Going people-watching at the zoo with primatologists. Here’s what they saw.

Maura Judkis

The zoo is the perfect place to observe primates in the wild: pushing their offspring in strollers. Eating pizza. Cooling off on a bench in the shade. Buying souvenirs. Demanding ice cream. Gawking at their distant relations.

“There was definitely some begging going on over there,” says Sims Patton, gesturing to a table at Panda Plaza, the food court at the National Zoo, where a family with three young children had stopped for a snack. The mother opened her children’s drink bottles, one by one.

“Food-sharing has been observed in numerous nonhuman primates,” Carson Murray says. “Very often it’s mother to offspring.”

“For capuchin monkeys, nut-cracking is really a big part of their diet. But when you’re small, it’s hard to crack a nut,” Patton says. “So you give the nut to your mom and get her to crack it.”

Patton, a doctoral student, and Murray, her adviser, are primatologists at George Washington University. Today the two women - along with Lydia Hopper, a comparative psychologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine - are engaged in a pair of popular human behaviors: 1) going to the zoo in August, and 2) people-watching.

Watching them carry their young (in Baby Bjorns or $400 strollers). Watching them use their opposable thumbs to open containers (of squeezy fruit pouches). Watching the juveniles tug at their mothers for attention, get jealous of their siblings and have tantrums. (Just spend 10 minutes sitting near the carousel if you want to see some major meltdowns.) Primates share resources (french fries). Primates beg for treats (SpongeBob SquarePants ice pops, specifically, for one very cute male juvenile primate in Crocs).

Primates watching primates watching primates.

Humans, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons - to name a few nonhuman primates - are distant relations. We all evolved from a common ancestor and share quite a large portion of our DNA. Primatologists study primate behavior because it teaches us about our connection to our animal ancestors. And they can study any aspect of that behavior: whether monkeys have friends, how watching a yawning android makes chimps yawn, and how one population of chimpanzees sticks blades of grass in their ears for no purpose other than a simian fashion trend.

All three of these primatologists who joined us at the zoo were already acquainted; primatology, one of the few fields in biological science that is especially female, is a tight community. Hopper studies primate innovation and learning. Patton studies the impact of primate violence on youth. Murray teaches anthropology, and studies mother-child relationships and female bonds between primates.

In primatology and at the zoo, so much comes back to parenting.

“You can’t help but make comparisons with humans when you’re seeing an orangutan mother or a gorilla with their offspring,” says Becky Malinsky, the zoo’s primate curator, who joined the trio for a stretch. “I mean, there’s so many similarities. There’s different parenting styles amongst nonhuman primates.”

Many of those styles are on display at the zoo: authoritative, authoritarian, gentle, permissive, neglectful. They’re happening on the Olmsted Walk (“Mom. Mom. Mommmmmmmm,” says one young primate, competing for attention with her mother’s iPhone), and they’re happening inside the ape enclosures.

Malinsky points toward one gorilla - Mandara, an elder at 43 - lying calmly in the outdoor part of the enclosure.

“She is a fantastic mom. She’s very much a disciplinarian,” says Malinsky. “All of her kids have turned out very well-behaved, respectful, socially savvy. And our other female, Calaya, who’s had the most recent offspring, she is not a disciplinarian. And her kids are a little more wild and get away with a lot more.”

And, like other primate parents at the zoo, Mandara can be silently judgmental about another primate’s child-rearing, Malinsky says: “Even though I think it’s in her nature to try to discipline these kids that are acting out … She has learned it is not [her] place to get involved with Calaya’s children.”

A juvenile human primate, watching the gorillas with his father and grandfather, suddenly decides to make a run for it. He swings under a metal railing and runs off the zoo pathway, into a grassy area not intended for pedestrians (but not an animal enclosure, thankfully). The dad dashes after him.

