This week, Lesley Stahl and a 60 Minutes crew traveled to the island of Cayo Santiago— also referred to as Monkey Island— simply off the coast of Puerto Rico.
Cayo Santiago is house for about 1,800 Rhesus macaque monkeys, who’ve been studied by scientists for over 80 years as a result of 94% of their DNA is identical as people. They reside in isolation on the island, a pure laboratory the place they reside midway between captivity and the best way they’d within the wild.
However every little thing modified for the analysis and the monkeys when Hurricane Maria tore by means of Puerto Rico in September of 2017.
Then-scientific director Angelina Ruiz-Lambides and her crew had seen a trajectory for the hurricane that went immediately over Cayo and carried out some preparations upfront, however they nonetheless thought it was unlikely that the monkeys would survive the storm.
“Symbolically, we stated goodbye to Cayo,” she informed Stahl. “We thought the monkeys have been going to die.”
Ruiz-Lambides, her husband and two youngsters have been sheltering of their house on Punta Santiago as Hurricane Maria raged on. About two hours into the storm, her home windows have been sucked out, and shortly all the second ground of their house was flooded.
“And we’re making an attempt to take water out. And I fall two occasions, you understand, pregnant. It was so demanding for us,” she informed Stahl.
60 Minutes
Two days after the hurricane had handed, Ruiz-Lambides acquired a textual content message from members of the Cayo crew: that they had booked a helicopter to see what remained of Cayo and the monkeys, and requested if she may go. She agreed.
As she made her manner up within the helicopter, Ruiz-Lambides appeared out the window and noticed the destruction Maria had wrought.
“It appeared like a bomb had dropped on the island,” she informed Stahl.
Ruiz-Lambides requested the pilot to fly over their workplaces in Punta Santiago first. She was heartbroken to see that their neighbors’ houses had been destroyed.
As they flew over the subsequent block, she took a chilling {photograph} of a message written in white paint on the street that might later grow to be an iconic picture of the disaster.
“‘SOS, we’d like water and meals,'” she translated.
Ruiz-Lambides flew over Cayo Santiago within the helicopter, and her coronary heart sank when she noticed the Hurricane’s affect on Cayo. The island had misplaced two-thirds of its vegetation and gone from a lustrous inexperienced to a unclean shade of brown, buried in lifeless branches.
She could not see any monkeys and was beginning to lose hope, however then she noticed a gaggle of them working away from the helicopter.
“There’s monkeys. There’s nonetheless Cayo,” she thought within the second.
As soon as the workers was capable of return to the island and do a whole census, they discovered, to their utter amazement, that many of the monkeys of Cayo Santiago had lived. They estimated 50 had died.
How they survived stays a thriller. One idea is that they huddled collectively on a facet of the island that was protected by a cliff. James Higham, an investigator for the Cayo mission, believes they started consuming extra seaweed and algae that was deposited on the seaside throughout the storm.
Ruiz-Lambides defined to 60 Minutes that luck performed a significant function within the survival of knowledge and journals from the Cayo mission that date again to the Thirties: That they had not too long ago moved workplaces from a beachside location to a former faculty that would face up to the high-winds and water throughout the storm.
“If we’d’ve nonetheless been at that home within the seaside, we’d’ve misplaced every little thing,” she defined.
After which there have been the organic samples: blood serum and organic samples from all of the monkeys dwelling on Cayo Santiago that wanted to be saved at particular temperatures utilizing freezers.
Ruiz-Lambides says the workplace constructing of the Primate Heart in Punta Santiago had been with out energy for 9 months after the hurricane. However regardless of that, her devoted workers was capable of hold the freezers working utilizing a system of mills, and backup mills in case these failed.
“They’d come in the course of the night time to examine the mills,” she defined. “And we didn’t lose a single pattern.”
Stahl requested Ruiz-Lambides why she did not go away the island of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, as so many others had after the storm devastated the island.
“I did not go away as a result of I used to be wanted right here,” she stated. “There’s nonetheless a number of work to do right here.”
The video above was produced and edited by Will Croxton.