Monkeys are voracious eaters with diets ranging from tasty tropical fruits to crunchy insects, seeds and even small lizards and animals. They are frugivores (fruit eaters) and omnivores (plant and animal parts eaters).
Some monkey species, like rhesus monkeys and Old World monkeys, live in groups that help them find food, which provides more protection from predators. In fact, the oldest monkeys often serve as guardians of younger members of their troop.
Infant monkeys are very helpless at birth and must ride on their mothers to survive until they can fend for themselves. In apes and other Old World monkeys, fathers also share feeding responsibilities. In some monkeys, a mother may feed her babies for more than a year!
In the wild, monkeys use their prehensile tails to hold onto branches and bark while they hunt for food. They are also known to eat leaves, seeds and twigs, insects, birds’ eggs and other invertebrates. They can even eat meat, especially when it’s easy to catch, such as young antelope and rabbits, or from lizards and other small vertebrates.
Some monkeys have special anatomy that allows them to exploit hard-to-get foods. For example, howler monkeys have long digestive tracts to help them extract the nutrients in leaf matter. And some Old World monkeys, including colobus and langurs, have multi-chambered stomachs that allow them to ferment their food, just as ruminants do. In other cases, monkeys use tool-aided techniques to get at difficult to acquire food. For example, researchers set out both fake and real poop, along with more enticing peanuts on top of them, to see whether monkeys would be willing to wash poop from a tree branch in order to eat it. They found that the monkeys did not consider the poop worth the effort to wash, but they readily ate the peanuts on top of the poop.