This web report was prepared by C. Kent in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Anthro 1, Spring 1999, Cabrillo College. The smallest monkey found in Africa or Asia is the talapoin, which lives in dense tropical rainforest in West Africa. Swimming is also used to escape from predators. If threatened, talapoins will dive into the water and swim to safety.
Swimming is a fairly unique characteristic of talapoins.
Not many monkeys swim regularly. Other aspects of talapoin behavior, however, are not so unique, in fact in many ways they are very similar to the squirrel monkey of South America. The environments in which they live, their diets, and even the part of the trees they choose to travel in are similar. Like the squirrel monkey , talapoins are extremely gregarious and live in very large troops containing many adult males, females, infants and juvenils. Also like the squirrel monkey, most of the social interaction within the talapoin troop occurs between animals of the same ange and sex and females tend to be the more dominant social force.