Golden lion tamarin

Golden lion tamarins live in Brazil.

They live in warm, wet forests near the ocean. They stay high up in the trees, and they sleep in holes in tree trunks.

Golden lion tamarins live only in the Atlantic coastal forest of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in southeastern Brazil, mostly around the São João River. This is a part of Brazil where a lot of people live.

They live in humid forest full of vines and bromeliads, plants that grow perched on trees. Tamarins usually stay in the treetops, about 10 to 30 meters above the ground. At night they sleep in tree holes, which keep them warm and hidden.

The original range covered most of the lowland coastal region of Rio de Janeiro state below about 300 meters, across 24 municipalities. Surveys in the 1960s found tamarins surviving in only seven of them, and a 1990 to 1992 survey found them in just 104.5 square kilometers of forest. The center of today's range is the basin of the Rio São João, where most of the population lives, including the Poço das Antas and União biological reserves.

The National Zoo describes humid forest rich in vines, bromeliads and other epiphytes, with tamarins keeping to the closed canopy 10 to 30 meters up and sleeping in tree holes for warmth and protection.

Golden lion tamarins eat fruit and bugs.

They poke their long, thin fingers into cracks and holes to find insects. They share food with their family.

Golden lion tamarins are omnivores. They eat fruit, insects and other small creatures, and almost any small animal they can catch.

Their long, slender fingers are perfect for hunting. Tamarins poke them into cracks in bark, holes in trees and the cups of bromeliad plants to pull out hidden prey. Family members share food with each other, though they rarely share with tamarins outside the family. Young ones sometimes playfully snatch food from their parents or brothers and sisters.

The diet is omnivorous: fruits, insects and other small invertebrates, and potentially any smaller animal. The National Zoo describes extractive foraging with long, slender hands and fingers that probe crevices, bark, bromeliads and other hiding places.

Food is shared within the family group but rarely with outsiders, and juveniles playfully steal food from parents and siblings. Competition for resources with introduced common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) is one of the pressures the IUCN lists for the species. In human care at the National Zoo, the diet includes fruit, vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, mealworms, crickets and a specially made marmoset gel.

Once, there were very few golden lion tamarins.

People worked for many years to help them. They planted trees and protected forests. Now there are many more!

In the early 1970s, forest clearing and the pet trade had left only about 200 golden lion tamarins in the wild. Zoos and scientists in Brazil and around the world worked together: zoo-born tamarins were returned to the wild, forests were protected and new trees were planted.

Then, from 2016 to 2019, a disease called yellow fever killed nearly a third of them. Scientists vaccinated tamarins and kept connecting forests, and a census in 2022 and 2023 counted about 4,800. They are still endangered, but their story shows what people can do.

Habitat loss to sugar cane, coffee, cattle, logging, charcoal and urbanization, plus the pet trade, reduced the wild population to about 200 in the early 1970s. Decades of work by the Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, led by the Smithsonian's National Zoo and the Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado, including reintroduction of zoo-born animals and translocation of isolated groups, led to downlisting from Critically Endangered to Endangered in 2003; about a third of wild tamarins descend from reintroduced animals.

The 2016 to 2019 yellow fever outbreak cut numbers to about 2,500. A 2022 to 2023 census found about 4,800, helped by reforestation, corridors, wildlife crossings over the BR-101 highway and vaccination. The IUCN still lists the species as Endangered, citing fragmentation, roads, introduced marmosets, hybridization with introduced golden-headed lion tamarins and disease.