Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) and southern pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) have emerged as important model organisms, especially for research on infectious diseases. While not quite as popular with scientists as their cousin, the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), both species provide unique insights into difficult-to-study viruses, including HIV and SARS-CoV-2. Unfortunately, in July the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated its Red List designations for both species, shifting them from “vulnerable” to “endangered” and putting them three steps away from the final stage of the organization’s seven-step scale, “extinct.” It’s a move that primate experts say is necessary to ensure the animals’ survival in their natural habitats scattered throughout Southeast Asia, but because the IUCN identifies export for the purposes of laboratory experimentation as one of the main threats facing the macaques, biomedical researchers worry that designating the species as endangered could stymie some types of science.

The new designations don’t trigger any immediate changes to primate research, notes University of Washington researcher Charlotte Hotchkiss, the associate director for animal resources at the Washington National Primate Research Center—an institute that conducts both biomedical and conservation-focused macaque research and also maintains a colony of macaques for their own and others’ research, at the behest of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “Right now, there is no impact, but we are very concerned for the future, and we are trying to figure out the best way to address this,” says Hotchkiss. “One thing I hope we can do is get the message out that we [primate researchers] are important.”

Lauren Gilhooly, a former anthropologist who studied the effects of ecotourism on wild macaque populations but has since left academia, says it’s past time that the plight of the animals receives the same attention as concerns over whether researchers will be able to do their experiments. “I understand the cost-benefit tradeoff [of] lab research with helping humans and treating disease, but we also have to think about the cost-benefit of using nature as a commodity to help humans,” she says