It's just the latest in a long line of 'end of the line' primate rarities at Twycross - since I've been visiting Bolivian Red Howler, Red Uakari, Kloss's Gibbon and Phayre's Langur have all died out at the zoo.
It's just the latest in a long line of 'end of the line' primate rarities at Twycross - since I've been visiting Bolivian Red Howler, Red Uakari, Kloss's Gibbon and Phayre's Langur have all died out at the zoo.
...while the last Purple-faced Langurs have gone to Cotswold. Roloways/Dianas and Hamlyn's Guenons are others that could be on the way out too.
I was wondering if the Crowned Guenon might follow the Red-tailed to the Isle of Wight Monkey sanctuary- the difference being perhaps that he was a singleton whereas this one(female?) is living with a Spot-nosed Guenon.
It is a shame that so many interesting primate species have disappeared, and are unlikely to come back. I'm particularly annoyed at missing the proboscis monkeys and the bald uakaris.
Haven't we now reached the stage where any Guenon is a rarity in the UK?
Unfortunately, if we're going to keep viable breeding stocks of things, we can accommodate only a fraction of the species held in the bad old 'stamp collecting - if it dies we'll import another one from the wild' days.
Its a personal beef of mine that more isn't done to encourage better numbers of Guenons in our zoos where possible. To my mind the EEP programmes need to speed things up. Take one of the few successful breeding species-Diana Monkeys;
at one time Newquay had at least six. In the last few years they have(or had until recently) just two females(sisters of breeding age) and this has remained unchanged for several years now. While Exmoor have a female and son but no adult male.
Paignton were recently asked to send away the male of their good breeding pair(3 offspring) so have temporarily stopped breeding them- to what purpose I cannot ascertain- probably due to 'over-representation' in the population no doubt which seems a poor reason to split them up.
So three places in the SW. with Dianas but all of them are in non breeding situations at present.
London finally got a male for their two females recently, again after several years of having no male.
It seems that overlong delays in organising new partners results in some of these Monkeys being left in non-breeding situations for several years, while studbook movements are being decided/organised.
I think they need to speed things up radically. All the emphasis on genetically matching the correct pairs etc seems to cause these ridiculously long delays with no breeding- the animals are more likely to die out as a result.
A disadvantage of some 'managed' species is that not enough are bred to maintain populations. While 'global' management has to be a good thing overall, it does lead to some frustrating anomalies.
Then it's a good thing they are not managed on a UK level, but as a European population . The situation for guenons is stiff difficult though, but I'm not sure that the coordinators can be blamed. A huge problem with many EEP:s is that participating institutions doesn't follow recommendations. Not sure if this is the case in any of the guenon studbooks, but they also have the husbandry problems, which I think far supersede lack of coordination.
I don't think they could be managed on a local level- there simply aren't enough individual animals. But unfortunately when animals are being moved between UK and Europe it also means longer delays too in pairing up or re-pairing animals.
I appreciate that there are many pitfalls and obstacles involved in finding and providing mates for unpartnered animals- unavailability, age, import and export delays, quarantine, zoo politics etc to name a few, and that Co-ordinators are not reponsible for all of these- but I find it very frusrating to see individuals without partners of the opposite sex remaining like that for protracted lengths of time(not just months, but sometimes years)
