I'm still trying to figure out how to best divide up my term paper from last semester about the evolution of hunting behavior in primates and hominids, but one thing that I learned was that a number of living primates will eat meat or catch prey if given the opportunity to do so. Chimpanzees have taken meat-eating to a more organized level than every other living primate except our own species (although behaviors associated with hunting may be used in raids on desirable plant food resources), but baboons frequently take animal prey, too. The narration is a little over-the-top (as is the slow-mo playback), but the baboon in the video below the fold definitely took advantage of a situation that provided him with a tasty flamingo;
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Besides the savanna baboons and chimpanzees, are there any other anthropoid primates that will hunt large vertebrate prey? I won't be surprised if mandrills have been recorded snatching duiker, or if bonobo won't resist the occasional colobus. Besides these, I've read of orangutans will eat slow loris and rats.
It's a little interesting that the capuchins, for all their intelligence and cognitive skills relative to the other New World monkeys, also appear to have developed similar tastes for meat (in their case group hunting of squirrels and coati, apparently).
Hai; I guess I should really convert my term paper, then, because I cover those issues (if only briefly) in it. The use of the word "hunting" is tricky, but many primates eat meat. From what I was able to glean from the literature, madrills have been seen to eat duiker and two orangutans were once seen eating a gibbon (although how they acquired the carcass was not seen). Bonobos have been known to eat meat as well, although I'd have to look back at the paper to tell you precisely what.
I mention the habits of capuchins in the paper too, notably their raids on nests of baby coatis. In terms of lemurs, it's much more irregular and opportunistic but it does happen. There are probably more events witnessed than recorded in the literature, but (as I argue in my paper) binocular vision and grasping hands are two good exaptations in the process of seeing, chasing, capturing, and consuming prey. If I'm right, then potential to hunt (behaviorally speaking) goes all the way back to some of the earliest primates that ate insects, as insectivory involves hunting behaviors, too. My hypothesis, then, was that our ancestors around the time of the hominid-chimp split were catching small prey in the forests, the acquisition of larger prey (as well as active scavenging) requiring something of a shift in behaviors due to changing prey animals and ecology.
This area of Kenya, in the EA. Rift north of Nairobi, is the only place known where baboons eat flamingos. It is said to be a trait practiced by a small number of individuals, and invented fairly recently, but I'm not too sure of that.
But of course baboons do go after "large" prey in a number of other areas as well.
By the way, baby chimps are in the size range for baboons to eat. But at Gombe, where the two are often together (especially at feeding stations) my understanding is that young chimps dominate the baboons because the chimps know how to pick up a branch and wave it around as a display, and that freaks out the baboons, even the big adults.
That's a very strange clip. The baboon goes blundering into the crowd, they panic and flee, and then the kill-shot (run forward, back, and forward again) has a single bird just standing there as if drugged. Then back to the original camera angle (with a very different background) and the baboon has a seemingly larger bird. Not that I doubt the behavior occurs, but that looked like a drive-the-lemmings-over-the-cliff setup to me.
Sven: There are two kinds of nature shots (on film). The kind that are set up and look like they are set up, and the kind that are set up and don't look like they are set up.