The known
hothead,
US Person, intends this post to take your mind off the coronavirus plague because as you know, misery loves company. Golden-maned tamarins,
Leontopithecus rosalia, are beautiful monkeys that live in Brazil's Atlantic Forest.
[photo below] As their name describes, adults have luxurious, colored manes surrounding their faces.
[photo left] Their populations have suffered drastic declines due to fragmentation of their disappearing forest habitat and extreme poaching; they were down to just a few hundred in the 1980's. Thanks to intensive
conservation efforts that included reintroduction of zoo reared tamarins into the wild, the population was raised to 3700 by 2014.
A new, more insidious threat to the tamarins was discovered in May, 2018. The first confirmed death of a tamarin due to yellow fever, a human disease, occurred. Brazil had suffered a major yellow fever epidemic, the largest since vaccinations began in the late '40s; hundreds of people were killed by the mosquito borne disease in the populous southern states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Thousands more were infected. The pathogen made the inter-species jump to tamarins, killing an estimated 30% of the species that was already endangered according to the IUCN. Predictably, panicked humans
contributed to the death rate by killing all monkeys because they believed yellow fever could be directly transmitted by monkeys to humans. More bad news was the fact that another primate species, the woolly spider monkey, was also decimated by the contagion.
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| a mother with two infants, credit: A. Martens |
Yellow fever is believed to have been transmitted to the Americas by transported slaves from Africa. The disease first appeared in Recife, Brazil 1685. Since it is pathogen not endemic to the Americas, native monkeys have no natural resistance to the disease. A combination of climate change and deforestation in areas that serve as
buffer zones between tropical forest and urban areas has allowed yellow
fever to spread. Scientists worry that yellow fever outbreaks may become a regular occurance in the Atlantic Forest remnants where the tamarins now hang on to survival. It once stretched along South America's Atlantic coast from Venezuela to Argentina, now because of logging, charcoal production, agriculture and urbanization it is now just 2% of its original extent, chopped up into fragments. But it is home to 22 of Brazil's 77 primate species.
There is some hope for the tamarin, if it recovers from the latest onslaught. A vaccine for monkeys has been developed based on the human yellow fever vaccine. No one has vaccinated wild primates before, so the effort to protect surviving tamarins is fraught with challenges. No licenses or permissions exist to conduct such a vaccination program in Brazil, and the ethical question of un- vaccinated humans remains. Administering the vaccine to five hundred wild tamarins in a cost effective way has also not been determined.
