Florida's wild monkeys escaped from a riverboat tour in 1938
A tour boat operator known as Colonel Tooey released rhesus macaques near Silver Springs, Florida, around 1938, planning to keep them on an island as a Jungle Cruise attraction. Nobody told him the monkeys swim well. Their descendants now roam the park, the city of Ocala and the surrounding national forest.
No other primate apart from humans covers as much ground. Native from Afghanistan and Pakistan across India and Nepal to Vietnam and southern China, the rhesus macaque lives in grassland, woodland and mountains up to 2,500 metres. It is brown or grey with a bare pink face; males average about 53 centimetres and 7.7 kilograms, females smaller. Fossil teeth from caves near Zhoukoudian suggest the monkeys living around Beijing in recent decades descend from Pleistocene ancestors, not escapees.
They live in matrilineal troops of 20 to 200, active by day, both in trees and on the ground. Fruit is the staple, supplemented by seeds, roots, bark and crops, and city monkeys happily raid rubbish. They adapt remarkably well to people, forming larger troops in human landscapes than in forest and drifting from villages into towns for handouts.
Their similarity to humans, easy care and availability made them a mainstay of laboratories. Research on them contributed to vaccines against rabies, smallpox and polio and to antiretroviral drugs for HIV. In 1948 one became the first primate astronaut. Research colonies live on Morgan Island off South Carolina, imported in the 1970s, and on Cayo Santiago near Puerto Rico, where people may land only for study.
In Florida the story is more fraught. Some colonies may trace to zoos wrecked by hurricanes such as Andrew, and a 2020 estimate put the state's population at 550 to 600, with officials having caught more than 1,000 over the preceding decade. Most captured animals carried herpes B virus, so wildlife officials treat them as a public health hazard, yet many residents strongly oppose their removal. The species as a whole is rated Least Concern. As for the name, Jean-Baptiste Audebert, who coined it, insisted it meant nothing, despite echoing a Thracian king from the Iliad.
Source: Rhesus macaque
