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An Indochinese rhesus macaque. The species has a nice little community of its own in Ocala, Florida.Broobas [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
Municipal tourism bureaus probably love it when their town makes it onto the pages of National Geographic. We're not sure how Ocala's marketing folks feel about this piece, though.
The central Florida city's Silver Springs State Park has been invading rhesus macaques, which are monkeys native to south and southeast Asia. Ocala's adventure began in 1938, according to NatGeo, which wrote that tour boat operator "Colonel Tooey" released six rhesus macaques on a small island. The monkeys can swim, so they ditched the island and escaped to the woods. At one point, the state of the art, approved the removal of 1,000 monkeys (and sterilized 20 female macaques) in the hopes of slowing population growth.
Today, the park is home to at least 300 of the damn things – and that the population is growing around 11 percent annually. To make things even cooler Wildlife Management The study published last month estimates that the population could not be more than 20,000 people in the population (a move that is unpopular with some of the locals).
The real treat, however, is the study of which of the monkeys – as many as 30 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – carry the herpes B virus.
It's a rare and deadly form of herpes, but it's extremely rare for herpes B to spread from a monkey to a human. Attacks in Ocala are not common partially closed in the past after some aggro monkeys went on the offensive), and the transference of herpes B is even more unlikely, but the fearmonger in us wants to point out the fact that humans who contract herpes B can experience inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, which sometimes leads to brain damage or death.
"Only about 50 human cases of herpes have been documented," as far as NatGeo knows, but none of them derived from wild macaques.
So the bottom line? Do not feed the monkeys, bro.
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