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  • From: "carrie mclaren" <brooklynite282 AT gmail.com>
  • To: monkeywire AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [monkeywire] Female spider monkey adopts rat as offspring in Mexican zoo
  • Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:42:28 -0400

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/219457,female-spider-monkey-adopts-rat-as-offspring-in-mexican-zoo.html

Female spider monkey adopts rat as offspring in Mexican zoo

Posted : Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:48:00 GMT

Mexico City - A female spider monkey has adopted as its offspring a
Syrian rat at a zoo in the eastern Mexican city of Veracruz, in a
behaviour that experts have termed a "psychological maternity" derived
from hormonal disorders, Mexican media reported Wednesday. Photographs
published in the daily La Jornada show the monkey named Pancha with
the little rat in its arms. The rat left the place in the zoo where it
had been living to move to the area reserved for monkeys.

Pancha does not only hold the rat but also feeds it and picks off
parasites on the rat. The relationship has become a sensation at the
Miguel Angel de Quevedo zoo, some 400 kilometres east of Mexico City.

Zoo director Rafael Mariano Torres was quoted in Veracruz media as
saying that visitors first discovered the phenomenon on Sunday, when
they saw Pancha holding the rat on her lap.



  • [monkeywire] Female spider monkey adopts rat as offspring in Mexican zoo, carrie mclaren, 07/16/2008

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