60 Minutes Monkey Island Transcript

With extreme weather events on the rise across the globe, like the rare category five hurricane that hit Mexico in October, we were interested in a study that’s taking place on a remote island very few people are allowed to visit where scientists are studying how the stress of these environmental crises affect longevity and overall health. As Leslie Stahl first reported in November, the subjects are not what you’d expect. They’re monkeys, rhesus macaque monkeys who’ve been studied there for over 80 years because 94% of their DNA is the same as humans. They survived with relative environmental stability until six years ago when the island was hit with a devastating storm. After taking tests for tuberculosis, measles, and COVID, Leslie and her team were allowed to visit the island called Cayo Santiago or Monkey Island off the coast of Puerto Rico.

The story will continue in a moment.

There are roughly 1,800 monkeys on Cayo. They live in isolation in what is a natural laboratory, halfway between captivity and the way they would live in the wild.

(01:20)
Are they fighting?

Yeah. She’s looking around and screaming for help trying to get others to come to her aid.

Wow.

(01:27)
Biologists James Hyam of NYU and Noah Snyder-Mackler of Arizona State University are part of a team of investigators in this long-term research project. What’s the lifespan usually?

The lifespan here on the island for the females, the median lifespan is about 18 years, and then in males about 15 years. Right?

Do they have… Is there a predator?

No predators here.

Another way life here is unlike the wild, is that these guys serve their meals every morning. Researchers tell us there’s a hierarchy. The highest-ranking monkeys get to eat first.

I’ve even seen high-ranking individuals go up to a low-ranking individual who is eating food in their mouth and hold their mouth open and take the food out of their mouths. And then close it.

What do they get?

Purina Monkey Chow.

There’s monkey chow?

There is.

Oh, my goodness.

(02:34)
Rhesus monkeys are commonly used for medical research because there are close relatives, genetically and physiologically similar to humans.

They have systems that are quite like us, eyes that are like us, lungs and hearts that are like us.

These rhesus macaque monkeys, their ancestors came here from India in 1938.

The macaque is used in larger numbers for medical and zoological research than any other kind of primate.

American primatologist, Clarence Carpenter, took 500 of them on a grueling 14,000 miles sea voyage that lasted 51 days. He wanted to create a naturalistic research facility to study the monkey’s social and sexual behaviors. Their early years here were tough. Many died from disease, but enough of them lived on so that by the 1950s, scientists began tattooing them and taking a daily census. That meticulous record keeping has continued with today’s monkeys, all of whom descended from the original group, giving scientists rare access to more than six decades of their biological and behavioral data. One of the things they learned is that their highly adaptable, acclimating quickly to the island. They also learn that they can be quite aggressive, especially around food and during the mating season. Are these monkeys intelligent?

Sure. They’re pretty intelligent. They’re socially intelligent.

How similar to us are they and how they live?

They form really strong social relationships with their best friends and their family members.

They have best friends?

Some close friends, some best friends, right?

Rhesus monkeys live in female-led societies. Mothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers stick together in groups while the males leave when they reach maturity and join other troops for breeding. Few people know the troop tensions and allegiances better than research assistants. Daniel Phillips and Josue Negron who’ve worked on Cayo for years. They arrive every morning by boat at 7:00 A.M., and for the next seven hours, they document things like aggression, grooming, vigilance, and feeding. Do you ever get to know individuals? In other words, you know that monkey versus that one?

Yeah. Yeah. We need to recognize them right away because I need to know who is interacting with, how they groom each other or attack each other.

And how can you tell the difference? What are the characteristics that you see?

You can see the differences on even how they walk, how they move, their even faces have differences.

In other words, their faces become as ordinary in a way to your eyes as human faces.

Yes.

You recognize even families.

Exactly.

Your face is familiar. You should be the son of this female.

Everything changed for the research and the monkeys when Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017. 155 mile an hour winds smashed into homes and office buildings destroying everything in sight, including the power grid and communication systems. Nearly 3,000 people died. There was no way for the team to get to Monkey Island. Angelina Ruiz-Lambedes, the then scientific director of Cayo, seven months pregnant at the time, sheltered in her home outside of San Juan with her husband and two young children. You thought the monkeys were all going to die?

