Primo, the Infant Tarsier
This is a video we took of an infant tarsier sometime in mid-2000 during our fieldwork in Corella, Bohol. Carlito Pizarras chanced on this infant whose mother was eaten by a stray cat (i.e., feral cats are the primary predators of tarsiers).
Only about a week old when he was found, Primo–the infant tarsier–was nursed back to health. Nong Lito later released the tarsier back to the forest sanctuary of the Philippine Tarsier Foundation, Inc. (PTFI) after a few months.
Tarsiers For Sale and then some!
The selling of tarsiers is still happening in the Philippines despite the numerous laws and administrative orders banning this practice. I chanced on a seller over at sulit.com.ph, a popular online market site, advertising the sale of a pair of tarsiers for PhP9,000.00/USD 205.20. Apparently, the seller has already sold three pairs of tarsiers as per his comment on the online ad he posted: “Sold 1 pair to LEI of Antipolo. Sold 2 Pairs to Keen of Forbes park. These people can afford to take care of these lovely pets. They showed me the place where they will keep and nest them.”
In the Philippines, Tarsius syrichta is considered as a “specially protected faunal species” through Proclamation 1030 released by the President Ramos administration in 1997. The proclamation prohibits the hunting, killing, wounding, taking away, or possession of tarsiers and the destruction of its habitat. It also encouraged the establishment of sanctuaries “to preserve and protect the species.” In 2001, the Republic Act No. 9147 or the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act was passed to conserve the country’s remaining wildlife resources and their habitats, including the tarsiers. Several other ordinances were enacted at the provincial and town levels to stem the capture and live trade of tarsiers.
The apparent disconnect between state policies and the actual practice points at the need to rethink the conservation strategies for this primate. As I understand, the dominant conservation framework remains to be ecotourism, which is aimed at increasing revenues for the ‘community’ and, at the same time, conserving ‘nature.’ But with reports still coming about the sale of tarsiers, it would be worthwhile to investigate whether this framework has instead led to more species endangerment. Elsewhere, ecotourism has “accelerated the endangering of the survival of fragile and endemic species” (Honey, 2008)–most likely true also in the Philippines.
Alternatively, it would be interesting to investigate how ‘ecotourism’ is interpreted locally. A cursory visit to various tourist sites in the Philippines will show that ‘wildlife’ tourism is one of the country’s main tourist draw. In fact, some viewing stations display “wildlife” (with DENR permits) to encourage tourists to visit their place for a fee. In Albur, Bohol, for example, one of the tourist stops is a “mini-zoo” of various endemic and migratory animals. Thus, if the cages for birds, flying lemurs, grass owls, and macaques of this town are indications of what ecotourism is at the local level, then there is indeed an urgent need to understand more the dynamics of tourism, conservation, local community, and the environment.
Here are some photos from the viewing station in Albur, Bohol (photos courtesy of Lori Fields)
Juvenile long-tailed macaque (photo courtesy of Lori Fields)
Flying Lemur (photo courtesy of Lori Fields)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Let me also share this section of our paper (with Carla Escabi–Time Travelling’s other “us“) on the early days of hunting for tarsiers in Corella, Bohol:
The 1980’s saw some changes in the hunting techniques of the Corellanos. Hunters developed a new set of hunting techniques for tarsiers. Dogs (ayam) were trained to hunt (pangayam) for tarsiers. The dogs pick up the scent of a tarsier and chase it. As a response, the tarsier climbs to the highest reaches of the branches. The hunter then follows the dogs’ barks and captures the tarsier with a net or with a piece of cloth, usually a shirt. Often the tarsier dies, especially if the plant that it is clinging to is within the reach of a dog. Yet the use of dogs for hunting tarsiers is not widespread in Corella. Neither have specialized traps been developed for tarsiers. Corellanos saw tarsier traps only when scientists came and used mesh nets to capture them. Interestingly, Dagosto et al. (2003: 249) solicited the help of “trained guides with hunting dogs” in their study of tarsiers in Mount Pangasugan on the island of Leyte.
Corella hunters pursue tarsiers using their “knowledge of the forest.” They notice that a tarsier is “near” through its smell and calls. One informant describes the tarsier’s smell as having a stench akin to that of a bat. Recounting his experience in catching tarsier, he relates:
One needs to approach a tarsier in a certain manner. I silently get closer to it, one step at a time. When the tarsier is not looking in my direction, I make one little step. Watching the tarsier from the sides of my eyes and keeping my head down helps, because the tarsier will not feel intimidated by this body position. Once I am near to where the tarsier is grasping, I try to read its movements. Knowing these is important, and especially how its body is positioned, because these will indicate to you the prospective twig or branch that it might jump to. You can grab the tarsier then and there or, if not, you can force it to jump to the prospective twig and then sway the twig so that the tarsier cannot reach it. Once it falls to the ground, it can easily be captured.
