This week on December 14th, we celebrate Monkey’s Day. A day to create awareness, recognize their diversity and role in our and forest wellbeing. In today’s post we are going to talk about this day’s celebration.
Around the world people working with primates in general and specially those working with monkeys (all primates with tails from America, Asia and Africa) use this day to celebrate the diversity of this incredible group of animals with which we work on a daily basis at laboratories, reserves, rehabilitation centers and field in different regions.
We also use this day to create awareness about the threats they face like the illegal pet trade (if you want to know more about why they are not pets, see here), hunting for bushmeat, loss and fragmentation of their habitat as a result of different human activities (mining, agriculture, grazing, urbanizations, infrastructure constructions among others).
Monkeys are an important part of all the habitats in which they live. They disperse seeds (more here), transform their habitat (more here), and they also are preys and predators (more here and here). They help to maintain the forest and all the services that forest provide to us like clean water and clean air, a place to enjoy ourselves, home for pollinators that also helps us to grow our crops.
With this post, we celebrate the diversity of diets, families and behaviors of the five monkey species living in our study area. We celebrate their flexibility to adapt and survive in forest fragments surrounded by human activities. We also celebrate that until know the monkey’s populations we have been studied over more than a decade are stable and able to reproduce.
We also invite you to celebrate with us, so if you live, work or have been close to a monkey (not pets, only monkeys living in their natural habitats) send us a message to xcarretero@zocayproject.com telling us something interesting you have seen from those monkeys. We will choose some of those stories to post in this website to celebrate monkeys diversity during more days in 2021 (your name will be published next to your story, unless you prefer to remain anonymous). You can send us a message in English, Spanish or Portuguese and your message will be posted in the language you send your message and in English.
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