Andrés Link, Season 2 Episode 7
The brown spider monkey and its “orchestral” Magdalena River Valley habitat in Colombia have been the focus of Dr Andrés Link’s work for 20+ years.
Birds, not monkeys were his original plan, he tells Kate Humble and Edward Whitley, but the monkey’s graceful movement and complex social behaviour drew him to the species whose forest habitat had become fragmented, cleared for ranching and palm oil.
Reconnecting it is crucial for survival and Andrés and his team at the NGO he founded Fundación Proyecto Primates are not only winning support from local landowners, they’re helping them to plant trees. It’s a project Andrés says has the potential to be replicated across Colombia, home to almost 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity.
Read the transcript here.
NEWS FROM Andrés
Since winning his award in April, Andres’ team has completed planting two additional corridors and maintained all the corridor network. They have installed and recovered all terrestrial camera traps to start work on their third mammal survey in the Middle Magdalena River Basin. The camera traps recorded all large terrestrial mammals that could potentially live in the region which have ruled out any local extinctions of large mammals.
A demographic study which involves identifying each member of four social groups which include about 60 individuals, has been restarted. The team now have a thermal drone to start systematic surveys of the brown spider monkey population which aims to count all spider monkeys in the forest fragments of the project area. The team hopes to get incredible data on spider monkeys but also on the presence of many endangered taxa in the region.
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