Another informant says:
If I find a tarsier infant, all I do is wait for the mother to come. The mother usually tries to make you follow her so that you will get her instead of the infant. And when you do follow her, you will lose sight of her as she heads for the bushes. I discovered that the mother usually comes back once the threat is gone. So one time I grabbed the infant and put it under my shirt to make it relax. It is the beating of the heart that calms it. Suddenly the mother jumped onto my back, searching for her baby. I took pity on them and just left them in the wild.
Tarsier hunting in Corella in the 1980’s came about as a response to three factors: a) external demand for live tarsiers, b) external demand for tarsiers for taxidermy (embalsamu), and c) the practice of keeping tarsiers to show to or lure tourists. Tarsiers have become visible in the money market as a commodity. Spielmann and Eder (1994: 318), writing about the hunter-gatherers, made sense when they said:
…if hunter-gatherers are intensifying hunting to participate in an exchange system, the organization of the hunt and/or species targeted for the hunt will probably change from the pre-trade situation. The ethnographic record contains numerous references to differences in hunter-gatherer hunting techniques and technology that are attributed to the demands of exchange [emphases ours].
The live tarsier trade for export in the Philippines started on October 17, 1850 with Amsterdam as the receiving destination. Fitch-Snyder (2003: 278-282) recorded that a total of 130 tarsiers from 1850 to 1986 were exported from the Philippines (see her table on p. 279) with the United States, Europe, and Japan as top importers. Thirty-nine percent were exported from August 1981 to November 21, 1986. Most of these tarsiers ended up in universities, zoos, and museums. Although the number of tarsiers that reached a target destination was relatively low, this may not represent the actual quantity of tarsiers exported. According to Cowlishaw and Dunbar (2000: 263-264), “There is a substantial additional loss associated with mortality during capture, storage, and transport, and this may ultimately be the greatest source of population loss.”
Our fieldwork in Corella supports Fitch-Snyder’s data that there was an increase in captured tarsiers in the 1980’s. In this period, Corella hunters specialized in tarsiers because of the orders of buyers from Tagbilaran, the provincial capital of Bohol, who in turn were commissioned by middlemen from outside the province. Petshop owners as far away as Manila bought Bohol tarsiers. Hunters were informed that some tarsiers were going to Cebu. Nong Lito participated in the capture of 15 live tarsiers for a certain Louis Weaver, travelling on the inaugural flight of an airline company bound for Chicago (around 1985). They were intended, he was told, for Chicago zoos and universities elsewhere in the United States. Patricia Wright, a primatologist, also “obtained and imported…tarsiers for breeding and for research purposes after surveying the Philippine Island of Bohol in 1985” (Fitch-Snyder 2003: 281).
A hunter recalled that hunting of tarsiers was profitable at that time for a single tarsier could fetch P50-P200 and orders sometimes reached more than 50 tarsiers. One of my informants remarked that the tarsier trade was so lucrative in contrast to farming that many hunters ceased to farm their lands and devoted their time instead to hunting tarsiers. “With farming, you have to wait for four months (referring to the harvest) before you can get your money. With tarsier hunting, you get your monetary rewards immediately,” he said. Thus for some Corellanos, the 1980’s heralded a shift to the commercial hunting of tarsiers.
But hunting Tarsius syrichta for the market also happened prior to the 1980’s. The earliest record of supplying tarsiers for buyers outside of Bohol is in 1930 when Professor Hegner from Johns Hopkins University obtained an anatomical specimen from the province (Fulton 1939). Back then, early tarsier researchers were confronted with the difficulty of locating tarsiers. Recording his exasperation, Fulton (1939: 566-567) remarked:
…nearly a week was wasted on trips through the inland jungles in search of a specimen…Nearly every native of whom we inquired had either seen a ‘maomag’ a few days earlier or knew of someone who had seen one. One day the trail seemed hot and a report came through that a native in a neighboring town was keeping one as a pet, but when we arrived we found only a dead and partly ant-eaten specimen…Others were reported at distant ends of the island, but we seemed always to arrive just after the animal had escaped, or after the neighbor’s dog had eaten it; and after many a frantic chase through the jungle of this incredibly hot and humid island, I was obliged eventually to fly back to Manila without having seen a living Tarsius.
