Primates in Peril

Tana River Red Colobus
Piliocolobus rufomitratus (Peters, 1879)
Kenya
(2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014)
Thomas M. Butynski & Olivier Hamerlynck
Tana River red colobus (Piliocolobus rufomitratus)
(Illustration: Stephen D. Nash)
On the current IUCN Red List, the Tana River red
colobus is presented as one of four assessed subspecies
of Procolobus rufomitratus (i.e., as P. r. rufomitratus).
The other three are Oustalet’s red colobus Procolobus r.
oustaleti (Trouessart, 1906), ashy red colobus Procolobus
r. tephrosceles (Elliot, 1907), and Tshuapa red colobus
Procolobus r. tholloni (Milne-Edwards, 1886). Here,
however, we follow Groves (2001, 2005, 2007) and
Groves and Ting (2013) in placing all red colobus in the
genus Piliocolobus, and rufomitratus and the other three
subspecies mentioned above as full species.
Gallery forests along the Lower Tana River, Kenya, are
part of the East African Coastal Forests Biodiversity
Hotspot. The Lower Tana River forests and some forest
patches in the Tana Delta are the only habitat for two
endemic primates; the Tana River red colobus and the
Tana River mangabey, Cercocebus galeritus Peters, 1879.
Piliocolobus rufomitratus is classified as ‘Endangered’
on the current IUCN Red List (Butynski et al. 2008a).
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Cercocebus galeritus is also classified as ‘Endangered’
(Butynski et al. 2008b).
Both the Tana River red colobus and the Tana River
mangabey inhabit forest fragments (size range about
1–500 ha) along a 60-km stretch of the Lower Tana
River (Butynski and Mwangi 1995; Mbora and Meikle
2004). In 2009, small populations of both species were
discovered in the Tana Delta (Hamerlynck et al. 2012).
The area of occurrence of the red colobus is