Last November we saw these Pygmy Marmosets in Putomayo, a department in south-west Colombia. We flew to Villagarzon from Bogota, staying at the Portal del Sol, an ecolodge owned by a family rewilding the farmland which runs down to the river. And it was by the river that the troop of marmosets appeared. We had already seen the holes they had gnawed in the trees and which they visit to gather the material the tree has extruded.
The shape of their lower incisors is a clear adaptation to gnawing holes in trees. The exudate the marmosets eat is said to be mainly gum rather than sap and to comprise their main source of carbohydrates. Fruit, flowers, buds and nectar also feature in their diet. For protein they catch insects and other small invertebrates as well as small lizards which they search for in the vegetation.
Pygmy marmosets inhabit forests along rivers, spending a great deal of their time gnawing the holes in trees, exhausting it and then moving on.
Both troops had a couple of young. Only one female in the small troop breeds.
These Pygmy Marmosets were of the species originally named and when only one was recognised. Cebuella pygmaea. Those south of two large rivers were considered a subspecies. But the splitters rife in mammalian taxonomy who ignore the biological species concept erected it as a separate species. Cebuella niviventris. To confuse matters further the one we saw has two common names: Northern or Western Pygmy Marmoset as does the other: Southern or Eastern. Taken as a whole or, if you will have it that way, as the two species together Pygmy Marmosets occur in amazonian Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. In Colombia it only occurs in the extreme south of the country.
Both groups we saw were low in the trees and made no attempt to flee. They did though carefully inspect us as we did them.
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| Holes gnaws in trees |
Lots more monkeys from Colombia to come.
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