Hard times can sometimes bring people together. For rhesus macaques, a destructive hurricane made their group an altogether friendlier place and helped increase individual survival year over year.
“It’s crazy — things have changed so much since the hurricane,” says Camille Testard, an ethologist at Harvard University. “The monkeys are less aggressive — they form these larger groups and interact with monkeys they’ve never interacted with.”
Rhesus macaques are native to Asia. But primatologist Clarence Carpenter introduced a colony of hundreds of them in Puerto Rico in the 1930s in an effort to study the creatures closer to his home. He set the colony up on Cayo Santiago, a small rocky isle off the east coast of the main island of Puerto Rico. Researchers have studied the colony off and on ever since.
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FrameFemme/Shutterstock
Rhesus macaques typically live in large colonies with multiple males and females. These groups ...
