Murichi, the hippie monkeys. They live peacefully and without fighting. And they resist disease.

In 2017, a yellow fever outbreak in the Caratinga region of Minas Gerais state, central Brazil, alarmed the WHO, with nearly 1300 cases and 35 human deaths recorded by September of that year. However, around the same time, biologists and ethologists had also raised the alarm: After more than thirty years of observing and studying primates in the Federal Reserve Feliciano Miguel Abdala, Karen Strier, an American primatologist, had told in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde: "At first, I understood. This silence... I'd never heard it before. There was also this smell that wafts from decomposing animals. And above all, a feeling of emptiness. It was like entering a cemetery."

Murich Monkeys

And, in fact, it seems that entire groups of animals have been decimated due to yellow fever, transmitted in the woods and forests by the mosquito. Aedes aegypti, a killer insect whose favorite target is monkeys.
In the days following that terrible January, the anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin and her Brazilian colleagues tried to take stock: 90 percent of brown howler monkeys have been decimated by yellow fever, as have capuchin monkeysSurprisingly, however, the muriqui monkey, or murichi in Italian, despite being the most endangered primate on the planet, had managed to significantly resist the epidemic, displaying extraordinary resistance to infectious diseases.

ALSO READ: Without prevention and care for the planet, future pandemics are just around the corner.

WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT MURICHI MONKEYS

The murichi, common name of the more scientific Brachyteles, lives mainly in twelve small "reserves" in the Atlantic forest of the states of Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo and Rio: sThere are approximately 1.000 specimens, 350 of which live in the Caratinga reserve.. Precisely because of its fragile survival, it is called "the Panda of Brazil", very little studied and little known, if it were not for the 35 years of work of Professor Strier, who arrived as a student in 1982 in the reserve precisely to study the monkeys and their organization in groups, falling in love with these endemic primates of the New World, also called, in fact, American monkeysHis studies, contained in a book that has become a milestone in anthropology and the study of apes, have revealed a social organization that, as in the case of Bonobos, challenges our cultural universals: 1,50 m tall from the tip of the arm to the tip of the paw and weighing 8 to 9 kg, murichi are hippie monkeysThey never attack each other, they cooperate peacefully and live in small groups of a few dozen individuals that are egalitarian, large enough to guarantee them protection but not so large that they fight over the fruits and leaves they feed on.

TO KNOW MORE: Bonobos: nature versus cultural dogma. They're neither jealous nor selfish. And the females are in charge.

HOW MURICHI MONKEYS LIVE

In muriqui society there is no competition, or at least as little as possible: the female gives birth to a pup every three years (after 7,2 months of gestation), which she nurses for twelve months and accompanies for the following year, before letting it become independent.
In the groups of murichi, which In the Tupi language it means "largest monkey in the world"Peace and harmony reign supreme. Throughout the day, Dr. Strier explains in the pages of Le Monde, they touch, rub, and embrace one another: "A way to release tension or reassure each other," continues Karen Strier. But it's during mating that, compared to other primates, their uniqueness stands out: no alpha male jealously guarding his harem of females, as happens with gorillas. On the contrary, males propose and females choose, without exclusivity or violence, with great brazenness. "The males line up waiting their turn, while the females grant matings at a… respectable pace," concludes the primatologist with a smile.
This social organization, just like that of bonobos, allows us to question the social constructs of violence, aggression, jealousy, and patriarchy, which we often consider natural without ever questioning possible alternatives, which apparently are equally real and natural.

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