The 2-ounce (57-gram) carnivorous primate had not been seen alive since the 1920s. That was until researchers on a summer expedition captured, tagged, and released three members of the species (including this individual, above).
"Everyone's always talking about pygmy tarsiers," said lead researcher Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a professor at Texas A&M University.
"There have been dozens of expeditions looking for them—all unsuccessful. I needed to go and try to see for myself if they were really there or if they were really extinct," added Gursky-Doyen, whose research was funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Conservation Trust.
Once relatively abundant among the mossy, forested mountain slopes of Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the pygmy tarsier population may have shrunk when logging in the 1970s destroyed its habitat, Gursky-Doyen said.
The nocturnal creatures rely on darkness to avoid predation. However in fragmented forests, the canopy lets in more moonlight, exposing the small animal to birds and other predators as it leaps from tree to tree.
Gursky-Doyen said she hopes the find will inspire the Indonesian government to protect the species and its habitat.
"[The] government needs to figure out a compromise between people and animals living in Lore Lindu."
—Tasha Eichenseher
Photograph by Sharon Gursky-Doyen
Gremlins Thought Extinct, Found After 85 Years
Jeanna Bryner, livescience.com Yahoo News 18 Nov 08;
Mouse-sized primates called pygmy tarsiers, not seen alive in 85 years, have come out of hiding from a mountaintop in a cloud forest in Indonesia.
Weighing just 2 ounces (57 grams), they resemble mini gremlin creatures, as they have big eyes and are covered in dense coats of fur to keep warm in a damp, chilly habitat. Unlike most other primates that sport fingernails, pygmy tarsiers have claws, which scientists say might be an adaptation to grasping onto moss-covered trees.
The recent sighting has conservation implications. And researchers said they hope that with new information about where the species lives, the Indonesian government will protect them from the encroaching development occurring in the animals' home range.
Hide-n-seek
The last sighting of this primate alive was in 1921 when live specimens were collected and processed for a museum collection.
Decades went by without another sighting. And scientists thought the pygmy tarsier (Tarsius pumilus) had possibly gone extinct. Then, in 2000, two Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, reported they had accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.
So Sharon Gursky-Doyen of Texas A&M University and her grad student Nanda Grow, along with a group of Indonesian locals, went looking for the teacup-sized primates on that same mountaintop. This past summer, the team trapped two males and a female. They placed radio collars on the animals for tracking.
Since pygmy tarsiers can turn their heads 180 degrees, this process can be dangerous, as Gursky-Doyen found out.
"I have the dubious honor of being the only person in the world to have been bitten by [a pygmy tarsier]," Gursky-Doyen told LiveScience. "My field assistant was holding the tarsier and I was attaching a radio collar around its neck and while I was attaching the radio collar he bit me [on the finger]."
The female has since been eaten by a hawk, Gursky-Doyen said.
Wacky primates
From the radio collars and observations, the researchers are learning more about the animals' behavior. For instance, even though the pipsqueaks weigh just one-half the body weight of other tarsiers, their legs are just as long. The tiny tots use their super-long legs to bound from treetop to treetop high up in the forest canopy.
And for sleeping, the nocturnal creatures tuck into hollowed-out trees. They also are much quieter than other tarsiers, such as the spectral tarsier that vocalizes for up to five minutes when returning from a night of foraging.
The researchers hope to continue studying the pygmy tarsier to glean more information, for instance, about why the animals are so much smaller than other tarsiers and to refine the extent of their home range.
The research was funded by National Geographic Society, Conservation International Primate Action Fund, Primate Conservation Incorporated and Texas A&M.
Tiny, long-lost primate rediscovered in Indonesia
Will Dunham Yahoo News 19 Nov 08;
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet's smallest and rarest primates.
Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers -- two males and one female -- on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.
They spotted a fourth one that got away.
The tarsiers, which some scientists believed were extinct, may not have been overly thrilled to be found. One of them chomped Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a Texas A&M University professor of anthropology who took part in the expedition.
"I'm the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier," Gursky-Doyen said in a telephone interview.
"My assistant was trying to hold him still while I was attaching a radio collar around its neck. It's very hard to hold them because they can turn their heads around 180 degrees. As I'm trying to close the radio collar, he turned his head and nipped my finger. And I yanked it and I was bleeding."
The collars were being attached so the tarsiers' movements could be tracked.
Tarsiers are unusual primates -- the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.
As their name indicates, pygmy tarsiers are small -- weighing about 2 ounces (50 grammes). They have large eyes and large ears, and they have been described as looking a bit like one of the creatures in the 1984 Hollywood movie "Gremlins."
They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.
They had not been seen alive by scientists since 1921. In 2000, Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats in the Sulawesi highlands accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.
"Until that time, everyone really didn't believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them," Gursky-Doyen said.
Her group observed the first live pygmy tarsier in August at an elevation of about 6,900 feet.
"Everything was covered in moss and the clouds are right at the top of that mountain. It's always very, very foggy, very, very dense. It's cold up there. When you're one degree from the equator, you expect to be hot. You don't expect to be shivering most of the time. That's what we were doing," she said.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)