A white-faced capuchin monkey used a rock to shatter a panel of its glass enclosure at a zoo in China last week. Watch the video below. (Stock Photo: Morgan Paul / 500px / Getty Images)
Monkeys have been known to use tools to crack open nuts and grind food, but visitors at a Chinese zoo found out last week that the smart animals also use them for attempted escapes.
A Colombian white-faced capuchin monkey, a resident at the Zhenzhou Zoo in China’s Henan province, was captured August 20 on tourist video using a small rock to shatter an enclosure wall made of tempered glass, according to Chinese online news outlet The Paper.
In the video shared to social media, and which quickly went viral, visitors can be heard laughing at the monkey raising the stone above its head and then striking the glass. But laughs turned into gasps of shock when the capuchin succeeds in fracturing the glass panel on his second try.
The monkey, which also seemed surprised, skittered away as the glass shattered.
Zoo officials told The Paper that no guests were injured as a result of the incident, the Epoch Times reported. The monkey was also unharmed.
According to Shanghaiist, zoo staff told reporters that this particular monkey was an “expert” at using tools, regularly utilizing them to open walnuts while other white-faced capuchin monkeys try to bite right in.
In 2017, scientists observed white-faced capuchin monkeys in Jicaron Island at Panama’s Coiba National Park using stones almost half their body weight as hammers to smash open shellfish, nuts, and other foods.
The finding was described in a paper published on the preprint website bioRxiv.
Using motion-detector cameras, the scientists captured the monkeys at Jicaron Island collecting large, heavy cobbles from streams and shorelines and carrying them to broad, flat rocks or logs that could be used as “anvils,” the Washington Post reported in a 2018 article.
“Standing on two feet, using their tails to anchor themselves against the ground or a nearby tree, they raised their ‘hammers’ high above their heads and then smashed them down on nuts, crabs, snails and other foods — cracking open hard shells to reveal a tasty morsel,” the article read.
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