Monkeys in Puerto Rico Became Kinder to Each Other After Hurricane Maria

When Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, rhesus macaques reevaluated their survival strategies.

By Joshua Rapp Learn
Sep 23, 2024 3:00 PM
Rhesus Macaques in Puerto Rico
Rhesus Macaques (Credit: Robert Sanjeev Ross/Shutterstock)

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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.

Social Structure and Aggression in Rhesus Macaques

(Credit: FrameFemme/Shutterstock)
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