According
to legend, if the ravens ever disappear from the Tower of London
both the tower and the British kingdom will crumble. And so, at
the venerable stone compound in the center of London one of the
colorful Yeoman Warders or Beefeaters (familiar to drinkers of
the gin brand of the same name) is appointed Ravenmaster. It's
his job to feed and care for a flock of at least six of the traditionally
ill-boding black birds so they always feel welcome.
Also, their wings are clipped so they can't fly away.
About a thousand miles south of London, a parallel superstition
holds sway. The future of one of the last vestiges of the British
empire, Gibraltar, on Spain's southern coast, is said to depend
on monkeys. And in a sense, maybe it does.
In 1704, not long after British and Dutch forces captured Gibraltar
from Spain, a shepherd led 500 Spanish soldiers up a goat path
on the sheer, eastern side of the Rock. The sneak attack was foiled,
it's said, when sounds of agitation from the Barbary apes living
there alerted the garrison. Thus was born the belief that as long
as the "apes" -- actually macaque monkeys -- live on Gibraltar,
Gibraltar shall be British.
The British military fed and managed Gibraltar's macaques for
decades until ceding the job to local authorities in the 1990s.
When the macaque population dwindled to seven during World War
II, Winston Churchill ordered seven more ferried over from North
Africa.
It's unclear how this sovereignty-monkey linkage works, but
there's no arguing with results. This past year Gibraltar celebrated
(and Spain rued) 300 years of continuous British control of the
area while the macaques ambled contentedly over the vegetated,
western side of the Rock, high above Gibraltar city and harbor.
On most days the monkeys can see across the blue Straits of Gibraltar
to the northern coast of Africa, where their ancestors likely
originated.
Gibraltar's macaques are a major tourist attraction. According
to local officials, more than 700,000 visitors a year pay to drive
their own cars or take a tour bus, van or cable car up the Rock,
designated a nature preserve since 1990. The descendants of one
of the first British colonial governors owns the cable-car concession
and one of the largest tour bus operations. Some taxi-van drivers
are said to make the equivalent of well over $100,000 a year.
As lucrative as the monkey business has been for Gibraltar,
though, it's unclear how long the present arrangements can last.
In the early 1990s, the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History
Society, a local environmental activist group, took over the job
of feeding most of the monkeys from the British military. Soldiers
have mostly withdrawn from the colony. In an age of cruise missiles
and spy satellites, occupying the high ground at the entrance
to the Mediterranean Sea no longer holds much strategic importance.
Tension exists because the nature society's leaders, who hold
advanced degrees in environmental sciences, aren't satisfied with
being merely monkey feeders and rest-stop custodians. They wonder
if it's safe -- for man and monkey alike -- to have so many people
touching and feeding the animals. Plus, there's the challenge
of keeping the macaques up on the Rock instead of down among the
homes and trash cans of the 30,000 Gibraltarians who live in the
city at the foot of the Rock.
No one had ever methodically studied how Gibraltar's macaques
interact with tourists and the locals until this past summer,
when Agustin Fuentes, a primatologist and associate professor
of anthropology at Notre Dame, spent a month there with a team
of eight research assistants, mostly undergraduate anthro majors.
The project was supported by a grant from the Notre Dame Institute
for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
Fuentes and the students were warmly welcomed by the nature
society, which figured the study's findings would bolster arguments
for more money and less interference from the government. But
their presence also aroused suspicion. Would these outsiders decide
it was too dangerous to have people mingling with monkeys and
tell them to build a zoo? That kind of change would likely cripple
the tourist trade, which has taken on added importance in the
wake of the military's departure. Fuentes and the nature society
assured people that this was only a preliminary study to get a
handle on existing conditions.
What they didn't mention was that results from certain aspects
of the investigation could possibly lead to the macaques being
sequestered, removed or even exterminated.
* * *
Legend has it that Gibraltar's macaques came from Morocco via
a tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar. More likely they were
brought over by the Moors when those North African Muslims conquered
the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century.
According to Fuentes, macaques have been living on the Rock
for about 800 years and elsewhere in Europe for even longer. Macaque
remains have been found entombed under the lava that buried Pompeii.
