2024 Author: Adelina Croftoon | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 02:07
Scientists were stunned to say the least when they made an unexpected discovery on palm plantations in Malaysia.
In the forests next to these plantations live pig-tailed macaquespreviously considered pests by farmers - macaques raided plantations and ate the fruit.
Now farmers have realized that macaques can be of great benefit - it turned out that pig-tailed macaques are very fond of feeding on rats, which are much more dangerous pests for palm plantations.
It has already been calculated that allowing the monkeys to catch rats among the palms and not chase them away will bring farmers about $ 650,000 in losses annually.
Palm plantations produce palm oil, which is used in a variety of food products around the world. Pig-tailed macaques are attracted by palms with delicious fruits.
Zoologist Nadine Rupert from the University of Science Malaysia and colleagues have been studying the behavior and habits of pig-tailed macaques in the Segari Melintang Forest Reserve since 2016.
They learned that macaques regularly raid palm plantations and eat up to 12 tons of fruit a year. This represents about 0.56 percent of the total palm oil production in these plantations. However, this damage is more than offset by the benefits that macaques bring by eating rats. After all, there are much more rats here and they eat much more fruit.
Rats hide among the trunks of oil palms and pig-tailed macaques have learned to look for them and get them out of hiding, dexterously wielding their paws with tenacious fingers.
“I was amazed when I saw how these macaques eat rats with an appetite,” says Nadine Rupert, “I didn’t even expect them to hunt rodents, especially since they consume so much meat. Pig-tailed macaques are known for their love of fruit and it was previously believed that they eat meat very rarely, having caught lizards or small birds."
Nadine Rupert's colleague, primatologist Anna Holzner at the University of Leipzig, Germany, has calculated that each group of pig-tailed macaques catches and eats about 3,000 rats a year. And these rats eat about 10% of palm fruits a year, causing tremendous damage to plantations. And no traps and poisons can cope with them. Thus, monkeys are suddenly found to be the only remedy that can help cope with this problem. At the same time, it is a very environmentally friendly product.
The detailed results of this amazing discovery were published the other day in the journal Current Biology.
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