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A Malaysian man says he found selfies and videos of monkeys on his lost phone a day after retrieving it in the jungle behind his house.
The content, including images of a monkey that appears to be trying to eat the phone, has been widely shared on social media since Zackrydz Rodzi posted it on Twitter.
The student said he thought his phone had been stolen while he was sleeping. But it was not clear exactly how the mobile was lost.
It was also not possible to verify the circumstances in which the photos and videos ended up on his phone.
Zackrydz, 20, told the BBC that he realized he did not have his smartphone when he woke up around 11 a.m. on Saturday.
“There were no signs of theft. All I had in mind was that it was some kind of witchcraft, ”said the senior computer science student from Batu Pahat in the southern state of Johor.
A few hours later, in a video shared with the BBC that had a time code of 2.01pm that same day, a monkey appeared to be trying to eat the phone.
The primate can be seen staring at the camera against a background of bright green leaves and singing birds.
There were also a series of photos of the monkey, trees, and other foliage on the phone.
Zackrydz said he couldn’t find any trace of his phone until Sunday afternoon when his father noticed a monkey outside his home. Calling his phone again, he heard a jungle ringing a few steps beyond the backyard, he said, and then discovered the phone smeared in some leaves under a palm tree.
His uncle joked that maybe there was a picture on the thief’s phone, he said, so after cleaning it he opened the image gallery “and boom, it’s full of pictures of monkeys.”
Unlike some parts of the world where monkeys live in or near urban areas, there is no history of monkeys stealing things from houses in the local neighborhood, the student said. He suspects that the monkey may have entered the house through the open window of his brother’s bedroom.
“Something that you can see once in a century,” he tweeted Sunday in a post that was shared and liked several thousand times and picked up by local media.
It’s not the first time that monkey selfies have made headlines. In 2017, a British photographer settled a two-year legal fight against an animal rights group over an image taken by a macaque.
In 2011, Naruto, a macaque monkey in the Indonesian jungle, took a camera owned by David Slater from Monmouthshire and took a series of “selfies”.
Slater argued that he owned the copyright to the widely shared image, but the animal rights charity Peta said the animal should benefit because it clicked the shutter.
A US court ruled that copyright protection could not apply to the monkey and dismissed Peta’s case, but Slater agreed to donate 25% of the image’s future revenue to charities that protect Naruto. and other crested macaques in Indonesia.
