Chimpanzee Santino nonchalantly picks up an apple from a water moat, 15 seconds before throwing the two stones in his left hand at zoo visitors. PLOS ONE, TOMAS PERSSON
Cold and calculating chimp
In 2009, a chimpanzee named Santino at Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, made global headlines for his surprisingly premeditated attacks on zoo visitors: Santino calmly created small piles of stones in the morning before the zoo opened, then later used those stockpiles to pelt zoo visitors who appeared to agitate him—strong evidence that nonhuman animals could plan ahead. But skeptics argued that Santino wasn’t necessarily planning ahead, and was instead repeating previously learned responses to the zoo visitors via a cognitively simpler process called associative learning, ScienceNOW reported.
But now, Santino is back and making his intentions even more clear. In a new PLoS ONE study, published May 9, researchers at the University of Lund in Sweden describe how Santino has ...
