‘Snow-white’ monkeys of Sri Lanka draw in tourists

For a small village near the Sinharaja Forest Reserve in Sri Lanka, “snow-white monkeys” have become a major tourist attraction, reports contributor Malaka Rodrigo for Mongabay.

These white monkeys are a color variant of the endangered purple-faced langur (Semnopithecus vetulus), also known as the purple-faced leaf monkey, found only in Sri Lanka.

Purple-faced langurs typically have black coats and purplish-black faces with white sideburns, but some individuals around the village of Lankagama near the Sinharaja forest have completely or partially white coats.

The white color is a case of leucism rather than albinism, Rodrigo reports. In albino animals, a mutation in a gene prevents the individual from producing melanin, a pigment that mainly produces brown and black colors. Albinism doesn’t affect other pigments like carotenoids (or red-orange pigments). Leucism, on the other hand, involves a partial loss of all pigments..…| read more on Mongabay