Ecuador ID: Woolly Monkey
Another puzzle from Ecuador: Woolly Monkey species are generally hard to ID by fur color, so people would go by range, but the separating line between Brown (L. lagotricha) and Silvery (L. poeppigii) is Rio Napo – so what do you do when you see a group of monkeys on an island in the middle of said river? To be precise, this particular island is near Panacocha, halfway between Coca and Nuevo Rocafuerte, it’s not any of the “Islas de los Monos” in the same river that a google search will normally show you. Our guide described these as Mono Chorongo, which is however a general name for Woolly Monkey as far as I was able to gather. He also described a touching story about the origin of the island population, but I did not really understand it as my Spanish is poor.
I know I promised the report after the Olingo problem, but then I found that this is also unclear, so I need to sort this out!
3 Comments
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JanEbr
Interestingly, the IUCN webpage does not agree with this decision – they clearly recognize all four taxa as species – https://www.iucnredlist.org/search?query=lagothrix&searchType=species
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Richard Webb
The Primate Specialist Group pages still show only two species which is interesting as most of the other changes were splits or new discoveries. Several of the other latest specialist group updates are also out of sync with the main list. The main IUCN Redlist often seems to lag behind the individual specialist groups taxonomy.
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RICHARD WEBB
The IUCN Primate Specialist Group lumped all the woolly monkeys other than Yellow-tailed as one species lagotricha in their September 2018 update. Although it would be interesting to know which form it is given the location I’m not sure you can really tell from the photos.