Endangered
Lion-tailed Macaque
Macaca silenus
The lion-tailed macaque, locally called wanderoo, is an Old World monkey endemic to the Western Ghats of South India.
Appearance
Lion-tailed macaques are covered in black fur, and have a striking gray or silver mane that surrounds the face in both sexes. The face itself is hairless and black in adults, but pinkish in infants less than a year old. The mane that surrounds its face gives this monkey its German name Bartaffe – "beard ape".
The size of their tail is about 25 cm (9.8 in) in length. With a head-body length of 42–61 cm (17–24 in) and a weight of 2–10 kg (4.4–22.0 lb), it ranks among the smaller macaques species.
Range and habitat
The lion-tailed macaque, locally called wanderoo, is an Old World monkey endemic to the Western Ghats of South India.
Other protected areas in Kerala include Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary, Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary, Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary, Periyar Tiger Reserve and its premises (Gavi and Konni), Eravikulam National Park, Pambadum Shola National Park, Parambikulam Tiger Reserve, Annaimalai Tiger Reserve, New Amarambalam Reserved Forest, Aralam Wildlife Sanctuary and Chimmony Wildlife Sanctuary and Wayanad region. The species is also prominently found in the Papanasam part of the Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve of Tirunelveli district, the Palani Hills Wildlife Sanctuary and National Park of Dindigul, the Anaimalai Tiger Reserve of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It is diurnal, meaning it is active exclusively in daylight hours. When active, they will spend half the day foraging, and the other half will be spent resting or finding new areas to forage.
While there is no specific breeding season, they tend to breed in the wet season, when resources are most abundant.
In crisis
While lion-tailed macaques are preyed on by snakes, raptors, and large carnivores, the impact of natural predators on population size does not compare to their largest threat. The largest threat to the lion-tailed macaque is habitat fragmentation due to large amounts of timber harvesting and exotic plantations, such as tea and coffee. Their second largest threat is from humans hunting and trapping them for meat, especially within areas that have primates as their preferred food.
The lion-tailed macaque ranks among the rarest and most threatened primates. From 1977 to 1980, public concern about the endangered status of lion-tailed macaque became the focal point of Save Silent Valley, India's fiercest environmental debate of the decade.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Lion-tailed Macaque 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 Lion-tailed Macaque, Wikidata item Q506518. 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.
