Monkey Business — Jan 13, 2026 – John Agliata

THE DAILY UPDATE

It’s a quiet Tuesday in Foristell, Missourah, my hometown of the past several years. The weather remains unseasonably warm, as it has for most of this “winter,” but another cold snap is on the way, and I fear for the monkeys.

Oh, you haven’t heard? That’s surprising, considering the story about the vervent monkeys running around St. Louis has jumped the pond after stops on the New York Times website among many others and is now being run by the BBC.

To catch you up, late last week, reports started to come in about several (the first report said four) monkeys — eventually identified as vervent monkeys — on the loose in the northern part of our fair city. This perplexed authorities because our zoo (a great zoo that is also free to enter, I might add) had reported the loss of no such monkeys (or any other animal, as far as I’m aware).

Vervent monkeys are not native to St. Louis. I know of no monkey that is. Vervent monkeys are found naturally in sub-Saharan African, and that’s a long way away from St. Louis, Missourah. Though I haven’t done the research, I imagine it never gets as cold where these monkeys tend to make their homes as it is here right now, and as I said, it remains unseasonably warm for January. Lows this weekend are supposed to be in the single digits.

This, my friends, is my wheelhouse.

Let me explain …

I consider it a great joy and a major professional accomplishment that if you google my name plus the words “boa constrictor,” something magical comes up.

Back in 2007, I was the assistant managing editor for production for Cox Ohio Newspapers. That was a long title that meant I was the manager for the newspaper group’s copy desk and photographers. On a cold, wind-whipped January morning, my office phone rang. On the other end was a caller who told me a strange, strange story. He and his construction colleagues had arrived at their worksite on the banks of the Great Miami River and, in a hollowed-out log, they had seen something that defied logic — a big snake. A really big snake.

At that point, I’d been a professional journalist for more than a decade. I’d run a few weeklies already. I knew that newspapers can be magnets for crazy people. I had once been told on a phone call that the U.S. gubment was really just a front for a cabal that governs the world, a cabal run by the CEOs of Home Depot, Lowes, and Sears with the help of JFK Jr., who, like his father, was not, in fact, dead. My thought was this snake tale was just that — a tale told by a crazy person.

Still, you don’t pass up an opportunity to see a huge snake in a log on a river bank, even if it might mean your demise at the murderous hands of a lunatic. It was an early-morning phone call, and none of the photographers had arrived for their shifts yet, so I grabbed my camera and a reporter who had just walked through the door and headed toward the river.

And that’s why, when you google “John Agliata boa constrictor,” you quickly can find this image, the crowning achievement of my journalistic career. The snake was very much dead, frozen stiff by the brutal Ohio cold.

And that’s why I fear for the St. Louis monkeys.

Like boa constrictors, vervent monkeys aren’t meant to live in cold climates, though they do have an advantage Mr. Snake didn’t have in being warm blooded. That said, the last thing I want is for someone to peep into a log along the banks of the Mighty Mississip and see the corpsicles of four frozen monkeys.

But if anyone does, I hope they call me first.