The Greek physician Galen, looking for a close approximation of
human anatomy, peeled back the skin of a close relative, Barbary
macaques, to make his pioneering medical drawings. For thousands
of years macaques were kept as pets in Europe or used in theatrical
productions.
Fuentes, 38, has spent years studying macaques as they live
in captivity or around populated areas in Morocco and in Bali
in Indonesia. There they have the run of Hindu temples and are
allowed to devour food and flowers set out as offerings to the
gods. As in Gibraltar, the Hindus' special treatment represents
a kind of debt of gratitude. In the epic Hindu story of Ramayana,
a monkey uses magic powers and his army of monkeys to defeat an
evil demon and rescue the wife of a hero. Because of the popularity
of the story, macaques and the long-tailed langur monkeys are
given food and protection in many parts of India, even when they
take up residence in cities and become nuisances.
Fuentes, who co-edited the book Primates Face to Face,
is one of a small number of primatologists who focus on monkeys
and humans living in close proximity. He calls the conventional
man-versus-nature perspective a "false dichotomy" because people
are always reacting to nature and nature is always responding.
Plus the buffer zones are disappearing. Every day, human activity
encroaches farther and farther into former wilderness areas, gobbling
up natural habitat. In recent years suburbanites in the United
States have grown accustomed to seeing deer in their backyards.
Monkeys aren't likely to follow, because 90 percent of the world's
primates live in tropical forests. But those are the areas being
converted the fastest to human use, chiefly agricultural.
Animals living close to human populations almost inevitably
creates tension and conflict, from stolen crops and property damage
to increased risk of disease transmission -- animal to human and
vice versa. Displaced species that fail to adapt or whose presence
humans won't tolerate face bleak prospects. Fuentes writes that
50 percent of all primate species are considered a conservation
concern and 20 percent are seen as endangered or critically endangered.
Fuentes had never studied the macaques on Gibraltar before last
summer, but he knew all about macaque behavior. Like other primates,
including man, macaques are social animals. They live in groups
and spend hours on "mutual grooming," picking through one another's
fur looking for ticks and debris. Macaque infants, who have black
fur, sometimes play the role of tranquilizer. When a fight breaks
out between males, one male will race off and grab the nearest
infant, even tearing it away from its mother. The kidnapper then
commences grooming it intently and the other combatant joins in.
It seems to make them forget what they were fighting about.
The most obvious difference between apes and monkeys is that
monkeys usually have tails and apes don't. Thus, gorillas, gibbons,
chimpanzees and orangutans are all apes. The tailless Barbary
macaques are an exception. In their case, the distinction boils
down to the ratio of brain size to body size. Macaques, smaller
than chimps, have monkey brains.
According to Fuentes, macaques in captivity have been known
to live as long as 30 years. In the wild a female will sometimes
make it into her early 20s, but males never live past their teens.
The oldest macaque on Gibraltar last summer was a 20-plus-year-old
female, Elizabeth, named for the British monarch who visited in
the 1950s.
The nature society maintains a daily count of the macaque population
and names every animal. Eric Shaw, the group's director of operations,
said that in recognition of the Notre Dame research team's
efforts he was going to name a newborn Rockne.
The nature society feeds the monkeys each morning by visiting
five tourist sites along the switchback road leading to the summit
and setting out a mix of potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, carrots,
melons and oranges. In the wild, the macaque diet includes small
animals, insects, leaves, seeds, roots and fruit.
Signs everywhere on the Rock forbid others from feeding the
monkeys. The animals are already being fed a well-balanced diet,
the signs explain; giving them anything else could make them obese
and shorten their life span.
The signs also admonish visitors to observe the monkeys from
a distance because too much interaction with humans breaks down
their family structure. They say not to touch the monkeys because
it can make them aggressive and bite. And if they touch you, wash
your hands before eating, the signs warn. Don't carry visible
food items because they will try to steal them.
The posted fine for feeding a macaque is 500 British pounds,
the equivalent of more than $900.
Since the ban went into effect in the early 1900s, there has
been one prosecution.
* * *
At one of the tourist stops along the switchback road, a tour
van driver is giving a young male macaque a drink. From a can
of Coca-Cola.
The driver looks up and sees Tricia David, a Notre Dame senior
from Page, Arizona, dutifully recording the event on a form pinched
to her clipboard.
