{"id":95644,"date":"2025-10-24T14:47:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T14:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/95644\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T14:47:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T14:47:07","slug":"why-are-there-monkeys-in-florida-it-goes-back-to-the-1930s-and-one-cruise-operators-cunning-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/95644\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are There Monkeys In Florida? It Goes Back To The 1930s And One Cruise Operator’s Cunning Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

A video recently shared on Instagram<\/a> captures a rather unusual scene \u2013 for Florida, at least. In it, someone taking a restful boat ride down Silver Springs suddenly gets rained upon by small projectiles. It\u2019s not rain. It\u2019s not even hail, oh no. It\u2019s raining monkeys.<\/p>\n

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In case you\u2019re thinking \u201cbut wait, monkeys aren\u2019t native to Florida?\u201d Congratulations! Gold star. The thing is, species not being native has never really stopped them.<\/p>\n

The story of how and why it became possible for monkeys to rain down on Silver Springs takes us back to the 1930s. Around this time, a chap named Colonel Tooey was running glass-bottomed jungle cruise boats along Silver Springs, giving visitors a wild ride.<\/p>\n

Thing is, that ride wasn\u2019t quite wild enough by Tooey\u2019s standards. He wanted to liven things up a bit, and what better way \u2013 he figured, presumably unfamiliar with the concept of invasive species \u2013 than to release a load of monkeys onto an island.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s how 12 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), a species typically native to southern and eastern Asia, found themselves in Florida. It\u2019s quite a leap even for a highly mobile and arboreal species, but they took to their new home quite happily.<\/p>\n

Boasting the largest geographic range of any non-human primate<\/a>, macaques have proven time and time again that they\u2019re highly adaptable when it comes to their environment. Urban or wild, remote or human-filled, they don\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n

As you can probably tell from that video I mentioned, that initial group of 12 did a decent job of propagating. By the 1980s, the authorities were growing concerned about the effect of this burgeoning non-native population, and so 1,000 animals were trapped and removed between 1984 and 2012 to try and get a hold on the situation. A 2015 estimate<\/a> put the population at around 176 across five social groups, and predicted that without intervention, that number could double by 2022.<\/p>\n

It’s a tricky situation to navigate, not least because these charismatic animals are hardly to blame for thriving after being dumped in unfamiliar territory. Not only are they not unique as non-native primates living it up in the state (hello,\u00a0farm-escapee vervet monkeys<\/a>), but they\u2019re not even the only invasive species falling from the skies.<\/p>\n

Every year, when summer concedes to autumn and the temperatures drop, seasoned Floridians prepare themselves for \u201ciguana fall<\/a>\u201d. It\u2019s a peculiar non-meteorological phenomenon where the cold weather causes rigid reptiles to fall out of trees.<\/p>\n

As animals that depend on the Sun to keep warm and mobile, they don\u2019t do well with the sudden drop in temperature and can look a bit, well, dead. Something one person learnt the hard way when they tried to take a \u201cdying\u201d iguana to the veterinarian, only for it to wake up \u2013 rather enthusiastically \u2013 inside their nice warm car<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Something tells me Florida’s in the market for some heavy-duty umbrellas.<\/p>\n