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“The first time I saw the spider monkeys, I fell in love with them. I really liked how they moved, so grace. So I decided to study them, know more about them.” These were some of the words of the Biologist Andrés Link upon receiving the 2025 conservation Whitley Award, awarded by the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN), in the building of the Royal Geographic Society of London. He was the one who stopped there, but the recognition – he says now from the University of Los Andes, in Bogotá, where he works – is for all those who are part of the Primates Project Foundation, which he founded 20 years ago with his wife Gabriela de Luna, also a researcher.
Link was seduced by spider monkeys in the Amazon jungles. First in La Macarena, Colombia, as a undergraduate student and then at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, in the province of Orellana, Ecuador, where the doctorate did. “But we knew that in Magdalena Medio there were also other populations that also lived in transformed forests, under many threats,” he says. While in the Amazon a population of around 25 or 30 individuals can move in 400 hectares, in Magdalena they spotted two groups limited to 60 hectares.
Luna and Link arrived there, at the mountain range of the Quinchas, in 2005, to simply make a diagnosis: to know if spider monkeys survived (Hybridus Ateles) and track if they behaved differently or what changed when they lived in a forest that only remained in pieces. Because it was to walk that inclined and broken land in a task that implies going behind the mycos from 6 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon, they decided to go down to flat and flood areas on the side of the Magdalena River, in the municipality of Cimitarra. And, although the idea was just going to take some data, the same monkeys were pointing out more paths.
“In the group we are currently following, there are three that have leukism,” says the biologist, referring to an intermediate albinism in which the monkeys have white hair, but elsewhere, such as the eyes, they do have color. These conditions, he adds, tend to increase in populations in which individuals reproduce with each other, without mixing with other communities. “And for us it was as if they sent us the sign of ‘do something.” That? Allow its habitat, fragmented by deforestation, mining and livestock, to be wider.
The foundation built native species and planted them to create runners between forests that are still standing, so animals could move through a longer extension. To date, they have sown around 15 of these runners who, although in practice there are only about 30 hectares, what they do is connect several vegetation mosaics throughout 500 hectares.
The ecosystem recovery process is slow, performed, precisely, with the patience of people who are accustomed to staying for hours observing spider monkeys in temperatures that are above 30 ° C and surrounded by mosquitoes. “After three years of planting the first plants, in the corridors we began to see terrestrial species, such as Jaguares, Pumas and Paujiles,” says Link. At five or six, it was that they began to travel tree species, such as porcospines and spider monkeys.
The next plan, in which they are already working, is to sow trees that give the fruits and spaces in which the spider monkeys sleep. “One of the first things we notice when we arrive at Magdalena Medio, is that, unlike what happens in the Amazon, the monkeys do not eat so many fruits and yes many leaves, but it is because there is no availability of the first.”
Identified in danger
Link remembers each of the individuals of the first two groups he observed in Magdalena Medio. Bachué, Pepa and Violeta, the females, which are now “grandmothers.” Roco, Wampi and Commandai are some of the males. Says their memory names. When Luna and he arrived in the area, it was believed that these spider monkeys were the same species that inhabits the Amazon, but in the course of their work, another group of scientists published a genetic study clarifying that these are two different species. The mission to conserve them became even more relevant. “Before it was believed that, if those of Magdalena were lost, at least those of the Amazon remained,” he clarifies. But, now, knowing that they are two different, if the former disappear, a whole species will be lost. The Magdalena or Choibo Marimonda, as they also call it in the region, is classified as critical danger of extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Preventing it from being lost, not only goes through creating runners, but also involving the community. For 13 years, in March, Caserío Bocas de Carare, in Puerto Parra, Santander, does the Choibo Festival. People meet in honor of the monkey, a troupe walks through the town, the children put masks that allude to the animal and even play a soccer tournament, the Choibo Cup.
People have learned about spider monkeys. They know, for example, that males and females are the same size, and weigh about 10 kilos. Also that when eating seeds and getting almost whole in their feces, they are like a kind of forest gardeners who disperse them. “There is something that is very beautiful and that I usually think: that the ancestors of these monkeys were the ones that plant the forests in which they live today,” says the biologist. Of the spider monkeys, people have also learned. Among them there are friendship dynamics, cooperation to survive and distrust when they feel danger.
“We want to help local communities to make a living sustainably,” Link also said when he received the prize. Because, he clarifies now, it is a project that has been done to steps: with the biology students who do their thesis, with the people of the communities that have reinvented how to prepare the seeds so that they give better plants and, of course, with the monkeys that, already without putting resistance, have become accustomed to that around them there are a group of people spying on them, looking at them without touching them or intervening them, and thus they can know more about their lives.
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