When it comes to getting along in life, it’s no surprise that interacting with friends can be a great boon to feeling good. Now, researchers have discovered that female white-faced capuchin monkeys tend to live longer when they have more “friends.”
The research team, led by Kotrina Kajokaite of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, gained insights into these monkeys’ social interactions by analyzing 18 years of data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in Costa Rica. “We know their life histories, who is related to who,” explains Kajokaite, who studied the capuchins while at UCLA.
