A couple of residents in North Miami Beach were surprised to see some other "residents" monkeying around the neighborhood.
Witnesses say a vervet monkey has taken up residence around 50 feet above the ground in the trees near Northeast 172nd Street and 16th Avenue.
“I walked outside and I saw a dog running down the ally, what I thought was a dog and then it started doing some ninja stuff and jumping on houses and stuff,” said Zac Groffman, who first spotted the animal, in an interview with NBC6. “I was like, that’s not a dog.”
As unusual as this seems, vervet monkeys have actually been a part of South Florida’s landscape since the 1940s, when a number of monkeys escaped from a chimpanzee farm in what is now Dania Beach.
“When they reach sexual mutuality at the age of five, they leave their social group and they go to look for other monkey groups to join,” said Missy Williams, the director of the Dania Beach Vervet Project.
Williams added there is a colony of around 40 wild monkeys living around West Lake Park.
The monkeys are native to Africa, but experts say they’re highly adapted to urban life and can navigate obstacles like South Florida’s traffic.