An international team of scientists, including Yale researchers, has described a new Colobus monkey species inhabiting high forest canopies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is just the fifth new species of African monkey discovered in the past 75 years.
The species, Colobus congoensis, is a rare and cryptic monkey largely unknown even among people living within its range. But those who are familiar with the small, black monkeys — an arboreal creature marked by distinctive orange-cream patches around their mouths and noses — call them “Likweli,” which the researchers recommend remain the species’ common name.
The identification of Likweli as distinct from other Colobus monkey species is supported by evidence drawn from its physical traits, genetics, and vocalizations.
“Our team evaluated multiple datasets that all reached the same conclusion: Likweli is a distinct species of Colobus monkey we haven’t seen before,” said Julia Arenson, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Anthropology and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS) and coauthor of the study. “Discovering a primate species is exceptionally rare, especially from populations previously unknown to science.”
The documentation of the Likweli, she said, also highlights the importance of protecting the rich biodiversity of Lomami National Park, an 8,874-square-kilometer park known for its rare and endemic species.
In the past 75 years, only eight new ape and Old World monkey species from populations previously unknown to science have been discovered. Those include Lesula, a monkey species discovered in 2012 in the Congo Basin by a team that included several coauthors of the current study.
The latest discovery is described in an article published on July 15 in the journal PLOS One. For the study, Arenson and Eric Sargis, professor of anthropology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and director of YIBS, collaborated with researchers from the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation and Lomami National Park in DRC, Florida Atlantic University, and Hunter College of the City University of New York. All research was conducted under the authorization of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN), an agency of the DRC government.
For more information, click here for an article published by Yale News or here for the full study in Public Library of Science One.
