The Golden Lion Tamarin on a Brazilian 20 Real note.
Half a Century of Lion Tamarin Conservation
I have been involved with lion tamarin conservation for this full 50-year period, so perhaps my perspectives on it can help to inform future conservation efforts on its behalf and also to provide some lessons for primate conservation in general. Although I had known of this wonderful little creature since childhood, I first became aware of the conservation issues it faced by reading articles by the then San Diego Zoo mammal curator Clyde Hill (in Zoonooz, 1970) and the National Zoo Assistant Director John Perry (in Oryx, 1971), and decided that I needed to do something to help. In 1971, I travelled to Cornell University to meet Barbara Harrisson, the first chair of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group. She put me in contact with the only Brazilian expert on the species, Adelmar F. Coimbra-Filho, who had not only done the first field studies of the Golden Lion Tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia), but had also rediscovered the two other then known lion tamarins, the Black or Golden-rumped (Leontopithecus chrysopygus) and the Golden-headed (Leontopithecus chrysomelas), neither of which had been seen in the previous 50 years.
The First Concrete Measures
In 1973, Coimbra and I published two papers on the lion tamarins, one in the proceedings of the conference and another in the journal Primates, summarizing everything we knew about the animals up to that time. In that same year, Coimbra pulled off a real coup, convincing the Rio de Janeiro state government to create the Banco Biológico dos Micos-Leões in Tijuca National Park in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where he housed a captive population of Golden Lion Tamarins, the first family groups of Golden-headed Lion Tamarins, and the first captive individuals of the Black Lion Tamarin. His aim was to breed them in captivity as a safety measure in case they went extinct in the wild.
The International Community Steps Up
Over the next three years, Coimbra and I participated in two other international conferences that again raised the profile of the lion tamarins and the family Callitrichidae (marmosets and tamarins) in general. One of these was in 1975, again at the National Zoo, organized by Devra Kleiman, and entitled “The Biology and Conservation of the Callitrichidae,” and the other was in 1977 in Göttingen, Germany, “The Marmoset Workshop,” the latter clearly demonstrating an increasing interest in tamarins and marmosets in Europe—perhaps not all that surprising since both tamarins and marmosets had been popular as pets in Europe going back to the earliest days of New World exploration, to the point that Madame de Pompadour of the French court in the 18th century even kept a lion tamarin as a pet. At the German conference, Coimbra and I began planning a broad survey of the primates of Brazil’s Atlantic forest.
The Atlantic Forest and Returning Golden Lion Tamarins to the Wild
In 1983, Coimbra facilitated the start of a long-term field research project on the Golden Lion Tamarins, the “Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program”, sponsored by the National Zoo of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This major initiative was created by Devra Kleiman, and its core leaders included James and Lou Ann Dietz (field research and environmental education, respectively), and Benjamin B. Beck (the reintroduction program). The aim was to understand the possibilities and means of protecting the species and of reintroducing captive lion tamarins back into the wild.
This was the first major reintroduction program of its kind for a South American primate, and it was made possible by the fact that over the previous decade Kleiman had succeeded in figuring out the captive husbandry of the liontamarins. One of the most noteworthy aspects of the reintroduction program was that it not only put captive lion tamarins into the government reserve, it also put them into forests on private lands. After a few years, having successfully established a reintroduced population, the lion tamarins became a major status symbol for landowners in the region.
During the 1980s and 90s, the in-country partner managing the Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program was the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992, however, we saw the creation of the Associcao Mico-Leao-Dourado,
with the next generation of Brazilians taking over the now diverse conservation activities for this important species. It was initially most ably led by Denise Rambaldi, and today by Luis Paulo Ferraz, who took over as executive secretary in 2011.After years of studying the lion tamarins in captivity and in the wild, we now have a secure, expertly managed captive population, and to a large extent, likewise in the wild. However, it became evident that a continued growth of the population was constrained simply by the amount of forest available for them to live in. The Golden Lion Tamarin Association’s focus is now on increasing the available habitat, planting forest, and creating forest corridors to connect isolated forest patches.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon