40 Fun Facts About Cotton-Top Tamarin

Germans nicknamed the cotton-top tamarin after which wild-maned Hungarian pianist of the 1800s?

Franz Liszt wore a flowing, swept-back mane so like the monkey's crest that Germans call the animal Lisztaffe, the Liszt monkey.

Which country, with both Caribbean and Pacific coasts, is the cotton-top tamarin's only wild home?

Colombia holds every wild cotton-top, all of them within one small corner of its northwest, hemmed in by the sea and a handful of great rivers.

Most monkey mothers have one baby at a time, but a cotton-top tamarin usually gives birth to what?

A pair of twins is the norm, and the non-identical babies are such a load that the whole family pitches in to raise them.

The cotton-top tamarin, down to a few thousand in the wild, sits in which IUCN Red List category?

Critically endangered is the last rung before a species survives only in captivity, and for several years the monkey was ranked among the world's 25 most threatened primates.

A fully grown cotton-top tamarin weighs about a pound, roughly the same as which kitchen item?

A can of soup matches this pint-sized monkey on the scales, yet its tail alone is longer than its head and body put together.

A newborn cotton-top tamarin, tiny enough to ride piggyback, weighs about as much as which food?

A chicken egg weighs about the same as one newborn, a hefty start in life when the mother herself tips the scales at under half a kilo.

When alarmed, a cotton-top tamarin raises the long white crest on its head for what purpose?

To look bigger, the monkey fans its crest up and out, a handy bluff for an animal that weighs about a pound and has enemies above and below.

Cotton-top tamarin whistles, chirps and trills are easily mistaken for the calls of which animals?

Birds are what most listeners think they hear, so scientists first had to decode the monkeys' calls in captivity before they could pick them out in the wild.

To cut hunting, Proyecto Tití let villagers trade in which weapons for plush toy cotton-top tamarins?

Slingshots were the everyday hunting tool near the forest, and soft toys were so rare in the village that interest in the swap ran high.

Field scientists tell wild cotton-top tamarins apart by dabbing what onto patches of their white fur?

Hair dye from an ordinary shop, dabbed on the head, legs, arms or chest, gives each monkey a marking that observers can spot easily among the trees.

Which Swedish naturalist of the 1700s first gave the cotton-top tamarin a scientific name?

Carl Linnaeus listed the monkey in the 1758 edition of his Systema Naturae, the book zoologists treat as the starting line for animal names.

The cotton-top tamarin's scientific name borrows from which mythical Greek king of Thebes?

Oedipus means swollen foot, a puzzle in itself, because the monkey's feet are perfectly ordinary and nobody knows why the name was chosen.

Besides the mother, which cotton-top tamarin relative starts carrying newborns on their first day?

The father often ends up hauling the babies more than their mother does, and males can shed about a tenth of their body weight during the busiest weeks.

Cotton-top tamarins share a family, the smallest of all monkeys, with which other pint-sized primates?

Marmosets and tamarins make up the family Callitrichidae, tiny tree-dwellers that climb with claw-like nails in place of the flat ones most primates have.

Cotton-top tamarins have claw-like nails on every digit except which two, which keep flat nails?

The big toes alone carry a flat nail like ours; the other digits end in curved claws that dig into bark and let the monkey cling to upright trunks.

The cotton-top tamarin's 38 catalogued calls were found to follow simple rules of what?

Grammar of a simple kind emerged from a 1982 study by Jayne Cleveland and Charles Snowdon, who sorted the calls into eight kinds of chirp and five longer whistles.

Perhaps to scrape worms from their gut, cotton-top tamarins swallow which hard-to-digest items whole?

Large seeds, heftier than those swallowed by chimpanzees or baboons, may knock parasites loose on the way through, and they sprout well once dropped.

While a cotton-top tamarin group rests during the day, one member sits apart from the others to do what?

Keep watch is the task: the sentinel scans the sky and the branches around the group and calls an alarm the moment it spots danger.

Before a 1976 trade ban, as many as 40,000 cotton-top tamarins were shipped abroad mainly for what use?

Medical research claimed them by the tens of thousands in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the exports seriously shrank the wild population.

Captive cotton-top tamarins are unusually prone to cancer of which organ, often after gut inflammation?

