Monkey Shine II

This is the non-manipulated version of Monkey Shine _link.

There is a bit of a story behind this snarling little guy. When I arrived at his enclosure, there was a volunteer there, next to the terrarium that houses a very large snake...either boa or python, not sure which. She had a rolled up skin from another snake, I believe a python so people could touch it and see what a snake skin was like. This particular one was about 20 feet long when unrolled. While I was photographing the Allen's Swamp Monkeys and the Colobus Monkeys, someone asked her if she could unroll it and let them take pics of their kids in front of it. She said yes and they unrolled it right there in front of the viewing area of the Swamp Monkeys. They held it at both ends in the middle so it draped down on both sides and looked quite real this way. Funny thing is, that even though they are zoo monkeys and have probably never encountered the dangers of a predatory snake in their lives, they still instantly recognized the skin of this python as danger and started going crazy! They started sort of barking, I suppose a warning to the others, and came up as close to the screen separating them from the people as they could, baring fangs, barking and peeing all over the place. I assume they were trying to "drive off" the dangerous snake.

I found this fascinating that they would recognize this "snake" even though it was only a skin and would still react to it the same as they would if they were in their natural habitat.

I stayed at this exhibit for about 1.5 hours and during that time, they unrolled this "predator" 3 times and every time, the monkeys reacted the same way.

This shot was taken during one of those times.


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