Pete Ross
speaker
4,645 appearances
35 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 5d ago
Pete Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 35 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 8.
Appearances
While some humans struggle to get along, a new study has shown surprising friendships being formed between different species.
The team at the University of Oxford found some pretty remarkable examples of animals that might normally be tempted to shun or even eat each other, choosing to be friends.
The study was led by Dr Cyril Grunter.
He spoke to Ben Wright.
I think it all started when I was visiting a zoo in China.
It was about 20 years ago, and I was watching the gibbons...
And I noticed that there was one gibbon who was carefully holding a little mouse in her hand and she was caressing the mouse.
Then later on, when I was doing fieldwork in China for my PhD, I was studying a group of monkeys in the forest.
And then I saw little monkeys jumping on the backs of domestic pigs.
And then I started to realise that this behaviour is actually more common than I thought.
So we tried to get more information about this.
And to our big surprise, we found more than 430 cases of primates interacting in a friendly way with other species.
And there were even a few cases where primates would adopt a member of a different species.
Well, take me through some of the most surprising encounters that you came across.
In the Americas we found one case where a capuchin monkey adopted a little marmoset monkey.
These are different species, they belong to different groups of primates and normally they would not interact socially with each other.
Or there was a case of a macaque monkey who made friends with a chicken.
Presumably, that's because the macaque monkey was lonely and he was looking for a social partner.
That's probably one of the reasons why this behavior is quite common in captive situations or in a zoo environment when individuals don't have a play partner, for example.
And what does that tell us about the emotional life of the animals and the species you've been looking at?
Showing 741–760 of 4,645 · page 38 of 233
← Previous
Next →