GUWAHATI: Possibly the largest troop of the vulnerable Rhesus Monkey species, the wild stump-tailed Macaca arctoides, has been spotted at the Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in Jorhat, Assam, said a study conducted by 13 researchers, published in a science journal on Friday. The study team found a total of 194 individuals in the 20.98 sqkm sanctuary.
“On December 22, 2016, we encountered a troop of stump-tailed macaques at the boundary of compartments 3 and 4 of the sanctuary. We counted the individuals but could not assign all of them to any particular age-sex class. We, however, recorded a video of the troop and were then able to assign all individuals to different age-sex categories with the help of this recording. We counted a total of 194 individuals, with their age-sex composition,” said Narayan Sharma, assistant professor, Cotton University, and one of the authors of the study.
The percentage of identified adult males, adult females as well as sub-adults, juveniles and infants of both sexes comprised approximately 24%, 23%, 12%, 24% and 13% of the troop respectively. The sex of 21 adult individuals, however, remained unidentified. He said very large and stable, socially coherent primate groups, not including fission-fusion societies, are usually rare in nature, owing to constraints imposed by various ecological and social factors. Moreover, unlike species in open habitats, those in forests tend to have smaller groups, and this becomes further accentuated in small and fragmented forest patches, Sharma added.
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The Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary is a small and isolated lowland tropical rainforest patch in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley.
This is possibly the largest wild group of the species recorded anywhere across its distribution range, said Sharma, who is with the department of Environmental Biology and Wildlife Sciences, CU.
“We conclude this note by highlighting the vital importance of conducting long-term studies on the structure and dynamics of this last remnant stump-tailed macaque population, including the monitoring of the study troop,” he said.
