NEWS - TINY PRIMATE 'TALKS' SECRETLY IN ULTRASOUND

Tiny primate ‘talks’ secretly in ultrasound

 

 February 12, 2012 

Philippines: One of the world’s smallest primates, the Philippine tarsier, communicates in a range of ultrasound inaudible to predator and prey alike, according to a study published on Wednesday. No bigger than a man’s hand, Tarsius syrichta can hear and emit sounds at a frequency that effectively gives it a private channel for issuing warnings or ferreting out crickets for a night time snack.   Only a handful of mammals are known to be able to send and receive vocal signals in the ultrasound range, above 20 kilohertz (kHz), including some whales, domestic cats and a few of the many species of bats.   And few of these can squeal, screech or squawk at the same sonic altitudes as the saucer-eyed tarsier, which up to now had been mistakenly described as “ordinarily silent.”   Its finely-tuned ears are capable of picking up frequencies above 90 kHz, and it can vocalise in a range around 70 kHz. By comparison, humans generally can’t hear anything above 20 kHz, and a dog whistle is pitched to between 22 and 23 kHz.   A team of scientists from the United States and the Philippines led by Marissa Ramsier of Humboldt State University gathered their inaudible results in two ways.   First they captured six of the docile nocturnal creatures and placed them inside custom-build sound chambers to test their sensitivity to high-pitched sounds. To measure the frequency of the tarsier’s ultrasound chatter, the researchers recorded another 35 specimens in the wild. “The minimum frequency of the call – 67 kHz – is the highest value of any terrestrial mammal, excluding bats and some rodents,” said the study, published in the British Royal Society’s Biology Letters.   What advantages do the tarsier’s high-end vocal acrobatics confer? There are several, they suggest. One is being able to sound a silent alarm. “Ultrasonic calls can be advantageous to both the signaller and receiver as they are potentially difficult for predators to detect and localise,” the researchers explain.   The tarsier’s exceptional hearing may also facilitate acoustic eavesdropping on noises emitted by prey, which range from crickets and cockroaches – their staple diet.   Finally, they speculates, being able to communicate in ultrasonic ranges filters out all the low-frequency “noise” of a tropical environment. Tarsier’s have five-digit hands that eerily resemble – in emaciated form – their human counterparts. Lacking the typical “night vision” of other nocturnal creatures, they also have – in relation to their body size – the largest eyes of any primate.

NEWS -PRIMATE PALACE OPENS AT AUSTIN, TEXAS ZOO

Primate Palace opens at Austin Zoo

  By Ben Wear AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Makayla, like anyone moving into new and strange living quarters, seemed a bit shaken by the experience Saturday.
She huddled under what appeared to be her favorite gray blankie and peered nervously at a visitor through the wire of her cage. Makayla, you see, is a capushin monkey who, like a dozen or so of her simian friends, is spending her first days in the Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary's new Primate Palace.
On Saturday, the rescue zoo, in Oak Hill near U.S. 290, celebrated the opening of the $102,000 revamped former pony barn. The small wood-frame building over the past three years had to be re-leveled, repainted (including a mural on one side), outfitted with several monkey "bedrooms" inside and expanded to the west with large outdoor cages for the residents.
Openings in the palace wall allow the monkeys to move at their leisure between the heated indoors (or air-conditioned, as the seasons demand) and the cages outdoors with ropes and platforms for climbing.
Dozens of zoo-goers gathered outside those cages on the brisk but pleasant afternoon as head zookeeper Sara King and primate expert Kelly Todd talked about the monkeys and how they came to live in the Hill Country.
The facility is a rescue zoo, one that does not seek out animals for display but rather accepts animals surrendered by civilian owners (including a lion that was living with an over-the-road trucker), given up by research or medical facilities, or captured by agencies like the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Donna King, a capuchin so named for a hairdo that resembles boxing promoter Don King's wild locks, had been a test subject for psychotropic drugs in an earlier life, zoo Executive Director Patti Clark said. Despite having been at the zoo for quite a while, Ms. King has never been able to grow back much of her coat, Clark said.
But most of the zoo's 30 or so primates, and the other 300 or so big cats, bears, foxes, birds and other animals at the sanctuary, looked hale Saturday.
The sanctuary, after a rough few years of lax management, poor morale and sometimes surly customer service under its previous owners, now has a $900,000 annual budget, a larger donor base and 15 full-time employees, Clark said.
"It's all about giving these (animals) a better opportunity than they had before," Todd said.

