Even Apes Are Now Using Dating Apps
It's hard to find a date in the city, even when you're an ape at the zoo.
So to help match orangutans with potential mates, researchers in the Netherlands are trotting out dating apps that allow the apes to swipe right on their top picks.
Seriously -- we're not monkeying (!) around.
The user-friendliness of simple dating apps makes them so easy to use, monkeys (um, apes) can do it. (These witty one-liners write themselves, I swear.)
Apeldoorn researchers recently launched an experiment with a few lucky orangutans. In the Tinder-like dating game, apes swipe through pictures of prospective ape boyfriends and girlfriends and decide which ones they're into. They even MATCH just like Tinder.
The research is designed to analyze the emotional responses of apes to get them to get down with their bad selves.
The goal of the program is to figure out an ape's mate preference to increase the likeliness of a successful match during mating season. More matches mean more BABY APES. I just died from this level of cuteness.
The biggest hurdle so far is finding touchscreens that can survive the frustrations of the dating app process; one we all know far too well. Soon after the experiment kicked off, one ape lady called Samboja smashed the tablet displaying the dudes.
I love the idea of a monkey finding love on a dating app. This is the cutest thing I have ever mentally visualized. And baby apes, y'all!
ORANGUTANS and bonobos are using Tinder style dating apps to fix-up some rumpy-pumpy.
A Dutch zoo is banking on boosting the bonking chances of a female orangutan by letting her choose a preferred fella on a touchscreen.
A four-year experiment called “Tinder for orangutans” is now underway in the Apenheul primate park in Apeldoorn.
Samboja, an 11-year-old female, browses through pictures of possible partners from an international great ape breeding programme.
The aim is to learn about female orangutans hook-up, Thomas Bionda, a behavioural biologist at the zoo, told Dutch broadcaster NOS.
He said: “Often, animals have to be taken back to the zoo they came from without mating."
Things don’t always go well when a male and a female first meet.
SQUASHED into a smuggler’s cramped crate and wearing a dirty nappy, an orphan chimp cries out for its slaughtered mother.
The traumatised baby is the victim of a barbaric trade that sees poachers massacre up to ten adult chimps at a time to steal the tiniest in the family.
The little ones are then flogged for as much as £10,000 to become pets for the super-rich — or to perform in commercial zoos.
Experts say the babies never get over seeing their mothers being shot along with the other adult chimps.
It is only after the rest of the family is callously wiped out — to prevent the primates trying to protect their young — that the babies are snatched.
The bodies of the adults killed are sold for bushmeat.
Dr Cleve Hicks, a chimp behaviour expert, said of the young: “They have a broken heart — they’ve seen their mothers die.”
Chimps like the one in the crate are taken to middlemen who arrange false wildlife transport permits to fuel a cruel global trade in the endangered animals.
The African chimps are destined for places such as the Gulf states, south-east Asia and China, where such pets are seen as status symbols.
But while the chimps are cute when they are young, they soon grow too strong and too violent to be kept in a house.
Many end up being killed.
The chimp in the crate was lucky — thanks to a BBC investigation that exposed a hub for wildlife trafficking in a dusty backstreet of Ivory Coast’s largest city.
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