The colon is the weak spot: tumours there often follow the colitis that strikes as many as half of captive adults, a link that mirrors one seen in people.

Women near cotton-top tamarin forests earn money weaving 'eco-mochila' bags out of what material?

Recycled plastic becomes handwoven bags that give local families a steady income and carry the monkeys' story to buyers far from the forest.

Proyecto Tití's clay stove, the binde, helps cotton-top tamarins by cutting villagers' need for what?

Firewood use fell sharply with the binde, which can burn corn husks and coconut shells, so fewer logs have to be hauled out of the monkeys' home.

Which close cousin from Panama was once classed as a mere subspecies of the cotton-top?

Geoffroy's tamarin was lumped in with the cotton-top in 1977, but later studies split them, and genetics suggests the two parted ways about 1.2 million years ago.

In the north of their range, cotton-top tamarins live in which type of habitat?

Tropical dry forest gets almost no rain from December to April, then downpours later in the year that can leave the ground beneath the trees under water.

According to Proyecto Tití, what is the greatest threat to the survival of wild cotton-top tamarins?

Deforestation for farms, mines, logging and growing towns has left the monkeys only scattered patches of the lowland woods they once roamed.

Baqui the cotton-top tamarin was mascot of the 2018 Central American and Caribbean Games in which city?

Barranquilla picked Baqui because the little monkey is native to the surrounding region and lives nowhere else on Earth.

Because the gene sits on the X chromosome, which cotton-top tamarins can enjoy full three-colour vision?

Only some females inherit two different versions of the gene and see in three colours; males, with a single X chromosome, are limited to two.

Although a cotton-top tamarin group reuses favourite spots, it rarely does what on two nights running?

A group rarely sleeps in the same tree twice in a row, and it favours trunks armoured with thorns, which may help keep night hunters away.

A cotton-top tamarin that never carried younger siblings is likely to do what with its own first babies?

Reject them is the likely outcome, because parenting in this species is learned, not instinctive, and babysitting younger brothers and sisters is the training.

How is the dominant mother in a cotton-top tamarin group thought to stop her daughters from breeding?

With scent chemicals called pheromones, backed by bossy behaviour, she is thought to delay their puberty, so the family raises only her babies.

Cotton-top tamarins use stealth, pouncing and leaf-flipping to catch which staple prey?

Insects and other small animals make up about 40 percent of the menu, and each monkey hunts for itself instead of sharing the chase.

Unable to gouge bark, cotton-top tamarins lick which sticky food only where it already oozes?

Tree gum matters most in the rainless months when other foods run short, and the monkeys lick their own sticky hands afterwards so that nothing is wasted.

The cotton-top tamarin's long tail cannot grip branches, so what is it mainly used for in the treetops?

Balance is the tail's main job: unlike a spider monkey's, it cannot curl around a branch, so it works more like a tightrope walker's pole.

Long after exports were banned, wild cotton-top tamarins are still illegally caught to be sold as what?

Pets taken from the wild remain a serious drain, which is why local schoolchildren are taught that these monkeys belong in the treetops, not in homes.

Proyecto Tití's TITI SHOW teaches children about cotton-top tamarins with games, stories and what else?

Puppets star in the roadshow, which uses humour and local culture to reach villages far beyond the project's partner schools.

A cotton-top tamarin's claw-like nails look less like a monkey's and more like which rodent's?

Squirrel claws are the closest match, and they let the monkey cling to trunks, gallop along thin branches and leap from one crown to the next.

Snakes, ocelots and tayras hunt cotton-top tamarins, but which raptors are their most notable predators?

Hawks strike from above, which is why the monkeys keep glancing skyward and give one kind of alarm call for danger in the air and another for danger below.

Which quick mouth gesture do cotton-top tamarins use both when courting and when squaring up to a rival?

Tongue flicking also features in face-offs, where two rivals step away from the group, fluff up their fur and stare each other down.

To follow each study group through the trees, Proyecto Tití fits one adult male cotton-top tamarin with what?

A radio transmitter light enough for a one-pound monkey lets the team track where the whole group travels, what it eats and which patches of woodland it uses.

Which body's Appendix I listing has barred international sales of cotton-top tamarins since the 1970s?

CITES, the global treaty on commerce in threatened wildlife, placed the monkey in Appendix I, the highest level of protection it offers.