Scientists in Malaysia have said they were “stunned” to discover monkeys regularly killing and eating rats on palm oil plantations, providing a natural anti-pest measure in the country, which is responsible for 30 percent of the world’s palm oil production.
A report released on Monday in Current Biology showed that southern pig-tailed macaques, generally thought to eat mainly fruit plus occasionally lizards and birds, foraged for rats on plantations.
REDUCED LOSSES
Photo: Reuters
The authors said that the monkeys’ appetite for rodents showed that rather than being pests, as is commonly believed, the primates’ presence reduced crop losses.
“I was stunned when I first observed that macaques feed on rats in plantations,” said Nadine Ruppert, senior zoology lecturer at University Sains Malaysia, who cowrote the report. “I did not expect them to hunt these relatively large rodents or that they would even eat so much meat.”
The report monitored macaques between January 2016 and September last year in plantations around Malaysia’s Segari Melintang forest reserve.
It showed that each of the monitored macaque groups, featuring an average of 44 monkeys, killed about 3,000 rats each year.
Rats are estimated to damage an average of 10 percent of oil palm crops by eating its fruit, compared with the macaques, which damage 0.54 percent.
As a result, the rat-eating monkeys help save crops, the authors said.
Malaysia produces about 19.5 million tonnes of palm oil per year — the world’s most popular vegetable oil — making it one of the biggest producers of the product globally.
MAIN INGREDIENT
It is used in many products, from shampoo to lipstick to bread and chocolate.
It is also a cleaning agent and is used as a component in fuels such as biodiesel.
Plantations’ effects on forests and peatlands and the wild animals that live there have made them hugely controversial. Large areas are often burned and cleared to make way for the plantations, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Southern pig-tailed macaques are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, but are regularly shot by palm oil plantation staff in Malaysia.
The authors hope their findings will help reduce such behavior and promote a “win-win solution.”
“Our results suggest important opportunities for mitigating human-wildlife conflicts,” they wrote.
“Farmers and palm oil companies are encouraged to protect primates in their natural habitat via wildlife corridors between forest patches and viable interfaces between forests and plantations,” they added.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
A new online voting system aimed at boosting turnout among the Philippines’ millions of overseas workers ahead of Monday’s mid-term elections has been marked by confusion and fears of disenfranchisement. Thousands of overseas Filipino workers have already cast their ballots in the race dominated by a bitter feud between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his impeached vice president, Sara Duterte. While official turnout figures are not yet publicly available, data from the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) showed that at least 134,000 of the 1.22 million registered overseas voters have signed up for the new online system, which opened on April 13. However,
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
RSS