In today’s post we want to celebrate Biodiversity International Day by celebrating biodiversity in our field site area where fauna and flora from natural savannas, gallery forest, Mauritia flexuosa swamps and lowland relict forest meet and survive surrounded by introduced pastures, palm oil plantations and annual crops. This is an area of contrast where you can find different habitats immersed in highly transformed landscapes where cattle ranching, agriculture from small and large scale, petrol exploitation and infrastructure are all together. Despite this contrasting activities, there is a rich biodiversity still surviving in these areas of degraded habitats, including wild cats such as ocelots, jaguars and pumas as well as their preys (tapirs, collared peccaries and coatis) and other small-sized mammals such as crab-eating raccoons, tayras and small marsupials. A wide diversity of birds, butterflies, bees, frogs, snakes and ants. Giant ant-eaters and tamanduas with their high specialization to eat ants and termites. An incredible diversity of plants including several species of palms (in some forest fragments with at least 10 species) and species typical of interior and edge habitats. And of course, our main focus of study, primates with five species: red howler monkeys, black-capped capuchins, Colombian squirrel monkey, ornate titi monkey and Brumback night monkeys.This is a place where despite of centuries of transformation, native fauna ad flora shows resilience and give us hope of a better future for the planet and our own survivorship. An area with a long history and vibrant gastronomy. A place where animals, especially monkeys teach you about second opportunities, persistence and resilience. A place to celebrate biodiversity of a country where still nature is considered as something useful only if it can benefit human purposes and not just the right to be there and exist.Let’s celebrate our biodiversity resilience to face changes provoked by our activities and lack of respect for the wonderful creatures that share our planet…If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titimonkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?© Copyright Disclaimer. All pictures used on this web page are protected with copyrights to Xyomara Carretero-Pinzón. If you want to use any of these pictures, please leave a message on the website.

This weekend we celebrate Mother’s Day. Primates like many mammals are great at being moms, although like in humans there are variations of what a mom do for their babies. This variation goes from the ones that are not so tight to their babies because fathers take care of most of babies’ care like Brumback night monkeys and ornate titi monkeys. In the other extreme, we have mother’s that spend several years caring and protecting their babies, even when they are juveniles like in howlers, gorillas, and chimpanzees. We also have the moms who had a lot of help by living in large groups where other member of the group can help once babies get some independence like squirrel monkeys, black-capped capuchins, sometimes in howlers, tamarins, and many other primate species. Finally, we also had single moms who give everything for their babies like mouse lemurs and orangutans.
So as in humans, primate moms also had different styles and ways of care and protect their babies. We as another primate and mammal developed an instinct to protect and take care of our babies because biologically, they are an extension of us. However, we also are shaped by our social environments and member of our groups/ societies. Monkeys’ babies as human babies learn from their mothers what to it and where to find it. As in some cases babies steal from their mouth moms their food to try it for themselves. They also learn from their moms how to move and routes to move from one area to another.
When working with local communities, it is common to hear people telling stories of how monkeys moms teach their kids and even correct them when they do something considered wrong. For example, a common story is to hear people say that moms take a stick to hit their babies when they fell from tree. Although in all my years observing primates, I had never seen this, not in squirrel monkeys with which I had spent several hundred of hour, not with red howler monkeys with who I started my behavioral studies and with which I study babies’ behavior, in particular. However, it is still a common story. Probably as a reflection of how similar it is to see grow a monkey baby and a human kid.
So, in this Mother’s Day celebration, let’s celebrate also all primate mothers and their efforts and rights to see their babies grow up!!!
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A few weeks ago, there was a twitter from a person who work/ use to work in government in Colombia asking long-term projects in Colombia to contract national professionals. What this twitter said it wasn’t bad per se, but it has a big lack of knowledge about how difficult actually is to get funding to pay salaries.What most people don’t know is that salaries are rarely cover in most grants, especially small grants that are the ones used to cover most of the expenses in long-term projects. Most long-term project manage by small NGOs where there is only one person managing all aspects of a project, not necessarily had a salary to cover this person. Actually most of the small NGOs are manage by compromised professional who loves what they do and have additional jobs to cover their basic needs. So please don’t assume that if you see a long-term project, or even most of research projects done in countries like Colombia, they had excess to money to pay salaries, especially salaries for professional biologist/ecologist. Most grants cover logistic expenses (transport, food, local people payments per day, and logging) but no salaries to cover the time spend on analyzing data, making financial and technical reports, making grant applications, making maps. All that time is free labor done by most managers and directors of smalls NGOs and research project directors. Support from governments and governmental institutions is limited and depends on political connections and specific interests and government agendas. Therefore we use international grants that doesn’t cover salaries and continue having more than one job to do science and study the organisms that we love and want to conserve. So, my advice to people wanting to do research in Colombia is to get a job in a university/ institution and work in their research projects unless you want to have more than one job and still do research in your passion. It is a reality that not anyone want to tell you while you are studying, but it is part of science reality in countries like Colombia.

