Secretive and colorful dryas monkey isn’t as rare as once thought

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• In 2014, biologists discovered a population of critically endangered dryas monkeys (Cercopithecus dryas) living 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of their only known range in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Multi-level camera traps revealed that these stealthy monkeys are more common — and a lot weirder — than previously thought. They digest young leaves, snuggle up in impenetrable vine thickets, and sometimes boast an outrageous blue behind.

• In 2019, the IUCN downgraded their conservation status to endangered, and scientists are predicting a potentially positive future for the dryas.

On a July day in 2014, biologists Henri Silegowa and Jean Pierre Kapale were buying rice in Bafundo, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when they noticed a dead monkey about to be cooked as bushmeat. In seven years of surveying the region’s primates, neither they nor their colleagues at the Lukuru Foundation’s TL2 Project had laid eyes on a monkey like this.

“We were inside the fenced compound of a local woman, buying rice for our patrol teams, when I saw this tiny monkey hanging off the side of the kitchen. I’d never seen anything like it, and the woman said she did not know its name,” Silegowa recalls.

The specimen was a small female, the size of a housecat. Her black face was cushioned in lushrusset fur and haloed by a white diadem. She had a pale blue rump. The hunter, when Silegowa tracked him down, called the monkey inoko. He’d traded the carcass for a few measures of rice.

John Hart, scientific director of the TL2 Project, described her as “beautiful,” a “miniscule little animal.”

Secretive and colorful dryas monkey isn’t as rare as once thought