Episode 196: Many Monkeys

Strange Animals Podcast

Thanks to Nick and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about A BUNCH OF MONKEYS! Further reading: How we solved the Green monkey mystery--and found an important clue to Bronze Age world Field Notes: Singing Titi Monkeys (with a video of them singing) Dracula monkeys and Dracula: The Dracula monkey orchid (not a vampire, not a monkey, but it is an orchid): A capuchin monkey insisting a friend "see no evil": Abu! Mandrills gonna get as colorful as monkily possible: Rafiki! Why is your tail so long? One of the "blue monkey" wall frescos and some grey langurs: The fluffy titi monkey: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Halloween is over for another year, but that doesn’t mean things get boring. This week let’s learn about some monkeys, including a few monkey mysteries that were solved with science! Thanks to Nick and Richard for their suggestions. We’ll start with the Dracula monkey, suggested by Richard from North Carolina, who also sent me an article a while back about the monkey. I meant to include this topic in an episode before October but got distracted by all the other awesome animals that have been suggested lately. The Dracula monkey is also called Miller’s Grizzled langur, but that’s a mouthful and Dracula monkey is funnier. It’s not called the Dracula monkey because it has fangs, but because its body is gray with a white ruff that sticks out on either side of the neck like the collar of Dracula’s cape in the movies. Its face is also gray except for a white U-shaped marking under its nose like a little white mustache. It grows up to 22 inches long, or 56 cm, not counting its tail which is even longer than its body. The Dracula monkey eats young leaves and unripe fruit, along with flowers, seeds, and sometimes eggs. It spends most of its time in trees and is endangered by habitat loss and hunting, and it only lives in one place, in rainforests on the island of Borneo in South Asia. It was spotted by scientists in 2012 after it was suspected to be extinct, but that was the last anyone saw of it for years. An Animal Planet show called “Extinct or Alive” was filming in Borneo in spring of 2019, unless it was 2018, it’s not clear from the article, searching for the Dracula monkey. The host and his team set up camera traps in the forest, braving literally hundreds of bee stings as they did so. But it worked, catching the monkey on camera and proving it wasn’t extinct. When an animal is declared extinct, conservationists lose funding to help it and it’s removed from the list of protected animals, so it’s important to search for animals that are suspected to be extinct but might not be. While I was researching the Dracula monkey, I learned about a rare orchid called the Dracula monkey orchid. It has fuzzy reddish-brown and white flowers that look remarkably like a monkey’s face. It doesn’t actually look like Dracula or a Dracula monkey, though. Who names these organisms? In this case, scientists. The orchid’s scientific name is Dracula simia, and the genus Dracula is named because some of the orchids in the genus are red or black and white and the long spurs supposedly hang down like fangs. The Dracula monkey orchid is found in southeastern Ecuador in South America, and only grows in moist high-altitude forests. The flowers smell like oranges. This has been your bonus plant fact of the week. The Dracula monkey orchid actually looks more like a capuchin monkey than a Dracula monkey, so let’s learn about the capuchin next. You probably know what the capuchin monkey looks like because it’s so common in movies. The monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark (you know, the “bad dates” monkey) was a capuchin, but the noises he makes in the movie are actually voiced by a human actor named Frank Welker. Welker also voiced the monkey Abu in Disney’s Aladdin from 1992.