This South Carolina Island Is Home to 4,000 Monkeys

And no people

(By Timothy Gonsalves — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93038661)

Sitting halfway between Charleston and Savannah in South Carolina’s coastal lowlands is an island sitting at the confluence of the Morgan and Coosaw Rivers. At first glance, the island is unremarkable. It is one of dozens of similar uninhabited islands that dot the swamps, marshes, rivers, and deltas of the South Carolina coast. But this island, known as Morgan Island, is special because it is home to a large colony of free-ranging rhesus monkeys.

Morgan Island is home to nearly 4,000 of these rhesuses living in a tropical forest in the island's center. These monkeys live with little human intervention as the island is uninhabited. Many monkeys are terrible swimmers and are scared of deep or moving water. That makes the island the perfect place to house these monkeys. They won’t leave because of the deep, marshy waters that surround them.

Morgan Island is 4,500 acres, which gives each monkey over an acre of territory to call its own (though they avoid some of the swampy areas near the water.) The monkeys mostly live in the center of the island, where 600 acres of highlands remain dry and heavily forested.

So these monkeys are safely trapped on this one South Carolina island. But that doesn’t answer a large number of obvious questions. Why are there thousands of monkeys on this remote South Carolina island? Where did they come from? Can you see these monkeys?

The Origin of the Monkey Colony

(Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Like all good stories, the origins of South Carolina’s monkey colony starts with the government. In the 1960s and 1970s, eastern nations like India and Thailand ceased exporting monkeys to the United States. Prior to that, the United States would buy rhesus from Asia for research purposes. With the supply of rhesus monkeys cut off, the United States started a primate research center in Puerto Rico.

This was a good idea, in theory, but in practice it failed. The monkeys managed to escape the research center and they started to pester the locals and spread disease. This caused the government…