Japanese Macaque
Index | Sun Wukong | Capuchin Monkey | Movies with Monkies!
Here is a link to a Wikipedia page on Japanese Macaques.
Some key points about Japanese Macaques:
- Japanese Macaques, as their names suggest, a species native to Japan.
- They are also known as "Snow Monkeys" because they tend to live in areas where snow is common many months out of the year.
- The species is officially known as "Nihonzaru" ("Nihon" being "Japan" and "Zaru/Saru" being "Monkey"), but most Japanese natives simply call them Saru to identify this particular species more than others.
- Japanese Macaques have brown-grey fur, red faces and rears, and short tails.
- Unlike various Ape species, Japanese Macaques are capable swimmers.
- Average lifespan is 6.3 years, but are capable of living up to 32 years.
- Japanese Macaque families are Matrilineal, meaning females stay with their birth family and inherit, while males leave their birth family to join other groups. They can have many matrilineal families in one troop, and dominance or submission is shared across entire family lines over other family lines within single troops.
- Japanese Macaques participate in group bathing in hotsprings during winter, rolling snowballs, and often seasoning bland foods with salty sea water.
- Japanese Macaques in different areas only a few hundred miles away from each other have different accents from other macaques, just as humans do.
- Japanese Macaques are Diurnal, meaning they are primarily daytime animals.
- Japanese Macaques have a diet of 213 different species of plants, as well as insects, bark, soil, fruit, mature leaves, fallen seeds, fungi, ferns, invertibrates, nuts, roots, and fish.
- Japanese Macaques have appeared more and more in both urban and city dwellings in Japan due to deforestation for lumber plantations, and lost their fear of humans due to growing proximity because of it.
- Japanese Macaques appear frequently in Japanese Shinto, a polytheistic collection of many native myths, faiths, gods, and spirits. Sometimes they appear as other beings such as "raiju" (lightning beast) taking the form of macaques and kept the God of Lightning, Raijin, company. Other times as the three "wise monkeys" (see, hear, and speak no evil). More still, they sometimes appear as sidekicks in stories such as the famous fairytale of Momotaro, the boy born from a peach.
- Japanese Macaques have made appearances in various sources of pop culture, such as the "Hanagami trio" or "Three Flora Gods" in the game Okami, who reference the three Wise Monkies ("see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil"), the macaques that show up in the Monkey arc of the Ginga Densetsu Weed comics, and various other stories.
To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!