How can we make them have more monkeys? The keepers are really worried

Key Points

★ Due to hunting and habitat shrinkage, white-shanked langurs are critically endangered. Artificial breeding is imperative to protect them.

★ There are many difficulties in artificially breeding wild animals. Not only do they need a suitable living environment, they also need to ensure nutrition, and they also need to avoid "social difficulties." If this is not possible, artificial insemination is the only option.

When it comes to monkeys, many people may think of the image of Sun Wukong. When Sun Wukong was the king of Huaguo Mountain, he called himself "The Great Sage Equaling Heaven, the Beautiful Monkey King". At this time, a question came to my mind: How beautiful can a monkey be? Today's story is about a rare and beautiful monkey: the black-legged white-rumped leaf monkey.

A newborn leaf monkey. | Xinhua News Agency

Recently, Guangzhou Chimelong Safari Park also showed the media a baby black-legged and white-shanked langur still in a nursery. This is the first successful artificial breeding of black-legged and white-shanked langur in China.

01

Let's get to know each other

Black-legged white-shanked langur

Leaf monkeys are a very special type of monkeys. They live in tropical and subtropical jungles in southeastern Asia. They mainly feed on leaves, flowers and fruits of plants. Because leaves account for more than 90% of their total food, they are called leaf monkeys.

The white-naped leaf monkey is considered to be the most beautiful leaf monkey. They have a variety of colors: gray upper body, black lower body, chestnut red from knee to ankle, white forearm, dark yellow face, pink blue eyelids, a long and white tail, and a white triangular area at the base of the tail. They have slender hands and feet, and very long arms and legs. This special body structure is very suitable for it to move in the canopy, and the long tail allows it to maintain balance when jumping between branches, and it can jump to the canopy 6 meters away.

The picture comes from the Internet

White-shanked leaf monkeys live in small family units, with a male as the leader and several females and their children. The general group size is less than 10, but there are also records of several small families forming a large group of dozens of individuals. They live in rainforests above 2,000 meters above sea level, and their staple food is the tender shoots, leaves, flowers and fruits of various plants. These foods plus a small amount of dew and rain can basically meet the water needs of the white-shanked leaf monkeys, so they rarely go to the ground to drink water.

There are three species of white-shanked langurs, namely the gray-legged white-headed langur (Pygathrix cinerea), the red-legged white-shanked langur (Pygathrix nemaeus), and the black-legged white-shanked langur (Pygathrix nigripes). The color of their leg hair is different. The black-legged white-shanked langur that was successfully artificially bred at the Guangzhou Chimelong Primate Research Center this time is the black-legged white-shanked langur.

02

Don’t let the white-shanked langur disappear!

Why does the successful artificial breeding of white-shanked leaf monkeys attract so much attention? Because white-shanked leaf monkeys are an extremely endangered primate, with only a few hundred left. In comparison, the total number of giant pandas, a national treasure, is close to 2,000. The reason why the number of white-shanked leaf monkeys is so small is first of all hunting. The fur of white-shanked leaf monkeys can be processed into leather products, the bones are used as medicine, the meat is used as food, and some people also keep them as pets, which has led to many white-shanked leaf monkeys being killed or captured.

Not only hunting, human activities are increasingly encroaching on the living space of wild animals. | Tuchong Creative

The biggest factor affecting the white-shanked leaf monkey is the shrinking habitat. Southeast Asia is the most densely populated region in the world. Many forests have been turned into farmland or cash crops, and road construction has divided their habitat into small pieces. Mining, pollution and disease have caused the number of white-shanked leaf monkeys to decrease.

Therefore, artificial breeding and reproduction of endangered wild animals, such as white-shanked leaf monkeys, is a very important part of wildlife protection. If animals with extremely endangered wild populations can have a stable artificial population and increase their population through artificial breeding, they can also release artificially bred individuals into the wild when they find a suitable area for survival to supplement the wild population.

03

Artificial breeding of wild animals

The road ahead is long and difficult

However, is it easy to artificially breed wild animals? As someone who has raised more than 300 species of animals, I can tell you responsibly that it is difficult. Animals may be in a state of tension and anxiety for a long time when they are away from their familiar environment, and most wild animals need to be in the best physical condition and most relaxed before they enter estrus. However, under captive conditions, the physical fitness of animals is relatively poor, and natural mating becomes a problem.

