
From Bibliodyssey
An omnibus of observations from the San Fernando Valley and beyond.
One morning this past May, Elizabeth Mallott, a researcher working at Suomi’s lab, arrived to start her day at the main rhesus enclosure and found a half-dozen monkeys in her parking spot. They were huddling close together, bedraggled and nervous. As Mallott got out of her car and moved closer, she saw that some had bite wounds and scratches. Most monkeys who jump the enclosure’s double electrified fences (it happens now and then) soon want to get back in. These monkeys did not. Neither did several others that Mallott found between the two fences.
After caging the escapees in an adjacent building, Mallott, now joined by Matthew Novak, another researcher who knew the colony well, entered through the double gates. The colony, numbering about 100-odd monkeys, had been together for about 30 years. Changes in its hierarchy usually came slowly and subtly. But when Novak and Mallott started looking around, they realized that something big had happened.