The Vanzolini bald-faced saki monkey eluded scientists for over 80 years, yet a rare sighting during an Amazon expedition has the scientific community buzzing with renewed excitement for this rarely seen species.
“It was fantastic,” said Dr. Laura Marsh, director of the Global Conservation Institute and leader of the Amazon expedition, speaking to
National Geographic. “I was trembling and so excited I could barely take a picture.”
The monkey, named after Brazilian zoologist Paolo Vanzolini, was first spotted by Ecuadorian naturalist Alfonso Olalla in 1936. As per the
Huffington Post, an expedition to the Brazilian rainforest two decades later discovered only carcasses, raising fears that the Vanzolini bald-faced sakis had succumbed to extinction.
In the early summer of 2017, a crack team set out to investigate.
The scientific mission, going by the name of “Houseboat Amazon,” comprised a team of experts from the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and the United Kingdom, as per
bioGraphic. Seven primatologists collaborated with veterinarians, photographers, and guides as they set off from Deus é Pai on Brazil’s Eiru River, near the Peruvian border.
It was on day four of a three-month-long survey of the mammals and primates of the region that the Vanzolini bald-faced saki monkey made its welcome reappearance.
Bald-faced sakis are distinguishable from other variations owing to their black and golden fur, mop of hair on their heads, bushy tails that cannot grasp, and cat-like way of running along the branches of trees, as per
National Geographic,
It was experienced field guide Ivan Batista who fist noticed the elusive monkey amidst the canopy.
“From a distance, we see the outline of a black monkey with a long fluffy tail surveying us from a branch overhanging the open water,” explained journalist Christina Selby, writing for
bioGraphic.
“As we approach,” she continued, “it stands up, walks cat-like on all fours, its limbs covered in unmistakable golden fur. Then it leaps from the channel’s edge and disappears into the dark forest.”
The team high-fived one another, ecstatic about the unexpected sighting.
Over the course of the next 21 days, the team amassed 20 saki group sightings. As per the
Huffington Post, despite the team’s elation, further research into the region alluded to myriad threats to the monkeys’ Amazonian habitat, primarily hunting, deforestation, and other types of human interference.
Marsh noted that, fortunately for the primate, the locals didn’t seem to enjoy the taste of the saki’s meat. “If [human intervention] just stayed at this level of impact right now,” Marsh explained in an expedition report published by
Mongabay, “it’s not ideal for the conservation of Vanzolini populations, but at the end of the day, it’s not killing the entire species.”
“[H]umans simply can’t get at them all,” she said.
Logging, however, does eradicate a large number of trees that the monkeys may use as food sources or shelter. In light of encroaching deforestation, the Houseboat Amazon team collectively feared for the future of the Vanzolini bald-faced saki monkey.
Marsh fell in love with sakis at Ecuador’s Yasuní Biosphere Reserve as a graduate student back in 2001, as per
bioGraphic. While conducting a primate survey in the area, she happened to lock eyes with a monkey she had never seen before; it was a saki.
“Initially we set out to find this lost species,” Marsh explained in 2017, per
National Geographic. But the team, she added, had no idea they would rediscover the Vanzolini bald-faced sakis quite so quickly.
As of 2020, while the
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has yet to officially categorize the saki’s population status, the primate’s population trend is registered as “decreasing.”
Logging and hunting continue to be the biggest threats to the primate creature’s continued existence. The saki’s reemergence after 80 years in the Amazon rainforest, however, is a promising sight.
