You can thank Hollywood for those monkeys, California that is and Johnny Weissmuller.
New York Times:
SILVER SPRINGS, Florida, In the early nineteen thirties, a Hollywood movie company making Tarzan movies along the Silver River imported rhesus monkeys from South east Asia to give the central Florida jungle an “African” look.
In 1934—after having made several of the early Tarzan epics — the movie company packed up and left. But three of the monkeys could not be caught. They swung around the trees in the deep jungle along the Silver and Oklawaha Rivers, eluding men with nets.
Descendants of the monkeys have adapted themselves to live in central Florida and two packs of them are now seen roaming a 50‐mile long stretch of river forest from near Palatka to below Ocala.
Any Changes Sought
Dr. William C. Maples, a University of Florida anthropologist who is an expert on baboons, said that a study of the rhesus monkey packs was yielding information about how wild animals adapt themselves to new climates and new geography.
Graduate students are trying to find out what the monkeys eat and if there has been any change in family structure. No one knows exactly how many monkeys are in the two packs.
One pack ranges along the Ocala National Forest, which follows the Oklawaha, a wild river that would have been de troyed if the Cross‐Florida Barge Canal had been allowed to be completed. Work was stopped on the canal just be fore it reached the area where the monkeys live.
The second pack of monkeys stays more or less in the vi cinity of Silver Springs, a giant welling spring near Ocala that has long been one of Florida's major tourist attractions.
Ross Allen, a naturalist, who developed Silver Springs and has since retired, said that the Silver River monkeys do not stray far because the captains of the “jungle cruise” boats feed them.
Mr. Allen doubled in some of the swimming and diving scenes for Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan in the films made along the Silver River. “Johnny was too valu able to take a chance on being hurt,” Mr. Allen said.
Dr. Maples, the expert on baboons, said that the pack along the Oklawaha, which he estimates to number “certainly less than 100 and perhaps less than 50,” eats grass shoots, buds, berries, ash tree leaves, insects and bird eggs.
Some weeks ago, in an at tempt to find out the exact range of the monkeys, Dr. Maples asked the University of Florida Information Service to issue a news release asking for reports from people who sighted the Oklawaha pack. Most of his reports had been coming from fishing camp operators.
An unexpected furor fol lowed the issuance of the news release. Many people in the area became alarmed after the operator of a zoo was quoted as having said that rhesus monkeys are so powerful that a grown one could twist off a man's arm. There were some demands that the monkeys be caught or fenced in.
Dr. Maples said that, al though the rhesus monkey is very strong—they grow to be about 3 feet tall and weigh 30 pounds—they flee from human contact, and that there is absolutely no danger to humans from the Florida packs.
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