I can’t believe it is Friday already! To show my appreciation I decided to complete a fact on an animal that is much cuter than the naked mole rat. Although, I guess any animal I wrote about today would be cuter than the mole rat.

So what is an emperor tamarin? Well this little mustache guy is a primate that lives in the southwest Amazon Basin.  They weigh about 400 grams (14 oz) and mostly feed on insects, seeds and fruit. The emperor tamarin lives in families of about 3 to 8 individuals.  They will actually team up with another type of tamarin called the saddlebacks.  What is the purpose of this? Maybe they just like having a diverse family? Actually, this mixed troop of tamarins is a survival technique.  The emperor tamarins are able to detect predators from the sky while the saddlebacks are better at noticing the land predators.  So mixing the two types together seems like a pretty good idea, doesn’t it? Usually, these two type of tamarins will get along without any problems but it is clear that the emperor tamarins are dominant.  My guess is they are dominant because of the wicked mustache!

An interesting thing about the emperor tamarin is the fact that two-thirds of the female population have the ability to see three different colours.  This allows these females to pick out the ripe fruit. The other one-third of the females and all the males can only see two colours.  This gives this portion of the population an advantage to spotting camoflaged predators. Once again, you have a pretty good, well rounded, family when you mix the two together. It is obvious to see that living in a group is a main survival technique for the emperor tamarin.

Before I go I want to give proper credit to the photographer of the Emperor Tamarin in today’s post.  I came across it on Flickr by a person called Ghazghul and I highly recommend checking out some of their photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghazghul/223052047/.

Well that is the week of Wild Facts!  Have a great weekend! I am off to get my very first Christmas Tree tomorrow so wish me luck!