13/07/2025
CBC - A group of chimpanzees in Zambia have resurrected an old fashion trend with a surprising new twist.
Fifteen years after a female chimpanzee named Julie first stuck a blade of grass into her ear and started a hot new craze among her cohort at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage, an entirely new group of chimps at the refuge have started doing the same thing.
"We were really shocked that this had happened again," Jake Brooker, a psychologist and great apes researcher at Durham University in England, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
"We were even more shocked that they were doing their own spin on this by also inserting the grass and sticks in a different or***ce."
The chimps, he says, have been putting blades of grass and sticks into their ears and anuses, and simply letting them dangle there for no apparent reason.
"Like with all cultures, things change over time and they get refined and new quirks and new traditions pop up," he said.
Chimpanzee influencers
In this case, the team traced the "new quirk" to a male chimp named Juma, who seems to have originated the grass-in-butt variation.
From there, the study shows, it spread rapidly to most of his groupmates within a week.
The same thing happened to Julie's group. She started putting grass in her ear in 2010, and pretty soon, seven other chimps were doing the same. Much like humans, Brooker says the chimps appear to be willing to suffer for the sake of fashion.
And as for Juma's grass-in-butt variation?
Teichroeb says it's possible they're doing it to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. Females, in particular, she noted, display a swelling on their rear ends to indicate when they're receptive to a little hanky panky.
"They spend a lot of time looking at each other's butts," she said. "So it's kind of not surprising maybe that they were innovating this way to sort of decorate their butts."
