After Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico in 2017, monkeys living there forged new bonds to share a suddenly scarce resource: shade.
Amid Hurricane Maria’s heavy rain and furious winds — coming just two weeks after Hurricane Irma dumped a heavy deluge of rain — trees and other plants across Puerto Rico toppled. Nearly a quarter of Puerto Rico’s total forest biomass was demolished (SN: 3/17/20). Cayo Santiago, a once lush key located off Puerto Rico’s coast, was left largely barren after it lost nearly two-thirds of its vegetation.
More than five years later, Cayo Santiago’s flora hasn’t recovered, says Camille Testard, a behavioral ecologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. As of April 2023, the tiny island hosted fewer than 600 living trees.
But a colony of around 1,600 macaques, managed by the University of Puerto Rico’s Caribbean Primate Research Center, also calls Cayo Santiago home. Without much remaining tree cover, the destructive hurricane left many monkeys searching for shady relief from temperatures that regularly exceed 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit). Some of that shade now comes in smaller forms: from boulders, water basins or even human shadows.
2023-08-15 06:00:00
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