Description: Spider monkeys are characterized by their long, slender limbs and great agility. They travel in small bands in forest trees, moving swiftly by making tremendous leaps, sprawling out like spiders, and grasping tree limbs with their prehensile tails. The fur is gray to brown or black, with lighter undersides; the face has white eye rings and is shaded by projecting hair that is either light or dark in color.

Range/Habitat: Tropical rain forest of southern Mexico, Central and South America

Adaptations: Spider monkeys have prehensile tails. This tail is the longest and most powerful of all primates. The hands lack thumbs. Males will occasionally scent mark branches by mixing saliva with a secretion produced from a gland on their chest.

Courtship/Gestation/Birth:

Diet: mainly fruits and nuts, occasionally invertebrates.

Remarks:Spider monkeys use specific routes as they travel through the trees. These routes remain constant. During the time of the year when fruit is particularly abundant, they decrease their daily travel length from 3 miles to around 765 years. Spider monkeys travel by brachiating through the trees using their prehensile tails as a fifth limb. These monkeys depend highly on their keen binocular vision.
Spider monkeys live high in the trees of the rain forest and only rarely descend to the jungle floor. They forage in groups ranging from one to twenty individuals. The groups are constantly changing as individuals come and go. This gives the group the appearance of being unstructured but these fluid groups are actually subgroups of a larger permanent group.

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