NEWS - TOURISM THREATENS TINY PHILIPPINE PRIMATE

Tourism threatens tiny Philippine primate
 By Joe Sinclair (AFP) – Dec 11, 2011

BOHOL, Philippines — The tiny creature turns its head slowly through 180 degrees and stares, boggle-eyed as another group of noisy tourists takes its picture from just inches away.
This is the Philippine tarsier, one of the smallest primates in the world. It is a remarkable animal, just 10 centimetres (four inches) tall, weighing 120 grams (four ounces), with a rat-like tail, bat-like ears, and giant eyeballs, each one as big as its brain.
Its strange appearance is obvious, but what these tourists may not realise is that their very presence is putting the animal at risk.
The tarsier is nocturnal, lives in the forest, and is highly sensitive to daylight, noise and human contact.
According to conservationists, if it becomes stressed it will kill itself by bashing its head against a tree or the bars of its cage.
"People go near and they're loud, or make a picture with the flash, or they're touching them. Most of those tarsiers, when they become stressed they commit suicide," says Carlito Pizarras, known as The Tarsier Man.
"They don't breathe and slowly die. If you put them in a cage they want to go out. That's why they bump their heads on the cage, and it will crack because the cranium is so thin."
Pizarras is the field manager at the Philippine Tarsier and Wildlife Sanctuary in Corella on the island of Bohol, one of the country's most popular tourist destinations.
Unlike other tarsier attractions on the island, visitors at the sanctuary are allowed to look, but not to get too close, and definitely not to touch.
Different species of tarsier are found in the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia. And populations in all these countries are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as "decreasing".
The Philippine tarsier, or tarsius syrichta, is categorised as "near threatened", while species in other countries are already "vulnerable", "endangered" and "critically endangered".
As a child Pizarras would hunt tarsiers with his father, a taxidermist. The stuffed creatures were best sellers, fetching 250 pesos ($6) a time.
Aged 12, he decided to start keeping the animals in captivity, venturing into the forests at night to collect crickets for them to eat and learn about their habits in the wild. He realised how sensitive they were to human contact.
By the time he reached his 20s the tarsiers living around his village were becoming scarce. Hunting, habitat destruction and predatory house cats were causing numbers to dwindle.
Pizarras knew he was also partly to blame, so he stopped hunting them and became a pioneer of conservation.
The tarsier became Bohol's logo, and a big tourist draw. And the Tarsier Man, once derided for his strange behaviour, became a national treasure, even presenting a pair of the animals to Britain's Prince Charles in 1997.
But Pizarras, now in his 50s, believes not enough is being done to protect the creature. It may be a tourist symbol, but more should be done to make it a symbol of conservation.
"In other areas they are still putting tarsiers in cages for the tourists," he says. "I don't know why but the government gives them permits."
At one of these attractions, a guide calls to a group of tourists and points to a tarsier clinging to a tree branch.
"Now there you are, I think you are hiding," he says in a loud sing-song voice, before encouraging the group to move closer and take a picture.
A sign warns visitors not to use their camera flash, and the guide tells them not to touch.
But the tarsiers here live in a thinly forested area, with light seeping through. Their ultra-sensitive eyes are murky, and their movements slow. At this time of day they should be asleep.
"Before we put them in our hands," the guide says. "But if you touch, they die. They are so very sensitive."
These ones have been "domesticated" using cages, he adds, and now they are "tame".
"Try to go closer," the guide says. "They won't bite."
Pizarras argues that tarsiers in the wild are very defensive and do bite -- and that these docile animals are not tame but weak.
"The tarsier is a superstar but unfortunately it's suffering because of its fame," says Joannie Mary Cabillo, the programme manager at the Tarsier and Wildlife Sanctuary.
"The government is backing up but not that much. We have a presidential proclamation and laws to protect the tarsiers but unfortunately nobody is sanctioned."
The government declared the tarsier a "specially protected" species in 1997, outlawing hunting of the animal, and effectively banning restaurants and souvenir shops from keeping them on display.
Theresa Mundita Lim, director of the Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), says the indications are that the tarsier population has gone up since then.
But she acknowledges that tarsier tourism is a double-edged sword, and more needs to be done to protect the animal.
"We can still do more through education and stricter enforcement," she says. "There has to be stricter monitoring, also for tourists.
"It's not just up to us. We issue the policy but the policy needs to be implemented at the field level."
The DENR's tarsier conservation programme has an annual budget of five million pesos ($115,000).
"It's not enough. But we also rely on social mobilisation," says Lim, adding that it is sometimes concerned tourists who report centres where the tarsiers are not being well treated.
People caught breaching the wildlife act can be fined or even jailed, but tarsiers are still found on the black market in Manila for sale as pets, fetching about 6,000 pesos each.
There are only several hundred tarsiers left living in the wild on Bohol, according to the Philippine Tarsier Foundation.
Pizarras says most of these live in the 167 hectares (413 acres) of forest around the sanctuary -- elsewhere it is much harder for them to thrive.
"In the 70s the population was going down so I decided on my own to stop hunting tarsiers," he says.
"My father got angry with me because this was our means of livelihood.
"But I said maybe someday my kids and my grandchildren can see them no more, and he understood."

