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Monkey Island is, perhaps unsurprisingly, home to thousands of monkeys. And when a major hurricane blew directly across the island, the researchers who study those monkeys thought that they were going to return to a scene of mass tragedy. But only two monkeys died during the storm. It wasn't until long after the skies cleared that the bodies started piling up. Hi I'm David, and this is MinuteEarth. Long ago, I used to study those monkeys, but I hadn't been back to Monkey Island since Hurricane Maria tore through there in 2017. So a few months ago, when Kate and I were invited to Puerto Rico for a conference,
we took a side trip over to the island. The place looked completely different. Most of the man-made structures were in ruins. This exposed hilltop used to be completely covered with forest. Even the isthmus that used to connect the big isle and the small isle was completely washed away. And despite all of this, somehow, only two monkeys died. But then, in the years following the hurricane, fifty more monkeys died than usual. Stressed-out monkeys with weakened immune systems succumbed to diseases.
Traumatized females gave birth to babies who died soon after they were born. And with over half the trees on the island gone, monkeys were suddenly way more exposed, leading to more heat-related illnesses and deaths. The monkeys weren't the only primates affected by Hurricane Maria; the hurricane also pummeled mainland Puerto Rico and the humans that live there. About 100 people are estimated to have died as a direct result of the storm. But, as with the monkeys, lots of deaths happened later on, too. The electrical grid got overwhelmed and hospitals lost power, causing people to die from infections.
Roads were blocked or destroyed, so others couldn't even get to hospitals in the first place, causing them to die from things like emphysema and pneumonia. And insulin shipments couldn't get through, causing people to die of diabetes. Researchers think about three thousand more people died as a result of these longer-term, indirect impacts of the storm; that's 30 times more people than died during the storm itself. That ratio - which we can call the "aftermath number", is remarkably similar to the one for Monkey Island, which was 25. All hurricanes have these kinds of lingering deaths - sometimes lots of them; for example, the average hurricane that makes landfall in the US has an aftermath number of more than 200.
And other disasters have aftermath deaths too. Major floods lead to heart attacks in overworked farmers, who have to replant their soggy fields. Earthquakes often lead to disease outbreaks by breaking sewage pipes and creating unsanitary conditions. Scientists are still trying to figure out what it is about a particular disaster that determines its aftermath number. Disasters like earthquakes tend to have lower aftermath numbers for the same total of deaths because more of the deaths happen during the disaster. But the fact that aftermath deaths exist at all -and that some disasters have so
many of them- means we probably need to pay just as much attention -or even more- to the lingering effects of a disaster as to the disaster itself. And when you hear that a hurricane in the US killed, say, 5 people, you should multiply that number in your head by around 200 to understand the true death count of the hurricane. And that brings me back to the monkeys of Monkey Island. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the monkeys started grooming one another more often than they used to - like, way more often. For monkeys, grooming is a way of building social ties and making friends, and the researchers think that, collectively, the monkeys were grooming more as a way
of lowering their stress levels - and, inadvertently, their aftermath number. And even today, these monkeys still groom each other more than they used to. That's the kind of aftermath we should all be aiming for. Monkeys live in all sorts of cool places, and I've gotten to go all over the world studying them. Of course, that also means I've spent a ton of time in airports using public wifi. Which is why I'm psyched this video was sponsored by SurfShark, my goto VPN whenever I'm travelling. SurfShark encrypts my online data whenever I'm on a sketchy connection; even if someone
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