The coronavirus outbreak has left the popular Indonesian holiday resort severely depleted of tourists, who have been providing plenty of food for the local macaques, but the shortage has left the animals scrambling to find food in a settlement around their habitat, AP reports.
The news agency reports that the macaques have left their ancestral home in the Sangeh Monkey Forest and gone to the Sangeh settlement, half a kilometre away, to find food. According to residents, the monkeys have not only infested the village, but are stealing all the food left behind. Residents of the village have therefore taken fruit, nuts and other delicacies to the Sangeh Monkey Forest in an attempt to lure the animals back to their original habitat, but fear that the monkeys will go wild and become aggressive. Before the pandemic, the monkey forest was visited and fed by 6,000 tourists a day, but now 500 foreigners a day visit the forest, reducing the local authorities’ income.
The daily cost of feeding the animals is about 60 US dollars, which is enough to buy the monkeys 200 kilograms of cassava and 10 kilograms of bananas. However, with the lack of tourists, there is not enough money for such purchases, so they fear that the increasingly hungry monkeys will become violent.