The View from Here:
Becoming a Monkey's Aunt: My Adventures at the Caribbean Primate Research Center, Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico [Part 1]   **

Lynne K. Fukuda
Distance Learning Specialist, University of Hawaii at Hilo
lfukuda@hawaii.edu

As an idyllic, young researcher, I wanted to travel to an exotic location, as many of my anthropology colleagues did, and live in the field, collecting precious data that would establish me in my field. First, I pondered over India, then Southeast Asia, particularly where temple monkeys--mostly rhesus monkeys--mingled on the temple grounds, fed by the populus, because they are symbols of sacred animals in the Buddhist tradition. I imagined myself sitting on the temple steps, notebook in hand, dressed in my Indiana Jane outfit with pith helmet, khaki pants, and all the stuff researchers wore in the field, making friends with the temple monkeys. I wanted to be just like Ms. Jane Goodall--living amongst the primates.

However, being a lifelong hypochondriac, I thought about cholera and the polluted waters. I thought about Malaria and the air filled with disease-carrying mosquitoes. I thought about rodent fever, and TB, and hepatitis. Before long, my enthusiasm for exotic locations began to wane. Then I did a search of Latin America. There were jungles where wild monkeys lived, but soon images materialized in my sleeping hours of snakes more poisonous than rattlesnakes, deadly spiders, Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito fevers as well as relentless rebels with machine guns. I had a primatologist friend in Ecuador who was constantly chased by terrorists. I also knew a professor whose colleague was murdered, along with his family, by hired hit men when he worked for a native rights movement in the Amazon.

One fateful day, I came across an ad in the Animal Behavior Society newsletter for a position as a volunteer researcher at the Caribbean Primate Research Facility in Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was an American territory, so there would be no red tape getting in and out. It was also a very safe island. And the climate and the people were very nice. I knew that, coming from an island myself, I would be happy in Puerto Rico. I refreshed my rusty college Spanish and read about the island and its people. When the acceptance letter arrived, I knew that I was practically already there.

Images of the humid tropics began to dance in my head. I imagined the monkeys not in a cage, not in a zoo, not far away, but hanging on branches, sitting under trees, and eating real food at my feet. They would be numerous, just like in the black and white photographs of the rhesus monkeys in the old pictures of Cayo Santiago. I never anticipated riding a boat across the ocean daily to the islet. I never imagined how really beautiful and diverse the large island of Puerto Rico would be.

It was fate that finally brought me to Puerto Rico and to Cayo Santiago. All the years I spent in Spanish language class gave me the skill to communicate with the locals, and my childhood in the Latin world also helped prepare me for the culture of Puerto Rico. In addition to my cultural preparation, I observed rhesus lab monkeys in a biomedical research lab a few years prior; the monkeys were used for dengue fever research. And now, in Puerto Rico, I would be observing rhesus monkeys on an island where dengue fever existed. It was as if I had been training my entire life for what was to come.

Landing in Puerto Rico, in the dark of the night--it was close to midnight--I was engulfed in the humid tropical atmosphere; so thick I could have cut it with a knife. The night was filled with the sounds of what I believed were birds. The air was filled with the mysterious scents of night-blooming flowers.

I awoke the next day to a lovely island morning. The sky was a gentle pink but promised to be warmer as the day wore on, since it was mid-July. I did not know, coming from the subtropics of Hawaii, that the temperature difference between night and day was only a few degrees. In Hawaii, even in the hottest of summer, we shivered in the night and in the early morning. I did not know that this lack of drastic temperature change was the reason that the inhabitants of the small town I now resided in, Punta Santiago, were not susceptible to colds or flus. Everyone seemed to be smiling, and, in spite of poverty, they found simple pleasures in doing the Salsa, swimming at the beaches, and fishing. I was transported back to the Hawaii of my youth, when people were simpler and kinder, and the pleasures of an island and its natural resources provided for the people in their daily lives.

Punta Santiago is a former sugar plantation town which reminded me very much of the sugar plantation towns in Hawaii. And yet, the Spanish influence was strong in the culture and in the language of the people. The Spanish-style architecture, the forts, and the cobblestone streets, and the churches reminded me of Europe more than America. The food smelled of olive oil and spices that the Spaniards use. "I smell Europe," I told my friends, when we drove into San Juan on one of our days off.

Every difference that annoyed foreigners and made them remark in scorn or in disgust pleased me. I was glad that many residents did not speak English. I was glad of the inconveniences that made life a little more complicated, because it reminded me of life in 1960s Hawaii. I did not mind the isolation from the big city nor the lack of foods that I was used to. I cooked Puerto Rican food the local way, with available ingredients, making beans and rice my regular staple.

On Cayo Santiago, or the Island of Monkeys, as the locals call it, after a breath-taking early morning ride from Punta Santiago, I got off the boat to greet the monkeys who now inhabited my dreams. But there was an initial shock: "Where are the sweet, gentle monkeys who played in the lab?" I was only used to very young monkeys in the lab who were almost house pets, being hand-raised by humans. They were usually very uniform in size.

