The most delicious, aromatic tea grows on the steep, rocky slopes of Wuyi Mountain in China’s Fujian province — and it comes from only a handful of bushes. Even the most determined pickers can’t reach these plants. That’s where trained monkeys come in. They scale dizzying heights, plucking precious leaves from the tea bushes and bringing them back to their human collectors.
China isn’t the only place that uses monkeys for delicate work. In Singapore there’s a special monkey nursery where these agile climbers are trained for botanical tasks. They can memorize up to thirty Malay words — enough to send a monkey up a tall, slender tree, tell it which branch or fruit to take, and have it bring the harvest back down.
With the monkeys’ help, botanists have already found several plant species in tropical jungles that were previously unknown to science.
