Dude getting groomed by his mother and his aunt.

Hi friends! I am back with more stories about the amazing Bonnet macaques at the IIT Madras campus. This is the second article of the promised series. In case you missed the first one (which was much more than an introduction!), please read the same at this link.

Monkeys, like humans and most other mammals, are highly social beings. I remember from my school days (spent at the beautifully located town of Balaghat) how I had to skip several of my tuition classes when a big troop of Colobinae monkeys (more commonly called Langurs in India) used to visit our locality and used to choose my home as its resting place (due to the presence of several guava trees around). They used to be all over the place — sleeping on the terrace, jumping over the walls, and trying to ride my bicycle. Further, when in a group, they were quite ferocious and dare not someone try to move them after they had their lunch! However, unlike the langurs, the Bonnet macaques at IIT Madras have become used to living near humans (well, it’s the vice-versa to be correct), and we can observe their organizations (i.e., troops) much more closely without fear.

As per an article from 2011, the IIT-M campus consists of about 7 macaque-troops, with each troop having 25–30 monkeys. My estimate for 2019 is also nearly the same. Following are some common characteristics of every macaque troop:

Each troop has a male leader (usually called the alpha male) as well as a female leader (let’s call her the lead female).

The troop usually moves together and has an area of influence which sometimes overlaps with the areas of other troops.

The troop has a fixed resting place and all the monkeys in the troop reach the place by sunset — in the IIT-M campus, it’s usually either a big (Banyan) tree, the terrace of a building (mostly in the residential zone), or sometimes a complete hostel-building (sorry for the difficulties faced by the inmates!).

Within a troop, though, there are several small groups — based on the activity that the inmates of that group like doing the most. Mothers with small babies always have an exclusive group; they are relatively quiet and usually busy in feeding the babies, teaching them how to get food, and occasionally reprimanding them for their naughtiness. Then there are the extremely-energetic grown-up kids (I call them the khiladi-monkeys, meaning players) that always keep jumping, rolling, and trying to imitate the bigger ones. Finally there are some grown-up monkeys — usually observable in male-female pairs that sometimes sit so deterministically as if in deep contemplation related to the future of their troops.

The most common activity in any group though, or the activity that binds a group if I may say, is grooming! Who dares to think that monkeys bath only during the rainy seasons (more on that in a later post) — they get dry-cleaned, free of cost, several times every day! Yes, literally. Whenever monkeys are not playing or sleeping or eating, they are cleaning themselves or the other members of the group. And the cleaning is so meticulous, I sometimes wonder whether they are really finding any dirt or insect, or simply acting for my camera! See the following clip for a demonstration:

The big monkey (center, with a baby) is being groomed by two of her group members simultaneously.

The grooming sometimes happens in larger groups too, especially after breakfast or lunch, when some of them in fact get into deep sleep while being cleaned (remember how nice you felt when your mother used to caress your hair!). See the following pic on the famous grooming table of Madras Avenue:

Notice the small monkey trying to clean a big one, apart from the prominent pair.

I have noticed that grooming is also used as a reconciliatory act after small fights. For example, once two monkeys came to my balcony (remember the cage that I mentioned in the last post from where the monkeys observe us?), and they had an argument over the cloth that they had snatched from the rope where it was hanging dry. We noticed the nuisance and snatched the cloth back. And then? To my surprise, they immediately stopped fighting and one of the arguing monkeys started grooming the other one; and as if the other one said “okay, okay, but leave me alone”, both of them turned to individual grooming! The change was so telling that I couldn’t resist taking a pic of the duo:

The fight ends and grooming starts.

No sooner than I had taken the pic, both the monkeys peacefully left without any further grooming — sheer acting for reconciliatory purposes! Very interesting.

In summary, for Bonnet macaques, grooming is not only about maintaining a clean and hygienic body, but also about showing care, forming groups, and mending relations. I hope you are enjoying the series; I will be back in a few weeks with some more interesting insights about these wonderful animals — the monkeys of IIT Madras. I leave you with a video of the dude who was getting cleaned by his mother and his aunt in the title pic:

The recipe for getting a clean monkey.

You can either keep checking this space for new posts, or follow me on Medium to get notifications. I will also be posting about each new article on my Facebook and Twitter pages. Please use the comments area to share your own experiences or give feedback. I am open to ideas and/or content (with proper credits) to include in future stories as well. Stay on; Happy Reading!!