Party in the park
Feeding the coatis has led to a troublesome population explosion in one Brazilian city
IT’S A SUNNY SUNDAY in Mangabeiras Municipal Park, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In spite of the pandemic, the park is crowded, and for good reason Typical lowland Chocό rainforest in a downpour – wet! – it is one of the largest urban parks in Latin America and a valuable green lung for the city’s residents. Children run around the Praça das Águas ( Waters Square) with balloons and candyfloss, while their parents rest and cool down with ice creams.
Strolling up to the Ilhas do Passatempo (Pastime Islands) – apleasant picnic area in the woods – Ispy a different kind of movement. A long tail, striped yellow and black, emerges from a rubbish bin. Seconds later, I spot another tail, followed by a long snout and a charismatic little face resembling a cross between a fox and a raccoon. There’s a black mask over the snout and white dots around the eyes. The ears are short and rounded; the limbs are stocky with strong claws. These are ringtailed coatis, a medium-sized carnivore related to raccoons and kinkajous.
Before I know it, several dozen of them have surrounded me and the visitors enjoying their Sunday treats. They move fast, jumping between bins in search of food scraps, and the bolder ones even invade a picnic that has been left unattended, making off with a bag of bread and cheese. By the time their victims realise, the coatis are already in the trees, sharing the loot.
I don’t escape, either. As I turn to photograph the action, a sneaky individual seizes my lunch – a sandwich inside a bag – and runs to the safety of the forest. I’ve been mugged by coatis!
In the wild, ring-tailed Coatis omnivorous and eat almost anything they find: fruits, seeds, insects, worms, molluscs, spiders and even vertebrates such as birds, frogs, lizards and small mammals. But locating these items in the wild takes time and energy, with the resulting morsels inevitably smaller than a chocolate bar or packet of crisps. In the presence of humans, energy-rich, abundant food is easier and faster to find. McDonalds and Coca-Cola were never on the coatis’ natural menu, yet we have got them hooked on junk food.
I must admit, it’s hard to resist their pleading looks. But it’s a trap – atrap that the community of Mangabeiras Park has fallen into. The plentiful food here has enabled the local coatis to multiply and become more daring, venturing out of the park and into adjacent areas of the city.
At the height of the pandemic, with people spending considerably less time at the park, the coatis started to approach houses, returning to those whose owners offered a titbit or two. They quickly turned from visitors to burglars, scaling walls with unparalleled cunning, jumping in and out of windows and making away with the weekly shop in a matter of seconds. They even started to turn up in hospitals, police stations and offices.
There are obvious problems brought by the newly confident coatis. Fights break out with stray dogs, increasing the spread of disease, and more coatis on the street means more are hit by cars. And occasionally, there are bites to people who get too close: these are wild animals, after all.
Elenice Antunes runs a catering van in the surroundings of Mangabeiras Park. She recieves daily visits from the coatis, who break into her van and generally cause bedlam, tearing up packets of food and knocking utensils over. “I have to lock the rubbish bin inside my car, and as soon as I see the animals coming, I close everything up,” she says. Other traders are having similar experiences, and according to Elenice, the lack of regular rubbish collections is making the problem worse.
Marcos Antônio Alves dos Santos, who has been park caretaker for 40 years, has spent many a morning watching the coatis’ movements. They pass methodically through the park’s main and secondary entrances in the early morning and late afternoon, always in large groups, rummaging through bins and making a mess as they follow their regular feeding routes. When they find a new, easy larder – whether at a picnic area, in a house or in a rubbish bin, they add the location to their itinerary. Great care needs to be taken with food waste to avoid trouble.
But few people have spent as much time observing and recording the coatis as biologist Nadja Simbera, who manages environmental education in the city’s parks, and who I join as she goes about her daily tasks on site. “In the beginning, people thought I wouldn’t be able to do this job, as I’m a woman,” she says. Yet she has since proved that she can hold her own in the wild, and she’s not alone. “Projeto Quatis (The Coatis Project) is essentially female, founded and managed by women,” Nadja says. The organisation was set up in 2007 to study coatis and forge a peaceful coexistence with humans. Men have, of course, contributed over the years, but the majority of the team – biologists, vets, geneticists, ecologists, parasitologists, interns and field assistants – are female, all breaking convention and pursuing careers in fieldwork and science. “We are very proud of what we’ve built here,” she adds.
After 15 years, Nadja continues to proudly sport her Projeto Quatis uniform. It’s almost as if part of her life history is here, tied to these animals that she loves so much.
I’m accompanying Nadja on some fieldwork, and today’s mission is to check the coati traps set the previous afternoon, as part of a study on local population dynamics. Nadja is using the mark-and-recapture method, which involves tagging the animals in order to estimate their numbers. Science is rarely that straightforward, though. “Occasionally the coatis rip out their tags,” she says. “You also have continual births and deaths to factor in, and individuals migrating to other areas. All these variables hamper our coati counts.”
But what makes population estimates so important? This takes us back to junk food. More food means more energy, which can be expended exploring new areas, seeking better roosts, building safer nests against predators, defending territories and, of course, breeding and caring for young. In nature, greater food resources almost always equates to a population increase.
Mangabeiras is a textbook case. Projeto Quatis data shows that the population density of ring-tailed coatis in the park – 30 individuals per square kilometre – is three times higher than the average of other, more natural areas in which the species occurs. Social groups are larger than normal and birth rates are higher. Mortality among pups is lower and the animals live longer.
Since the coatis breed every year, the long-term effect of this population explosion could be disastrous, particularly as the animals have no natural predators here, such as jaguars, pumas, caiman and wolves. Analysis of blood samples is also indicating lower genetic variability among the coatis in Mangabeiras Park. This means they are moving less and in-breeding, exchanging fewer genes with external populations. In other words, they’ve got a bit too comfortable.
