Japan’s Snow Monkeys Survive Harsh Winter By ‘Fishing’ Live Creatures From Streams

 

Monkeys, humankind’s closest relative, have always impressed with their intelligence and ingenuity and yet another example of this has come to light through a recent study.

Inhabiting one of the globe’s coldest areas in Japan, snow monkeys have managed to live and survive the harsh winter by “going fishing”, that is lifting out creatures alive, including the brown trout, out of rivers of Japan and consuming them alive, states this new study.

Native of the main Japanese islands, except Hokkaido, the snow monkey or the Japanese macaque Macaca fuscata is the non-human primate living most northerly. With the Kamikochi area of Chubu Sangaku National Park located in the Japanese Alps covered in snow, these creatures are confronted with scarcity of their preferred food.

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Faced with such adverse conditions, the monkeys running low on energy are bound to die of starvation but the streams that are fed by groundwater with a constant temperature of 5 degrees Celsius, thus being accessible to the animals to find alternate food which is a live.

The findings of this study done by an international research team that was led by the experts of University of Birmingham, was published in Scientific Reports this week. This is the first scientific paper that has reported about these Japanese macaques definitively eating animals of freshwater, including the brown trout.

In the past it was observed that snow monkeys were opportunistic as they managed to grab the fish which was either being dried or had washed up on the beaches but now it was found their closely-related species were consuming freshwater fish.