White-Face Macaque

The White-Faced Macaque (More commonly known as the Panamanian white-faced capuchin is a species of monkey found in the forests of Central America. It is known for its role in maintaining the rainforest ecosystem as it disperses seeds and pollen.

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Characteristics of the White-Faced Macaque

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin has mostly black fur, with white to yellow like fur on the neck, throat, chest, shoulders, and upper arms.

The face is pink or a white-cream color and may have identifying marks such as dark brows or dark fur patches. An area of black fur on the crown of the head is distinctive.

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin is similar to the Colombian white-faced capuchin in appearance, except that the female Panamanian white-faced capuchins have brownish or grayish elongated frontal tufts, which provide a contrast to the pure white cheeks and throat.

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Behaviour and Hunting Traits of the Snow Leopard

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin is a diurnal and arboreal animal. However, it does come down to the ground more often than many other New World monkeys.

It moves primarily by walking on all four limbs. It lives in troops, or groups, of up to 40 monkeys (mean 16, range 4–40) and has a male/female adult sex ratio of 0.71 on average (range 0.54–0.88). With rare exceptions, females spend their entire lives with their female kin.

Kinship is an important organizing factor in the structuring of female-female social relationships. Particularly in larger groups, females preferentially associate with, groom, and provide coalitionary support to their matrilineally related female kin. They do not exhibit a similar preference for their paternal half sisters, which may mean that they only are capable of recognizing kinship through the maternal line.

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin is an omnivore. Its primary foods are fruit and insects. It forages at all levels of the forest, including the ground. Methods for finding food include stripping bark off of trees, searching through leaf litter, breaking dead tree branches, rolling over rocks, and using stones as anvils to crack hard fruits.

Capuchins are considered among the most intelligent of the New World monkeys; they have been the subject of many studies on behaviour and intelligence. The capuchins’ intelligence is thought to be an adaptation to support their feeding habits; they rely on ephemeral food sources which may be hard to find.

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Conservation status of the White-Face Macaque

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin is regarded as vulnerable from a conservation standpoint by IUCN. It is threatened by deforestation, hunting for pet trade and sometimes for bushmeat and by the fact that farmers sometimes attack them as potential threats. However, deforestation may also impact its main predator, the harpy eagle, more than it directly impacts the Panamanian white-faced capuchin, and so on a net basis deforestation may not be as harmful to the capuchin’s status.

The Panamanian white-faced capuchin can adapt to forest fragmentation better than other species due to its ability to live in a wide variety of forest types and exploit a wide variety of food sources

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