Like humans, the free-ranging monkeys, the monkeys of the wild, as scientists call them, were of different sizes and shapes. Some were chubby, some thin, some were muscular, and others were pretty; some were red-heads, some dark brunettes, and others platinum blonde. Some had green eyes and others blue, while many had dark brown eyes. They also had differing personalities; some reminded me of people I knew back home in Hawaii. Although, as a scientist, I was supposed to be objective, I could almost swear that monkeys had the same quirks as humans, some being stingy and mean, others being generous and kind, and some with leadership qualities, while others were willing to be happy-go-lucky.

My study encompassed the prosocial behaviors of rhesus monkeys; these were all the behaviors that were glorified in religion, in various cultures, and in day-to-day life. Prosocial behaviors are defined as self-sacrificing behaviors that lessen the survival of the individual or lessen the chances of his or her genes going into the next generation. Some human examples are that of Jesus Christ, who died in order that many people could be "saved," or parents who sacrifice part of their lives to raising their young, or the deeds of soldiers, policemen, firemen, and ordinary individuals who risk their lives to save others. Other examples are just chance happenings of altruism where an individual who has always minded his own business and is not particularly religious jumps into a burning house to rescue a screaming child without a thought to possible danger or death..

In the animal world, such behavior is much more common than many humans may believe. For instance, when salmon swim upstream to spawn in the streams of their birth, they are essentially tattered, half-living corpses when they reach their destination. Scales have come off, they are half-starved, and half-crazed, and yet, they desire to spawn their young. Bird parents expose themselves to constant danger in parenthood, going out more often to find food for their rapidly-growing offspring, fighting off predators by acting injured, and battling a snake that comes to their nest when the parent could simply fly away and leave the snake to eat the egg. Smokey the Bear's mom has always inspired me. The legend of Smokey, a symbol of the National Park Service, was inspired by a baby bear found alive in a forest fire. He was wrapped lovingly in the legs of his mother's burnt corpse; his bear mother holding him close until the end so that he would live in her stead. In Hawaii, where I now live, tropic bird parents that nested in the Kilauea Crater when it was not yet erupting, ignited and exploded as they dived into the crater in order to reach their young when it began erupting. ,

Apes are known to adopt orphans, baby-sit infants that are non-kin, and share food and show acts of kindness. I wanted to concentrate on that aspect of their goodness. There was too much misery in the human world, where parents abandoned or abused their young, people killed one another in war, crime seeped through all corners of society, and the thinking of our youth had become warped. I wanted to become inspired by the sacrifices of animals. I wanted them to reflect what was truly desirable and good in humans and not reflect on the bad. I imagined myself somewhat like Jane Goodall, sitting in the forest, watching the quiet monkeys patiently and taking notes. Never did I expect what was to come. Jane's films always seemed so idyllic, because they were doctored up by National Geographic.

My daily routine was a battle against monkeys that were potentially dangerous. A monkey bite or scratch could result in a serious infection from the simian herpes virus, something like a cold sore to monkeys but fatal to humans if it resulted in encephalitis. A veterinarian on the US mainland had gotten such a bite and died as a result. A few coworkers at Cayo had gotten scratched and bitten. I studied them daily, as they seemed weaker from the strong medications they took, wondering if they too would die. But luckily, they were all unaffected.

The monkeys were also very hard to keep track of. I did not know one from the other. Painstakingly, I sketched each face, made notes on small characteristics such as fur color and thickness, size, shape, color of eyes, and whom they reminded me of. One of my favorite females was a slightly obese grandmother who had raised her two orphaned grandchildren when her daughter died. She was a strawberry blonde with long and wavy fur and eyes that were almost blue. Her granddaughter, also a strawberry blonde, was thin but also very pretty with large bluish eyes. My other favorite female was a slim brunette, who had a round face, large eyes, and reminded me of a pretty East Indian maiden. I almost imagined her wearing a silk sari with fleckles of gold woven into it and a red dot on her forehead. She was quiet and shy, eating alone, or with a young friend, later that season she was pregnant with her first baby. My favorite male was an immigrant male who arrived in the group about the same time as I did. Male rhesus monkeys usually immigrated out of their birth groups after puberty--a form of incest avoidance--and traveled from group to group, forming relationships and loyalties for years at a time until, in the end, as elderly males, they travel alone and die alone. It was as if the monkey society banished them, having bred with the females and having offspring in every group.

In rhesus monkey society, prosocial behaviors were highly valued. As social animals, rhesus monkeys needed one another to survive against other hostile groups that could threaten their lives. They also needed a show of loyalty by new immigrant males, as well as the caring of the females for each other and for their young. The friendships between females and males as well as males and males bonded the group together. They traveled as one unit, mating and raising young, maintaining a hierarchy, and passing on their genes that carried the most favorable traits of all, that of kindness and helpfulness, so that their society and their beings were the result of all the prosocial acts of their predecessors.

**   This article is dedicated to John Berard, Matt Kesslar, and to all the monkeys at Cayo Santiago.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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