The Frost Monkey

The Frost Monkey spends most of the summer months forests, surviving off insects, seeds, and anything they can get access too. However, come Autumn, they begin to eat only the fattiest foods available to them. In the early winter, they begin to leave the forests in the greatest migration of primates on Earth. They have a single destination, the slopes of Mount Erebus, where they know for a fact Hot springs are located, as like the Japanese Macaque, they survive the cold winter by bathing in the hot water. Those who get there late, or are to weak of defending their claimed hot springs are doomed to die in the high winter. The many who die along the slopes provide the monkeys with their winter meal, cannibalism.

Nice. Mt. Erebus is on Ross Island, on the outer coast of the large island of Zhoole, head of the dragon which shaped by the Island complex of West Antarctica. The Island chain is mountainous and much more tectonically active than the rest of Antarctica. For the last several million years, there have been hotspots up and down the Island chain, and usually at least one or two actively hot volcanoes, allowing shifting populations of Frost Monkeys to evolve into distinguishably different species than their hive monkey cousins.

Frost Monkeys are found in the other islands, but by far the largest population is on the Island of Zhoole.. When winter comes, the great migration begins, and the hordes of monkey begin their trek, gathering along the shores and waiting for the sea ice to form between the Zhoole coast and Ross Island, so that they can cross.

Nice. Thanks.