I have been watching various groups of this mammal for a couple of years now (although i’m not sure about their being various groups or only parts of the same larger group, and I hope that this could be one of the outcomes of this little research). In fact, i don’t get the opportunitty to observe a lot of different behaviour since my window for watching these animals is short (pun intended).
I live in Rio de Janeiro and from the window of my apartment I see a huge rock and some vegetation that thrives to grow with very little organic soil. you can see the actual location here.
Unfortunately i will start with a problem that isn’t solved yet.
I found very hard to distinguish among species of the Callithrix genus. There are three possible species.
1- Callithrix Kuhlii
2- Callithrix Jacchus
3- Callithrix Penicillata
all of these three species can be found in this region. None of them is originally from here. They were brought from northeastern and/or mid-western regions of Brazil, mainly as pets (a reference in portuguese).
My background ‘folk’ knowledge of the species is limited to the name that i heard as a child and was used to various species that live in this region and differs little for the eventual observer. Any primate that was small and had a long tail will be called ‘mico’, ‘sagüi’. There are other possible names – sauim, xauim, sauí, soim, massau, tamari e mico-estrela – but those two are the ones i remember hearing.
But i don’t know much of these animals. i’ll start from here.
Just by looking at the photos of the wikipedia entries it’s very hard to find wich one it is. The Weid’s Marmoset (Callithrix Kuhlii) is one animal in the profile picture and another in the picture below (the description matches the photo below).
But i’ll guess that part of the work is going to look more closely to the animals, not doing more refined searches on line.
Best of both worlds should be a little bit of this and a lot of that. we’ll see what comes next.
Sagüi (kind of) 