Smuggled Spider Monkeys Open $66 Million Center at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo

Five young Mexican spider monkeys are about to make their public debut at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Rescued at the US-Mexican border in 2023, the babies have been recovering from their ordeal suffered at the hands of smugglers. The zoo will feature their story for educational purposes.

The monkeys were found in Tijuana, malnourished and in diapers, their mothers apparently killed by the smugglers. Three were sent to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the other two to the Houston Zoo. Animal care teams at both facilities nursed and socialized the orphans for a year and a half. Now the five are reunited in Chicago.

“Their situation early in life was likely very traumatic,” the zoo’s director of primate care and conservation Kim Skelton tells the Chicago Tribune. “So a lot of times, when they come to us, or when they get picked up, they’re malnourished, they’re very traumatized.”

So traumatized that there’s no hope of releasing the monkeys in the wild, as they do not have the necessary life skills to live as nature intended. But they will be treated well at Brookfield because the zoo is about to open its new $66 million Tropical Forests facility, where the spider monkeys will share space with older capuchin monkeys, not far from the gorillas, orangutans, and other primates.

“Tropical Forests embodies the Zoo’s mantra: Connect. Care. Conserve,” the zoo said in a press release. “The new habitats are designed to foster human-animal connections, inspiring guests to care about these animals and join efforts to conserve them and their ecosystems.”

The endangered spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi vellerosus) are among the early beneficiaries of the Wildlife Trafficking Alliance, launched in southern California in October 2023, just as the orphans were being rescued. The network coordinates with local law enforcement and animal-rescue facilities to find appropriate homes for wildlife confiscated at the US-Mexican border.

Confiscation of smuggled spider monkeys is on the rise. Rescued monkeys need around-the-clock attention – immediate veterinary care and disease quarantine and, eventually, placement into appropriate social groupings, like the new arrivals in Chicago.

For more info on Brookfield’s Tropical Forests (and to donate if you’re inclined) see here.

Photo credit: Brookfield Zoo