They were out on a river cruise in Florida. Then came the fighting monkeys, video shows
It’s raining monkeys in Florida.
Earlier this month at Silver Springs State Park in Ocala, a Florida family witnessed quite the sight.
In video posted to his Facebook page, Matthew Schwanke told his followers that his “short, little river cruise” on Dec. 3 turned exciting pretty quickly. In the clip, dozens of monkeys leap from a tall tree into the Silver River, landing with a splash, squealing and grunting as they plummet.
“They’re all jumping!” screams a child off camera as they jump one by one in quick succession. “Oh my God! Dad, back up!”
“I’m not backing up,” Schwanke laughs nervously from the safety of the boat. “We’re fine, we’re fine.”
“That was crazy,” says the kid.
In the caption, the outdoorsman explains just how crazy it was, saying that the animals they witnessed were “two rival monkey troops fighting it out for over half-hour.”
Schwanke said they were going “back and forth across the river like this screaming at each other.”
Their aggressive behavior was likely due to a “turf war between two troops,” on opposite sides of the river, the Florida man told Storyful, which bought the rights to the video.
The original troop was eventually run off by the rival one at the 5,000-acre popular park. The Silver Spring monkeys are rhesus macaques, a species not native to Florida, originating from south and southeast Asia.
The macaques were first reportedly spotted in the 1930s, after a dozen were released by a local tour boat operator intent on starting a Tarzan-themed tourist attraction that never came to be. Their 300 or so descendants remain.
