|Scientific Name:||Mungos mungo|
|Species Authority:||(Gmelin, 1788)|
|Red List Category & Criteria:||Least Concern ver 3.1|
|Reviewer(s):||Duckworth, J.W. (Small Carnivore Red List Authority) and Hoffmann, M. (Global Mammal Assessment Team)|
Listed as Least Concern as the species has a wide distribution range, is generally common in suitable habitat, there are no major threats, and it is present in several protected areas.
|Range Description:||Distributed widely in sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal and Gambia to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, and south to about 31° in South Africa. Although fairly widespread in southern Africa, the species appears to be rare in West Africa, and it has not been recorded from several countries including Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Niger (Cant and Gilchrist in press). They apparently were introduced to Zanzibar (Pakenham 1984), although neither Stuart and Stuart (1998) nor Goldman and Winther-Hansen (2003) recorded them during camera-trapping surveys, suggesting they are either rare or absent. Recorded to 1,600 m in Ethiopia (Yalden et al. 1996).|
Native:Angola (Angola); Botswana; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Congo; Congo, The Democratic Republic of the; Côte d'Ivoire; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Gabon; Gambia; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Kenya; Malawi; Mali; Mozambique; Namibia; Nigeria; Rwanda; Senegal; Somalia; South Africa; South Sudan; Sudan; Swaziland; Tanzania, United Republic of; Uganda; Zambia; Zimbabwe
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
|Population:||Recorded densities vary widely between habitats and locations. On the Serengeti plains, Banded Mongooses live at a density of around 3 individuals/km² (Waser et al. 1995). By contrast, a population in Queen Elizabeth N.P., Uganda, lives at higher densities, averaging 18 individuals/km² (Cant 1998, Gilchrist and Otali 2002).|
|Habitat and Ecology:||Occurs in a wide range of habitats, but primarily found in savanna and woodland, usually close to water, and absent from desert, semi-desert and montane regions (Cant and Gilchrist in press). Often found in habitats containing termitaria, which are used as den sites. Diet includes a variety of invertebrate material (insects, snails), small reptiles, the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, and wild fruits (Cant and Gilchrist in press).|
|Major Threat(s):||There are no major threats to the species.|
|Conservation Actions:||Banded Mongooses are present in numerous protected areas across their wide range on the African continent.|
Cant, M. A. 1998. Communal breeding in banded mongooses and the theory of reproductive skew. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cambridge.
Cant, M. A. and Gilchrist, J. S. In press. Mungos mungo. In: J. S. Kingdon and M. Hoffmann (eds), The Mammals of Africa, Academic Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Gilchrist, J. S. and Otali, E. 2002. The effects of refuse-feeding on home-range use, group size, and intergroup encounters in the banded mongoose. Canadian Journal of Zoology 80: 1795-1802.
Goldman, H. V. and Winther-Hansen, J. 2003. First photographs of the Zanzibar servaline Genet Genetta servalina archeri and other endemic subspecies on the island of Unguja, Tanzania. Small Carnivore Conservation 29: 1-4.
Pakenham, R. H. W. 1984. The mammals of Zanzibar and Pemba islands. Printed Privately, Harpenden.
Stuart, C. and Stuart, T. 1998. A note on the herpestids and viverrids of south-eastern Unguja (Zanzibar) Island. Small Carnivore Conservation 18: 16-17.
Waser, P. M., Elliott, L. F., Creel, N. M. and Creel, S. R. 1995. Habitat variation and mongoose demography. In: A.R.E. Sinclair and P. Arcese (eds), Serengeti II: dynamics, management, and conservation of an ecosystem, pp. 421-447. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA.
|Citation:||Hoffmann, M. 2008. Mungos mungo. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2014.2. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 31 July 2014.|
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