Oliver Conway

A seven-year study in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula found they hang out in different social groups and share insider knowledge about where to find the best fruit trees.

I heard more from ecologist Matthew Silk.

These spider monkeys, they live in groups, but they don't spend all of their time together.

And so each of them has different kind of core ranges in the forest.

And so encounters and knows about different fruit trees, which are their main kind of source of food.

They will form these kind of subgroups and they often will follow each other to fruit trees that particular individuals know about.

And so what we were really interested in was understanding the structure of these groups and how they pull their kind of collective knowledge of all the fruit trees within their group home range.

So they will often follow different monkeys and form different kind of subgroupings depending on who knows about which fruit trees have food available right now.

So say there's one monkey who's found a particularly abundant fruit tree.

They're joined by some others who have never been there.

And then they in turn can pass that information on to others.

Yes.

And so this is often why these kind of monkey groups and potentially groups of other animals kind of have central areas that the whole group might use and kind of overlap their ranges so that they have opportunities to share this knowledge and kind of have this complementary knowledge through the group.

And is this quite a surprising finding?

And how did you track them all?

And so this study was conducted by collaborators of mine in Mexico, and they largely conducted observations of the monkeys.

So followed them through the jungle and recorded where they were and which other monkeys they were with.

And what does this tell us overall about how animals in the wild cooperate?

So that's a really interesting question.

I think it suggests that in these kind of groups where you're consistently interacting with the same individuals, there can be real advantages to kind of sharing or pooling this information and being able to potentially gain from your group mates in one situation and provide knowledge or information to them further down the line, especially when groups kind of stay together for a long period of time or potentially are grouped with their relatives as well.