Silvery Marmosets

My mother, who lives on the other side of the World in Holywell, North Wales, has a photograph of me at Gerald Durrell’s Zoo. Thinking on, it is a photograph of the great man himself, accompanied by his wife Lee Durrell, with me in the background admiring the denizens of a marmoset enclosure. Durrell’s zoo was years ahead of its time. It was one of the first zoos to have as its objective the breeding of endangered species in captivity for return to the wild. That has become the mantra of the modern zoo world, but in the 1960s, when Durrell’s Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust (JWPT) was founded, it was revolutionary.

It was revolutionary in another way: the International Training Centre was part of JWPT and welcomed trainees worldwide to care for the animal’s in JWPT’s care that were from their country. Brazil’s trainee, Claudio Valadares-Padua, worked on Tamarins and Marmosets, and it was the Tamarin and Marmoset enclosure I stand in front of in the photo.

After moving to Brazil I bought a book in Portuguese about the conservation biology of Brazil’s enadangered species. This was so that I could improve my Portuguese by reading a subject I was interested in.  Later, I attended the Society for Conservation Biology’s annual conference at the Federal University of Brazilia and met Valadares-Padua and we spoke for a while about Jersey, which we both know, and Marmosets, which I wanted to know more about.

Back in Cuiabá I found that there were marmosets around, and that the Silvery Marmoset was common in the ctiy’s park, Mãe Bonifacia. You can often find troupes of these charming primates around the city. So imagine my delight when one was delivered by the Environmental Military Police today.

One of the residents came into the Non-Infectious Disease Small Animal Sector today and called me in. It seems that the professors now want a full physical examination carried out on these wild specimens. Something I was pleased to carry out. Those who delivered the animal said it had been run over but I think it had been attacked by a cat. If you read the falconer Nick Fox’s book ‘Understanding the Bird of Prey’ you will be astonished by the toll cats take on British wildlife. I think a similar toll can be extended to Brazilian urban wildlife casualties.

The fullest clinical examination was carried out and I identified the animal as Callithrix argentata, the Silvery Marmoset. This one had developed myisas, a foul condition where the animal is eaten alive by blow fly larvae. We cleaned the monkey’s wounds with physiological solution and removed the maggots.  The animal was then taken to a cage and left to recover from its sedation. We shall see what tomorrow brings…

Conservation Status

The IUCN lists the species as of Least Concern, but decreasing