I think this is the back story on the monkeys (from the internet)
Silver Springs Park has been one of the main tourist attractions of the place, but the monkey infestation began about 80 years ago. Now they are almost 300 in number, and their population is expected to double in the next few years.
The monkeys belong to the species
Rhesus macaque, indigenous to south and southeast Asia. So how did these monkeys land up in the Floridan Silver Springs Park?
In 1938, a tour boat operator, Colonel Tooey, released just 6
Rhesus macaque monkeys onto a small island, later converted to Silver Springs Park. His motive was to create a park closely resembling the Tarzan story; therefore, he procured the monkeys from New York City.
But what Colonel Tooey didn’t know is that this particular species of monkeys are excellent swimmers – they escaped the premises within minutes of releasing them. Thus, to replace them, six more monkeys were bought. They, too, escaped like the previous batch. By the early 1980s, these monkeys had already spread across what now is the 5000-acre Silver Springs Park.
As they began to grow in numbers, the Floridan government ordered the removal of 1000 of these monkeys from the place between 1984 and 2012. 20 female monkeys of the same species were sterilized too.
The officials believe that if they can sterilize half of the existing female population, they can significantly reduce the growth of this species. However, the removal and sterilization procedure was stopped in 2012 when authorities discovered that these monkeys were sold to biomedical researchers to be experimented upon. This raised concern among animal rights researchers too.