 The
Moor Macaque - Issue
Thirty-Five |
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Get
To Know
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Collector by Ken Poyner
After years of impersonating a Systems Engineer, Ken has
retired to watch his wife of forty-one years continue to break both Masters
and Open world raw powerlifting records. Ken’s two current poetry and
two short fiction collections are available from Barking Moose Press,
Amazon, and Sundial Books in Chincoteague, where Ken and Karen go to escape
irreality.
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The Moor Macaque is endemic to the tropical rainforests and
grasslands of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Their diet consists
of they eat figs, bamboo seeds, buds, sprouts, invertebrates and
cereals. They have brown to black body fur with a pale rump patch
and pink bare skin on the rump and are about 55 centimetres in height.
They are sometimes called a "dog-ape" because of their dog-like
muzzle, although they are no more closely related to apes than any
other Old World monkey. Adult male moor macaques do not interact
frequently, although the interactions that occur frequently involve
affiliation rather than aggression, with greetings being the most
common form of interaction. The greetings enable males to show their
willingness to invest in the relationship, and may represent one
way for adult males to ease social tension and build social bonds.
The moor macaque is threatened mostly due to habitat loss from an
expanding human population and deforestation to increase agricultural
land area. The population is estimated to have decreased from 56,000
to under 10,000 from 1983 to 1994. In 1992, Supriatna et al. conducted
an extensive survey and found only 3,000-5,000 individuals of the
species. The survey estimated densities to be 25-50 individuals
per kilometre. Several Sulawesi macaque species are endangered,
and information on their ecology and behaviour is desperate needed
if conservation plans are to be effective.