Fulton eventually was able to procure some 30 tarsiers through a local hunter, Jorge Lumantao of Tagbilaran. In Corella, Cañete (2003: 187) records that “the collection of live tarsiers originated when Japanese sailors on vessels making stopovers at Bohol…began exchanging transistor radios for live tarsiers with the locals.”
Taking tarsiers from the wild also occurred on neighboring islands. In Samar, for example, Cabrera (1923:91) noted that “natives sometimes carried tarsiers for sale.” Cook, a retired U.S. army captain, found it easy to procure tarsiers in Davao. He bought 15 tarsiers for $1.20 each from the locals. He said that the tarsiers were “captured in daytime, but only one was caught in a tree. This was a half grown specimen, seen in a small tree just after dawn, and secured by cutting down the tree. One was seen on the tip of a stalk of tibgao, a tall and strong grass, and caught while making a flying leap. Others were captured in vines, hemp plantings, and in underbrush…” (Cook 1939:173).
New Tarsier Genus Named After ‘Tarsier Man’
Nong Lito, Dennis Bait-it, and a farmer resting after a trek in the secondary forest of Corella
Because of his dedication to the conservation of the Philippine tarsiers, Carlito Pizarras, popularly known as Nong Lito, is now immortalized in the annals of scientific literature after a new Tarsier genus was named after him.
Groves and Shekelle, in a paper published in the International Journal of Primatology, said that molecular and morphological evidences warrant a revision of the tarsier taxonomy from one genus, Tarsius, to three genera, Tarsius, Cephalopachus, and Carlito.
The figure below (from the Groves and Shekelle paper) summarizes the most conspicuous features for the three genera:
According to the authors, the three genera are found in distinct biogeographic regions : “Tarsius is found on Sulawesi and surrounding islands; Cephalopachus is found on a restricted subset of Sundaland, principally southern parts of Sumatra and the island of Borneo; Carlito is found on islands of the southern Philippines that were a single Ice Age landmass, sometimes called Greater Mindanao.”
Etymologically, the new genus, Carlito, is from Carlito, “diminutive man of the countryside.” The authors said that this comes from “the German Karl or Carl (country man), and the diminutive suffix from Spanish, -ito.” They propose this name because it is “an apt description of tarsiers as small primates of the countryside, but more particularly in recognition of Carlito Pizarras, the “Tarsier Man” of the Philippines, featured in nature films such as The Littlest Alien, a man of the Visayan countryside who dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge about and the conservation of the Philippine Tarsiers.”
The three biogeographic regions of the genera (figure from Groves and Shekelle paper):
__________________________________
Colin Groves and Myron Shekelle (2010). The Genera and Species of Tarsiidae International Journal of Primatology
BBC’s Faulty Tarsier Video
Here is a video from BBC on the tarsiers of Bohol. Nice but faulty.
The nice part. I am glad to see Nong Lito Pizarras being interviewed. He knows these primates better than anyone. He has no graduate degree to his credit but his knowledge about the primate is worth a library of books. His experience working with tarsiers has proved indispensable in the conservation efforts of the Philippine Tarsier Foundation, Inc. Absolutely no tarsier research project has ever been done in Bohol without the help of Nong Lito. While graduate students have moved on, Nong Lito remains in Bohol, dutifully attending to the conservation demands of this primate species.
The faulty part. There are glaring errors in the BBC tarsier report. While the tarsier is indeed a fascinating primate, it is not the world’s smallest nor the oldest primate species as BBC contends. With regards to the claim that the tarsier is the smallest primate, Philippine tarsiers’ head and body length is 11.7-12.7 cm while its average weight is 67-112 g. Compare this for example to a mouse lemur species (M. jollyae), its average head and body length is at 5.3 cm and average weight is 61.3 g. Is the Philippine tarsier the oldest primate? A cursory look at fossil primates automatically disqualifies the tarsier as the oldest primate. Besides, primatologists are of the consensus that the Philippine tarsiers are more recent than the other tarsier species from Borneo and Indonesia. In a previous post, we noted that ” Philippine tarsiers may have migrated from Borneo through the Sulu archipelago, arriving sometime in the late Miocene to mid-Pleistocene.” Furthermore, there were a bunch of primate species whose existence can be traced back to the late Eocene like the lemurs of Madagascar.
