The Monkeys of Silver River: Florida's Most Surprising Wildlife Story
Near Ocala, Florida
In the spring of nineteen thirty-eight, a glass-bottom boat operator at Silver Springs made a mistake that is still swimming through the forest today.
The operator, known locally as Colonel Tooey, decided that his jungle cruise tour needed more jungle atmosphere. He acquired six rhesus macaques, monkeys native to South and Southeast Asia, and released them on a small island in the Silver River. His plan was that tourists would spot them through the trees and feel transported somewhere exotic.
There was one problem Colonel Tooey had not considered. Rhesus macaques are excellent swimmers. The monkeys left the island the same day they arrived, swam to the forested riverbanks, and disappeared into the Ocala National Forest.
They did not disappear permanently. They bred. A nineteen sixty-eight survey counted seventy-eight individuals. By the nineteen eighties, the population had grown to nearly four hundred animals ranging along the Silver River and the adjoining Ocklawaha River corridor. Today, several hundred rhesus macaques still live in the forests here, the only wild monkey population in the continental United States outside of a small colony in Puerto Rico.
The monkeys have generated genuine scientific interest and genuine controversy. Rhesus macaques can carry herpes B, a virus harmless to them but potentially dangerous to humans. Wildlife managers have debated for decades what to do. From nineteen ninety-eight to twenty twelve, a trapper captured more than eight hundred animals and sold them to biomedical research facilities, a practice that eventually drew enough public opposition that it stopped.
The monkeys are still here. Kayakers on the Silver River see them regularly. Scientists study them. And the question of how to manage a population of Asian primates living freely in a Florida national forest remains unresolved, one of the stranger legacies of a nineteen thirties tourism gimmick.
