Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in 2017, may have accelerated the aging process in rhesus monkeys living on the region’s Cayo Santiago island, a team of scientists has concluded. Its findings suggest that an increase in adverse weather events may lead to biologically adverse consequences for those who experience them.
“While the short-term consequences of natural disasters are well-known, we have little idea what the long-term impacts of natural disasters are on human health and disease progression” says James Higham, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Anthropology and one of the authors of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our study shows that natural disasters have the potential to accelerate the aging process, which is important because age is the primary predictor of risk from most non-infectious diseases.”
Cayo Santiago, also known as “Monkey Island”, is home to over 1,000 free-ranging monkeys, which have been subjects of scientific research since the 1930s. After Hurricane Maria devastated the island, Higham and his colleagues worked to assess and repair the damage.
In subsequent years, a collaborative group of researchers from NYU, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, the Caribbean Primate Research Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Exeter have studied Cayo Santiago’s rhesus monkeys—or rhesus macaques—in order to better understand the impact of natural disasters on populations. In 2020, they discovered how the monkeys formed new social connections in the wake of the hurricane, findings that were reported in the journal Current Biology.
