative extremely important in the monkeys’ diet, said the  institute.

They will be in the field attempting to get samples of the fruit and from the monkeys for more than a year, the institute  said.


Dudley has  said via the academic literature that understanding the primate's attraction to  alcohol might be important to understanding human abuse of liquor.

Frank  Buck, the famous early 20th century animal collector, has reported that natives  in Asia used to capture powerful adult orangutans by making available in the  jungle large tubs of alcohol. The orangutan quickly gulped down the drink and  collapsed into a drunken sleep, thus making capture easy.

Primates have  been eating fermented fruit for 40 million years, said the Smithsonian. That  means ingesting alcohol may give some kind of evolutionary advantage to the  drinker. That's a good excuse, anyway.


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    Picture
    In the jungle with the monkeys.

    Michele Gawenka 

       Jane Goodall has always been my hero, and working with primates an aspiration.  Africa wasn't in the cards the summer I turned 16, when my parents offered to send me to volunteer,  and there was only one class (in physical anthro-pology) when I wanted to study primatology in college.  
         Decades later my husband and I retired in Costa Rica, and this is our journey with spider (and howler) monkeys. 

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