India uses artificial intelligence to fight monkeys
The confinement of the 1.3 billion people in India has caused the Asian country's fauna to take the deserted streets into images reproduced on the net, as has happened in other latitudes. In the case of India, monkeys camp at large even in residential complexes in cities such as Bombay. Now animating protagonists of the animal nature that populates the urban environment, the behavior of macaques is, however, a problem in India.
Last November, Neha breastfed her baby when a monkey came in through the window and took it from her. Relatives and neighbors ran after the thief, who dragged sunny through the streets of Agra, Taj Mahal city, north of India. The newborn was found on a roof and arrived dead in the hospital, according to local media. The incident is not unusual in certain parts of the country, where deforestation and territorial invasion cause violent encounters between people and apes to proliferate. This was the case a month earlier on the outskirts of Gurgaon, the dormitory district of the Indian capital, New Delhi. A man was looking for wood on the edge of a forest when a pack of monkeys lynched him with bricks from a nearby construction.
The presence of macaques in urban areas of India is common, such as their theft from passers-by or their home searches. Of the entire animal Kingdom, moreover, primates are among the most beloved in the Indian subcontinent, where one of the gods of Hindu mythology most revered by their devotees has a similar appearance, Hannuman. But their violent behavior changes the way they are seen.
"generally, the macaque Rhesus [common monkey] is a harmless and peaceful species," explains Iqbal Malik, a primatologist and environmentalist from New Delhi. "they live in groups where the connection between infants and mothers is very strong, so their aggressiveness increases in situations of group split or separation from mothers and children." The expert says that the destruction of its habitat by large-scale deforestation has resulted in the fragmentation of its groups and their violent behaviour.
In addition, Rhesus macaque adapts well to the environment and often makes it easier for people to live together. So far. "they are becoming the dominant species because of their proximity to human settlements in urban and rural areas," explains Sindhu Radhakrishna of the cognition and behavior program of the Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore. The expert thus explains the proportional decrease in the endemic species of central and southern India, the Bonnet macaque, compared to the Rhesus, which populates the north of the country.
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The adjacent region of Telangana, in the heart of India, experienced the most alarming event to date. Earlier this year, the 20 families living in a municipality near the capital, Hyderabad, were evacuated by the invasion of some 400 macaques. "we close doors and windows to shut and sing. But they are smart enough to open them," his mayor, Srivarama Krishna, explained to the media. According to research, the virtual war with this apes population began about 15 years ago; when a group was displaced by human settlements in the vicinity of the capital, its natural habitat then.
Sterilisation and facial recognition technologies
Although India records a thousand bites of monkeys a day, the inactivity of the central executive has led the states to take action. The Telangana region where the ape invasion took place created several sterilization centers a decade ago, but only one is still active. In 2006, the north-western state of Himachal Pradesh, on the slopes of the Himalayas, was the first to launch a surgical sterilization programme for macaco Rhesus to reduce crop damage. The eight operating centers have reduced their population from 3.2 million in 2004 to 2.1 million in 2015, while their environment department confirmed the sterilization of 157,000 more monkeys in December. But the poor execution of the measure may have made the macaques more aggressive, according to Iqbal Malik.
One technique used to control the monkey population is also immunocontraception, based on contraceptive vaccines that create a temporary immunological response against reproduction. Experts, however, stress the difficulty in administering the various doses that are needed for primates.
In the face of the difficult application of the measures, others suggest alternative technologies for their implementation. Researchers at the Indraprastha Institute of Information in New Delhi (IIT) are working on a facial recognition system for the monkey. Through Microsoft's artificial intelligence program, AI for Earth, monkeys who reinfect their aggressive behavior could be identified through databases with their images. For this purpose, the researcher at the university, Ankita Shukla, calls for citizen collaboration. For now, the pilot project has 4,000 images of more than 90 monkeys of the macaque species Rhesus and the ITI team plans to develop a mobile app available to citizens. Following the identification of the most violent individuals, the implementation of a sterilization programme would be the only effective step towards reducing the most aggressive variety.
