From the category archives:

Primates

Common Marmoset (Callithrix jacchus)

by JR Kinyak on September 18, 2011

in Primates

Common marmoset (click image to enlarge)

Common marmoset by Coco, age 12

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Like many people, some of us Kinyaks are addicted to Angry Birds. The last edition we played, Angry Birds Rio, is a tie-in with the animated movie Rio, which I haven’t seen and don’t plan to, but I assume the characters in the game come from the movie. While the original Angry Birds game has pigs as the birds’ enemies, in Rio, your enemies are marmosets, and after flinging little birds at them, I decided to draw one.

The common marmoset is also known as the white-tufted-ear marmoset. It’s endemic to the forests of eastern Brazil. I’ve just learned a new biology word, and you probably know that learning new biology words is one of my favorite parts of the Daily Mammal. The common marmoset is both an exudativore and an insectivore. That second one is obvious (it eats bugs). The first was new to me. Exudativores make tree sap, resin, and gums a major part of their diet. Common marmosets gnaw into the bark of a tree and then scoop out the sap or what have you with their teeth. About 70 percent of their food-finding time is spent on tree saps and the rest on insects.

Tagged as: coco, monkey, words

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Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana)

by JR Kinyak on April 10, 2011

in Primates

Golden snub-nosed monkeys (click image to enlarge)


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Golden snub-nosed monkeys live in central China, with the majority making their homes in the Sichuan province. They roam through mountain forests where snow covers the ground for half the year, eating lichens and other ploants and the occasional insect. They are endangered, and the IUCN tells us that the major threats to their continued existence are habitat loss and tourism-related activities.

I learned from the Eponym Dictionary of Mammals (I need a copy of that book!) that the roxellana part of the monkey’s scientific name comes from Roxelana, a Ukrainian woman who was captured and sold into slavery in the 1500s. She was put in the harem of the sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, where she became his favorite concubine and eventually his second wife. In his poetry, he called her his one and only love. Apparently, she had beautiful golden hair and a turned-up nose, just like these monkeys. But she probably didn’t have a blue face.

Tagged as: books, endangered, humans, names, threats

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Japan Benefit: ニホンザル (Japanese Macaque) (Macaca fuscata)

by JR Kinyak on March 30, 2011

in Mammalthons,Primates

This week’s drawings, by me and by Coco, are for sale to benefit animals and people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan! If you buy a drawing, we’ll give half of the purchase price to the American Red Cross and half to Animal Refuge Kansai, an animal shelter in Japan. You can select a matted drawing or leave it unmatted. Unmatted, they’re 6″x9″ in colored pencil and marker on vellum. The mats are 9″x12″ and black. On to today’s monkey!

Japanese macaque (click image to enlarge)


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This drawing has sold!

The Japanese macaque is also called the snow monkey. They’re the guys you see relaxing in hot tubs and hot springs like this:

(That photo, as you no doubt noticed, is from National Geographic.) I wish there were Japanese macaques at Ten Thousand Waves, our local Japanese-style spa. It would be the perfect addition for the transporting atmosphere. Except I can imagine that they’re pretty noisy, and that might not be relaxing. Here’s a pretty fascinating article about why the macaques started hanging out in hot tubs, along with why they started playing with rocks and washing their sweet potatoes and wheat. The big trendsetter there was an 18-month-old baby girl monkey!

Here is Coco’s Japanese macaque. You should consider buying it to help Japan: all her other drawings have sold out. Collectors are lining up, people.

Japanese macaque by Coco, age 12 (click image to enlarge)

Coco’s drawing has sold!

My Japanese squirrel is still available for sale, too, and if you’re not big on art but you’d like to help the American Red Cross and Animal Refuge Kansai, consider clicking the button below. We’ll put your contribution into our fund.

Tagged as: coco, humans, japan, monkey

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Horsfield’s Tarsier (Tarsius bancanus)

by JR Kinyak on March 10, 2011

in Primates

Horsfield's tarsier (click image to enlarge)


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I know we just met the greater slow loris the other day, but here is another fuzzy fellow with huge, unmoving eyes and a neck that swivels 180 degrees. Horsfield’s tarsier lives in Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia, where he climbs in the trees and forages on the ground, looking for insects like cicadas, moths, stick bugs, and cockroaches, as well as bats, snakes, and birds to eat. Over the past 20 years, the Horsfield’s tarsier has lost at least 30 percent of its habitat, according to the IUCN, and it’s also a victim of the illegal pet trade.

The name tarsier comes from the tarsus bone, which is in the foot. Tarsiers have elongated ones, which helps them climb.

Tagged as: threats

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Greater Slow Loris (Nycticebus coucang)

by JR Kinyak on March 7, 2011

in Primates

Greater slow loris (click image to enlarge)


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Now, this is an interesting little primate. The greater slow loris (there are a few other kinds of lorises, as well) lives in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. It’s nocturnal and its eyes don’t move—it has to turn its head to look around. It’s very solitary, crawling around in the trees, eating sap and fruit and snails and eggs.

Inside each of the slow loris’s elbows, you’ll find a gland that produces a toxin. While there’s still a lot to learn about this substance, some scientists say that the loris will take this toxin into its mouth when it’s threatened, in preparation for biting the threat, and that it also spreads the toxin around its head and neck for protection. Mother slow lorises coat their babies with the stuff, perhaps as a defense. Other scientists seem to think that the toxin is used for olfactory communication rather than defense. The substance is a protein similar to the one in feline saliva and sebum that causes cat allergies, which raises an interesting question about the purpose of that protein in cats. No one knows what exactly it’s for, but it’s possible that it’s a defense, too, and that cats aren’t just grooming when they lick themselves, but spreading a toxin around. Humans who are bitten by slow lorises experience anaphylactic shock, an allergic reaction.