Nadja visited this park as a child and doesn’t remember seeing many coatis. “They were rare and shy,” she recalls. But misguided management measures have taken their toll: in an attempt to keep the clan will defend a huge territory and travel up to 40km to hunt when prey is coatis inside the park, employees used to feed them in troughs. “Of course it didn’t work,” says Nadja. “They multiplied.”
The park sits on a former mining site. The abandoned works in the forest and the slopes of the open pit are now smothered in vegetation, but the landscape is still in a process of recovery that relies, in part, on the coatis. “Coatis do well in degraded areas – they’re used to environmental disturbances,” Nadja explains. The animals feed on fruits and defecate, dispersing the seeds – they’re gardeners of the forests. We need them to eat native fruits to keep the ecosystem healthy. When they’re stuffed with junk food, they can’t fulfill this role.”
A disturbed area in regeneration, the forest of Mangabeiras Park is dominated by lianas, dry branches and shrubs that grow among the older trees, giving a dense appearance. Nadja suspects that the high abundance of lianas can also favour the coatis, since they use these elevated, leafy tangles for nesting.
The coati crisis has snowballed over time. Increasing numbers of residents have started feeding the coatis, believing they don’t have enough food in the forest and mistaking opportunism for hunger. And more recently, tourists are offering food to bag an Instagram selfie. “People taking pictures of nature is great, but they are interfering in the animal’s behaviour,” says Nadja. “We need a healthier relationship between coatis, people and the environment.”
Unlike other expeditions I’ve been on, where traps often remain empty, those in Mangabeiras deliver. The first inspection of the day reveals a peaceful coati, lured by a piece of banana. Nadja and her team of vets take it to the procedure room at the park’s HQ, where they have set up a clinic with portable tables, syringes, scales, stethoscopes and all the other equipment needed to perform an examination. The animal is sedated, weighed, measured and has blood and other samples collected. It also receives a coloured, numbered ear-tag, a microchip and a GPS collar before being released. Before the day is out, five more coatis have undergone the same procedure.
Projeto Quatis has tagged more than 300 individuals to date, amassing a colossal amount of data. “We now have a detailed picture of the coatis’ behaviour, health and population dynamics. We are also able to follow their life history, from birth to death,” says Nadja.
As well as regular monitoring, the team undertook an awareness programme with the local community from 2011-2013. “Without working on people’s perception about the coatis and food, the problem of superpopulation and all its associated conflicts will never be solved,” Nadja says. “There is no conservation without people.”
Elenice is one person that has greatly benefitted from the programme, and understands the complexities of life alongside coatis. She now advises her customers not to feed the animals – and they are starting to listen. “When there is nobody offering food and there is no accrued rubbish, the flocks generally pass through and do not cause any problems,” she says. Instead, they head into the woods, looking for insects under the dead leaves, just as they should do.
Indeed, those who work in the park are now the project’s allies. They don’t just help to educate visitors, but also to monitor the coatis, passing on information such as group numbers, location, health status and ID. In turn, more and more people are joining in – it’s a cascade effect. “I hope that in the future we can lower the population density of these animals in Mangabeiras Park and with it, the problems,” says Nadja. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end for a series of problems that started decades ago.
Projeto Quatis is now moving towards the integrated analysis of all population data already collected, which will determine whether the ring-tailed coati population in Mangabeiras Park has reduced, if it has remained stable or, in the worst scenario, has increased. From this, the researchers will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their actions so far and plan their next steps.
There’s still a long way to go. New generations of visitors come to the park, residents move out and the coati populations renew. Attitudes change and so do the challenges. But Nadja’s work has left an undeniable legacy – and love – for these cheeky creatures.
Feeding animals
It’s rarely a recipe for success…
The problems caused by an artificial diet is by no means exclusive to coatis. There is a culture of feeding capuchin monkeys in many suburban parts of Brazil, which facilitates the transmission of disease and prevents the animals from fulfilling their important role as seed-dispersers.
Food provided by humans also affects seed dispersal by guans – large, tree-dwelling birds – as well as making them vulnerable to poachers and predators.
Canids, such as wild dogs, wolves and foxes, are also drawn to human food, increasing the spread of rabies.
Even caiman, which rarely associate with people, are attracted to the food waste thrown into the water by riverine communities, and to titbits offered by tourists, bringing with it serious risk of injury.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Augusto Gomes is a Brazilian biologist, nature photographer and filmmaker. See more of his work at augustogomes.myportfolio.com and find out more about the coati project at @projetoquatis.
AT A GLANCE
Coati fact file
WHAT ARE COATIS AND HOW MANY SPECIES EXIST?
Coatis are medium-sized carnivores from the Procyonidae family – the same family as raccoons. There are four species, all endemic to the Americas. The ring-tailed coati is the only one that occurs in Brazil.
WHAT HABITATS DO THEY OCCUR IN?
Forest – from rainforest to deciduous dry forest – and less frequently in grasslands and wetlands. They also occur in urban areas and on disturbed ground.
WHAT DO THEY EAT?
In the wild, ring-tailed coatis are omnivorous and eat almost everything they find, from fruit to frogs. They use their long, malleable snouts to sniff out and catch prey under the leaves, in tree bark or underground.
HOW ARE THEIR SOCIAL GROUPS CONSTRUCTED?
Coatis are social animals and may form large groups with more than 30 individuals, generally composed of females, cubs and a single dominant male. Peripheral males will try and breed with the females opportunistically.
WHEN DO COATIS BREED?
In the dry season (June to August), coatis build nests in the trees. In the breeding season, males fight for the females. Pups are born a few months after mating at the start of the rainy season, when there is high food availability.