Monkey Business Is Giving Company a Bad Reputation : Environment: Monkeys are destroying islands in the Florida Keys. Residents want them moved, but their owner says the herd is vital to medical research.

Residents of the Florida Keys are fed up with Bausch and Lomb’s monkey business.

The vision-care giant put thousands of monkeys on two small, deserted islands more than a decade ago to breed, offering a steady supply of laboratory animals to biomedical researchers.

But people who live near the islands where the rhesus monkeys have been allowed to run free, fouling the water and turning lush mangrove trees into useless skeletons, object to what they deem is needless environmental destruction.

“It looks like a war zone right now. Just like Vietnam,” said James McElroy, who’s part of a grass-roots anti-monkey campaign.

The rhesus monkeys have been good business since they were first brought over from India 18 years ago. Handlers regularly dispense monkey chow and capture more than 1,000 each year, generating more than $1.5 million in annual sales.

The breeding colonies became more important to U.S. researchers after India, Pakistan and Bangladesh banned monkey exports in the late 1970s, said Dr. Joseph Held, vice president for primate research at Charles River Laboratories, the division of Bausch and Lomb that runs the islands.

And because they are untainted by Herpes-B virus and other infections from the outside world, they are much more valuable than other primates destined for the nation’s laboratories, Held said. “It’s the cleanest, healthiest commercial production colony in the world.”

Most of the animals are sold to labs doing advanced neurological research; none are used for eye-care tests, the company says.

More than 1,900 breeding animals and several thousand of their offspring roam on 300 acres of partially submerged wetlands on Key Lois and Raccoon Key, another company-owned island several miles away.

Even Charles River Laboratories, which is under a consent agreement to replace damaged trees and reduce the population, agrees that the monkeys have made a mess of things.

The monkeys stripped the leaves from thousands of red mangroves, a protected species, and now struggle to find shade in the Florida sun. Their waste has fouled the waters, leaving a band of yellowish-brown algae that chokes out marine life.

“They weren’t too noticeable until the vegetation began disappearing. That’s when people became alarmed,” McElroy said.

Even armed with the necessary permits from pro-growth Keys officials, humans could never get away with such destruction, said Curt Kruer, a biologist and Audubon Society leader who has studied Keys wetlands for 13 years and can see Key Lois from his back yard.

“You could take all the mangroves destroyed for condo projects in the Keys in the past 10 years and it wouldn’t come close to this,” Kruer said as he poled his boat in for a close look at Key Lois. “Where’s it all going to end?”

The state owns everything below the high-water line, including the area where most of the mangroves have been destroyed. Environmental officials ordered the company to clean up those grounds years ago.

Charles River Laboratories fenced in and replanted some trees, but disputed the boundary and sued the state in 1986. Nothing much changed until the two sides quietly agreed to a settlement in May that would allow the company to phase out the monkeys over 20 to 30 years.

McElroy, Kruer and other Keys activists raised a ruckus. Then-Gov. Bob Martinez and the Florida Cabinet responded by scuttling the agreement and deciding to go after Charles River for destroying state property instead.

“They just stripped all the state land and left it bare,” Martinez said. “I’d like to see if we can prosecute.”

Ken Plante, general counsel for the Florida Department of Environmental Resources, says the title dispute has to be resolved first.

But the department is still trying to find surveyors willing to brave the monkeys and measure the property, Plante said.

Meanwhile, said Barbara Kelley, a spokeswoman at Bausch and Lomb’s Rochester, N.Y., headquarters, the company is quietly scouting out alternative sites where the breeding operation can be moved.