Haven Appeal For Monkey Mate

Wednesday, August 24th 2011 14:59
A lonely monkey on the Isle of Wight could have a chance of happiness with a new mate if it's keepers can raise enough money to get the pair together.

Martin, a white throated capuchin at the the Owl and Haven, sadly lost his brother Owen last year and has been on his own since.

A zoo in France has offered Martin a new female companion called Lulu who's been rejected by her own group. All that separates the pair is the English Channel and the estimated £33,000 it will cost to transport and rehouse her.

Animal keeper Harvey Broadhurst says the company would be invaluable to Martin. "He gets lonely, he's always been with his brother for 15 years of his life, he's about 16 now and it's taken it's toll on him. We try our best to give him things to do, we're always on our toes around Martin and we couldn't provide even the tiniest bit of enrichment that a mate would."

"Lulu's been rejected by her group, so she's in the same kind of position as Martin where I imagine she's quite lonely. The Zoo have said we can have her, but we will to collect her. The problem is she needs a 6 month quarantine period if she's coming into the UK."

The Owl & Monkey Haven are appealing for donations to help them build a new quarantine approved enclosure for Lulu.

Report by Emily Wells

NEWS - PROGRAM COULD BOOST PRIMATE NUMBERS

Program could boost primate numbers

Aug 19, 2011

 

