The urgent phone call to Vince Sodaro, a supervisory keeper at Brookfield Zoo, came at 3 a.m. from an overnight animal keeper at the zoo’s Tropic World exhibit hall.
Noodle, a tiny, hand-reared callimico monkey just 46 days old, somehow had escaped from her cage in the dead of night.
Sodaro had been planning to place Noodle later that very day with an established callimico family, hoping that it would adopt her. As it turned out, the monkey had jumped the gun by several hours.
“The guard found her sleeping with her adoptive family, all of them piled together on a shelf in their cage,” he said, laughing.
Within a few days Noodle was getting piggyback rides from the group’s adults, an important gesture of family acceptance in the surprisingly complex callimico society. She has been with the family ever since.
The adoption is another little triumph for Brookfield, which boasts the most important captive-breeding group in the world for callimico, an endangered species also known as Goeldi’s monkeys. The zoo has had 330 callimico births in 27 years.
“The callimico are sort of the mystery guys in South America,” said Leila Porter, a University of Washington biologist who recently spent 3 1/2 years studying callimico in Bolivian rain forests, largely through Brookfield Zoo sponsorship.
Swiss biologist Emil August Goeldi discovered the callimico (Latin for “beautiful little monkey”) in Brazil in 1904, but Porter’s work is the first long-term study of them in the wild since their discovery.
More than any other institution, Brookfield has been driving force to learn more about the shy, dark, long-haired, bug-eyed, deep-forest creatures with nine-inch bodies and 12-inch tails.
More than 20 zoos in Canada and the U.S. display callimico, but you can’t see them at Brookfield. The zoo doesn’t display them, even though it has by far the species’ largest zoo population in North America. Thirty-five of the monkeys live in banks of spacious cages in non-public rooms of Tropic World.
The zoo got a family of 10 callimico from the U.S. Customs Service, which had seized them as they were being smuggled through a Florida airport in 1977.
At the time, very few callimico could be found in North American zoos and the animal’s life cycle was virtually unknown. Gradually the zoo developed a high level of expertise, and it now boasts the continent’s top zoo experts in callimico husbandry, nutrition, breeding and veterinary care.
Brookfield has nine staff members who each devote about 25 percent of their time to the zoo’s callimico. They are painfully aware that, from lack of knowledge, the entire North American callimico zoo population was nearly killed off in the 1980s.
At the time, zoos had become so successful in breeding the monkeys that nearly every adult zoo female was put on a birth control implant. “In the early 1990s we found the implants, which had worked on all other non-human primates, sterilized callimico females,” Sodaro said.
The zoos had sterilized two generations of females. Had Brookfield not imported more callimico from European zoos to resume breeding, it’s likely none would be in North American zoos today.
The accidental sterilizations pushed Brookfield staff members to re-examine all their husbandry practices to try to assure a more stable population, Sodaro said.
The zoo used to rescue poorly parented babies and let keepers hand-rear them, placing them back with their families after they were old enough to eat the same foods as the other animals. But the babies would get “imprinted” on their human caretakers and grow up believing themselves to be human, rejecting their own species.
“By the time we’d let the babies have direct contact with their family, tremendous damage had been done,” said Sodaro. “The babies didn’t recognize another callimico for what it was. The group didn’t regard infants as part of family.”
The hand-reared babies grew up to be poor parents, and the cycle would repeat.
In the early 1990s, Sodaro and his staff experimented with ways for keepers to intercede with at-risk newborns and raise them without the babies and their families noticing the human input.
The method they hit upon is the one that seems to have worked in successfully integrating the baby Noodle into her foster family as a full-fledged callimico kid.
When Noodle was born at the beginning of the year, keepers decided her mother, Pasta, whose two previous pregnancies resulted in dead newborns, was not to be trusted.
The keepers placed Noodle in a small, clear plastic incubator, which was placed in the cage of another callimico family. The baby was given a furry toy gorilla doll about the size of an adult callimico as a surrogate mother to cleave to.
Babies need to eat every two hours, so keepers were there with a bottle for Noodle day and night. Each time she fed, keepers took her from the incubator aboard her surrogate toy so that she could bottle feed while family members came to sniff and touch her.
“That way the baby and the others get to know each other both by sight and scent,” said Sodaro.
When the baby was old enough to leave the incubator, it was put into a small mesh cage where it continued to come out during feeding time and was gradually weaned from the bottle to mushy baby food.
Noodle escaped from her cage to sleep with her foster family when she was 46 days old, the very time keepers deem babies old enough to abandon their own cage for good.
Several days after Noodle joined her family, the adults began to let her climb on their backs to ride, and she now spends her nights perched on the back of a real callimico as she sleeps.
“The fact that she’s being carried is a great sign that she is being socially integrated into the group,” said Sodaro, who has spent two stints at Porter’s Bolivian jungle study sites hoping to improve husbandry techniques by learning more about wild callimico behavior.
“We do know that callimico must grow up in a normal social group and be accepted, groomed and played with by parents and siblings in order to have normal social interactions later in life.”
Though Brookfield used to display a few callimico at its old small mammal house, none have been on display since that building was converted several years ago to a children’s zoo center.
“Getting a callimico display is high on our wish list,” said primate curator Melinda Pruett-Jones.
The monkeys have a doll-like cuteness, and they are superb athletes capable of leaping 13 feet horizontally–the equivalent of a human broad-jumping 100 feet–so they should be visitor favorites. Lincoln Park Zoo, which this week got a breeding pair from Brookfield, will display them in its primate house later this spring.
