Only 25 miles from Key West and just two miles from their closest neighbors on Summerland
Key, more than 1,000 rhesus monkeys frolic in the sun of the Florida Keys.
They play “King of the Hill” in the mangrove trees, live on Monkey Chow brought in by boat each day and are known only by their tattoo num-bers.
Depending on whom you ask, the monkeys are either crucial to medical researchers seeking a cure for AIDS, osteoporosis, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease or they are an environmental disaster that could spread elsewhere in the ecologically sensitive Keys.
The monkeys’ breeders and the state have been engaged in battle for about a decade.
Now Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Cabinet are being asked by state agencies to order the monkeys out of their home on state-owned Lois and Raccoon keys and into cages on Florida’s mainland.
State officials argue that the monkeys are killing the trees that hold the islands together. They strip the bark, leaves and trees from the mangroves as if peeling the skin from a banana. “It’s the amount of degradation that’s occurring,” says an obviously exasperated Virginia Wetherell, Secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Fears are that a hurricane or even a major storm could carry some members of the colony to other islands. So DEP wants the monkeys off state-owned land as soon as possible.
Chiles and the Cabinet, acting as the trustees for state lands, will be asked to do that at their meeting on Tuesday.
“What was once a red mangrove fringe around Key Lois is gone,” said David Schwartz, a DEP attorney. “There is less island than there was. They have removed and taken away state lands.”
The monkeys were brought to the Keys in 1973 from India by Charles River Laboratories, a Massachusetts-based company that breeds the primates for biomedical research. A division of vision care giant Bausch & Lomb, Charles River is one of only about five breeders of the rhesus monkeys that are so popular for medical research.
About 500 to 600 a year leave the island for labs owned by drug companies, federal agencies, France and Japan. Monkeys from this colony were instrumental in helping to find a cure for polio.
What makes the Keys monkeys so unusual – and valuable? Their isolation has kept them from contracting a myriad of modern-world diseases.
“We have got a national resource for public health that is not available anywhere else,” said Bob Routa, Charles River’s attorney, who is trying to buy the monkeys time before they have to leave. “These islands have kept them isolated for more than 20 years, so they are disease free. They are highly sought after by researchers.”
It has been a self-sustaining, closed colony for 25 years. No new animals have been introduced. Some of the free-roaming animals are 28 or 29 years old.
The monkey population reached a high of 6,000 in 1983, before the state passed any laws protecting its mangroves.
“And, to be honest, they ate a lot of mangroves,” Routa said.
At first, state agencies just wanted the monkeys locked up. But an agreement with the state allowed breeding to continue on 100-acre Key Lois until 2012, at which time the island would revert to the state, and on 300-acre Raccoon Key until 2024, when the federal government would take control.
Now, armed with proof of the ecological damage being caused by the primates – and the pollution their waste is creating in surrounding waters – the state’s environmental agencies are seeking ways to get the monkeys off.
“This is needed for Florida’s ecology,” said DEP’s Schwartz. “The red mangrove provides critical habitat for wading birds and a nursery for marine life.”
Schwartz is leading the state blitz in court to get the monkeys off. DEP is asking the governor and Cabinet – as the trustees of state-owned lands – to immediately cancel Charles River’s lease.
Charles River has already spent more than $1 million on self-contained waste water disposal plants and preparations to replant the keys.
“We’ve been caught up in a change of the environmental laws,” said Dr. Paul Schilling, director of the primate operation.
Schilling said 95 percent of the monkeys will be removed from Key Lois by June, with the remainder expected to be gone by December. The company is asking for a few years to collect all the animals on the larger Raccoon Key.
Caging the older animals – especially those who have roamed free since they were brought to Florida from India – will be “extremely stressful and result in a high death rate,” Schilling said.
“I’d hope we’d have a reasonable amount of time to get them off,” he said. “We need at least two to three years unless you go out with a gun.”
If the state orders the monkeys out, Schilling said the company will have to seek help from the courts.
“There’s no place for them to go,” he said.
