Today we have the pleasure of bringing you a unique interview with Marc van Roosmalen which illustrates his situation and problems as he sees them. For those of you who aren’t familiar with who Marc van Roosmalen is, what he has done, and his present situation, I recommend reading this short introduction before reading the interview.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Marc!

You have discovered a number of different species. Was finding one of them more special than finding the others? Is it still as much fun to find new species as it was when you found your first new species?

Marc G.M. van Roosmalen (MGMvR): Most fun but also most time and energy consuming for me was finding the ‘Land of Dermis’, where the relatives of Dermis occur – the baby black-capped dwarf marmoset that was delivered on my Manaus doorstep April 1996. With decades of experience in keeping all kinds of primates in halfway houses I knew right away that Dermis represented a new species of monkey and, undoubtedly, also a new primate genus. That event instantly took away the scepsis in me as a primatologist that nowadays it would be impossible to find new species of primates hitherto unknown to science. The quest that followed to find the monkey’s distribution somewhere in the huge Rio Madeira Basin had me stumbling into a Conan Doyle type of ‘Lost World’ – the Rio Aripuanã Basin – a hotspot of biodiversity that I soon recognized to be a totally new ecosystem within Amazonia, whose fauna and flora had never before been inventoried by naturalists, animal collectors, botanists and ornithologists alike. It took me a number of boat surveys to find Callibella humilis, a needle in a haystack as big as France. During innumerable surveys of the local rainforest and through interviews with the locals showing pictures of Dermis I happened to identify at least five other hitherto undescribed primates in the area.

Other highly memorable discoveries were those of some large terrestrial mammals whose existence I did not know of until I had close encounters with them while hiking alone through the forest. First spotting of a giant peccary (Pecari maximus) family silently crossing my trail while I was watching a group of Gray sakis in the canopy, or a group of dwarf peccaries (Pecari?) bumping literally into my feet while chasing one another through the undergrowth. And, back in camp, asking the locals what the hell the creature was that I had come upon that day…

Nowadays, under the Lula regime, it is not so much fun anymore to find new species because you run the risk to get caught in the ‘criminal’ act of collecting and transporting living evidence to support the validity of your find. To be able to publish it in a peer reviewed scientific journal you need at least to collect and deposit holotype material in a Brazilian museum. Without the proper collecting permits – a federal “license to kill” you can apply for in Brasilia, but never get granted – you seriously run the risk to be thrown in jail on accusation of what officials in Brazil call “biopiracy”. That is when you – like me – still collect, transport or keep alive any biological sample that could serve as holotype material or for DNA analysis in order to determine the phylogenetic and taxonomic status of your find. This way they make it impossible for Brazilian as well as foreign scientists to carry out biodiversity studies so needed for a sound nature conservation policy.

What do you feel when you finally find a species you have been looking for during a long time?

MGMvR: In the field you really feel yourself catapulted back in time, following the footsteps of the great naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, Spruce, Spix & Martius. Little progress has been made in the Brazilian Amazon ever since my natural-history heroes collected and described a large part of the Amazonian flora and fauna. In this euphoria one tends to forget that times have changed. That having the great privilege to pick up the thread these icons left behind some 150-200 years ago is now considered a ‘criminal act against nature’.

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Born in the Netherlands in 1947, Marc van Roosmalen is a Brazilian primatologist of Dutch birth living in Manaus, Brazil. After studying biology at the University of Amsterdam he did four years of doctoral fieldwork in Suriname studying the Red-faced Spider Monkey. Since then, van Roosmalen has devoted his life to the scientific exploration of the South American flora and fauna.

Marc van Roosmalen is described as a hand-on naturalist and has spent long periods of time doing research work in the Amazonian rainforest, while simultaneously producing prolific amounts of scientific papers, books, reviews, and wildlife documentaries. His work has led to the discovery and description of several new species, such as Callibella humilis, the dwarf marmoset, the second smallest monkey in the world, and Lecythis oldemani, a tree belonging to the Brazil Nut family. From 1986 to 2003, van Roosmalen served as senior scientist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) under the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology.

Parallel to his research work, van Roosmalen is a dedicated conservationalist trying to protect the Brazilian rainforest from destruction by humans. During the late 1980s, he launched “The Center for the Rehabilitation and Re-introduction of Endangered Wildlife” in the federal Rio Cuieiras Nature Reserve; a centre where all kinds of animals, but especially monkeys confiscated from the illegal pet trade, were rehabilitated in the local rain forest. In 1999, he founded the NGO “Amazon Association for the Preservation of High Biodiversity Areas” (AAPA) and began purchasing areas of pristine rainforest in regions harboring extremely high biodiversity and/or animals and plants new to science.

For his outstanding work in South America, van Roosmalen has received several honors and was knighted as Officer in the Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1997. At the turn of the millennium, van Roosmalen was selected as one of the worldwide recognized “Heroes for the Planet” by Time Magazine.

You can read about van Roosmalen’s current predicament in our interview with him which is found here. More information can also be found in this Wired article and this article published by the Smithsonian institution.

“For if there are out there big tree-dwelling, ground-dwelling and even aquatic mammals not known to science – a dwarf tapir, a giant peccary, a white deer, a dwarf manatee, another river dolphin, to name a few – what do we really know about its flora and fauna? Very Little. About its ecology – the utterly complex web of relationships between plants and animals? Even less. Then what do we know about the sustainability of this ecosystem? Absolutely nothing.”

– Marc van Roosmalen

This might not be news for some of you, but for those of you that has missed it: a new species of manatee might have been encountered by Dr Marc van Roosmalen in the Brazilian Amazon! Not only is this believed to be an entirely new species of manatee; it is also the smallest living member of the order Sirenia, measuring no more than 130 cm as an adult.

All Picture by: Marc van Roosmalen

In September 2002, wildlife-researcher Dr Marc van Roosmalen collected a complete skull from a recently killed specimen, but it would take an additional two years before he could finally photograph, film and examine a live specimen in its natural environment. As per usual when a new mammal is “discovered”, the species is only new to the scientific community, not to the locals of the area, and the skull of the specimen collected by van Roosmalen came from a manatee that had been killed and eaten by the locals.

Van Roosmalen has proposed that the so called Dwarf manatee should be considered a separate species of manatee and has given it the name Trichechus bernhardi, but others have suggested that this peculiarly small manatee is actually an immature Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis). Both animals are very closely related and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comparisons have failed to reveal any difference between the two.

According to van Roosmalen’s scientific description of the dwarf manatee, it lives in one of the tributaries of Rio Aripuanã where it inhabits shallow, fast running water. This distinguishes it from the Amazonian manatee which is known to prefer deep and slow moving waters and is found throughout a much larger part of South America. There is also a difference in diet; both animals feed on aquatic plants but on different species. In addition to this, there is a significant disparity in both proportions and colour. The dwarf manatee weighs about 60 kg as an adult and has a dark, almost black, body adorned with a white patch on the abdomen. The Amazonian manatee is much larger than the Dwarf manatee and can weigh over 500 kg. This difference has been used by both sides; those who believe that it is a separate species and those who believe it to be an immature Amazonian manatee.

Regardless of whether this is truly is new species or merely an immature version of the Amazonian manatee, I certainly agree with Christopher Collinson’s comments on the Tetrapod Zoology blog: “On a side note, why the heck are those dwarf manatees so friggen adorable? They have way more cutesy factor than any one animal should be allowed to posess, its at least like a million times more than regular old plain Jane manatees.”

Picture courtesy of: Marc van Roosmalen