Keeping Down With the Homo Sapiens

I was sitting around for the first half of November, wondering what I was going to write about; nothing was leaping out at me when suddenly I received a text from my son Drew. It was a link to an article describing the fashion preferences of chimpanzees. Just so we’re clear, a chimpanzee is not a monkey: it’s an ape. Almost all monkeys have tails: apes do not. The only reason this matters is because I was going to use “Monkey See: Monkey Do” as the title for this post.

Good thing I checked out the ape-monkey thing. The last thing you want to do is tick off a chimp by calling it a monkey. A chimp could easily rip your arm clean off if you so much as looked at it sideways. Ditto hippopotamuses. Tail or not, never trust a hippo, even if it looks like it is peacefully meditating. It will crush you like a potato chip if you disturb it.

And since you asked, I would also recommend giving Komodo Dragons a wide berth, especially if you happen to resemble a deer.

It seems I’m getting a bit off topic here. This is supposed to be about fashion trends amongst chimps. It turns out that chimpanzees are a lot like humans when it comes to fashion. (Not surprising, since we share about 99% of our DNA with them.)

This is how it works: say that you have a kid who is in the habit of wearing regular jeans with straight legs and a belt around his waist.

If you just now actually spoke that phrase out loud: “that you have a kid who is in the habit of wearing regular jeans with straight legs and a belt around his waist” then I suggest you stop reading this post immediately. You are probably suggestible and very easily hypnotized.

Anyway, one day your kid comes back from “The Mall” wearing sagging jeans: jeans that are buckled somewhere just below the butt. Your kid may now be shuffling along like he is in a chain gang but that’s not my point.

My point is that there is a high probability that your kid saw ANOTHER kid wearing sagging jeans and Sneetch-like, decided to join the club.

Chimps are no different. In 2010, a chimp named Julie, in the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia, decided to stick a blade of grass in her ear and leave it dangling for no apparent reason. Shortly after that, seven other chimps started doing the same thing.

Julie died in 2013, but the trend didn’t die with her. A new study was commissioned around 2023 and into 2024 and revealed that two of the original seven copycat chimps (not to mix metaphors) were still festooning their ears with stalks of grass.

But wait! There’s more. Sometime prior to 2025, a different group of chimps who had never seen the other group, picked up the grass-blade-in-the-auditory-canal trick. And some other out-of-the-box chimp thinkers used small sticks instead of blades of grass.

Remember that these two groups of chimps had never overlapped. However, what they did have in common was that they had been exposed to the same caretakers who had been in the habit of sometimes using blades of grass or match sticks to clean their ears when working at the sanctuary. The chimps evidently mimicked what they saw.

Now enter Juma The Innovator, a male chimp who took a notion to insert a blade of grass into his NBA, aka Nethermost Bodily Aperture, and leave it there. Apparently this Anal Probing Propensity (APP for short) spread rapidly to other members of the group. Who knows where Juma got that idea? I doubt that the caretakers were wandering around with blades of grass sticking out of their butts but you never know.

Primatologist Julie Teichroeb at the University of Toronto (Motto: We need more Primatologists) made this observation regarding the grass blade insertions: “It just looks like an earring, you know, like a fashionable way to present yourself.”

If so, those are the weirdest earrings I’ve ever seen. More like antennae if you ask me.

Teichroeb then moved on to the NBA insertions and opined that it’s possible that the chimps were doing it to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. (Chimps spend a lot of time peering at each other’s backsides.) She noted that females, in particular, display a swelling on their rear ends to indicate when they’re receptive to a little hanky panky. Sort of like the neon “OPEN” signs you see in store windows.

Professor Teichroeb says that because the Chimfunshi chimps are fed by humans, they may have more free time to develop social trends. 

“We think of, like silly, little pointless cultural ideas like auto theft, returning stuff to Work Wearhouse three years after it was purchased, and wearing a pineapple on your head, that spread amongst people,” she said.

“Learning that animals have these kinds of same, pointless little behaviours that become fads and become viral, I think it really shows how closely related we are to them, how much kinship we actually share. Or it may be that there are a lot of aliens disguised as runway models among us. Time will tell.”

Disturbingly, Jake Brooker, a psychologist and great ape researcher at Durham University in England said that the chimpanzee behaviour reminded him of the behaviour of orcas (aka Killer Whales) first spotted in the 1980’s wearing salmon on their heads like hats. This behaviour has resurfaced-no pun intended- and scientists are still scratching their heads about what it all means.

The director of the University of British Columbia’s Marine Mammal Research Unit, Andrew Trites, saw no obvious reason for the behaviour and speculated that it might be to impress other pod members or “maybe they just like the smell of dead fish.”

Blog posts, like dead fish, shouldn’t linger on so I’m winding this up but I’ll leave you with this old adage: “He who weareth a pineapple on his head shalt not frequenteth the chimpanzee enclosure.”