They don’t have a name yet since we won’t know their gender until the next few days, but they already have an audience. The two little golden lion tamarins, twins born on April 12, are gradually adapting to their environment in the oldest zoo in France. The two little red-haired monkeys, now about twenty centimeters tall, have joined their two parents and their four brothers and sisters in the cage of the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes. This birth is unique in zoos in France this year and is good news for this species, threatened with extinction.
– Steven Gouaillier
A “safeguard” population in case of another extinction
“Golden lion tamarin almost died out in the 70s“, explains the director of the menagerie Michel Saint-Jalme, “only thirty remained, in an area north of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Today the population is 3000 individuals in the wild“. Primates born in European zoos are not, however, destined to return to South America, but to become a backup population: “in the event of a disaster and a new extinction, it will be used to reconstitute a wild population“, says the director.
– Steven Gouaillier
In the meantime, these new tamarinds will only be able to stay “two to three years, before they are rejected by their father, as happens in the wild. The young will then be dispersed to form new families” in European zoos as part of the exchanges set up to preserve the species.