If you’ve been in Lincoln Park Zoo’s 2-year-old Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House and seen a monkey doing the breast stroke, you’ve seen something fairly rare in nature.
The monkey most likely was Franco, a 5 1/2-year-old Allen’s swamp monkey, one of the very few monkey species that enjoy water and know how to swim.
In the next few weeks, some visitors to the building may see something nobody else is known to have witnessed before: how a baby swamp monkey learns to swim. Two weeks ago, Franco’s 5-year-old mate, Carmen, gave birth to their first offspring. The healthy, precocious female–as yet unnamed– already springs away from her mother at every opportunity to explore her jungle river habitat.
The birth of the monkey is an exciting chance for zoo officials to build their fund of knowledge about an unusual species.
But it is also a reminder of how little scientists know about many animals and birds. In this case, despite the inherent allure of a monkey that can swim, no one has ever documented, either in the wild or in captivity, how such an infant acquires that skill.
Scientists don’t even know how many swamp monkeys are left in their natural riverbank habitats in Congo, Angola and the Republic of Congo. Only 53 live in zoos worldwide, just 18 in American zoos.
Now, keepers at Lincoln Park are closely watching the baby and her parents, part of the zoo’s leading role in figuring out which such rare monkey species should be kept and bred in zoos so scientists can study their life cycles and behavioral traits–such as how swamp monkeys learn to swim.
“Franco loves to swim,” said John Gramieri, the zoo’s chief mammal and reptile curator. “In the wild, he’d be hunting fish, but here he dives down to the bottom with eyes wide open, sorting through the gravel on the bottom for a piece that might catch his eye.”
Fearing that the newborn might inadvertently tumble into the water, keepers drained the habitat’s pool shortly before Carmen gave birth on June 8. It remains drained, but in the next week or two the keepers will refill it, taking the chance that the first-time parents will know enough to keep the baby out until it can swim.
Whether it will ever learn isn’t certain. Carmen, the mother, has never shown any interest in jumping into the water.
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“We don’t know how this particular monkey species learns how to swim,” said Gramieri. The only monkey species known to swim besides swamp monkeys are Japanese macaques, Barbary apes and, occasionally, rhesus monkeys, he said.
“I’ve seen rhesus monkeys teach their babies by letting them ride on their backs through the water. That may be how swamp monkeys learn, too, but I don’t know of anything in the literature that describes how this happens. We have an opportunity here to learn something.”
Observing Franco, Carmen and the baby may begin to yield many facts about their species that, until now, have remained a mystery to science: when mother swamp monkeys wean their babies; when they reach sexual maturity; how often they give birth; and what their gestation period is.
“There’s just not much known about this species,” said Dennis Pate, Lincoln Park’s head curator of animals. “Very little research has been done on them in the wild. The ones we know about live mostly in scattered, protected game preserves. We don’t know if they used to be more abundant, or if they have been decimated by human hunting and habitat destruction.
“We don’t even know if they are endangered in nature, though all primates–except for humans–are categorized as being threatened with extinction due to hunting and the destruction of their wild habitats.”
Very active and prone to interacting with humans, swamp monkeys make fine zoo animals. They are cute but not beautiful, with greenish-gray, short-haired coats, and they are stocky, with males weighing about 13 pounds and females about 8.
Unfortunately, they and other guenon monkeys, a group of about 20 African species, are rarely seen in zoos, partly because they lack the charisma or glamor of bigger or more flamboyant animals such as gorillas, giraffes and elephants.
Lincoln Park Zoo obtained Franco and Carmen two years ago from other zoos when it opened its stylish small mammal and reptile house, which features natural habitats as much as it does individual animal species.
“Most zoo primate houses don’t have wet exhibits, equipped with pools deep enough for these guys to swim in,” said Gramieri, “so most zoos wouldn’t think about acquiring swamp monkeys. They don’t want to go to the expense of building an appropriate exhibit for them.
“From the very onset of the planning of this building, we wanted swamp monkeys, because this building talks about wet forests and preserving wetlands, so many of our exhibit spaces have water.
“These are very interesting animals, with webbed fingers and toes for swimming. What little we know from them in the wild is that they live in large social troops of perhaps 40 or so individuals. They apparently swim because, in dry seasons, they go into the water and hunt for fish to eat.”
Lincoln Park Zoo has assumed something of a leadership position in overseeing what kinds of Old World (African and Asian) monkey species are collected and kept in American and Canadian zoos. The zoo’s Pate serves as co-chairman of the Old World Monkey Advisory Group for North America.
“Back in the 1980s,” said Pate, “zoos began organizing species-survival plans for animals in danger of extinction and began keeping track of which individual animals were related to each other to avoid inbreeding. We eventually realized that zoos still were haphazardly keeping `a few of these and a couple of those’ sorts of collections.”
In the case of Old World monkeys, seven years ago all accredited North American zoos joined in an advisory group to take stock of what species of guenons, baboons, macaques, langurs, mangabeys and colobuses are in American collections and how many of each.
For example, in North America there are only four Hamlyn owl-faced monkeys–another species of guenons–with two zoos each having a pair. At least 20 Hamlyn monkeys live in European zoos, and Pate’s group has told the two American zoos to give up their pairs to European zoos, thus freeing the space they take up here for other animals.
“With too few animals, you are going to have inbreeding,” Pate said, “and certainly we have to avoid that. We have set a standard for monkeys that, to ensure the genetic diversity (of the animals in North American zoos) over the next 50 years, each species should have at least 100 individuals, of whom 20 must be founders,” or animals unrelated to any others in the population.
For swamp monkeys, that means American zoos will have to bring in animals from European and Asian zoos and send some American-bred monkeys to overseas zoos, making the effort truly an international one.
“We think we have a good chance of doing that with the swamp monkeys,” Pate said, “and we’ve recommended they remain in North American collections. The fact that the female (Carmen) in our zoo is such an obviously attentive and outstanding mother after her first birth is really encouraging. That bodes really well for this species.”