You just can’t trust a male, study of female monkeys shows

FEMALE monkeys are reluctant to follow the example of males even when they would obviously benefit from doing so, research has found.

A study by St Andrews University established that even when males demonstrate superior methods of obtaining food, females would rather mimic each other’s techniques because of an innate distrust of the opposite sex.

The behaviour, which the researchers said echoes some human traits, is rooted in the tendency of male monkeys to roam between groups.

This leads females to believe that males have poor local knowledge because they move around so much.

By contrast, male monkeys are happy to learn from whichever sex appears to be the more effective in a given situation, the study found.

Prof Andrew Whiten, of the school of psychology and neuroscience at St Andrews, said: “The explanation for the sex difference may be that, for females, the important thing is to maintain close bonds with the other females as they spend their whole lives in the same group.”

The experiment, published in the journal Current Biology, involved vervet monkeys and a box of fruit that could be opened at either end to extract a piece of apple. Researchers ensured that the females were trained to get the apple from one end and the males to get apple from the other end.

However, the researchers arranged it so the males got five times more food than the females.

The team found that males showed a significant tendency to copy the successful males but females in the group stuck to copying the females, despite their relatively lower success.