Red-shanked doucs are adept communicators, growling with a fixed stare when they’re threatened, or squealing harshly and slapping tree branches when they’re in distress or startled.
By Alex Fox
With maroon stockings, white sleeves, a heathered gray vest and an orange mask fringed by a wispy white beard, red-shanked doucs look dressed for a swanky party. These spectacular primates live in the treetops of forests in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where there have been a small number of sightings.
The douc’s leafy diet means that its digestive system must process a prodigious amount of fiber. To turn foliage into energy, the primate has a four-chambered stomach, like a cow, and relies on gut bacteria to break down the roughage through fermentation. This digestive machinery takes up a lot of room, giving the animals a potbelly. Andie Ang, a primate researcher for Singapore-based conservation nonprofit Mandai Nature, said that when she first saw a red-shanked douc in the wild she wondered if it was pregnant. “I was told, ‘Oh, no, that’s a male.’”
Unfortunately, these colorful primates are in trouble, as development and logging, mining and agriculture have destroyed or fragmented their forest habitats. The critically endangered monkeys are also hunted for meat and for use in traditional medicine, and are sometimes captured for the international pet trade. Researchers now estimate the species’ population declined by more than 80 percent in a 36-year period from 1979 to 2015.
A model for saving the species can be found in Vietnam’s Son Tra Peninsula, just a few miles from the city of Da Nang, with a population of 1.3 million people. Son Tra, also called “Monkey Mountain,” is a forested nature reserve of more than 6,000 acres that is home to a large population of red-shanked doucs once thought vanished. When Ha Thang Long co-founded the Vietnamese conservation organization GreenViet in 2012, few people in Da Nang knew about their stunning primate neighbors. Since 2013, GreenViet has put up nearly 200 posters with photographs and information about red-shanked doucs and started leading wildlife tours inside Son Tra. The campaign has grown to include school presentations and wildlife photography exhibitions.
This heightened awareness became important in 2017, when the Vietnamese government announced plans to build luxury hotels in Son Tra, threatening the douc’s habitat. GreenViet collected some 13,000 signatures opposing the plan, which, along with efforts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Vietnam’s Southern Institute of Ecology, helped persuade the government to suspend it. As pride in this monkey has increased, Son Tra’s red-shanked douc numbers have grown from roughly 350 individuals in 2012 to an estimated 2,000 today. “Seeing the beauty of the red-shanked doucs connects people to nature,” Ha says. “I hope more people see that animals deserve to live on this planet just like humans do.”