Critically Endangered
Tana River red colobus
Piliocolobus rufomitratus
Tana River red colobus is an Old World monkey in the family Cercopithecidae (order Primates) — Piliocolobus rufomitratus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Range and habitat
The Tana River red colobus monkey gets its name from where it resides, along forests along the floodplain in the lower Tana River in eastern Kenya, the country's longest river. The river is roughly 1,000 km long. When the river is in a flood, the floodplain measures from one to six km in width, and about 60 to 100 m in width when not in a flood.
It was, together with the equally endangered Tana River mangabey, the main reason for the creation of the Tana River Primate Reserve in 1978, but human encroachment within this reserve continues. The Tana River red colobus has been under the watch of the Tana River Primate National Reserve (TRPNR).
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Colobus monkeys eat mostly leaves from a limited number of tree species. Sometimes they eat soil, clay and charcoal to help digest toxins and toxic leaves.
The dominance hierarchy typically determines that individuals are allowed to mate. Little is known about the reproductive cycle in the wild due to this species' constant migration.
In crisis
The Tana River red colobus had been considered one of The World's 25 Most Endangered Primates. With these as subspecies, P. Rufomitratus is considered to be of least concern in the 2008 IUCN Red List, while P. (r.) rufomitratus is considered endangered.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Tana River red colobus 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 Tana River red colobus, Wikidata item Q1194811. 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.
