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These Monkeys Survived a Deadly Outbreak, Then Started Acting a Lot Like Humans

Macaques exposed to a deadly outbreak became more cautious about contaminated food, even though the virus wasn’t foodborne.

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Monkeys, they’re just like us! Yes, we share a ton of genes, but socially, researchers recently found monkeys from groups that lived through a deadly outbreak became much more wary of tainted food afterward. Now you’re starting to see why Taco Bell is still trying to recover from that tainted lettuce scare.

As The New York Times described them, they’re basically “germaphobe monkeys,” an apt nickname for the Japanese macaques observed in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

When a virus tore through a South Texas macaque sanctuary, three out of four monkey groups watched their neighbors suffer and die from a disease spread through bites and scratches. Once the epidemic faded, cognitive scientists from the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment,........

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