A last blog!

Save the Golden Lion Tamarin Foundation
c/o Mr. Limbeck

I am writing to update you on my research concerning Golden Lion Tamarin. The Golden Lion Tamarin, like other mammals, reproduces sexually through the interaction of sperm and egg. For a proper pregnancy to occur, both the male and female Tamarin must be in good physical health. To that end, I worry about the release of airborne pollutants near their habitat in Seattle, Washington. Specifically I am worried about the release of Glycol Ethers into the air, a group of known toxic chemicals. Not only does Seattle release Glycol Ethers into the air, but it is the number one pollutant released in the city, according to Scorecard, a pollutant information site.
An alarming characteristic of glycol ethers, besides their harmful effect on the respiratory systems of tamarins exposed to them, is their effect on the reproductive system of many animals. They are suspected to cause many general reproduction properties, including early embryonic death, and reduced fertility in the females. In my opinion, though, the threat is their damage to the male of the species. Studies have been done in animals and humans exposed to Glycol Ethers, and found that there is a positive correlation between exposure to the toxic chemicals and a reduction in testicular size and sperm health. Lower sperm health can mean less effective sperm, in that the sperm would be unable to get to the egg and begin fertilization.
Unsurprisingly, no test of this nature has been run specifically on Golden Lion Tamarins, so we are unable to be absolutely certain of the effect of Glycol Ethers on our tamarins. I believe that it would inhibit the reproduction of the species, but it is imperative that we know for sure. It should be fairly simple to test. We will collect a sample of 4 males and 4 females of early adulthood, and 4 males and 4 females from late adulthood. Unfortunately, due to a limited population, this is the largest feasible test group. Half of each group would be the control population, and half would be the test population. The control group would be placed in a controlled environment in their natural habitat near Rio de Janeiro. The test group would be kept in Seattle, where they will be exposed to Glycol Ethers, the levels of which we know from environmental reports. From there, we will measure the testicular size of the males in each environment every 30 days, and check sperm activity. If there is a difference between the control and test groups, we have confirmed the toxicity of Glycol Ethers. Hopefully, there will be some mating, as well, and we can check embryonic health. However, the sample size is small enough that this will be an unpredictable source of results. I predict that we will see a correlation in the males between poor reproductive health and exposure to Glycol Ethers. From there, we should take steps to educate the city of Seattle on the damaging effect of its pollutants.


Sources:

Scorecard. 2005. Major Pollutants (online). Accessed April 23, 2006 at http://www.scorecard.org/community/pollution.tcl?fips_county_code=53033&name=KING&zip_code=98101.

Scorecard. 2005. Glycol Ethers (online). Accessed April 23, 2006 at http://www.scorecard.org/chemical-profiles/html/glycol_ethers.html.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 2006. Air Toxics Website – Glycol Ethers (online). Accessed April 23, 2006 at http://www.epa.gov/ttnatw01/hlthef/glycolet.html.

The Adaptability of the Golden Lion Tamarin to a Profitable End

Mr. Sprocket,
As per your instructions, I have compiled information on the possibility of selectively breeding the Golden Lion Tamarin.
Classification:

• Kingdom Animalia
  
• Phylum Chordata
  
• Subphylum Vertebrata
  
• Class Mammalia
  
• Order Primates
  
• Family Callitrichidae
  
• Genus Leontopithecus
  
• Species rosalia
  

The Golden Lion Tamarin has adapted many ways to suit its woodland environment, such as:

• It has claws on its long fingers, allowing it to cling to trees and other vertical surfaces. Since they spend most of their time in trees, it is useful for them to be able to move freely all through the tree.
  
• Golden Lion Tamarins have very long, narrow hands and fingers, allowing them to forage in tight spaces for food, and deftly manipulate foliage.
  
• They are adept jumpers, and can quickly move from tree to tree to escape predators.
  

I believe that we can capitalize on the jumping ability of these tamarins. They are already quite skilled at making long horizontal jumps, but I believe we can breed them to be even stronger jumpers. If we bred a tamarin that could jump very well, it would be able to make the same jumps with scientific equipment on its back, such as cameras, or other recording devices. Then, we could use the tamarins to do dangerous, difficult rain forest exploration for us, saving countless dollars in equipment and labor.
Luckily, these tamarins are already bred in zoos, so we have an accessible population already, and the knowledge of how to breed them. The real question is, how do we determine which tamarins are the best jumpers? Hopefully, we can organize some sort of jumping “contest” to determine this. Then, we select the best 5 males and 5 females , and allow them to breed. We will have to continue this process for several generations.
In any selective breeding situation, we run the chance of creating an entirely new species of tamarin through reproductive isolation. If there are variables we don't see in the tamarins we breed, or if they mutate in some large way, they may become unable to breed with the existing tamarin population, either through biological roadblocks, or tamarin-societal roadblocks. A biological roadblock would mean that the two animals simply could not produce offspring. A societal roadblock, probably more likely in this situation, would occur if something changed in the new tamarins that made them non-sexually-attractive to the current tamarins, or vice-versa.
The benefits of selectively breeding this tamarin have already been discussed. It may even help the survival of the species if they become better jumpers. However, the use of animals for the purpose discussed is somewhat unnecessary. Animals are unpredictable, and may not even survive the rain forest we send them to. A more viable solution would be the development of robots to handle the task of rain forest exploration. Robots would also be able to collect samples and return them to the lab.

Sources:
Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed April 09, 2006 at http://animaldiversity.org.

Philadelphia Zoo. 2003. Animals: Mammals Golden Lion Tamarin (online). Accessed April 09, 2006 at http://www.philadelphiazoo.org/index.php?id=3_1_1_8.

