Chang Ai-Lien, Straits Times 20 Apr 08;
'Singapore does such a great job of living with our cultural diversity, maybe now we can start learning to live with our biodiversity too.'
Who says humans are the only species to pay for sex?
Monkey business abounds with long-tailed macaques, whose frisky males use grooming as currency for a romp.
According to work by a researcher here, the less available females are, the greater time a male will spend grooming them during courtship.
'It's an exchange, and grooming seems to increase the likelihood that sex will occur,' said American primatologist Michael D. Gumert.
Assistant Professor Gumert reported these results in a paper, Payment For Sex In A Macaque Mating Market, which was published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
The 32-year-old, who joined Nanyang Technological University's division of psychology in August last year, believes that monkey behaviour can be used to understand the abstract underpinnings of human behaviour.
'Studying macaques allows us to see and investigate many facets of social behaviour, such as kin selection, dominance, social markets, and even culture,' he said.
'To watch monkeys is to watch a never-ending soap opera - you find yourself sucked in.'
Indeed, the monkeys' behaviour bears uncanny similarity to that of their human counterparts.
Adolescent males, for example, are the most unpredictable and the biggest trouble-makers. 'They're just like unruly teenage boys,' he said.
His PhD work involved a 15-month stint, supported by a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship, spent traipsing through the jungles of Indonesia's Tanjung Puting National Park in 2003 and 2004. Before long, he could recognise every one of the 50 troop members, from the high-ranking alpha female Helen (the prettiest - he named her after Helen of Troy) to her nephew Caesar, a feisty juvenile male.
His time there was not just spent battling mosquitoes, angry monkeys and snakes to spend some quality time with his study subjects. He also picked up Bahasa Indonesia, found a love for South-east Asia, and met his Indonesian wife Indah, 30.
Dr Gumert grew up in rural Pennsylvania and obtained his PhD at the University of Georgia. He came here from Hiram College, a prestigious liberal arts institution in Ohio.
A life-long love for primates, coupled with a desire to work outdoors and a keen interest in wildlife photography resulted in him combining all three loves to become a primatologist.
He admitted that he had started out just like many other primatologists - keen to study the glamorous apes, and his passion was the orang utan.
That is, until a stint at a small Pennsylvania zoo during his college days in his early 20s redirected his path.
It took him just three days to discover the joys and intricacies of the long-tailed macaques' behaviour, and he was hooked.
Singapore is the ideal place to continue his studies, he said, because it is easy to track and observe macaques here. He has ambitious plans, and hopes to track and study as many of the country's 1,400 macaques as he can over the next few years.
Although recent incidents of monkey mischief in Singapore have thrown the spotlight on the clash between the two primate species, Dr Gumert said that the human-macaque conflict here is probably the best-managed in the world.
'Compared to other countries, there is much less direct contact, and the risk of harm by the macaques is very low,' he said.
To keep the level of conflict down, the National Parks Board has been making sure that people do not feed the macaques - the root cause of nuisance behaviour - by putting up signs and advising in pamphlets against the practice.
In addition, cameras have been installed at selected spots along Upper Thomson Road to deter feeding of monkeys.
The agency is also working closely with managing agents of condominiums near nature reserves on how they can discourage monkeys from entering their compounds, by say, not planting fruit trees and ensuring litter bins are covered.
NParks is exploring the use of other methods, such as sterilisation, to control the monkey population here.
'We are in the process of conducting a trial on a small troop of monkeys to understand if there are any behavioural changes in the social structure, and to assess if there is any long-term impact on the overall monkey population,' said Ms Sharon Chan, NParks assistant director of central nature reserve.
Nonetheless, the number of monkeys being culled has gone up, in tandem with complaints and subsequent trapping efforts by residents.
Humans who live on forest fringes complain of monkeys stealing their food and picking their fruits. But to the monkeys, there's no pilfering involved because according to monkey rules, any object that is not being held by anyone is fair game, explained Dr Gumert.
Trapping is not the long-term answer, he added.
'In the United States, game commissions won't come and set traps in your yard just because a deer wandered into your garden. Singaporeans are lucky to have such a responsive park service for nuisance wildlife. It seems a pity to kill a monkey just because it did something like take a cupcake from your window sill,' he said.
Rather than having to respond to every call and complaint from the public, agencies such as NParks and the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority should focus on 'hot zones' where human-ma-
caque conflict is high to develop resolutions, he added.
'It is important for people to know that every time you call to make a complaint, it's a monkey death threat as trapped monkeys are never released,' he said.
He hoped that Singaporeans could begin to learn more about their macaque population and find ways of living together.
'Singapore does such a great job of living with our cultural diversity, maybe now we can start learning to live with our biodiversity too.'
