Help Save Golden Lion Tamarins and Other Wildlife

Wild places around the world are home to remarkable rare creatures like the golden lion tamarin. These playful, social primates are a favorite among zoo-goers, and that’s no coincidence — the effort of zoos worldwide to house captive tamarins is actually a vast, coordinated effort to rebuild the population after decades of habitat loss, overhunting, and disease in their native forests of Brazil.

Conservationists are hard at work protecting golden lion tamarins and other wildlife from extinction, and now you can help them from the comfort of your own home.

Grow Trees for Golden Lion Tamarins

Support efforts to create more golden lion tamarin habitat! Golden lion tamarin numbers in the wild are increasing, but to keep that positive momentum going, they will need bigger areas of connected forest. More habitat connectivity ensures that the little primates can roam freely across a wider area and access a greater range of potential mates. The Brazilian conservation organization Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado (AMLD) is hard at work planting trees to connect 25,000 hectares of forest for tamarins within the next two years.

Help plant trees for tamarins by following this link.

A golden lion tamarin clings to a branch, with other branches and leaves in the background.

Identify Animals, Help Conservationists

The Instant Wild app shows you live images and videos from habitats around the globe — providing a unique window into some of the world’s wildest places. By tagging the species you see in photos, you can help collect important data for nearly two dozen conservation projects.

Put your animal ID skills to the test at SciStarter.

April 8, 2024

Episode 20: One Golden Chance

In the past 40 years, golden lion tamarins became a symbol of conservation success when 150 zoos worldwide assisted a breeding and reintroduction program that brought their numbers in the wild from 200 to over 3700. Then, yellow fever jumped from humans to the primates and began to decimate their population—taking a third of the population in just two years.

March 15, 2024

Insurance Population

In conservation, an insurance population is a breeding group of endangered plants or animals kept in captivity to ensure that the species won’t go extinct, even if it disappears in the wild. Examples of insurance populations include the Panamanian golden frog and the golden lion tamarin of Brazil.

March 1, 2024

Help Protect Brazil’s Wild Spaces

Brazil is a trove of biodiversity — habitats like the Atlantic Rainforest, urban forests like Tijuca National Park, and more coastlines, rainforests, and rivers that are rich with endemic plants and wildlife.

An agouti holding a large agouti tree fruit.

March 4, 2024

Episode 18: Rewilding Rio

Smack-dab in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, stands the world’s largest urban rainforest…and it needs our help. To combat a century of deforestation and hunting, a team of researchers are repairing the forest’s forgotten web of life, one species at a time.