Thank you for your interest in the protection of the Golden Lion Tamarin!

Report #1: To the Society for the Conservation of the Golden Lion Tamarin:

Thank you for your interest in protecting the future of this great race through DNA fingerprinting. Your assistance will be of great help to systems already in place to replenish the population of the Golden Lion Tamarin, such as the Washington National Zoo Reintroduction Program. At the zoo, they breed Golden Lion Tamarins in captivity, and when they have a large enough population, they release them into the rainforest. Unfortunately, the great majority of them do not survive. DNA fingerprinting could help scientists know just how great this majority is.

Such a method of using DNA fingerprinting this way is by following family lines. By tracing family lines, and obtaining DNA samples from the captive-bred tamarins, scientists can determine how quickly the captive-bred tamarins are proliferating, or if they are at all, like they do in the journal entry described here. A method like this is best for a population of Golden Lion Tamarins because there is no control over where the tamarins live, and there's no easy way to determine visually which tamarins you are examining. This way, you can grab any random tamarin, get a DNA sample, and know where it came from. You'd be able to tell this because families have mutations and alleles mostly unique to their family, and with enough of these mostly-unique traits, you can establish with fair certainty what family a tamarin belongs to. If they are not proliferating well enough, other methods of adapting them to the wild should be examined.

Report #2: To the Society for the Genetic Modification of the Golden Lion Tamarin:

Thank you for your interest in protecting the future of this great race through genetic modification.

After much thought, I can only imagine one way to bring the Golden Lion Tamarin back to its formerly prominent place in the ecosystem of the South American rainforests: Fix the problem that made them endangered in the first place. For many years, the numbers of the Golden Lion Tamarin were drained by poachers out to make a profit off their fur, up to $20,000 for a single animal! There are penalties in place for poaching the animal, but they are not successful enough, as many hunters are willing to risk a few years in jail for the excellent price their furs fetch.

Hopefully, this problem can be solved through genetic modification. I hope that we can eliminate the poaching of this creature by eliminating the demand for its fur. By modifying the texture of the fur of the Golden Lion Tamarin, we can enable it to be less desirable as a pelt, while still leaving it with the natural protection of its fur, and its beautiful golden color. We need to find a gene that affects hair texture, perhaps in another breed of tamarin with rougher hair. The procedure we could use with such a gene might go as follows:

• Identify the gene on the tamarin controlling hair texture.
• Modifying a virus so it contains only the gene of the rougher-haired tamarin.
• Infect Golden Lion fetuses with the modified virus.

Hopefully this would produce a roughly-haired Golden Lion Tamarin. Presumably, there would be no environmental impact by this modification, but it is possible that bugs that make a home in the fur of tree-dwelling mammals would not find the rough hair as habitable, and we could see a decrease in their population. If there is interbreeding, we could see this new gene passed onto other breeds of tamarin, and perhaps their coats would also become uninhabited, increasing the effect discussed earlier. Less insects could mean less spread of disease, which could mean that populations formerly precluded by disease from forming extremely large populations would no longer be held back, and we could see an enormous shift in the fauna of the Rio de Janeiro area. I do not see this as being likely, however.

Blue Planet Biomes. 2003. Golden Lion Tamarin - Leontopithecus rosalia. http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/golden_lion_tamarin.htm. Downloaded March 12, 2006.

Wyner, Yael. Undated. What's black and white and fluffy all over? http://www.ology.amnh.org/genetics/aroundtheworld/pages/lemur.html. Downloaded March 12, 2006.

An introduction

Welcome to my page! Here you will learn absolutely everything there is to know about the Golden Lion Tamarin, minus a few select details here and there.


In the Eukarya domain, in the sizable kingdom of Animalia, there lives a group of species by the genus name of Leontopithecus, the tamarins. In this group, there was a lone tamarin who rose above the rest: The Golden Lion Tamarin, Leontopithecus rosalia. The Golden Lion Tamarin was the bravest of them all, it was said that his vertebrate-ness was so extreme as to make a mountain lion look like a spineless jellyfish. This, of course, was an exaggeration, but in any case, let it never be said that the Golden Lion Tamarin was invertebrate!

Though brave and courageous, the Golden Lion Tamarin was also cute. He was covered with fur, preened his friends' hair, and munched on a diet of plants, insects, small rodents, and whatever birds he caught sleeping.

The Golden Lion Tamarin does most or all of his hunting in and around Rio de Janeiro, in heavily forested areas. They require heavy forestation due to their sleeping and eating habits. They commonly sleep 30 feet up in a tree!

Besides being cute and cuddly, they have a history of being extraordinarily tamable - they were used as pets for many years until they became endangered. I can't imagine they'd be too terribly useful to bioprospectors as a medicinal source, but surely their friendly behavior and primate status lends them to lab work; in fact, they were used previously in the lab. They have become possibly the rarest mammal in existence now, though, and only around 400 are known to live, most in captivity. However, their future is promising, as they will successfully breed in captivity.

I chose the Golden Lion Tamarin for a few reasons. The first and foremost is that my friend has a band named the "Flying Tamarins", and I never knew what it meant. I saw the word "Tamarin" on a list of endangered species and went right for it! Now I plan on asking his permission to use some of his band's music to flesh out this page a bit. Another obvious reason to choose an animal like this is just so darn cute, and I love jungle animals. Girls like boys who like animals, right? Do you think I can get a girlfriend through my blog?


Sources:
Frantom, S. 1999. "Leontopithecus rosalia" (On-line), Animal Diversity Web. Accessed February 07, 2006 at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/.