Do Monkeys Have Pimples?

[Nanohedron]

Well?

[MTGuru]

Does this count? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox

[Nanohedron]

No, I'm just talking about garden-variety zits.

[gregdidge]

Or do pimples have Monkeys?

[Nanohedron]

To date I have never squeezed out a monkey. And much to my relief, now that you've made me think about it.

[crookedtune]

19 thousand posts, lives in Minneapolis, and thinking about monkey zits. Hmmmm.

[Nanohedron]

I actually have a good reason for this inquiry, I'll have you know. I was watching a nature program where one monkey was grooming another's back, and every now and then it seemed that the groomer's technique made the groomee kind of jump, as from a sting, and yet this didn't dissuade the recipient from sticking around for more. Now, it's been a while since I saw the program, but for some reason the tableau came back to memory, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the begroomed monkey had "backne", and the groomista was occupied with, well....you know. Both possibilites seemed somehow rather remarkable to me, particularly that such a subcategory of grooming behavior that I blithely assumed to be uniquely human might instead extend far, far back into the primate genome. Hence the question.

And here you thought that my scientific interest was merely an idler's nonsense. Tsk.

[Doug_Tipple]

Ditto Crookedtune's comment.

[Nanohedron]

So in other words, you don't know, either.

[Denny]

ticks?

[Nanohedron]

While this is one entirely plausible explanation as to what I witnessed (it could have been hiccups for that matter), it does not answer the question. Next.

[Roderick [Rod] Sprague IV]

I tried various combinations of words on Google and quit when I found out a bit more than I really wanted to know about primate skin diseases, human and otherwise. I imagine it would depend on how you define pimple.

[Innocent Bystander]

Yeah. What Rod said. Monkeys don't sweat in the way humans do. So they don't have pores that fill up with seebum, or whatever you call it. Probably they get infected hair follicles, which are a painful category of pimple.

You'll have to make do with "It's a pimple, Nano, but not as we know it."

[Nanohedron]

Excellent. I can just see it:



"It's a pimple, Nano, but not as we know it."

Thanks, guys. Yes, I could have of course Googled, myself, but y'all are so much more fun.

[littleblue]

You could always look up a vet that treats primates and call them to ask.