"You don't have to write this down," he says sheepishly.
But she does. And she did.
It's Fuentes's job to crunch the numbers and analyze the data
from this study. It's the students' responsibility to record essentially
all that data, endless details about human-monkey interactions.
The students work in pairs, trudging out to the tourist sites
once in the morning and rotating to one of the four other sites
in the afternoon.
Their first task upon arrival is to inventory the number of
people and monkeys present. Then it's time to record behavior.
For each interaction -- defined as a monkey or a person doing
something and the other reacting -- more than a dozen questions
must be answered: Who initiated the contact? Into what age groups
did the people and monkeys fall? Was food involved? What kind?
Was it dropped, handed, held or placed on a surface? Was there
a tour guide present?
One student scans the area and records every interaction he
or she sees during a 10-minute period. The student will repeat
this process three more times over the course of an hour.
The other student selects a single macaque and records every
interaction in which the monkey engages during a 15-minute period.
The goal is to record three of these so-called "focals" in an
hour, following a macaque of a different gender/age group each
time.
It isn't always easy. If one's focal monkey jumps a wall and
disappears into the brush you have start all over with another
one.
The second hour the students switch jobs.
At some locations and during certain times of day no monkeys
are present, the tourists don't linger, and time passes slowly.
But at two of the five sites -- Ape's Den and Prince Phillip's
Arch -- there are almost always monkeys. Mostly they sit on boulders
or balance on the road's cable guardrails, watching the tourists,
grooming each other or picking through the fruit and vegetable
pieces remaining from the latest drop by the nature society.
At midafternoon a visitor leaning up against a wall near one
of the tour stops is surprised and delighted when a large macaque
walks by and inadvertently brushes against his back, not unlike
a cat rubbing against its owner's leg.
"It's amazing how tame they are," the visitor remarks.
Nothing amazing about it, Fuentes says. "It's the context of
how they've been living for hundreds of years. It's like saying
it's amazing they can climb a tree. They are accustomed to it."
Maybe too accustomed.
About halfway up the Rock a middle-age woman emerges from a
snack bar holding a chocolate-covered ice cream confection called
a Magnum. A stranger warns her to be careful because the monkeys
love ice cream. Two minutes later she is standing rigid, mouth
open, Magnum gone.
The culprit, having snatched it out of her hand, sits in a closed
patio area beyond a locked iron gate enjoying the confection unhurriedly
and without apparent remorse. Fuentes says he has seen the same
animal liberate four Magnums and a frozen lime bar in under seven
minutes.
"If they hear something that sounds like a wrapper they perk
right up and go toward that sound," the ponytailed primatologist
says.
When not on observation duty students sometimes trade stories
of monkey larceny. Meegan Anderson, a senior from Glen Ellyn,
Illinois, says she once saw an adult female actually enter the
snack bar and run out a short time later carrying a bag of peanut
M&Ms in one hand with three more bags tucked under her arm.
Student say they've seen the macaques eat peanuts, hard candy,
sunflower seeds, tomatoes, graham crackers, corn chips, potato
chips, popcorn, bread, dry pasta, croissants, apples and gum.
If a tour van's door is left open, some will climb inside to steal
a sandwich.
Such snacking, says Fuentes, poses the same health risks to
the macaques as to people: cavities, ulcers, high cholesterol.
The no-feeding rule is never enforced because there's nobody around
to enforce it. No wardens are posted at the sites, and the nature
society's two-person food-delivery team has no authority to issue
citations.
Katie Hogan, a junior from Wichita, Kansas, says she once had
an American tourist come up to her while she was doing observations
and point out people who were feeding monkeys. "They said, 'The
sign says right there that there's a 500-pound fine. Why aren't
you doing anything? Isn't that your job?'" It wasn't, of course.
It's usually not the tourists who feed the macaques -- not intentionally,
anyway -- it's the tour-van drivers. Here's what happens: The
same group of monkeys hangs out at each location every day, and
every day they see the same drivers. Over time the animals learn
which drivers offer treats and what tricks they're expected to
do to get them. At one tourist stop in particular -- Prince Phillip's
Arch, second from the summit -- the animals behave more like circus
performers. A driver pulls out a bag of peanuts and gestures to
a tourist standing next to him. An attentive male hurries over
and jumps up on the tourist's shoulders for a picture. At a signal
the animal hops down and receives its reward. Some macaques let
drivers pry open their mouths to show tourists their fangs, which
can be up to three inches long.
"They'll just sit there and let them do it because they know
they're going to get fed afterward," says Tricia David.
Fuentes says the actions demonstrate how "incredibly mellow"
this species of monkey is. But that doesn't stop him from worrying
about the animals becoming aggressive.
Steve Luke, a graduate student from New York who is studying
the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame, remembers
a day he was doing observations at the highest tour stop on the
Rock, the upper terminus of the cable car. People were walking
up the stairs to the viewing platform, he says, "and the monkeys
all started making threat faces and moving down the stairs." The
panicked tourists turned tail and raced down the stairs.
Luke isn't sure what caused the disturbance but says, "Once
one of the males gets into a prolonged conflict they all get a
little nervous and start jumping on everyone."
Sometimes aggression has an obvious purpose. At Prince Phillip's
Arch one day, a 2-year-old male jumps on a man's shoulder, steals
his golf hat and hops around on a trellis just out of reach of
a tour guide. Someone in the group yells, "Give him a Euro [the
European community's equivalent of a dollar]," which produces
laughs but no hat. A few minutes later the macaque surrenders
the headgear after extorting a whole banana.
More often the physical contact initiated by the monkeys is
playful. For some reason a young male in the group that lives
near the souvenir shop likes to pounce on Anne Kwiatt, a senior
from Vernon Hills, Illinois. Students are instructed to ignore
the behavior and walk away. The monkeys eventually get bored and
hop down.
Eric Shaw isn't as lucky. The nature society
director visits the feeding sites so often that the monkeys have
come to recognize him -- and his car. From experience they know
that, unlike the tour group drivers, who will swat at a macaque
with a cane or rag to get it off their vehicles, Shaw never retaliates.
As a result, the animals jump on his vehicle, bend the antenna
over and pry off whatever parts they can. Having stripped the
vehicle of all of its body side molding, they've now started in
on the rubber holding the windshield in place.*
* * *
"Down!"
"One."
"Down!"
"Two"
"Down!"
"Three"
It's early evening about two weeks into the project. After recording
monkey-tourist interactions all day, five of the students are
up on the veranda of the research team's quarters doing calisthenics.
Push-ups at the moment.
Typical of any group of Notre Dame students, this one includes
plenty of athletes. Katie Hogan and Anne Kwiatt are members of
the Notre Dame women's boxing club. Tricia David
is a rower.
The professor and students are staying at a turn-of-the-century
British colonial home called Bruce's Farm, named for a colonel
who once lived there. It's now owned by the nature society. The
house perches on the west side of the Rock, hundreds of feet above
the city of Gibraltar with a spectacular view of the bay and Spanish
coastline. Temperatures remain comfortable day and night with
low humidity. The screen-less windows are almost always open because
there aren't any mosquitoes.
The accommodations are hardly elegant, and are even crumbling
in places. There's also not a lot to do at night. The house has
a TV but no cable. Gibraltar has only one television station,
GBTV. One night the station's local newscast airs a report on
the presence of the Notre Dame research team. The 203-year-old
Gibraltar Chronicle later follows suit with a front-page
piece.
A steep path leads down the Rock face to the city, but with
cable car service ceasing at 5 p.m. daily (earlier if it's windy),
that means a grueling return walk. Mostly Fuentes and the students
read, enter data in the computer, check their e-mail or watch
one of the few movies on video in the house.
Everyone pitches in on the chores. A schedule posted on the
refrigerator names the pairs responsible for cooking and cleaning
up each day. These are the same teams who work together in the
field. Fuentes organized the twosomes himself based on perceived
compatibility. Six of the eight students are women. There are
no mixed gender pairs.
Although the weather and scenery suggest otherwise, this is
no vacation. The students all had to apply to work on the project,
which carries three academic credits, and not everyone was accepted.
Several are seriously considering careers in primatology. One,
Meegan Anderson, has conducted research at the Brookfield Zoo
near Chicago and hopes to publish a research paper.
