#howler monkeys

The Quizzer Book of Knowledge: Nature. Written and edited by George Beal. 1978.

Hope everyone is having a good one 💕🐒

A brown howler monkey (Alouatta guariba) in Caratinga, Brazil 

Excerpt from this story from NBC News:

Threatened howler monkeys have been dropping dead from trees in Mexico’s southeastern tropical forests in recent weeks amid a nationwide drought and heat waves that have sent temperatures soaring across much of the country.

In the state of Tabasco, where temperatures are forecast this week to surpass 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), local media have reported up to 85 deaths, while local authorities have confirmed the trend without providing a death toll.

In a statement over the weekend, Tabasco’s Civil Protection agency attributed the deaths to dehydration.

A source from the agency told Reuters on Monday that monkeys have been confirmed dead in three municipalities of the state.

In a forest outside Camalcalco, Tabasco, volunteers collected the corpses of mantled howler monkeys (alouatta palliata) that died from high temperatures, before placing buckets of water and fruit to try to stave off more deaths.

Not gonna lie, this is a topic proving weirdly difficult to investigate. I've been scouring online and for some reason no one wants to talk about howler monkey ears! Multiple combinations of keywords have not gotten me anywhere.

What I can tell you is that I phoned the LA zoo and left a message for the primste department (feeling confident I'm probably the only person over the age of 10 to call with this kind of inquiry), and that I have an educated hypothesis from personal experience.

Howler monkeys like other monkeys (and apes, including humans) have ears that consist of a canal with external cartilage forming neat shapes. It can be hard to see through all the fluffy fur, but here is a howler monkey (ears included)

What you may not be able to tell from the photo but you could tell by feeling an ear with your fingers, is that the cartilage is very firm and complexly shaped. In fact, while you could easily plunge a finger into your own ear, a howler monkeys ear canal is tricky to find. The firm cartilage encircles it well in a way that I can only guess works to absorb loud noises in close proximity. So howler monkey ears may hols the answer to your question, but at the moment I can only give you an educated assumption from my howler monkey fondling experience.

Black howler monkeys move through their environment using mental maps that they modify and adapt as the landscape changes – a skill previously seen only in humans.

In 2016, Miguel de Guinea at Oxford Brookes University, UK, spent a year in Palenque National Park, Mexico, tracking groups of black howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra) to observe how the primates traverse the complex rainforest landscape.

Tagging the monkeys with GPS tracking technology would have been too invasive, so de Guinea and a group of volunteers had to follow them on foot. “It was a bit exhausting at times,” he says. Tracking the monkeys frequently required the researchers to cross rivers and to climb to the pinnacles of ancient Mayan temples. But the results of their endeavours were surprising.

“We found that the monkeys follow certain routes,” says de Guinea, “but they structure and combine those routes in an efficient, human-like way.”