We thought that the monkeys were going to die.

James Hyam and Noah Snyder-Mackler couldn’t get any news about their colleagues or the monkeys. So two days after the storm, the team came up with an idea. And you hired a helicopter?

We hired a helicopter.

They enlisted the pilot to fly over Cayo and do a survey, and they had a list of questions.

Can he see any monkeys? Are they alive? What is the status of the vegetation? Are there standing pools of water that they might be able to drink?

Angelina who had decided to go up with the pilot was horrified. This is footage she shot from the helicopter.

I see destruction, like eighty-plus years of work, completely flattened.

This is Cayo before the hurricane with a dense canopy of trees and lush foliage. This is after, a green oasis turned brown, buried in dead branches. The island lost two-thirds of its vegetation. Heartbroken by what she was seeing from the air, Angelina wanted a closer look, but even on the ground, she didn’t see any monkeys.

So then I get on the helicopter again.

Back up again.

And that’s when I see a social group running from the helicopter and it’s like, oh, there’s monkeys. They’re still Cayo. I think I estimated, okay, that must be around like 300, 400 monkeys or so.

Out of 1,700.

Yes.

But once the staff was able to return and do a complete census on the ground, they found to their utter astonishment that most had lived. They estimated just about 50 had died. And you’re thinking, how could they survive this? How could they?

How could they survive this?

It’s still a mystery. What did the monkeys do to ride out the storm? Where did they shelter from the wind and what did they eat? So one of the big questions is, without being fed, how were they nourished?

Yeah. So although the hurricane did dramatically de-vegetate the island, one thing it also did was deposited a great amount of seaweed and algae onto the island. And so one possibility is that the monkeys were eating more of this kind of vegetation.

Which they still seem to enjoy. After the hurricane, the monkeys had to adjust to a new far more hostile environment. Their innate adaptability certainly helped.

So they bob up and down to try and stop themselves from falling forward?

Six years after the storm, the adjusting continues. Attempts to replant the trees have been stymied because the monkeys ever curious about anything new in their environment, uproot them before they have a chance to grow. So now there’s very little shade. This used to be almost forested, right?

Lots of space and shade.

Now they’re forced to sit in a few shaded areas. And so they’ve been clumped by the changing distribution of shade. So an interesting thing that we saw is that individuals became more social.

Not just more social. The researchers have noticed that the monkeys are more tolerant of each other, which at first seemed counterintuitive. I’m thinking of humans in a situation where there’s fewer resources, and I see in my mind’s eye competition, I see them saying, get off my property, or whatever. But you are saying that it was the opposite here?

Perhaps. But there’s also famous examples of people pulling together. So I think it can go both ways. We are capable of great greed and competition and cruelty, but humans are also capable of great kindness and compassion and friendship and generosity. And that kind of duality exists in rhesus macaque societies too.

And I think anyone you talk to here in Puerto `Rico would bring up the fact that the people of Puerto Rico sort of gelled and increased their support of one another in the face of this event.

Beyond observing their social interactions, they were also able to track biological changes since they had access to blood tests done on the monkeys for 13 years.

So what we found is that individuals who had lived through the hurricane had immune systems that looked like they had aged an extra two years.

What is that in human years?

Six to eight human years.

They aged six to eight years?

They aged six to eight human years.

Oh, my gosh. Through the trauma?

That was on average. That’s the work that we’re trying to do right now, is what makes some of these individuals more resilient to the hurricane, right?

Is the hypothesis that it has something to do with friendships?

We think that those individuals who are able to have stronger bonds, stronger friendships, might’ve been protected from this really stressful event.

The hurricane opened all new avenues of their research with questions such as what predicts who survives a catastrophe, like an earthquake or a hurricane, and how quickly they recover. So when you step back and look at your study in terms of climate-related trauma or any kind of trauma, are you expecting to find answers for survivability in these situations for human beings?

Given the strong similarity between these primates, these monkeys, and us, we know that a lot of the work that we’re doing and the things that they might do to be more resilient to this might be translatable to humans, to us, and might provide ways for us to intervene and help buffer against the negative effects of these traumatic events.