Endangered Mammals - Primates

The World Conservation Union (IUCN), in its 2003 Red List of Threatened Species, reported that the 295 examined species of primates (excluding humans) are among the most endangered mammals. Since the 1996 IUCN assessment, the number of "critically endangered" primates increased from thirteen to twenty species, and the number of "endangered" primates rose from twenty-nine to forty-seven. Another forty-seven primates are considered "vulnerable." Critically endangered primate species included the Roloway monkey (lowland tropical rainforest in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire), Mentawai macaque (Indonesia), Sclater's black lemur (lowland tropical rainforest, Madagascar), red-handed howling monkey (Brazil), and the black lion tamarin (lowland tropical rain-forest, Brazil), among others. Much of the increased endangerment of primate species is due to loss of habitat and hunting.

Brazil is home to the largest number of primate species—seventy-seven at present—followed by Indonesia (33), Democratic Republic of Congo (33), and Madagascar (30). Many of the most endangered primate species are found on Madagascar, which has a diverse and unique primate fauna. The majority of Madagascar's primate species are endemic—that is, they are found nowhere else on earth.

Habitat loss, especially the fragmentation and conversion of tropical forests for road building and agriculture, contributes to the decline of nearly 90 percent of all IUCN-listed primates. In Indonesia and Borneo, for example, home to most of the world's 20,000 to 30,000 orangutans (see Figure 7.10), deforestation has shrunk orangutan habitat by over 90 percent. A 2004 census suggested that the total orangutan population has halved in the last fifteen years. Logging and extensive burning have caused many orangutans to flee the forests for villages, where they have been killed or captured by humans.

Thirty-six percent of threatened primates also face pressures from excessive hunting and poaching. Today, almost all countries have either banned or strictly regulated the trade of primates, but these laws are often hard to enforce. Large numbers of primates are also used in medical research because of their close biological relationship with humans.

Not all relationships between primates and humans are exploitative. People in some regions protect primates from harm by according them sacred status or by making it taboo to hunt or eat them. One of the rarest African monkeys, the Sclater's guenon, survives in three areas of Nigeria in part because residents regard the animal as sacred.

Good news arrived in January 2004 when it was announced that the highly endangered mountain gorilla had experienced a population rebound, with numbers increasing 17 percent since 1989 in the Virunga forest of Rwanda, Uganda, and The Democratic Republic of Congo. Gorilla populations had plummeted in the 1960s and 1970s due to civil unrest, habitat destruction, and poaching. A total of 380 mountain gorillas were counted in the Virunga Forest, and an additional 320 were identified in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda.