The baboons took to the trees in fear... and stayed there |
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Staff at a
zoo in the Netherlands say they are baffled by their baboons, who have spent
days sitting still, huddled together in fear and hardly eating.
The
behaviour started on Monday evening, and only now are the 112 baboons becoming
their normal, active selves again, said a biologist at Emmen Zoo.
The zoo
still has no idea what spooked the hamadryas baboons, but it is a good sign
that some are now eating apples, biologist Wijbren Landman said.
The zoo
last saw such hysteria in 2007.
"What
frightened them? We don't know, it's a mystery. There have been many
suggestions - an earthquake, escaped snakes, aliens, thunder," Mr Landman
told BBC News.
"The
other animals here are OK - they have lemurs, elephants and kangaroos as
neighbours, and they show no sign of panic."
Emmen lies
in the north-eastern Netherlands, near the German border.
Mr Landman
said he had consulted a French baboon expert who had witnessed such baboon
hysteria in the wild, triggered by awareness of a predator. But the French
expert said such hysteria had not lasted as long as in the Emmen case.
"The
first deviation we saw was on Monday evening," Mr Landman said.
"We
were going to bring them to the night enclosure - it normally takes a minute
for all 112 to enter, but it took more than an hour to get them all inside.
Then the next morning it was a problem to get them out, and then they were
immediately sitting in the trees and on the rocks doing nothing at all."
He said
some males in the hierarchy must have got frightened for some reason, and the
rest of the baboons followed their lead.
According
to Mr Landman, it is unlikely they would have been spooked by a fox, as the zoo
is in the city centre, and they are used to seeing herons flying low over their
enclosure, so a bird of prey is also an unlikely cause.
The Emmen
baboons had similar scares in 1994, 1997 and 2007 and some would have
experienced the previous hysteria, as hamadryas baboons can reach the age of 30,
Mr Landman said.
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