Imagine a troop of monkeys in front of a mirror, screaming in their heads “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” and then just waiting for something to happen. Something similar to this happened in Gabon recently, when a French photographer named Xavier Hubert Brierre decided to pull out a big mirror and record animals reacting to their own reflections.

At first, a gorilla walks by. Confused and lost, he looks into the mirror and starts pounding the ground. Tired of some other gorilla imitating his acts, he also tries running over the mirror. A leopard also tries to figure out this mirror conspiracy by trying to eat his own reflection. A troop of monkeys line themselves up in front of the mirror and wait for something to happen. One monkey even stands up and starts scratching his armpit to understand how another monkey on the other side manages to imitate him perfectly.

The aim of the experiment was to gauge self-awareness by determining whether an animal can recognise its own reflection in a mirror as an image of itself. On the way though, Brierre managed to get some hilarious reactions too.