In researching the slow loris, I learned about something called an ethogram. In biology, an ethogram is a catalog or inventory of an animal’s behavior, described in some detail and sorted into categories. I found a loris conservation database that includes an online husbandry manual. In the husbandry manual is this slow loris ethogram. Ethograms don’t have to include illustrations, but this one includes some really nice ones. I wish I’d found it before I did the drawing, and I wish I had ethograms like this one for all the species I draw.

Coco also drew a slow loris. I love her drawing so much. I adore it. It’s beautiful.

Slow loris by Coco, age 12

Tagged as: biology, cat, coco

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Repeat: Common Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

by JR Kinyak on March 6, 2011

in Operations,Primates

Common chimpanzee (click image to enlarge)

Until February 24, 2011, I hadn’t posted a mammal since July 10, 2010. Why? Well, the kids kept me busy, and that’s an understatement. Most of it was just general exhaustion. But I was also a bit burned out after my World Cup series, a month-long extravaganza of mammals that involved a whole lot of research about soccer and different countries in addition to the standard mammal research I do for each post. And it seems I had reached a tipping point at which I had drawn all of the mammals most people had heard of, so that people say, “Oh, you should draw a giraffe!” or an armadillo or even an aye-aye or pygmy mouse lemur or dog or human, and I always have to say, “I already drew it.” Every time I run across an interesting article about mammals, I’ve already drawn all the mammals mentioned. It seemed I was in for a long—decades-long—slog of obscure rodents and hardly known bats and shrews.

Well, I am still in for that decades-long slog of lowly little furry things, but as I was reading an article in The New Yorker about bushmeat and the spread of viruses, regretting that I had already drawn the common chimpanzee, I decided, so what? Nobody is telling me I can’t draw it again if I want to, except myself, so why not? If it helps me stay interested in this project, I may as well do it, even if it puts off the project’s eventual completion. At this rate, I won’t finish until I’m in my late 80s anyway, so what’s the difference? So here is a chimpanzee (my drawing of which I like much less than my original chimpanzee drawing).

The New Yorker article I mentioned was “The Doomsday Strain” by Michael Specter and appeared in the December 20 & 27, 2010, issue. (The link is to a PDF.) It’s about a scientist named Nathan Wolfe and his organization, Global Viral Forecasting, which seeks to predict and prevent future viral catastrophes. One thing they do is study bushmeat, which is wild animals killed for food, particularly in Africa. I’ve talked on this site before about bushmeat as a threat to animals—see the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force if you’d like more information about that—but it’s an equally dangerous threat to humans. In some parts of Africa—and other continents, but we’re talking about Africa here—bushmeat is the primary protein source that humans eat. Because they don’t have many alternatives, people will kill rodents, elephants, antelopes, monkeys, or apes and bring them home to their families. Sometimes they won’t even kill the animals but just pick up ones that have already died.

The hunting and the preparation of the carcasses are both very bloody enterprises, and nobody wears gloves or masks or protective gear. Through the hunting and eating of bushmeat, many viruses spread to humans, including HIV, which was probably first contracted by a human who killed, prepared, or ate a chimpanzee. Now that humans can travel over oceans and across continents without too much trouble, these viruses can spread out of Africa quickly.

Here is a video from Anderson Cooper that features Nathan Wolfe and a lot of animal carcasses.

Tagged as: ape, repeat

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Mating Week: Saddleback Tamarin (Saguinus fuscicollis)

by JR Kinyak on March 5, 2011

in Primates,Theme Weeks

Saddleback tamarin (click image to enlarge)


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I’ve decided to go ahead and call this an official theme week. This is the fifth and last entry in our Daily Mammal Mating Week. The saddleback tamarin, which lives in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, practices polyandry, which means that a single female mates with more than one male. (Polygamy technically refers to a marriage or partnership with more than two partners; polygyny means one male and two or more females. Other members of this tamarin’s taxonomic family also practice polyandry.)

A typical group of tamarins includes one mating female and at least two males, but they’re flexible about their family systems, and sometimes they’re in a monogamous pair accompanied by adolescent offspring or in a group that includes other, non-dominant females, whose ovulation is suppressed and who help take care of the dominant female’s babies, who are nearly always born in sets of twins. All the males take turns mating with the dominant female, and Walker’s Mammals of the World says that “tamarins generally display minimal intragroup aggression, with a marked degree of cooperation and tolerance, even by sexually active males towards one another.” It’s a nice system:

In Saguinus the father and sometimes other adult members of a group assist at birth, receiving and washing the young. The newborn have a coat of short hair and are helpless. They cling tightly with their hands and feet to the body of the mother or father. The father transfers the young to the mother at feeding time and then accepts them from the mother again after feeding…Several members of a group besides the mother and father may help carry and provision the young…

So that’s it for our Mating Week. In addition to today’s polyandrous group, we’ve visited a lek, a barbaric “rape society,” a monogamous pair, and a “big-bang” reproducer. We mammals find what works, and the diversity in that is pretty beautiful.

Tagged as: mating, monkey

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