SALISBURY -- Because only 350 or so remain of their kind, the cotton-top tamarins at the Salisbury Zoo tend to be a bit spoiled.
"They're like kids that only get ice cream for breakfast," Zookeeper Caleb Oliver said as an eager adult tamarin took a berry from his hand.
There are four tamarins at the zoo: an adult male and female, and two of their offspring, one of which was initially rejected by his mother. But thanks to a new reintroduction technique developed by staff, there could be many more of these endangered primates swinging on branches in zoos worldwide.
As part of the cotton-top Tamarin Species Survival Program, the zoo paired a male and female for breeding in 2006. The female became pregnant in late 2008, but she rejected her offspring because she was hand-reared -- meaning she was fed and cared for by zookeepers when she was young and therefore did not understand her responsibilities as a mother.
"She was naive about her offspring and she neglected them," said Zoo Director Joel Hamilton. "Consequently, they did not survive."
Since then, the Pittsburgh Zoo has developed a program in which they successfully placed a rejected, older infant with a surrogate parent couple who would finish raising the baby as their own.
The plan, Hamilton said, was to send Salisbury's next set of tamarin babies to Pittsburgh if the mother once again rejected her offspring. But in May, the zoo's female tamarin gave birth to two babies and only rejected one.
Research conducted by Zookeeper Debbie Graham suggested the rejected baby could be reintroduced to its biological parents if it's hand-reared until the age of 8-10 weeks, when it can feed itself. In that time period, the young tamarin was incrementally exposed to its family using what Hamilton called a "howdy," or reintroduction, cage.
"We put the howdy cage inside the display and slowly moved it closer and closer to where their food bowl is, because that's their most protected spot," Hamilton said. "Finally, once we felt everything looked good, we opened the cage. All behavioral signs were great and there was no aggression toward the hand-reared youngster."
Now, the male infant, slightly smaller than his parent-reared sister, is seemingly a member of the family. Hamilton said he sleeps with the other tamarins and plays with his sister, who sometimes assists him in moving around the display.
"His mobility and agility was a few weeks behind the parent-reared animal and his confidence level was different," he said. "We actually saw the parent-reared offspring put the hand-reared offspring on its back and jump to the tree, then let it off. The interaction is incredible."
Hamilton said the technique is management-changing information in how the species is bred and raised in the future.
"Not just for us, but in general when females reject their offspring," he said. "It's a pretty big deal and I'm pretty darn proud of the staff."
Karen Carney, a zoo docent, said the entire zoo community should be impressed by Salisbury's accomplishment.
"It shows so much devotion on the part of our zookeepers," she said.
The zoo became a participant in the SSP in 1997, when it agreed to exhibit the monkeys, which are considered one of the world's 25 most endangered primates. According to zoo officials, nearly three-fourths of the tamarin's native range in the tropical forests of Columbia has been destroyed by deforestation and habitat fragmentation. The illegal pet trade has also severely impacted the wild population.
Through Labor Day, visitors can participate in a naming contest for the female baby tamarin. Visitors can choose from three names -- Q-tip, Pocco and Lilly -- and voting is done by donating money in a jug of the name they choose. A donation station will be set up at the tamarin exhibit. The jug with the most money is the winning name.

NEWS - ANCIENT PRIMATE FOSSIL UNEARTHED

2 August 2011

Ancient primate fossil unearthed

Researchers working in Uganda say they have unearthed the well-preserved fossil skull of an ancient primate.

The 20 million-year-old specimen comes from the site of an extinct volcano in Uganda's north-east Karamoja region.
The scientists say preliminary analysis showed the tree-climbing herbivore was roughly 10 years old when it died.
The skull is about the same size as that of a chimp, but its brain was smaller.
"It is a highly important fossil and it will certainly put Uganda on the map in terms of the scientific world," Martin Pickford, a palaeontologist from the College de France in Paris, told journalists in Kampala.
Dr Pickford and his colleague Brigitte Senut say the fossil skull belonged to a creature they call Ugandapithecus major.
Professor Senut, a professor at the French National Museum of Natural History said that the remains would be taken to Paris to be X-rayed and documented before being returned to Uganda.
"It will be cleaned in France, it will be prepared in France... and then in about one year's time it will be returned to the country," she said.
The remote and arid region of Karamoja is one of the least developed in Uganda.

NEWS - RARE LITTLE PRIMATE FOUND ON SASTRI NAGAR TERRACE

Rare little primate found on Sastri Nagar terrace

A Selvaraj, TNN Jul 31, 2011

CHENNAI: Forest department officials rescued a slender loris, a rare primate normally found in dense tropical rainforests of south India and parts of Sri Lanka, from a house in Sastri Nagar, Adyar.
The rare one-year-old animal is now at the forest range office in Velachery. A few days ago, a cat-eyed snake was found in a parcel destined for Slovakia at a courier company in Nungambakkam.
On Friday, the animal was spotted by the wife of a businessman, Kannan. She had gone to the terrace to hang out clothes to dry. As she was going about her work, she suddenly noticed the animal sitting at the far end of the terrace. Screaming with fear, she called out to her husband. Upon hearing her screams, Kannan immediately ran to the terrace.

Soon, Kannan called the police, who in turn alerted the forest officials. The forest officials rescued the animal and kept it safely at their office in Velachery.
Forest ranger Dr S David Raj said, "We will release it in the forest in a couple of days. The animal may have crossed the forest borders in search of food and finally landed on the terrace of the house. We are feeding it a few insects. A veterinary doctor will also inspect the animal to check its condition."
"It sprays its urine all over its body to attract small insects. It normally lives in dense forests hanging on the barks of the trees. The Theosophical Society in Adyar, very close to Sastri Nagar, has a huge forest and the animal may have come from there," he added.
Forest officials say the slender loris prefer thick, thorny vegetation wherein they can easily escape predators and find insects, the mainstay of their diet,to eat. They also eat slugs, young leaves, flowers, shoots, and occasionally eggs and nestlings.
Another forest official said, "The slender loris is about the size of a chipmunk, with long, pencil-thin arms and legs. It is about 15–25 cm long and has a small, vestigial tail. The round head is dominated by two large, closely set, saucer-like brown eyes. They flank a long nose which ends in a heartshaped knob. The eyes are surrounded by dark-brown to black circles of fur. The ears are large and round. Its coat is light red-brown or gray-brown on its back and dirty white on its chest and belly. The second digit on the hand and foot are very short. They move on the same plane as the thumb, which helps them grasp branches and twigs."

NEWS - RARE BABY MONKEY REMOVED FROM MOMS CARE-DOING FINE

Rare Baby Monkey Removed From Mom's Care

One-Week-Old Silver Leaf Monkey To Be Hand-Raised At The San Diego Zoo

POSTED: 3:28 pm PDT July 27, 2011

UPDATED: 4:23 pm PDT July 27, 2011

SAN DIEGO -- The first silvered leaf monkey to be hand-raised at the San Diego Zoo was doing well Wednesday.According to San Diego Zoo, the one-week-old female named "Thai" was born July 3 to a first-time mother.Sadly, Thai's mother was not holding her correctly for nursing, animal keeper Janet Hawes said, she needs to be bottle-fed several times daily."The small, orange monkey continues to spend time with her family between feedings so that social bonds remain strong," San Diego Zoo said.The monkey is a rare Asian species that is born with orange fur that becomes silver as they age. Females have some white patches.They're generally found in coastal mangrove forests in Borneo, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, in habitats considered to be threatened by deforestation.

NEWS - GORILLA TIRES OF ALL FOURS, STARTS WALKING UPRIGHT ON TWO LEGS

Gorilla tires of all fours, starts walking upright on two legs

UNITED KINGDOM - A gorilla at a British Zoo has become an Internet sensation, all because he's given up "knuckle walking."

Gorillas, of course, normally get around on all fours. But Abram walks upright on two feet.
The gorilla keeper says it seems to run in the family. He says Ambam's father used get around the same way when his hands were full. 

We wanted to know how normal is it for gorillas to just stand up and start walking? And will the gorillas at the Denver Zoo start doing it? We asked the CEO of the Denver Zoo. 

"I think what it demonstrates to me is you can know a lot about animals but they are always going to come up with something really surprising," CEO Kyle Burks said. 

Zoo vets say the gorillas are doing fantastic, enjoyed Friday's warm weather, but they aren't showing any signs that they will start walking around like humans anytime soon.

NEWS - GORILLA EYES SURGERY MAKES DALLAS DOC FEEL SENSE OF HIGHTENED RESPONIBILITY

Friday, April 24, 2009
Gorilla eye surgery makes Dallas doc feel sense of heightened responsibility

by PegNews wire

... as opposed to when he's working on mere humans.

Timbo the gorilla is the eldest of the great apes at the Dallas Zoo (she's 47). She was having trouble seeing, due to cataracts. So zookeepers called in Dallas eye doc R. Wayne Bowman to perform radical eye surgery on the beast, and the results have been peachy-keen, thanks very much.

According to the good doctor, he felt "a greater sense of responsibility" when operating on Timbo than when performing a similar procedure on a human.