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Central Park Zoo News
New Spring Bud at the Zoo
While spring is blossoming on Zoo grounds, the colobus monkeys added a new branch to their family tree on April 26. This tiny ball of fur can be found in the Rainforest, most likely nestled next to its mom, Tana, a longtime resident of the Zoo.
With a face that looks a little like an old man’s and an all-white coat, the baby will start to grow its adult black and white fur in about three months. Around that time, it will start leaving Tana’s side and find likely playmates in Nicky, Cody, and Kima, the troop’s three youngsters born in the last two years. Already, senior keeper Heather Gordon has noticed that the baby is unusually independent.
Colobus monkeys are highly social and spend lots of time grooming each other as they lounge in tree branches and graze on young, protein-rich leaves. In their native forests of central Africa, they live in territorial groups of 7 to 11 individuals, including a single male, females, and their young. Females remain with their group for life.
Within the territory that each colobus troop maintains, its members communicate with loud, resonating calls to warn of danger and discourage outsiders. While the others sleep, at least one individual in the troop is assigned “night watchman” duties in case predators—such as the crowned eagle or the leopard—are near.
More dangerous to colobus monkeys than forest predators, however, are the human loggers and hunters who destroy their habitat and threaten their survival. More than a million metric tons of “bushmeat”—wildlife killed by commercial and subsistence hunters—are taken each year from African forests alone. WCS conservationists are working to control the bushmeat trade and are helping to protect the species in Nyungwe Forest, Rwanda—the largest remaining lower montane forest on the continent of Africa and home to a large population of colobus monkeys.
The Central Park Zoo participates in the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan for the black and white colobus monkey. The SSP manages the breeding of certain threatened and endangered wildlife species in order to maintain a healthy, genetically diverse, and stable captive population.
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