Diademed sifaka

Appearance

It has a striking appearance that features a silky coat of brightly colored limbs that contrast with black, white, and gray shades on its torso, head, and tail. Russell Mittermeier, one of the contemporary authorities on lemurs, describes the diademed sifaka as "one of the most colorful and attractive of all the lemurs." The diademed sifaka is a diurnal, arboreal folivore that seasonally augments its diet with a variety of foods, among them seeds, fruit, and flowers.

Along with the indri, it is one of the two largest living lemurs, with an average weight of 6.5 kg (14 lb) and an average length of 105 cm (41 in), half of that is its tail.

Range and habitat

The diademed sifaka, or diademed simpona, is a critically endangered sifaka endemic to rainforests in eastern Madagascar. Every day a diademed sifaka patrols the boundaries of its home range with its fellows, depositing scent markings at contested trees along the way. The diademed sifaka has an abnormally slow life history for a folivorous primate of its size, as adults can live for up to 25 years in the wild, with sexual maturity typically occurring at five years of age.

The species is protected in the Mananara-Nord, Andasibe-Mantadia, and Zahamena National Parks, the Betampona, Ambatovaky, Mangerivola, and Marotandrano Reserves, and the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor. In 2007, 25 diademed sifakas that had been rescued from the Ambatovy mine were successfully reintroduced into the Analamazaotra Special Reserve by Edward E.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

It descends to the ground to eat soil, that plays a role in the detoxification of alkaloids and other harmful compounds in its gut. The diet of the diademed sifaka varies in composition and diversity throughout the year.

Males may copulate with breeding females multiple times during the brief estrus period. Female dominance and intrasexual competition may play a significant role in mate selection.

In crisis

The diademed sifaka is classified as critically endangered by the IUCN Red list and faces existential threats from habitat loss due to illegal logging and slash and burn agriculture. Poaching is another threat to the survival of the species, as many of the taboos that prohibit killing or eating other sifaka species in Malagasy culture do not apply to the diademed sifaka. Population recovery is made difficult by its slow reproductive rate, high infant mortality, and low population density, that increase its susceptibility to inbreeding depression.

Such attitudes are not uniformly applied to all sifaka species. A study in Alaotra-Mangoro found that less than 10% of surveyed individuals considered the diademed sifaka to be fady, and that 58% of those from rural communities had consumed its meat in their lifetimes. As of 2012, the wild population is about 6,000 individuals.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Diademed sifaka is Critically 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 Diademed sifaka, Wikidata item Q677608. 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.