A new Photo Ark video is giving viewers an unusually intimate look at the endangered Gee's golden langur.
Filmed at Assam State Zoo, the post puts a hard-to-spot animal at the center of a striking close-up.
Here's what to know
On Aug. 13, National Geographic Photo Ark photographer Joel Sartore shared the video portrait on Instagram. According to Sartore's post, Gee's golden langurs are both "very rare and highly secretive."
Its diet includes leaf buds, fruits, flowers, seeds, and twigs, and, like other Colobinae monkeys, it has a stomach adapted to digest cellulose. They are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, with just 6,000 to 6,500 mature langurs in the wild, and their numbers continue to decline due to population fragmentation and deforestation that impacts their habitat.
More background
The tendency to avoid people can make field observation more difficult for photographers, researchers, and conservationists than for more adaptable primates.
Recording the animal at Assam State Zoo allowed Sartore to capture a primate that is otherwise difficult to observe.
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What's being done?
Projects like Photo Ark are part of a broader effort to document animals before they become even harder to find. By creating high-quality images and videos of threatened species, photographers and conservation communicators can build public interest that supports research, education, and habitat protection.
Zoos and wildlife institutions can also play an important role by responsibly caring for rare animals and helping visitors learn about them. For species that are secretive in the wild, those settings may offer one of the few opportunities people have to see them up close.
As Sartore wrote, "researchers have said that this monkey works hard to avoid human interactions, making them extremely difficult to observe in the wild."
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