The worst offense in the BBC video report is classifying tarsiers as marsupials. This completely removes the T. syrichta from the primate order. Tarsiers do not put their infants in a pouch but “park” their infants. Relative to the mother’s size, tarsiers have one of the largest infants in the entire animal kingdom (30% of the mother’s body weight). Mothers have to leave their infants in order to forage and then return to pick the infant up (this is called “parking”). I cannot imagine tarsiers having an over-sized infant inside a marsupium. This would render the primate immobile and break all the ankle bones of this vertical leaper and climber if it attempts to jump to the next branch. Suffice it to say that BBC, please, not all animals that leap are kangaroos.
Here is BBC’s video:
On Anthropology Field Schools
In Philippine anthropology depart
ments, the start of April heralds the beginning of field schools. This is the time when professors drag their students away from the stuffy confines of the classroom and push them into the grime and sweat of fieldwork. For at least one month, students scrape the earth until callouses grow on their palms and the tedious job of accessioning artifacts lulls them to sleep. The nights are spent on heated anthropological discussions up until the wee hours, sometimes over bottles of beer and karaoke blaring in the background.
One of the best training ground for the basics of archaeology is the Boljoon Archaeological Field School of Prof. Jobers Bersales of the University of San Carlos. In here, students are given a well-rounded training in archaeological excavation techniques and theory while also in a very scenic place. The site is right at the yard of a Spanish-era church with the entrance facing the blue seas of Cebu Strait. A fortress of hills and cliffs with sparse vegetation envelops the area and, at its highest point, a sentry box made of coral rocks lies in decay. As the field school’s ex-bone guy and field hand, I had the chance to see the artifacts closely. We were able to recover interesting gold specimen, ceramics, precious stone bea
ds, potteries, among other things. One of the exciting burial finds were two pieces of needle-shaped animal shell(?) with deliberate puncture holes at its base. This burial ornament was located on top of the pelvic region of a male individual. We also noticed skull moulding and teeth filing practices in many of the buried individuals.
One of my memorable field school moments was in Joyce Well, New Mexico, located in that boot heel-shaped corner of this southwest state. We camped there for six weeks in the desert wilderness, amidst the purring of mountain lions and the scampering of roadrunners. Dr. William H. Walker, the field school director, armed us with machetes in case a wayward cat goes inside our tents (I think the purpose was mostly psychological than anything else. He could just have given us rosary beads against this very efficient ambush predators). Working on the Casas Grandes-type ball courts and pueblos, Walker and the team of field archaeologists helped students connect archaeological theory with the drudgery of digging. Walker would lie down flat on his belly next to your excavation pit and reveal the story of the scraped earth. He would talk endlessly about formation processes, the paleoenvironment of the site, the people’s religion, technology, sports, etc. that you could visualize the whole culture right before your eyes. Walker could also turn an ordinary trowel into a surgeon’s scalpel, deftly slicing the contours of the soil, exposing the artifact for removal and documentation.
Resting in the middle of a night trek
Another nice field memory was the 2006 primatological field school I co-organized (with Carla Escabi) in Bohol. Two primate species were observed: Philippine tarsiers (Tarsius syrichta) and Philippine macaques (Macaca fascicularis). The behavior, ecology and conservation of these species were the main topics for the training. Although macaques are not endangered, we focused on them for animal identification exercises and the recording of animal behaviors because of their size. We followed the format from other field schools, such as the La Suerte Biological Field Station in Costa Rica.
For the tarsiers, we did daytime and nocturnal observational treks in the forests of Corella, Bohol. We found a pregnant female and a (possibly) mating couple seeking refuge under a clump of leaves in one of our day treks. This couple was found no more than 6 inches from each other (which we found surprising since tarsiers are considered solitary in the literature). Though they appear sluggish during daytime, tarsiers can leap from one branch to the next in a flash at night. They are so fast and small that it is impossible to follow them through the thicket. One time, we lay down underneath a tarsier sleeping site for hours until it woke up. At first, the primate stretched its long ankle bones and elongated its body as if it were doing a vertical push-up. Then the tarsier licked the tufts of hair at both sides of its shoulder and then the knees. Though we stayed so silent, its bat-like ears perked up like small satellite disks pointing in our direction. Rotating its head towards us, the tarsier stared for a moment with those moon-shaped eyes (by the way, each eye is bigger than its brain) and, in a split second, jumped three meters to the next branch.
mother and infant tarsier
We followed the tarsier for 30 minutes but its speed and agility were too much for non-vertical leapers like us.
What I like best about field schools is the learning opportunity students get in doing anthropology. While book knowledge is important, being on the field somehow intensifies anthropological curiosity and interest. With all the discussions, work, and the general anthro-conducive atmosphere, students get to explore research questions and dream about what they could be in the future. I thus encourage everyone to head on to the nearest anthropology department and inquire about joining field schools. The experience is really worth the time.