“Write that down,” Murray jokes, as the primatologists laugh. Patton explains: In the wild, “We call it one-minute point sampling. So if you’re following a chimp in the forest, every minute, on the minute, you write down what they’re doing. So like right now I would write down, ‘Parent chasing, disciplining child.’”

The dad hoists his small, mischievously laughing youngster, who immediately begins to cry.

“I’m sorry,” says the dad, soothing him. “I want Mama,” the boy says.

Human primate dads are much more involved parents than nonhuman ones, the trio says. And primate parents soothe their children differently, depending on their parenting style.

Sims recently returned from several months in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where renowned primatologist Jane Goodall worked. In Gombe, if one juvenile chimp is lightly injured by a peer, they might “let out a scream,” she says. “Some moms will run over there, and other moms are like, ‘Figure it out for yourself.’” Some moms keep their kids on a tight leash - or at the zoo, for tiny humans, a literal leash - while others encourage more independence.

“It’s not safe to run away, honey,” says an adult female to her toddler, who has escaped her grasp outside of the orangutan enclosure.

“When the chimps are starting to be independent from mom, oftentimes they’ll like go and play, and then come back and kind of check in, and then go out again,” Patton says, “which I feel like kids do, too.”

We’re off to the watering hole, where the human primates are cooling off under a nozzle that sprays a fine mist into the air and looks like a rainbow when the sunlight catches it just right. They squeal and sigh with delight as they cool their skin in the water. The elders sit on a bench nearby, resting. A few dozen yards away, some apes do the same.

Human primates can get the wrong idea about what sitting around means when they see nonhuman primates doing it, the primatologists say.

“In zoos, animals are often resting, and to me, I’m like, ‘That’s great, they’re resting, they feel comfortable, they feel relaxed,” Hopper says. “You hear zoo guests a lot going, ‘Oh, they’re bored, they’re sad.’”

“You’re kind of putting these human emotions on them that we don’t actually know that they have,” Patton says.

We want to connect with our primate cousins. But we can’t anthropomorphize them. There are some big differences between human and nonhuman primates, according to the human scientists.

“Things like language, culture - there is cultural variation in chimpanzees, but it’s not ratcheted,” Murray says.

“They don’t have the same material, cultural complexity that we do,” Hopper adds. “Another big one is long-term planning. Like, we get pretty excited if chimps plan, like, a couple days out.”

But you know what’s pretty common primate behavior? Play. Over at the playground behind the prairie dog exhibit, three human juveniles - two little girls and a boy - are climbing on top of the tube structure and swinging off the edge of its entrance. Over in the ape house, 7-year-old Moke, a gorilla, is swinging from a donated fire hose in his enclosure.

“That’s a gesture, this dangling, that’s often like an invitation to play,” Patton says of Moke. “Play with me, notice me.”

Parents sit to the side, watching with varying degrees of attentiveness, and it’s hard not to wonder what both the human and nonhuman ones are thinking. Are they tired from the hard work of parenting? Are they longing for something? Do they all equally feel that little swell of parental joy - the kind you get when your child smiles back at you with pure happiness and you think, This is what life is all about, isn’t it?

Sorry. Anthropomorphizing again.

Here’s another thing about primates: They are interested in looking at other animals. In Gombe, Patton observed a family of chimpanzees with young children who “were really interested in chasing the monitor lizards in and out of the lake, not necessarily touching them, eating them, hurting them,” she says. “Watching them run, chasing them, following them.”

At the zoo, a school-age boy chases a squirrel under a bench near the otter exhibition. A mouse scampers through the hay in the orangutan enclosure, unnoticed by Lucy, the eldest in the enclosure, who is known to play with rodents who sneak into her space. A human child beats his chest in the direction of the gorilla enclosure, where Baraka, the silverback, is ambling along the ledge close to the thick glass, making humans shriek with delight. Is he making his own assumptions about the primates on the other side of the glass?

“Sometimes,” says Patton, “I think the animals here are observing us just as much as we’re observing them.”