The mysterious new monkey in the wild
If a monkey croaks in a forest, with no humans to hear it, does it even exist? Five million years ago, the recently classified Colobus congoensis split from the common ancestor of its closest simian relative. It was only in 2008 that researchers captured blurry photos of the reclusive, yellow-lipped monkey that makes a croaking sound at the Lomami National Park in Congo. People from the Balanga ethnic group call the animal — roughly the same size as a rhesus monkey — Likweli, and after years of study and genetic testing, it has now been classified as a new species. Its population, habits and social life will likely occupy zoologists for years to come. The question, though, is whether the Likweli monkey was better off “undiscovered”. There is, of course, a chance that the classification of the new species will help conserve it, that knowing it’s there may prevent hunting and habitat destruction. Human beings, though, don’t have the best record in this regard. Since the age of European colonial expansion, indigenous populations of entire continents have been all but wiped out by the excesses of “discovery”. Animals, once classified, enter the language of the creatures that have destroyed so many of them: They will be “conserved” till, perhaps, some rare mineral or the strategic imperative of a nation-state — far younger than the five-million-year life of the Likweli as a species — makes them part of a utilitarian calculus in which they are simply a variable on a ledger. Meanwhile, let’s hope the mysterious new cousin in the simian family croaks away without interruption or interference from its dominating relative.
- 1Species classification of this kind intersects with the Democratic Republic of Congo's domestic environmental governance and its status as a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, which obligates member states to conserve newly identified biodiversity within protected areas like Lomami National Park. India's own analogous framework, the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, illustrates how legal classification of a species as endangered can trigger Schedule-based protections, a comparative angle CLAT examiners often draw between international conservation law and Indian statutes.
- 2The Congo Basin, home to Lomami National Park, is the world's second-largest rainforest after the Amazon and has become a geopolitical flashpoint due to competition over cobalt, coltan, and other strategic minerals essential for electric vehicle batteries and electronics manufacturing. This resource competition, involving China, the United States, and regional powers, is precisely the kind of 'utilitarian calculus' the editorial warns could override conservation priorities once a habitat is mapped and its resources understood.
- 3Internationally, species like the Likweli monkey would likely fall under the ambit of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, 1973, which regulates cross-border trade in specimens once IUCN Red List assessments are completed. The IUCN's own classification process, distinct from taxonomic classification described in the editorial, determines conservation status categories such as Vulnerable or Endangered, a distinction often tested in legal-reasoning passages about environmental regulation.
- 4Taxonomically, the five-million-year divergence estimate places Colobus congoensis within the broader colobine monkey lineage, a group that includes roughly ten recognised Colobus species across Africa, most already facing habitat pressure from deforestation rates in the Congo Basin estimated at over one million hectares annually in recent years. This scale of habitat loss is the empirical backdrop against which the editorial's caution about 'discovery' followed by exploitation should be read.