It's unusual for undergraduate students to conduct field research
like this. Usually professors turn to graduate students, but Notre
Dame doesn't have a graduate program in anthropology. Fuentes
tells the students that those interested in continuing to work
on the project in the fall could become co-authors on one or more
papers published in scientific journals -- a dream credential
for anyone eyeing graduate school.
Two weeks into their observations, the initial fun of watching
the often-comical monkey behavior has lessened, but in its place
they've acquired a more analytical interest in the animal's social
structure. There's also the other half of the job -- watching
the tourists. The students sound alternately bewildered and appalled
by the behavior of visitors to the Rock.
Noelle Easterday, a junior from Washington state, recalls a
12-year-old English girl she saw at the cable car terminus. The
girl had been feeding one of the monkeys earlier, and when she
reached out for the animal it snapped at her.
"She was saying to it 'We don't bite. We don't bite' and waving
her finger in the monkey's face. And he bit her. Then she says,
'How dare you, you cheeky little monkey.' And it bites her again.
She starts moving away and screaming, and it bites her little
sister."
Unlike many of the tourists, the students aren't eager to pose
for a photo with a monkey on their shoulders. They know from observations
that, in spite of the preoccupation with mutual grooming, macaques
don't practice especially precise hygiene. Anywhere a monkey sits
is likely to receive what is referred to around Bruce's Farm as
"transmission of fecal material." And that can lead to the ingestion
of salmonella or campylobacter bacteria, known to cause serious
gastrointestinal disorders. Easterday cringes at the memory of
overhearing a little girl tell her parent, "I touched the monkey
-- I'm not going to wash this finger for a week."
After dinner Fuentes calls the students back to the dining room
for a review of data gathered so far. He's smiling.
"The work you're doing is very, very good," he tells them. "I
guarantee you there will be some [journal] publications to come
out of this."
As expected, the data point at the taxi-van drivers as facilitators
of most of the interaction, especially at Prince Phillip's Arch.
An encouraging sign is that only 19 bites have been observed over
the equivalent of nearly 100 hours. ("It's probably easier to
get hit by a bus," the professor quips.) The source of the largest
number of bites, eight, is the gang of rowdy young males at the
cable car terminus.
On the minus side, 15 to 20 percent of interactions are resulting
in fecal matter being transmitted. "If they could stop taxi drivers
from putting monkeys on people's heads that would reduce occurrences
by about 62 percent," Fuentes speculates. But without wardens
at the tour stops, that's unlikely to happen. Besides, the possibility
of someone contracting an intestinal disorder for lack of hand
washing is far from the greatest of Fuentes's worries.
* * *The next night at Bruce's Farm, Fuentes and
the students welcome John Cortes, general secretary and research
director of the nature society, to dinner. Cortes wants to know
what the primatologist thinks of the condition of the monkeys.
"This may not be what you want to hear," the Notre Dame professor
begins, "but, to be perfectly honest, I think all these monkeys
are in terrific condition."
The reason Fuentes suspects that's not what the nature society
wants to hear is because Cortes and Shaw perceive plenty of problems.
Not with the health of the monkeys, but in managing them. Without
wardens, no one is enforcing the no-feeding rule, and there's
no one to provide tourists accurate information on the animals.
Without running water at most of the tour stops, it's impossible
to keep the sites clean. Also, the present feeding method -- dumping
fruit and vegetables in a pile on the ground -- is promoting friction
within the macaque groups over who gets to pick first. Shaw would
like to see the food more widely dispersed.
Changing those conditions requires more money, which the nature
society plans to lobby for when its current contract with the
British government comes up for renewal.
"If we would come up with recommendations," Cortes says, "they
would listen to us."
The nature society also wants greater control. In the past,
the tourism ministry, not the nature society, has determined the
optimum macaque population for the Rock. In 2003, on a minister's
order, the local vet had 27 macaques euthanized without informing
Shaw or Cortes. The population had grown beyond what the ministry
considered to be the optimum population: 180 (six groups of 30).
Shaw, still angry about the incident, argues that the 180 figure
is arbitrary, not based on any scientific evidence.
A spokesman for the government says the cull was necessary because
the population had become unmanageably large. Macaques were invading
homes and other buildings, including hotel rooms. The animals
did more than $50,000 worth of damage to the water system at one
hotel, he said.
