The rare observation-and resulting images and video-is important because it means not only that boa constrictors are capable of killing such large monkeys, but also that they may play a larger predatory role with howlers and other primates than expected. “The boa applied the species’ typical hunting behavior of striking and immediately coiling around its prey and then killing it through constriction (probably in less than 5 min), but the entire restraint period lasted 38 min,” the researchers write, adding grimly, “The howler was swallowed head-first in 76 min.”Ĭlose-up of boa constrictor devouring female howler monkey. When she was attacked, the researchers note that another female howler monkey in the group “ran toward the snake, also vocalizing, and hit it with her hands several times, but the snake did not react and she moved off to a nearby tree from where she watched most of the interaction.”Īlthough the initial attack was lightning-quick, the boa hiding in the tree canopy and striking, the whole event too over an hour. The female in question was a member of a group of six individuals.
Howler monkeys are communal animals, often living in groups of over a dozen. Here, we report the first documented case of successful predation of an atelid by a snake-an adult female Puru’s red howler monkey, Alouatta puruensis, that was subdued by a 2-m-long Boa constrictor,” Quintino and her advisor, Julio Cesar Bicca Marques, write in the journal Primates. “Among New World primates, reports of snake predation are limited to medium- and small-bodied species. The rare predation event was recorded in a tiny forest fragment (2.5 hectares) in the Brazilian state of Rondonia by Erika Patricia Quintino, a PhD student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
In a world first, scientists have captured images and video of a boa constrictor attacking and devouring whole a femle howler monkey, one of the largest new world primates weighing in at around 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds).
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