There are many things that South Carolina is known for such as being home to beautiful beaches and mountains all in one state, but did you know that S.C. has an island dedicated to monkeys and health research?
S.C. has one of only two rhesus monkey colonies in the continental United States: Morgan Island, South Carolina, and Silver River, Florida.
Morgan Island has historically been an uninhabitable island in Beaufort County, S.C. This 4,489-acre marshland is home to a colony of approximately 3,500 free-ranging, Indian - origin rhesus monkeys. The monkeys reside mainly in a semi-tropical maritime forest located in the upland and measures about 370 acres.
This colony was originally in La Parguera, Puerto Rico, but free-ranging monkeys carrying viral herpes B kept escaping. This alarmed Puerto Rico, so S.C. came in and offered one of their uninhabitable islands at that time. Between 1789 and 1980, 1400 monkeys were relocated to Morgan Island.
These monkeys, which are used for public health research, are owned by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the island is owned by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR).
Using these monkeys for biomedical research can contribute to improvements to human health, but there's a flip side to this colony being on Morgan Island. According to Proceedings of the 14th Biennial Coastal Zone Conference:
Fecal matter from the 3,200 monkeys housed on Morgan Island may impact the water quality of adjacent island creeks. Fecal coliform bacteria such as Esherichia coli are positively correlated with fecal contamination from warm-blooded animals and are commonly used as indicators for enteric pathogens (Solic et al., 1999). Impacts to the under-story vegetation along the shoreline may also be associated with the monkey colony (McKenzie, 2004), although the extent of effects of the monkeys on native vegetation of Morgan Island has not been assessed.
Morgan Island cannot be accessed by the public, but if it could, would you visit it?
Written By: Jennifer
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