One recent day in the forests near a South Florida airport, an old vervet monkey moped on a mangrove branch as departing jetliners screamed overhead, his ego hurt.

Mikey, as he’s known to his human watchers, has long been the laid-back alpha male of a colony of monkeys that rule this patch of grass hidden away from the bustling runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

But on this particular day, he was defeated by a tenacious teenager named Spike. Mikey screamed and was now glaring sullenly at humans standing 15 feet (4 metres) away.

The sight of monkeys regularly astounds visitors. They shriek with joy and reach for their iPhones, hoping to capture the moment on camera. Vervets are grey and black with a touch of green, which helps them blend in with the trees.

Leopards, eagles, and snakes all consume vervets in Africa. Outside the mangroves, though, the risks are largely automobiles and trappers who sell them as pets in Florida.

Williams is afraid that inbreeding would impair the monkeys’ health due to their limited population. When vervet males attain sexual maturity at the age of five years in Africa, they leave their original group and join another. Every few years, they relocate. Because there are only four local soldiers, there isn’t enough turnover among the guys, resulting in a tiny genetic pool.

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