Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
including typhoons and WWII bombings on the island (Porrier and Smith,
1974
).
Kowloon Hills, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China
There are feral groups of poly-specific (i.e., consisting of differing species and
their hybrids) monkeys in the Kowloon Hills of Hong Kong, which were released
during the 1910s (Southwick and Southwick,
1983
). Wong and Ni (
2000
) have
reported that in the 1800s rhesus monkeys were in Hong Kong and thus they are
indigenous to the region, but not to the Kowloon Hills. The rhesus macaques
were introduced to the Kowloon Hills as the result of an effort to remove a poi-
sonous plant called strychnos (
Strychnos angustiflora
and
S. umbellata
) that
had invaded the region after construction of a reservoir system in 1913. During
WW II the Kowloon Hills were clear cut and following the war the area was
reforested. This presented a highly disturbed habitat along with access to human
food resources.
In the early 1950s, a group of five long-tailed macaques were released into
the hills and they began to interbreed with the rhesus monkeys already present.
In the 1960s, a male and female Tibetan macaque (
M. thibetana
) and their
single offspring were released by a group of Chinese acrobats. The Tibetan
macaques integrated into the group, but were never observed to interbreed
with the rhesus, long-tails, or their hybrids, and the last Tibetan macaque was
reported to have died in 1995. Additionally there have been reports of pig-tailed
(
M. nemestrina
), Japanese (
M. fuscata
), and possibly Taiwan (
M. cyclopis
)
macaques living in these hills (Southwick and Manry,
1987
; Burton and Chan,
1989
; Burton
et al
.,
1999
), but these claims were not reported in later work by
Wong and Ni (
2000
). Long-tailed macaques can produce reproductively viable
hybrids with rhesus macaques (Bernstein,
1966
; Fooden,
1964
), which is why
they were able to easily hybridize into this population.
The population remained very small until recently, as there were only around
100 monkeys in the Kowloon Hills in the 1980s (Southwick and Manry,
1987
;
Southwick and Southwick,
1983
). Eventually the Kowloon monkeys became
a popular tourist attraction and humans began provisioning the monkeys more
and more, which may have been the driver for an increase in their population
size. In 1991, census reports indicated the population had increased six-fold to
~600 individuals (Fellowes,
1992
). The population increase continued and in
1994 Wong and Ni (
2000
) observed that the monkey population of Kowloon
had risen to ~700 macaques with a composition of 65.3 percent rhesus, 2.2
percent long-tailed, and 32.3 percent rhesus-long-tailed hybrids. The popula-
tion has continued to grow to around 2,000 individuals and has become a large
