Moor macaque

Appearance

The Moor macaque is a macaque species with brown/black body fur with a pale rump patch and pink bare skin on the rump.

It is about 50–58.5 cm long, and eats figs, bamboo seeds, buds, sprouts, invertebrates and cereals in tropical rainforests.

Range and habitat

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi hosts 7 species of macaques with one of them being the Moor macaque. Unfortunately, the Moor macaque is endemic to the island and is considered to be endangered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Moor macaques have significant ecological flexibility that enables them to use several forest strata, among them secondary habitats.

It is endemic to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, that is an important biodiversity hotspot. Even in areas that are under local protection, deforestation is still observed in many forests of the southern parts of the Sulawesi Island, thus conservation of the population of Moor macaques should be a priority since its population is declining at a high rate.

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

Diet

This has an important purpose, it avoids inbreeding and broadens the genetic pool of the groups. The results also show that Moor macaques tend to spend more time foraging as the group size increases as they spend less time in alertness.

This is crucial for sustaining forest regeneration and restoring vegetation in degraded forests.

In crisis

The Moor macaque is threatened mostly due to habitat loss from an expanding human population and deforestation to increase agricultural land area. The Moor macaque population is estimated to have decreased from 56,000 in 1983 to under 10,000 in 1994. In 1992, Supriatna et al. 1992 conducted an extensive survey and found 6.3–63.2 individuals/km2.

The population of this species is highly endangered due to serious anthropogenic activities like agriculture and tourism, that contribute to its habitat loss. Like many other frugivorous primates, Moor macaques have made significant contributions to the environment, helping to support high densities of seedlings and saplings as well as the process of gene flow among plant populations.

Moor 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 Moor macaque, Wikidata item Q913762. 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.