If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?© Copyright Disclaimer. All pictures used on this web page are protected with copyrights to Xyomara Carretero-Pinzón. If you want to use any of these pictures, please leave a message on the website.

In past days, while talking about Zocay Project results, someone ask me why we had so little information about Brumback nigh monekys (Aotus brumbacki) in general. In this post we are going to talk about this species, what had been done and what is still need it to be done to better understand this nocturnal primate species of Colombian Llanos.Brumback night monkeys are one of the 11 species of nocturnal monkey from genera Aotus spp. They are distributed in the piedmont of Colombian Llanos, but its eastern limits are not clearly defined, although it seems it can go up to Orinoco River. Information about this species is limited to a few studies, an undergraduate thesis from Solano in 1995 where she reported a group’s activities, home range and daily distance, as well as a list of plants from which they feed. An anecdotal report of a female Aotus brumbacki female consumed by a group of black capped capuchins (Sapajus apella fatuellus) by Carretero-Pinzón et al (2008) and a list of plants consumed by this species in forest fragments by (Vargas et al. 2023).But why there is so few studies on this species? Well, working at night have its own challenges and it is not always easy to see them and even more difficult to follow a group of this species, and other species of nocturnal animals. Another issue is that not everyone is good to work at night and to be in the dark inside a forest, this is one of those things that trigger some of our deepest fears, which make even more challenging to work with this and similar species. Some technologies can help and may be that is something we need to explore in the near future. For now, at least, we are working on two additional studies with this species that we hope can help us to better understand and protect this species in the study area and its distribution area. Studies about this species in forest fragments are important as most of its known distribution area is located in an area that is continuously deforested, so if you like to work at night and are interested in monkeys, like hot weather and don’t feel afraid of working at night inside forest, please feel free to contact me.If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?© Copyright Disclaimer. All pictures used on this web page are protected with copyrights to Xyomara Carretero-Pinzón. If you want to use any of these pictures, please leave a message on the website.

One day in March of 2004, I started a small project in a cattle ranching farm, where owners wanted to know what species of monkeys were living in their forests as well as how many of them were there. What I didn’t know is that thanks to the interest of landowners of this and neighboring farms as well as nearby reserves this project will become my life research project, Zocay Project or “Proyecto Zocay” in Spanish. And this year, this project that was not only build by me, but also all the students, volunteers and collaborators, had 20 years. This project had many challenges over time but probably the best part, apart from looking at monkeys in every step, is the learning process. Since a few months after the beginning, I started to mentor undergraduate students and that had been the biggest learning lesson from this project.
I not only had learned about monkeys living in forest fragments in an amazing part of Colombia, piedmont of Colombian Llanos, but through mentoring students I had learned about myself and how I would have liked to learn myself, what things I wish I knew when I was starting this process. How to relate with different types of people, from different background and with different dreams and challenges in life. Not always was an easy process but I hope that I was able to teach and help my students in their own learning process.
This project had its lows and ups as many research projects had, especially in terms of funds, however we had been able to learn about monkeys and how they cope with forest fragmentation and other threats that they face in human transformed landscapes. This project had also taught me to see monkeys from different perspectives. I started as a natural history researcher, focus on behavior, then I focus more on the ecological aspects of their lives, focusing on what was happening in the forest fragments where they live. However, once I started to study ecology of primates living in forest fragments, I notice that monkeys move beyond forest fragments and use other landscape structures, such as living fences, isolates trees, wire fences and other human-made structures to move and find food resources. Therefore, this project also had expanded my way to see nature and how primates relate with their surroundings.
I want to thank all our supporters over the years, as well as all students, volunteers and collaborators, my advisors over the years and specially all the landowners in which this project had performed its activities in San Martin, Cumaral, and Villavicencio for all their support and for allowed me to study monkeys in their lands. Thank you all and let’s hope this project continues for more years…
If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?
