Because of the difficulty of keeping the species in captivity, officials from the Hattiesburg Zoo have sent their three Lion-tailed macaques to a new home at the Baton Rouge Zoo in Louisiana.
Rick Taylor, the executive director of the Hattiesburg Convention Commission – which runs the zoo – said the macaques are within 98 percent of the human genome, making disease highly transmissible between primates and humans. The macaques, which come from southeast Asia, also carry a native form of herpes.
“So our keepers, in looking after these three macaques, had to wear Tyvek suits and respirators to make sure they didn’t pick up anything or transmit anything,” Taylor said. “It was mostly so (the keepers) wouldn’t pick up something the macaques carried; (that form of herpes) doesn’t affect (the macaques), but they carry it.
“So you can imagine in July and August, having to go in and clean and put on a Tyvek suit in our temperatures. We had been looking for years, and we finally found a home for them.”
In addition, a few years ago zoo officials had to replace the macaques’ old “corn crib” exhibit with zoo mesh.
“Those exhibits are not considered appropriate by modern zoo standards; we just had nowhere for these primates to go,” Taylor said.
The macaques – one male and one female who came to the Hattiesburg Zoo in 2011 – were transported from the zoo on March 23. They will join another troop of macaques in Baton Rouge, giving the primates more company of their own kind.
“(That zoo) has a number of macaques, so it’ll actually be better for them,” Taylor said. “They’ll be around more of their species; primates are always very social.”
Now, zoo staff will take down the macaques’ former exhibit to make way for a holding space for new animal, possibly a Sun bear from Asia.
“That’s an old section of exhibits from the early ‘60s that were just concrete,” Taylor said. “We’re going to take that whole section, remove the ‘corn-crib’ as we call it, and work towards building a large enclosure. So we’re excited for (the macaques); they’re going to be in a better space.
"And we’re excited for us, because it was a very difficult animal exhibit to maintain. It was very costly, very cumbersome and time-consuming. So it was a good, practical move on our behalf, and it opens the door for future development in that area.”
Lion-tailed macaques, which are native to India, dwell in rainforests and are diurnal, meaning they are active exclusively in daylight hours. They mainly eat indigenous fruits, leaves, buds, insects and small vertebrates, but can adapt to eating fare such as seeds, shoots, flowers and cones.
The primates live in hierarchal groups of 10 to 20 members, consisting usually of a few males and several females.
