The macaques helped revive the Amazon rainforest

the lush Amazon rainforest in northeastern Peru lost most of its trees after it was cut down and turned into a buffalo ranch in 1990. However, after about 10 years of human abandonment of the area, forests began to regenerate slowly. Now, scientists have found an explanation for why it has recovered so quickly: the foraging activities of macaques.
macaque is a local squirrel-sized monkey. Scientists have long suspected that macaques played a role in rainforest restoration.
, for more than 20 years, researchers measured how long the monkeys stayed in previously deforested forests using GPS tracking devices and field observations. They also tracked how often and where monkeys excreted seeds from fruit trees. Most of the fruit trees come from nearby forests.
in the first three years, the monkeys spent less than 1.5 percent of their time in previously deforested forests. But by 2016, that proportion had risen to about 12 per cent. Of the hundreds of seeds tracked, 15 survived and grow into trees taller than 2 meters.
collected the leaves of the trees and analyzed their genes. It turns out that more than half of the trees grow from seeds that originally came from nearby forests.
scientists say in a recently published scientific report that this confirms the key role monkeys play in revitalised areas of deforestation.
, although the forest has been restored for more than 20 years, it still does not have enough plant diversity and vegetation cover to provide a suitable home for monkeys. For this, only time will tell how long it may take for forests to fully recover. (
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