Why do tamarins attack their babies

Although it is now illegal to import cotton-top tamarins into the U. Today, deforestation and human activity pose the most significant threats to the survival of cotton-top tamarins. Colombia is losing its tropical rainforest at a dramatic rate to development and agriculture—in fact, the South American country has recorded the fourth-highest loss of rainforest in the world.

Some of this loss can also be attributed to oil extraction projects as well as the construction of a hydroelectric dam that flooded more than 7, hectares of forest in Paramillo National Park, a sanctuary for the tamarin. All rights reserved. Animals Photo Ark. Cotton-top tamarin. The endangered cotton-top tamarin lives in a small area of northwestern Colombia that is currently threatened by deforestation. Common Name: Cotton-top tamarins. Scientific Name: Saguinus oedipus. Type: Mammals.

Diet: Omnivore. Size: Head and body: 8 to 10 inches; tail: 13 to 16 inches. Weight: 14 to 20 ounces. Critically endangered. Least Concern Extinct. Share Tweet Email. Go Further. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city.

Who looks after the babies? Older siblings also help out too. They look tiny, how big do they grow? They are quite small, and very cute, growing to roughly 44cm including their tail and they weigh only grams. Better to cut their losses, bag the babies and wait for a better season to breed. And when mothers are the perps, they are often facing some of the same kinds of pressures as the tamarins: uncertain resources read: money and an absent or unreliable male. The overwhelming share of mothers in such situations do nothing so heinous as killing their babies, but one provocative study argued that postpartum depression PPD is an adaptive strategy to achieve the same genetic culling by different means.

Anthropologist Edward Hagen of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who conducted the work, looked at all of the things his sample group of PPD mothers had in common and was able to rule out some of the obvious variables, such as unemployment or lack of education.

Repeatedly, he found that the two things that correlated the most strongly were the health of the infant and the amount of child-care support the mother was getting. Their depression informs them "that they have suffered a reproductive cost and that successfully motivates them to reduce that cost. Clearly, depressed or unsupported mothers have options tamarins don't, and in our species at least, nothing excuses willful neglect, never mind murder.

But excusing something is not the same as explaining it.