KEY POINTS:
A New Zealand academic who has just discovered his second new species of Amazonian monkey in four years says there are many more animals yet to be found.
"If we are still finding monkeys, imagine how many invertebrates and things like that are still out there," said Auckland University's only primatologist, Jean-Phillipe Boubli. "It's pretty amazing."
Dr Boubli's latest discovery is the Cacajao ayresii monkey, a black uakari species.
In 2003, Dr Boubli described a new species of bearded saki monkey (Chiropotes israelita), and he has said the Pantepui region of the Amazon basin on the Brazil-Venezuela border also contains new species of spider monkey, squirrel monkey and capuchin monkey.
"Finding a relatively large monkey as a new species these days is pretty cool," Dr Boubli told National Geographic magazine. "It shows how little we really know about the biodiversity of the Amazon."
Dr Boubli said the uakari discovery - which will be detailed in the International Journal of Primatology in July - was one of the most exciting and important of his career.
Dr Boubli specialises in primate ecology, tropical ecology, conservation biology and the biogeography of the Amazon basin, and was appointed a lecturer at Auckland in 2006 to teach courses in primate ecology and anthropology.
Dr Boubli undertook the first study of the black uakari monkey during a series of wildlife surveys after following native Yanomamo Indians on their hunts along the Rio Araca, a tributary of the Rio Negro in Brazil.
"They told us about this black uakari monkey, which was slightly different to the one we knew from Pico de Neblina National Park, where I'd worked earlier," said Dr Boubli.
"I searched for that monkey for at least five years. The reason I couldn't find it was because the place where they were was sort of unexpected."
Uakaris normally live in flooded river forests, but this one turned up in a mountainous region on the Brazil-Venezuela border.
Another species of primate in that region, which was very similar to the uakari, competed in the same ecological niche, Dr Boubli said.
"Wherever that monkey occurs, you don't expect to find uakaris," he said. "That's why I wasn't really looking in those places."
The new species appeared confined to a very small area outside any preserve. Dr Boubli said the population was quite small, so the species was vulnerable.
Throughout northern Amazonia, uakaris are regularly eaten by local people.
"I'm a bit concerned," he told National Geographic.
"We're going to have to create a park or reserve, because [its habitat is] not a protected area."
The species was not only vulnerable to regional epidemics, droughts, fires and global warming, but because it lived on public land it could be hunted.
- NZPA
