Critically Endangered
Verreaux's sifaka
Propithecus verreauxi
Verreaux's sifaka, or the white sifaka, is a medium-sized primate in one of the lemur families, the Indriidae.
Appearance
Verreaux's sifaka, or the white sifaka, is a medium-sized primate in one of the lemur families, the Indriidae. Its fur is thick and silky and generally white with brown on the sides, top of the head, and on the arms. Its ventral area is relatively glabrous.
Range and habitat
Critically Endangered, it lives in Madagascar and can be found in a variety of habitats from rainforest to dry deciduous forests of western Madagascar and the spiny thickets of the south.
A long-term, large-scale demographic study of the species at Baza Mahafaly Special Reserve in southwest Madagascar found that the sifaka population there had a population growth rate of 0.98 (with confidence intervals spanning 1), suggesting that the population was not in danger of imminent extinction.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Verreaux's sifakas forage for food with their troop, primarily in the morning and late afternoon, so they can rest during the hottest part of the day. Even so, they are mostly folivorous (leaves represent the majority of the diet over the year, especially in the dry season) and they seem to choose food items based on quality (lower tannin content) rather than on availability.
Verreaux's sifakas are diurnal and arboreal. Around 45% of females breed each year when in oestrous between late January and early February.
In crisis
The species is listed in CITES Appendix I, and its IUCN conservation status was updated to Critically Endangered in 2020. Even so, both severe droughts and an increased annual variation in rainfall levels can depress the population growth rate.. An additional threat to the species is predation by invasive feral forest cats, that are known to predate upon both juveniles and adults.
Verreaux's 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 Verreaux's sifaka, Wikidata item Q913789. 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.
