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This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

More than two weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, scientists are still scrambling to save the more than 1,000 rhesus monkeys that live on a small piece of land off the main island’s southeast coast.

Cayo Santiago, known as “Monkey Island,” has been a crucial resource for researchers studying primate behavior, cognition and genetics since the 1930s, when scientists brought monkeys to the island from southeast Asia. Since then, a population of rhesus macaques has thrived there, offering scientists a window into the primates’ lives.

An NPR profile of the island in 2015 characterized it as a monkey paradise, where human researchers ate their lunches in cages while the macaques roamed free.

Miraculously, the monkeys largely survived the initial impact of Hurricane Maria. Alexandra Rosati, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Michgain, wrote at The Conversation about the joy and relief that researchers felt when they discovered a particularly beloved monkey had made it through the hurricane.