![]() ![]() Gestation lasts about seven-and-a-half months, after which the female will give birth to a single offspring. ![]() There’s no external sign of when these animals are in heat, and mating occurs year-round. Females usually solicit males, often by shaking their heads with open-mouthed grins or by retracting their lips and opening and closing their mouths, a gesture called “tooth chatter” or “click.” Males reach maturity at age five and females between six and eight years old. High-ranking males and females are groomed by those wishing to curry favor young females groom their mothers and juveniles both groom and play with each other. These monkeys will also occasionally eat insects like beetles, ants, and mantids.Īs with other primate species, grooming is an important form of socializing for woolly monkeys, strengthening social bonds as they keep each other healthy. Fruit-eaters as large as woolly monkeys are rare in this environment, and they’re able to drop seeds far from the parent trees-meaning the plants won’t have to compete for resources. ![]() Wooly monkeys primarily are fruit eaters, but they’ll also eat leaves, nectar, and flowers, helping spread seeds through the environment. Some individuals may split off to join other groups, while outsiders may join a home range group, a practice known as fission-fusion dynamics. Sometimes group territories overlap, though the monkeys won’t fight over it. These groups can spread out over several acres, and members keep in contact with each other through vocalizations. Woolly monkeys live in social groups averaging about 50 individuals and led by an alpha male. On the rare occasions when they descend to the ground, they usually walk on all fours, but occasionally they’ll also walk upright, balancing with their arms. Woolly monkeys spend most of their time high in the tree canopy. It also helps them be balanced, stable climbers. Woolly monkeys have long, strong prehensile tails with a thick pad on the end that helps these arboreal animals grip branches. They all have round heads that are darker than their bodies-and, in the case of the gray and yellow-tailed monkeys, they also have large, dark eyes and expressive faces. The gray woolly monkey has a coarse, short, gray coat, for example, while the Peruvian yellow-tailed woolly monkey has longer, softer fur the color of dark chocolate with a distinctive yellow stripe on the underside of its tail and white hairs around the mouth. ![]() The coloring of their coats is the main difference between woolly monkey species and subspecies. The gray, Columbian, and silvery woolly monkeys were reclassified as subspecies of the brown woolly monkey. More recent genetic studies suggest there are only two species-the Peruvian yellow-tailed and the common (or brown) woolly monkey. Woolly monkeys were once considered four species: the gray, Columbian, silvery, and Peruvian yellow-tailed woolly monkeys. But the thick coat of fur covering these large primates protects them from the sun, rain, and insect bites of their native habitats in the forests and cloud forests of Peru, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil. An animal called a woolly monkey seems like it should live in the frozen north, not the sweltering Amazon Basin. ![]()
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