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In today’s post I want to highlight again the importance of all our hobbies and other activities that we do outside of our science career. I had a student who is beginning his science journey and I had been thinking of all the things I would like someone had told me, when I was starting. So here I will hive you some of that advise I would like someone had given me earlier.
If you are hyper focus as I was when you start you career in scince, my first advise will be take advantage of any experience you are offer to learn about other groups different that the one you love the most, even when you are complete sure that group of organism are the ones you want to spend your life studying. Although I took advantage of being working at my university museum when I was doing my biology career, I wish I had continued this practice after. The reason for this is that in today’s job market, being too focus can limit your job opportunities, especially in a country like Colombia in which research is not well paid.
My second advise is to get yourself a second career option and this can be directly related to my previous advise. Having skills, knowledge and passion about other things outside of science, like music, painting, crafting, languages or anything else can give you additional option when life get difficult and jobs are scarce.
And finally, learn about your finances early in life, specially because science jobs are not always permanent or well paid. Some of the people I know are as lucky as me to have family support, however that is not the case and I also had seen good professionals doing not so good thing or accepting jobs with ethical issues just to have money to feed their families.
So, although I had love my career more than I can express in a world like today’s with so much competition and lack of opportunities, it is useful to had a second career or at least a hobby that you can use to make you life easy and keep your soul free of ethical issues.
If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?
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In February, we continue our annual Colombian squirrel monkeys baby counts and we started our ornate titi monkey’s distribution project samplings in Upia- Meta rivers confluence and Metica river source. Although there were just a few days of sampling, work was intense and lots of distance were covered. Deforestation on both areas is widespread and monkeys are using living fences alongside primary, secondary and tertiary roads as corridors. Colombian squirrel monkeys are still having babies, with some females with infants of around one month and other still pregnant as usual for this species, in all sites visited. Ornate titi monkeys are more elusive up to now in our samplings with some local people reporting them occasionally in some areas but not in others.
During the first month of the year, Colombian Llanos had its drier season and with El Niño phenomenon, this month all rivers in the region had very low level, making navigability very difficult and access to some forest fragments near to rivers complicated by river or land, a challenge we had to sort during this month samplings.
During this field trip we also register red howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus), black capped capuchins (Sapajus apella fatuellus), and crab-eating fox (Cerdocyon thous) using open areas and living fences. Some prints of capybaras were also recorded on Meta riverbanks. We were also fortunate to had great people helping us with our samplings, especially Stella, Jose, Sr. Vanegas and Francisco, who support several aspects of our samplings during this month.

If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and our new journals in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/X-Carretero/dp/B0CWD1DBJM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.X-DZnsRxEDXfTBPZsuG4GiwWwBCqmoeCJ_WW-bEm_Z85wKyUyBvy76iMm0z4k4oY9YD81Pz4e_ZYHYz8QK7T3BNo_mX6d-Mo7FroQLkxo6yy0k6KPwMjP8GC27PVXa-39FSo87QCzagOOnEgz-IfS8ADg0gEc9feWAkXyRNpRpuqWEv9qnKE2ALCzsyAt4aM0O-PM4L6U1PSn1neUX7axw.vI1S0GofRHMSCqMV41jOdEmaxXHCJCHL6ya-uAHsxTo&dib_tag=se&keywords=X.+Carretero+Journal&qid=1709327306&sr=8-1
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On February 11th it was women and girls in science celebration day, a day to increase awareness to all the wonderful girls and women who through our lives and history had make an impact in the world for us to be able to be whatever we want to be. Something that we usually don’t say, or at least I rarely said it, is that most of us who live the life we always dream to live, probably have a mother or some family member who overcome a lot of challenges and showed us that whatever was possible if you try it. So, thank you mom and aunt Julia for showing me that if I wanted I can get it, despite all the challenges life put in your way.
Over the years, several women and sometimes little girls had incentivized me to be better in what I do. Most of them had been students, volunteers, and colleagues of different ages and at different stages in their careers and life. But all of them have something in common, a certain combination of curiosity and fire for do anything possible to make their dreams come true. Curiosity to try and ask questions that other didn’t and a tenacity to continue despite many people telling them they cannot do it.
I had also been lucky to have many men in my life who supported me over the years and give me enough confidence to be able to do what I love the most in life, work with monkeys!! Starting with my father and then all my academic advisor who had been all man. To all of them thank you too.
