Monkey Nearly 200 Species | East Africa Travel Company
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Monkey (plural monkeys) Any member of the clade Simiiformes not also belonging to the clade Hominoidea, which consists of humans and apes. They are usually smaller and have tails, and cheek pouches.
Monkey
Adorable Monkey, in general, is any of nearly 200 species of tailed primates except lemurs, tarsiers, and lorises. A monkey’s tail (even if it is only a tiny hair), along with its narrow chest and other features of the skeleton, distinguishes it from an ape.
A monkey’s face is usually short, and flat, and does not have a prominent muzzle. Baboons and mandrills, however, are notable exceptions.
Most species live in tropical forests, where they move on all four limbs.
Except for the durukuli of tropical Central and South America, most species are active during the day, moving frequently in bands to eat vegetation, birds’ eggs, smaller animals, and insects.
As monkeys are capable of sitting upright, their hands can perform many manipulative tasks.
With a few exceptions, monkeys are primarily arboreal, leaping from limb to limb in their travels across trees.
Both their hands and feet are used for grasping, with the thumb and big toe being divergent from the others.
In most mammals, the digits have flattened nails, but marmosets have claws on all but the big toe, which has a nail.
On the ground, monkeys walk with the entire sole of the foot touching the ground but with the palm of the hand raised. They almost never walk on two legs (bipedally) and can stand erect for only short periods, if at all.
Adorable Monkey - Monkeys are known for their intelligence
Monkeys are known for their intelligence and curiosity. As a result of their brain development, freeing their hands, and developing their vision, they can participate in a wide range of activities.
While they are good at solving complex problems and learning from experience, they do not reach the cognitive level of great apes.
Many people, such as the capuchins (genus Cebus), spontaneously use objects as tools (e.g., stones to crack nuts). Others, like baboons, can easily obtain food by using sticks.
Most monkeys do not appear to be very good at learning from one another’s experiences-individuals learn new behaviors by themselves, unlike most great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans).
A notable exception is a Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata). In field experiments, these monkeys were introduced to new Sweet potatoes and candies wrapped in paper.
Following the invention of new foods by a few individuals, their innovations gradually spread to the entire army. Experimental work has had implications for redefining cultural behavior.
Many Monkey Species
Many monkey species live in troop configurations consisting of several females with young and either a male (such as guenons and langurs) or several males (such as savannah baboons and macaques). The females, generally, but not always, stay with the troop in which they were born and are therefore closely related.
Men join new troops once they reach maturity, so they are unrelated to each other and somewhat antagonistic.
As with humans and apes, female monkeys nurse their young and have menstrual cycles, albeit not as frequent as those in humans.
For some species, sexual activity is strictly restricted to the period around ovulation (estrus); for others, there is little or no restriction.
Some species breed all year round, while others have a period of several months in which they do not experience sexual activity (anestrus).
Monkey - here are Two Main Groups of Monkeys:
There are two main groups of monkeys: Old World and New World. All Old World monkeys are from one family, Cercopithecidae, which is related to apes and humans, and together they are known as catarrhines (meaning “downward-nosed” in Latin). There are five families of New World monkeys, the platyrrhine monkeys (“flat-nosed”).
Old World (catarrhine) and New World (platyrrhine) monkeys are distinguished by the shape of their noses.
Old World monkeys have narrow noses with outwardly directed nostrils, while New World monkeys have broad noses with a wide septum separating them from a thin septum and downward-facing nostrils, as do apes and humans.
Old World monkeys have hard, bare “sitting pads” (ischial callosities) on the buttocks; New World monkeys do not.
The thumbs of many Old World monkeys can be opposed to the other fingers, allowing them to handle small objects precisely.
New World monkeys lack such manual dexterity.
Among many species, the main differences are between the index and middle fingers; in a few, the thumbs are reduced or absent altogether.
The tails of some New World monkey species can support the entire body weight or be used to grasp a peanut offered to them.
There are no Old World monkeys with this ability, and macaques are nearly as short as humans.
Monkey - Primarily Found
Primarily found in tropical South America, especially the Amazon rainforest, a few species range northward as far as southern Mexico or southward as far as northern Argentina.
In the New World, the alert and curious tufted marmosets, as well as the clever squirrel, woolly, and capuchins, have endeared themselves to humans, demonstrating the curiosity and cleverness ascribed to monkeys generally.
Among the larger New World species are acrobatic spider monkeys and howler monkeys. Among the New World monkeys are uakaris,
The Old World monkey lives in Africa, on the Red Sea coast of Arabia, and in Asia from Afghanistan to Japan, and to the islands of the Philippines, Celebes, Bacan, and Timor in the southeast. Gibraltar, France, Mauritius, Belau, and a few islands of the West Indies have successfully naturalized Old World monkeys.
Old World monkeys Among them are many species that are often found in zoos, such as the beautifully colored African guenons (such as the mona and Diana monkeys), colobus, mangabeys, and the Asiatic macaques.
Macaques include the Barbary “ape” of North Africa and the Rock of Gibraltar-the only macaque outside Asia and the only monkey that lives in western Europe-and the rhesus monkey of the Indian subcontinent, which has been extensively studied for medical research.
The Graceful Langurs
The graceful langurs of southern Asia include the hanuman or sacred monkey. One of the more unusual monkeys is the large and strikingly colored African drills and mandrills, the proboscis monkey of Borneo, and the rare and bizarre snub-nosed monkey of China and Vietnam. The Old World monkeys are divided into two subfamilies: Cercopithecines and Colobinae.
Cercopithecines have cheek pouches where they store their food; these include baboons, macaques, guenons, and their relatives.
The colobines lack cheek pouches but have three or four-chambered stomachs, where cellulose and hemicellulose are fermented by bacteria, enriching the nutrient content of their diet, which includes leaves and seeds. The colobus monkeys, langurs, and their relatives are colonies.
There are many parallels between Old and New World monkeys because of the similar ecological niches they occupy.
Both squirrel monkeys (genus Saimiri) and talapoins (genus Miopithecus) of West-Central Africa are small (around 1 kg [2.2 pounds]), green, live in large groups near rivers, and breed seasonally.
There are, however, other aspects of each group’s evolution that are unique.
There is no New World monkey that lives on the savanna or that has a multichambered, cellulose-fermenting stomach, and no Old World monkey that is nocturnal like the durukuli.
Chimpanzees are the closest analog to the complex society of the spider monkey.
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