In the wild, animals exercise a lot every day, and in order to find food, their range of activity can reach tens of kilometers. However, due to the limitations of cages, captive animals have a very small activity area, and the amount of exercise in this environment cannot be compared with that in the wild, which leads to the poor physique, athletic ability and body function of captive wild animals.

Staying in the garden every day will make your physical fitness not as strong as when you are in the wild. | Tuchong Creative

Interference from tourists may also be a reason why artificial breeding is difficult. Wild animals living in zoos have to face hundreds of human onlookers every day. For a wild animal that lives in dense forests in the mountains and leads a hermit-like life, the noisy environment may cause great pressure on it, causing it to be too nervous and unwilling to mate. For example, the two pandas in Hong Kong Ocean Park failed to give birth to children after 9 years of attempts. However, due to the epidemic, Hong Kong Ocean Park was closed in 2020. As a result, the pandas became pregnant soon after.

04

How can we help

Animals giving birth

Breeders will rack their brains to create conditions for animals to give birth to babies. Generally, the following methods are used during the breeding process:

1. Improve the cage environment: Arrange the playground reasonably, provide animals with objects for climbing, such as rocks, perches, and trees, set a reasonable slope in the playground, and add a pool if conditions permit. In addition, when designing the cage, add a place for animals to avoid the gaze of tourists to reduce the pressure on the animals. Let the animals have a "home" that is closer to their native environment.

It is a difficult problem to ensure that small animals get enough nutrition without becoming fat. | Tuchong Creative

2. Improve the "food" of animals: Make the "menu" of wild animals more scientific, taking into account nutrition while preventing them from having excessive nutrition; wild animals also have time to eat, except for very few cases, such as giant pandas, most of them do not eat endlessly. The key to supplementing nutrition is to try to keep it consistent with the original food of wild animals, and eat less food that we humans think is delicious and nutritious.

3. Helping animals raised in artificial environments learn how to "socialize": Animals living in artificial environments, especially those bred in captivity, may have certain behavioral differences from their wild counterparts due to their lack of wild experience, resulting in "social difficulties" and thus mating difficulties. Keepers will also increase the number of older wild individuals in the group, so that animals have more opportunities to interact with their own kind to improve their social skills and thus reproduce normally.

What to do if you lack experience? Animals also need sex education. | Source: Internet

The most famous example is showing giant pandas "sex education films". At that time, the five-and-a-half-year-old female panda "Kelin" refused to cooperate with mating during the estrus period. The keepers were very anxious and tried many methods but to no avail. Later, a keeper had an idea and played a video of other pandas mating on TV for Kelin, and then Kelin successfully completed mating. Putting aside the fact that pandas can understand "pornographic films", at least the keepers have taken great pains to ensure that the animals can live a normal life.

4. Use artificial insemination technology: The technology of artificially collecting semen from male animals and inserting it into the body of female animals to make them pregnant can be said to be the most efficient way to breed captive animals. There are many examples of rare wild animals being bred through artificial insemination. However, there are certain risks. For example, in 2019, Suzhou Zoo was performing artificial insemination on Yangtze giant softshell turtles, but due to improper operation and other problems, the animals died.

It can be seen that it is difficult to breed wild animals in captivity, so the birth of the black-legged white-naped leaf monkey baby made many people very excited. But behind this joy is the helpless reality: nearly 60% of the more than 500 species of primates in the world are in danger of extinction, and the black-legged white-naped leaf monkey is one of them. If we do not take action, they may disappear completely from the earth in a few years.

I hope that the prosperity of wildlife is not just in the dreams of sleeping little leaf monkeys. | Xinhua News Agency

The white-maned leaf monkey is also called the colorful leaf monkey. Whether this beautiful creature can continue to live on the earth depends largely on what we humans do in the future. Perhaps we can establish artificially bred populations to prevent this species from disappearing, but if they lose their habitats in the wild and can only live in cages, what is the difference between that and extinction?

Author | Li Weiyang, a popular science writer, has published works on Guokr.com, State Forestry Administration, China National Geographic, "Bowu" magazine, Juvenile Science Magazine, etc.

Review | Huang Chengming, Researcher, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Editor | Jiang Fan

Editor | Ding Zong

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