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:
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.
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.