The bald uakari (Cacajao calvus) is a small, arboreal New World monkey native to a small, broken range in Brazil and Peru in seasonally flooded forests of the Amazon River Basin. They eat nuts and hard, unripe fruit that other primates are unable to access thanks to their powerful jaws. 67% of their diet consists of these seeds and nuts, followed by fruit and flowers, with occasional animal prey (5%). They are also known to take insects that they encounter, but they don’t actively seek them as a food source.
Their distinctive red faces are due to both a lack of pigmentation and the presence of many capillaries beneath the surface of the skin. Sickly uakaris are therefore dramatically more pale, signaling potential mates to what could be poor genetics. The breeding period is between October and May, and females attract males with scent that signals her readiness to mate.
The IUCN lists the bald uakari as Vulnerable due to habitat loss and hunting. Due to their specific habitat needs and limited range, deforestation is particularly damaging.
“Thank You” Background
From tonight’s Thanksgiving special. The episode’s background designers were ghostshrimp and Santino Lascano. The painters were Martin Ansolabehere, Sandra Calleros, and Ron Russell. Nick Jennings is the show’s art director.
Hipparchus’s sky catalog found
A famous statue carries the only surviving record of a star catalog lost for 2,000 years.The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, invented the stellar magnitude scale, discovered a nova, and made accurate planetary observations. He also compiled the world’s first star catalog, in 129 b.c. But the catalog vanished in antiquity, and Hipparchus’s only surviving work is his Commentary on the Phaenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus, which describes the celestial constellation figures in detail. (continue reading)
