Proboscis monkey

Where does the proboscis monkey live?

Home: Mangroves and riverside rainforest on the island of Borneo.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei.

Conservation status from the IUCN: endangered.

The short profile

Fully grown: males about 75 cm long, plus a tail of the same length. It weighs about 15 kilograms. On the menu: plants.

The story behind it

The huge nose works like a loudspeaker: it makes the male's honking call deeper and louder, and females seem to prefer the noisiest partners. Males also grow a round belly, because their stomach has several chambers full of bacteria that break down tough mangrove leaves. Proboscis monkeys live in groups of about ten along the water, and towards evening they gather in trees above the river, where an enemy is easier to spot than in the dark forest. They are the only monkeys with partly webbed toes, and they swim well, sometimes crossing a river underwater or jumping in from a high branch with a loud splash. Their forests are being cleared for palm oil and timber, their numbers have more than halved in about forty years, and the species counts as endangered.

Find it on the globe

Proboscis monkey is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.