Red-handed tamarin

Red-handed tamarinA small forest monkey of northern South America with brightly coloured hands and feet.What does it look like?Orange-red or yellow hands and feet stand out against the black body.Tamarins that change sleeping sites oftenIn a French Guiana rainforest, researchers followed sleeping-site choices by three groups of red-handed tamarins for nine months. Each group used 30–40 sites per 100 days; around half were visited rarely, and no site was used more than three nights in a row. Tamarins sometimes visited a candidate tree hours before sleeping there, especially if they had not used it recently. Raptors repeatedly attacked during the study, but none succeeded. The researchers proposed that checking sites and changing them often may reduce predation risk.Sleeping trees had more complex structures and heavier liana growth than other trees. The monkeys chose the site nearest their final feeding place only one quarter of the time. This single-site study describes three groups, not every population.Keeping it safeIUCN Red List (IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group) · Least Concern (LC) · GlobalThe 2015 IUCN assessment listed the Red-handed Tamarin as Least Concern (LC). It was published in 2021.