A macaque of Taiwan’s forests. It is mainly arboreal but also searches for food on the ground.
It has a round head, flat face, small ears, cheek pouches and a thick, long tail. The back is gray-brown in winter and olive in summer; the underside is gray-white.
The Taiwanese macaque is the only nonhuman primate on Taiwan Island. A 2023 study assembled a draft genome of about 2.85 billion bases and assigned it to 21 chromosomes, using the related rhesus macaque genome as a reference for ordering sequence fragments.
The draft annotated 23,462 transcriptional origins, and comparisons with other macaques placed its divergence from a Chinese rhesus subspecies at about 1.8 million years ago. This reference gives researchers a way to compare Taiwan’s macaque with its mainland relatives.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The Taiwanese macaque genome draft provides a reference for comparing this island population with other macaques. Its approximately 2.85 billion bases were assigned to 21 chromosomes, providing genomic information for future comparisons of the island population.