Researchers surveying forested mountains in south-central Vietnam have located a new subpopulation of gray-shanked douc langurs, a critically endangered monkey species. The discovery is a sign that more groups of the rare primate may still be found in unexplored forest areas, the team write in a recently published paper in the journal Oryx. Fewer than 2,400 gray-shanked douc langurs (Pygathrix cinerea) are thought to remain in the wild, dispersed across six provinces in Vietnam’s central highlands. They typically live in dense canopy in upland forests, which limits their ability to disperse and makes population counts tricky. Although there have been some informal sightings of the species in eastern Cambodia, there’s little evidence of stable populations outside Vietnam. Deforestation and hunting for meat, the pet trade and body parts that are used in traditional medicine have slashed their numbers by 80% over the past three decades, according to their most recent assessment report for the IUCN Red List, published in 2020. Conservationists are particularly concerned that more than half of their population inhabits fragmented patches of forest outside of protected areas, where pressures on their numbers are intense and sightings are dwindling. The new subpopulation was sighted in a 17-hectare (42-acre) area of Quang Nam province called Khe Lim Forest. It came as a surprise for the team comprising researchers from the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), the GreenViet Biodiversity Conservation Centre and local guides, who were initially completing a botanical survey when they chanced upon the group of monkeys in trees…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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