General considerations

Size range and adaptive diversity

Members of the order Primates show a remarkable range of size and adaptive diversity. The smallest primate is Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae) of Madagascar, which weighs some 35 grams (one ounce); the most massive is certainly the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), whose weight may be more than 4,000 times as great, varying from 140 to 180 kg (about 300 to 400 pounds).

Primates occupy two major vegetational zones: tropical forest and woodland–grassland vegetational complexes. Each of these zones has produced in its resident primates the appropriate adaptations, but there is perhaps more diversity of bodily form among forest-living species than among savanna inhabitants. One of the explanations of this difference is that it is the precise pattern of locomotion rather than the simple matter of habitat that governs overt bodily adaptations. Within the forest there are a number of ways of moving about. An animal can live on the forest floor or in the canopy, for instance, and within the canopy it can move in three particular ways: (a) by leaping—a function principally dictated by the hind limbs; (b) by arm swinging (brachiation)—a function particularly of the forelimbs; (c) by quadrupedalism—a function equally divided between the forelimbs and the hind limbs. On the savanna, or in the woodland-savanna biome, which substantially demands adaptations for ground-living locomotion rather than those for tree-living, the possibilities are limited. If bipedal humans are discounted, there is a single pattern of ground-living locomotion, which is called quadrupedalism. Within this category there are at least two variations on the theme: (a) knuckle-walking quadrupedalism, and (b) digitigrade quadrupedalism. The former gait is characteristic of the African apes (chimpanzee and gorilla), and the latter of baboons and macaques, which walk on the flats of their fingers. After human beings, Old World monkeys of the subfamily Cercopithecinae are the most successful colonizers of nonarboreal habitats.

The structural adaptations of primates resulting from locomotor differences are considered in more detail in the section Locomotion, but they do not prove to be very extensive. Primates are a homogeneous group morphologically, and it is only in the realm of behaviour that differences between primate taxa are clearly discriminant. It can be said that the most successful primates (judged in terms of the usual criteria of population numbers and territorial spread) are those that have departed least from the ancestral pattern of structure but farthest from the ancestral pattern of behaviour. “Manners makyth man” is true in the widest sense of the word; in the same sense, manners delineate primate species.

Distribution and abundance

The nonhuman primates have a wide distribution throughout the tropical latitudes of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and South America. Within this tropical belt, which lies between latitudes 25° N and 30° S, they have a considerable vertical range. In Ethiopia the gelada (genus Theropithecus) is found living at elevations up to 5,000 metres (16,000 feet). Gorillas of the Virunga Mountains are known to travel across mountain passes at altitudes of more than 4,200 metres when traveling from one high valley to another. The howler monkeys of Venezuela (Alouatta seniculus) live at 2,500 metres in the Cordillera de Merida, and in northern Colombia the durukuli (genus Aotus) is found in the tropical montane forests of the Cordillera Central.

In habitat, primates are predominantly tropical, but few species of nonhuman primates extend their ranges well outside the tropics. The Barbary “ape” (Macaca sylvanus) lives in the temperate forests of the Atlas and other mountain ranges of Morocco and Algeria. Some populations of rhesus monkey (M. mulatta) extended until the middle of the 20th century to the latitude of Beijing in northern China, and the Tibetan macaque (M. thibetana) is found from the warm coastal ranges of Fujian (Fukien) province to the cold mountains of Sichuan (Szechwan). One of the most remarkable, however, is the Japanese macaque (M. fuscata), which in the north of Honshu lives in mountains that are snow-covered for eight months of the year; some populations have learned to make life more tolerable for themselves by spending most of the day in the hot springs that bubble out and form pools in volcanic areas. Finally, two western Chinese species of snub-nosed monkey, the golden (Rhinopithecus roxellana) and black (R. bieti), are confined to high altitudes (up to 3,000 metres in the case of the former and to 4,500 metres in the latter), where the temperature drops below 0 °C (32 °F) every night and often barely rises above it by day.

Although many primates are still plentiful in the wild, the numbers of many species are declining steeply. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), more than 70 percent of primates in Asia and roughly 40 percent of primates in South America, in mainland Africa, and on the island of Madagascar are listed as endangered. A number of species, particularly the orangutan, the gorilla, some of the Madagascan lemurs, and some South American species, are in serious danger of extinction unless their habitats can be preserved in perpetuity and human predation kept under control. The populations of several species number only in the hundreds, and in 2000 a subspecies of African red colobus monkey (Procolobus badius) became the first primate since 1800 to be declared extinct.

In the midst of these declines, the populations of some critically endangered primate species have increased. Concerted efforts to breed a type of marmoset, the golden lion marmoset (or golden lion tamarin; Leontopithecus rosalia), in captivity have been successful; reintroduction of that species into the wild continues in Brazil. The estimated number of western lowland gorillas (G. gorilla gorilla), a species thought to be critically endangered, increased when a population of more than 100,000 was discovered in 2008 in the swamps of the Lac Télé Community Reserve in the Republic of the Congo.