Now that I had mention people who had inspired me and supported me, my message to all the girls and young women who dream to work in science is first to surround yourself with people who support you and motivate you, fine passion inside and outside of you, don’t give up and even when times looks a bit dark, there is always something or someone who appears in your life in the right moment. And finally, something that I hear once from Jane Goodall, “you’ll have to work hard, take advantage of opportunities and never give up” something that her mother told her when she was a little girl and tell her she wanted to go to Africa. This phrase had resonated with me over the years and that is why I still do what I love (see monkeys in their habitat, in case you had forgotten), even when sometimes it looks that I will need to give up, something appears, or someone gives me a hand an offers me a new opportunity that in some way keep me going.
Finally, to all students, volunteers and colleagues who had share part of your life with me, thank you for helping me to keep going…Happy Girls and Women in Science Day!!!
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In today’s post we want to discuss a common practice that sometimes generates interpretation and identity problems in science, common names. Common names are the names that local people give to animals in a region or country. Sometimes those names came from other regions, countries or even continents as it’s the case of common name for our jaguar that usually is tiger. This is reflection of colonial times when Spanish people who arrive to America called jaguars “tigers” as it is a big cat as the original tiger of Asia. Some of these common names remains in our minds and cultures for centuries and changing these common names to more appropriate names for our species is not always easy. Our last example is one that have been changing over the years although there are areas in which jaguar are still called tigers.
But why we wanted to discuss about this? Our reason is because in this website and many publications product of all work done in this project had one of these confusing common names that we notice recently. As I mentioned several times in this website, I had been studying monkeys for over 25 years, during this time monkey’s taxonomy had changed over the last decade and with taxonomy some common names also changed to be more accurate to reflect that taxonomy. The case we are talking about is dusky titi monkey or ornate titi monkeys (Plecturocebus ornatus). In 1995 when I learned primate taxonomy this species was a subspecies of dusky titi monkeys, todays known as Callicebus moloch, a species from Peruvian Amazon very similar to another specie also called dusky titi Callicebus cupreus from Ecuatorian Amazon, from which Plecturocebus ornatus was a subspecies, until 2016. The reason for using this common name to different species is that at some point all these species were considered the same species, although they have different names in local languages. Therefore, when I started this project ornate titi monkeys were still dusky titi monkey until 2016, by Byrne and collaborators, when a new taxonomy for the whole subfamily Callicebinae.
So, as you see sometimes changing common names cost us a bit of time, but in order to be more precise and follow the IUCN red list classification in this website we are going to use ornate titi monkey as the common name to our endemic Zocay, as it is known in Spanish. A good practice in science is to be updated in taxonomy, even if the focus of your research is focus on other disciplines inside biology as this is a field in which changes are continuous and make exciting discoveries almost everyday.
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Today’s post is about the best part of my work, every year at the beginning of each year, my work and energy are focus on counting baby monkeys, especially Colombian squirrel baby monkeys. So as usual we start our year in Zocay Project by counting babies of Colombian squirrel monkeys, as well as ornate titi monkeys and Brumback night monkeys. All these species have babies between December and March.
The beginning of 2024 started with some new babies of all these species in San Martin, Cumaral and Villavicencio area. In following months, we also recount some of these groups as well as do our counting in Villanueva area. Also, we observed some of the older females in our Colombian squirrel monkey’s groups healthy and some seems to be pregnant and still reproducing.
But why is so important to us to count those babies? A way to know if a population is stable, growing or decreasing is by knowing how many babies born each year and more important how many of those babies survive that year and continue growing until they become adults and reproduce themselves. So as one of our main objectives is to know what is happening with monkey’s populations in the areas where we work, that is why the beginning of every year is so important for us. It is also important to do this counting every year because monkeys have long lives, therefore for a baby to grow to be an adult several years need to pass and you need be able to count and try to follow up those babies as many years as possible to be able to know what happens with their lives.
We also finished this month the field season from our collaborative project with Dr. Martha Ortiz about patch and landscape-scale effects on Brumback night monkey’s presence and abundance. Now it is time for our analysis part, more news on this project in following months.
We also started our logistic arrangements to our trips to areas that are limits of ornate titi distribution to confirm those limits and again we are grateful to Chalcraft Little Fund for their support to our work. We are also planning to expand our work on ornate titi monkeys as conservation for this species in the ground is highly need it. So, in following months we will give you more news about new activities and projects related with ornate titi monkeys and monkeys conservation, in general. Stay tuned and if you want to help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities. You can also support our activities by buying our ornate titi monkeys stuff dolls https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctm_sEORvk8/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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