A list of the world’s most threatened primates has been drawn up by researchers desperate to highlight the plight of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. Produced by 85 experts, the list shows how precarious the grip of some of these animals on survival really is.
“This report makes for very alarming reading and it underlines the extent of the danger facing many of the world’s primates,” says Schwitzer, advisor to the IUCN primate specialist group.
Madagascar, Vietnam and Indonesia stand out in the ‘primates in peril’ list, with five, five and four threatened species respectively. There are six new entries on the list: two Madagascan lemurs, an African colobus, a tamarin from South America, and a slow loris and a gibbon from Asia.
The figure getting many of the headlines today is actually from the 2008 IUCN ‘Red List’ of threatened species. It bears repeating though: of 634 primates assessed by IUCN researchers, 47.8% are classified as threatened.
“Support and action to help save these species is vital if we are to avoid losing these wonderful animals forever,” says Christoph Schwitzer, who is also head of research at the Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation.
Conserving these critters isn’t easy though. One crucial problem is destruction of their habitat. A study published at the end of 2009 in the American Journal of Primatology showed how even relatively large fragments of forest may not be enough to conserve species richness.
Andrew Marshall, of the University of York, and his colleagues found that the relationship between increasing forest fragment area and increasing number of species doesn’t seem to hold in forest fragments below 12–40 sq km. Below 40, external factors such as human activity come into play, they found in their analysis of monkeys in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains (press release, paper).
Their paper also suggests conservation managers should attempt to grow small forests to at least 150 sq km to ensure a species rich area.
“This study suggests that while small forest fragments need protecting we should intervene at an earlier stage to protect larger forest areas that are under threat,” says Marshall.
Image top: Siau Island tarsier (Tarsius tumpara) / © Geoff Deehan
Image lower: Cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) / © CI/photo by Haroldo Castro