Male and female macaques in a Balinese sanctuary commonly use stone tools to masturbate, possibly because they have more leisure time than wild primates
Life
12 August 2022
Long-tailed macaques appear to use stone tools for pleasure Shuttestock/fiz_zero
Male and female long-tailed macaques in Bali, Indonesia, frequently use stone tools as sex toys to pleasure themselves, according to a multi-year observational study.
Camilla Cenni at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and her colleagues noticed the behaviour while studying free-ranging long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) that live in and around the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in central Bali.
Between 2016 and 2019, they gathered video footage capturing hundreds of examples of males and females rubbing or tapping stones on their …