Nancy Ma's Night Monkey
For decades, monkeys from the Colombian Amazon have been used in biomedical research and returned to the wild—now researchers want to know what happens after that.
Of the 11 species of Night Monkeys (the only nocturnal primates in the Americas) the majority are in decline or are listed as data deficient, due to deforestation from agriculture, development, or logging; but they are also hunted for bushmeat; or trapped for the wildlife and biodmedical trade.
Angela Maldonado, a primatologist and director of Fundacion Entropika (a grassroots organization based in Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon), says that a Colombian lab has used wild night monkeys for malaria research for almost 40 years.
"After subjecting them to research procedures, the monkeys are released back into the wild without follow-up, which is possibly causing the displacement or hybridization of resident populations as well as risking zoonotic transmission," she says, adding that this might open wild populations up to diseases not usually found there.
Maldonado explains that in 2009 she and her team started the Aotus Project to assess wild population in areas where night monkeys had been extracted for malaria research and compare them to areas where they hadn't been, in order to gather data and provide base-line information.
"In 2018 we started the genetic and parasitological study focused on zoonotic risks, and today we expanded our research to new study areas, using genomic genetic tools," she says, adding that their preliminary findings provided molecular evidence of Flavivirus and Herpesvirus presence in free- ranging night monkeys, which had not previously been reported in the Amazon.
The Foundation is also supporting wildlife-watching tourism to help communities formerly involved in the trade of night monkeys to work in and discourage the use of the monkeys as props in tourist photos.
In 2017, Maldonado, was awarded £70,000 ($89,000) by British wildlife charity Whitley Fund for Nature to use the legal system to tackle the illegal wildlife trade in night monkeys along the Colombia-Peru border.
Angela Maldonado, a Colombian primatologist and conservationist.
Passion For Conservation
Angela Maldonado was born in Bogota and early on in life believed she'd be a vet, but she couldn't deal with blood so she changed her mind.
"I did a degree in business for family reasons, but after rescuing a woolly monkey from the pet trade, my life changed: I released this monkey back into the forest and I realized this was what I wanted to do," she says, adding that she would go on to do a Master's degree in primate conservation and then a PhD in conservation and anthropology.
She's now been working in the Colombian Amazon for more than 25 years.
Maldonado says a lot of foreign researchers that go into the field do not understand the local social context and culture and it can be very damaging if mistakes are made.
"When you understand local people’s needs, the mission is personal," she says, "I am Colombian, understand the culture, and am here to create meaningful change over the longer term and four of our team members are indigenous."
Nancy Ma's Night Monkey in the wild.
Other Monkey Research
Another Colombian researching monkeys in Colombia is biological anthropologist Laura Abondano.
Abondano, now a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, says the lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix lagotricha poeppigii) that she mainly studies, have fascinating behaviors that deviate from many other primates.
"For example, among woolly monkeys, females are the ones that solicit males for copulations (sex), and they actively compete with each other to mate with males, while males do not really engage in fights with each other to mate with females," she says, "Instead they seem to be more tolerant with one another even during mating contexts."
Abondano says when you have an understudied branch of species (taxa) like woolly monkeys that doesn’t receive as much attention as other primate species like chimpanzees, macaques, baboons, capuchins or even spider monkeys, it is hard to develop a strong theoretical background because there aren't a large number of strong previous studies to draw on.
