In retrospect, it seems obvious. If you want to make a movie about apes, let them film it.
That’s the thinking behind Betsy Herrelko’s Chimpcam Project. Herrelko is a candidate for a PhD in primate behavior at the University of Stirling in the UK. As part of her studies, she lent a ruggedized video camera to a group of eleven chimps living in the Edinburgh Zoo.
The result is a kind of higher primate reality show collaborative effort–chimpanzee cinematographers with human editors.
And while chimps have the intellect and the opposable thumbs to use lots of tools, it’s unlikely that they understood that the camera captured images that they could later replay.
Still, if you don’t have high demands for the artistic vision of your film crew, it could be interesting to see the world from the point of view of another hominid.
You can tune in to the show tomorrow, on BBC Two.
Image Credit: [doug88888, flickr.com]
Thanks for the heads up on a fascinating experiment by a young scientist. As you said, the chimps may not understand the outcome but the article did bring to mind a recent paper by Frans deWaal and Jennifer J. Pokorny. It was published in PNAS in December and titled “Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs”. Frans deWaal is one of my favorite scientists, a respected primatologist, and author of “Age of Empathy”.
The PNAS paper describes an extensive experiment examining the highly developed capacity for face recognition in primates. They asked “Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs?” The answer: Yes! “These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.