11 hours ago by Brendan M. Lynch

It's not a monkey. It's not a lemur. It's not an African Bush Baby or even a Madagascan Mouse. Meet the Philippine tarsier: a tiny, adorable and downright "cool" primate from Southeast Asia.

"It's really not like any animals that Americans are familiar with," said Rafe Brown, curator-in-charge at the University of Kansas' Biodiversity Institute. "A tarsier has giant eyes and ears; an extremely cute, furry body; a long tail with a furry tuft at the end; and interesting expanded fingers and toe tips that look a bit like the disks on the digits of tree frogs."

Brown said the tarsier (tar-SEER) has become the "flagship" iconic species for promoting environmental stewardship and ecotourism in the Philippines, a nation suffering from large-scale destruction of natural habitat.

"They're threatened with habitat loss due to development, mining and deforestation from the timber industry," Brown said. "On Bohol, where they are a big part of the tourist economy, literally thousands of animals are taken out of the wild, essentially harassed by tourists, and die in captivity due to the stress and inability of their captors to feed them an appropriate diet of live small animals. Tarsiers must eat an enormous amount every night to fuel their high metabolism."

Because of threats to the tarsier, conservation efforts are mounting for the charismatic animal. But these have been thwarted by a lack of research: Too little has been known about the tarsier's taxonomic diversity; there have been too few field studies; and a scarcity of genetic samples and voucher specimens in biodiversity repositories has left advocates of the tarsier in the dark. In short, to save the tarsier, experts have needed to know much more about the species.

"Basically, we can not legally protect something if we do not know that it exists," Brown said.

Today, research by Brown and colleagues published by the journal PLOS ONE will shed new light on the animal's genetic diversity and distribution. Additionally, the KU researchers have verified the presence of a new variety of tarsier, one heretofore only suspected to existthe Dinagat-Caraga tarsier.

"Previously tarsiers were one species, divided into three named subspecies," Brown said. "Our data disagree with that subspecies arrangement and instead demonstrate that the Philippine tarsiers are divided into three genetic unitsbut these units are from different localities than the named taxa. So our data provide an objective way to restructure conservation efforts and point the resources where they need to go, in order to really have an effective impact on preserving genetic diversity in the group."

Brown's student Anthony Barley performed genetic sequencing of the tarsiers' mitochondrial DNA at KU, while fellow student Karen Olsen characterized the nuclear microsatellite loci variation of the animals.

See the original post:
Philippine tarsier gets boost from Kansas research, and genetic proof of a new variety

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