Endangered
Central American squirrel monkey
Saimiri oerstedii
The Central American squirrel monkey, also known as the red-backed squirrel monkey, is a squirrel monkey species from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and Panama.
Appearance
The Central American squirrel monkey differs in coloration from South American squirrel monkeys. While South American squirrel monkeys tend to be primarily greenish in color, the Central American species has an orange back with olive shoulders, hips and tail, and white undersides. The face is white with black rims around the eyes and black around the nose and mouth.
Adults reach a length of between 266 and 291 millimetres (10+1⁄2 and 11+1⁄2 inches), excluding tail, and a weight between 600 and 950 grams (21 and 34 ounces).
Range and habitat
Its range covers Central Pacific Costa Rica in the north through western Panama. It lives in lowland forests and is restricted to secondary forests and primary forests that have been partially logged. It requires forests with abundant low and mid-level vegetation and has difficulty surviving in tall, mature, undisturbed forests that lack such vegetation.
Efforts are underway to preserve the species. There are significant efforts within Costa Rica to try to preserve this monkey from extinction.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Its diet includes insects and insect larvae (especially grasshoppers and caterpillars), spiders, fruit, leaves, bark, flowers, and nectar. It finds its food foraging through the lower and middle levels of the forest, typically between 4.5 and 9 metres (15 and 30 feet) high.
Two-thirds to three-quarters of each day is spent foraging for food. When it finds a bat it climbs to a higher level and jumps onto the tent from above, attempting to dislodge the bat. The breeding season for the Central American squirrel monkey is in September.
In crisis
In turn, it has a number of predators, among them raptors, cats and snakes. Sexually mature females leave the natal group, but males can remain with their natal group their entire life. The Central American squirrel monkey population declined precipitously after the 1970s.
This decline is believed to be caused by deforestation, hunting, and capture to be kept as pets. The population density has been estimated at 36 monkeys per square kilometer (93 per square mile) in Costa Rica and 130 monkeys per square kilometer (337 per square mile) in Panama.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Central American squirrel monkey is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Central American squirrel monkey, Wikidata item Q1150922. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
