OSAKA--A city government in Osaka Prefecture is expected to ban tourists from feeding Japanese macaques in a bid to dampen the ardor of the well-nourished and consequently fecund monkeys and slow down the excessive increase in their ranks.

The Minoo municipal government also is expected to enact an ordinance to impose fines of up to 10,000 yen on people who feed the monkeys living around the Minoo-Otaki waterfall.

While the Minoo monkeys are designated by the central government as a protected species, their number has grown to about 600--about three times what is considered a suitable figure--prompting the city to impose strict regulations and establish a rare ordinance to fine people feeding animals. The city government will submit the ordinance to the city assembly in September, aiming for its enforcement in April next year.

The city opened the Minoo-yama Shizen-Dobutsuen (Mt. Minoo Animal Park) near the waterfalls in 1955. It allowed holidaymakers to feed the monkeys in the hope that they would visit the park.

The government, saying that wild monkeys living in the suburbs of large cities were valuable assets to the nation, designated the Japanese macaques living around the Meiji no Mori Minoo Quasi-National Park as a protected species in 1956.

But they have become more apt to monkey around as they have grown accustomed to human visitors. They have injured tourists and damaged crops on a number of occasions.

This led the city to close the park in 1977, and reverting to a policy of returning the monkeys to nature, it moved their feeding ground to a location in the mountains about 1,500 meters north of the waterfall.

The city established a research committee of experts to protect and manage the prolific primates. The committee, in a bid to prevent the troop of monkeys splitting into subgroups and expanding their habitat, set a figure of 200 monkeys as about the right number for the area.

But their number keeps growing.

Gorging themselves on sweets, fruit and other treats offered by tourists the monkeys are so well fed that they are capable of reproducing once a year rather than biannually, which is the norm. The city even started giving female monkeys bananas laced with contraceptives in 2003, but it began looking at imposing the ordinance after this experiment proved ineffective.

This article was first published in The Yomiuri Shimbun/Asia News Network.