Primate Ranching – Results of an Experiment

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly difficult for biomedical research workers to get the wild primates they consider essential for their work. Successful primate ranching could help solve the problem. In 1967 a well-known animal dealer in Colombia, Mike Tsalickis of Leticia, released over 5000 squirrel monkeys on an island in the Amazon in the hope of quick breeding results. Five years later he estimated the island monkey population at over 20,000, and the experiment appeared to have been very successful; later counts, however, suggested considerable errors in the figures and that the monkeys had in fact decreased catastrophically. The authors describe this and other experiments, some successful, but only as a result of expensive supplemental feeding.