Cortes acknowledges that at least one group of macaques frequently
wanders into town to pick through the rubbish and be fed by people.
"Unfortunately, they never unlearn that."
The ministry spokesman says new contraceptive methods promise
to keep the population under control without euthanasia. Also,
responsibility for the macaque population has transferred from
the tourism ministry to the ministry responsible for the environment.
Shaw insists that the Rock could support 600 macaques if the
tree canopy were cut back to allow in more sunlight. This, he
says, would encourage the monkeys to forage for more of their
own food instead of relying on humans. (Fuentes estimates Gibraltar's
macaques get 10 to 20 percent of their food from foraging.) But
grooming the Rock that way also would take more money.
As part of his study Fuentes interviewed scores of Gibraltarians
about their attitudes toward the macaques. Many older people,
he says, see the animals as pests and want to get rid of them.
But the more common sentiment goes back to the notion that Gibraltar
might somehow cease being British if the macaques disappeared.
GBTV reporter James Neish says the apes are seen as part of the
character of Gibraltar, and residents "have a -- passion is not
the word, but they feel they should be looked after."
Cortes thinks the number of visitors to the nature preserve
should be limited, and both he and Shaw appear to favor changing
how monkey and tourists interact. In 1998 the nature society shipped
24 of the macaques to Germany to live in a huge outdoor enclosure.
The space allows people to walk through the monkeys' habitat and
see them, but there's no tossing peanuts or posing with monkeys
on one's head. One unforeseen problem was snow. After the first
snowfall, the monkeys, who had never seen snow, didn't know they
could dig through it and their food would be underneath.
If an enclosure like the one in Germany were constructed on
the Rock it would solve the problem of monkeys wandering into
town and reduce or eliminate potentially unhealthy feeding and
physical contact. The question is whether the politically well-connected
tourist industry would endorse such a change. That doesn't seem
likely. Shaw says the nature society already requires "political
consent" just to tell the tour drivers at Prince Phillip's Arch
that the circus-animal-like behavior they're promoting endangers
the macaques.
Which brings attention back to Fuentes's study and whether any
real danger exists in the way monkeys and people interact on Gibraltar.
The answer appears to be: potentially. First there's the danger
to the monkeys, whom Fuentes says can contract airborne diseases
like measles and tuberculosis from humans.
"All you need is a kid from Eastern Europe with measles coming
through here, and it would run through this population." He adds
immediately, "Then again, it might not happen for 50 years --
you don't know."
More ominous from a public health standpoint is the possibility
of macaques infecting tourists. As part of the Notre Dame study,
Fuentes had the macaques tested for the herpes B virus, which
macaques are known to carry. Unlike genital or oral herpes in
humans, which causes skin sores, herpes B can produce a devastating,
even fatal infection of the central nervous system -- in people.
Macaque carriers don't suffer any obvious symptoms.
Fuentes says there have been 56 cases recorded of herpes B being
transmitted to humans from monkeys in laboratories or zoos. In
the past the response has been to destroy the animals to minimize
health risks. Wild macaques typically carry the virus also, but,
oddly, no transmission to humans has ever been recorded involving
wild macaques.
Given the seriousness of possible infection and the volume of
interactions with tourists on Gibraltar, what would happen to
Gibraltar's macaques if they were found to be carriers of herpes
B?
"Then we would have a problem," Fuentes says.
* * *
After Fuentes and the students complete their month of observations,
the primatologist receives back his lab results. It's good news
for the monkeys. Unlike their wild brethren in Asia, the Barbary
macaques of Gibraltar do not carry herpes B or many other common
macaque pathogens.
In his preliminary report, Fuentes notes that other potential
hazards do exist for tourists, including skin- and fur-born parasites
like lice and fecal/urine contamination. He recommends running
water be made available where the monkeys are present and that
visitors be warned more forcefully to wash their hands and any
body parts that come in contact with the animals.
One of the more interesting findings from the interaction data
is that fewer than half of the macaques on Gibraltar interact
with humans on a regular basis. The monkeys seem to be deciding
for themselves whether they want to steal ice cream bars, perform
tricks or pose for photos. Apparently the majority would rather
stay away or just sit and watch.
Ed Cohen is an associate editor of this magazine. He also
took the picture, shown above.
(January 2005)
