Branches of primates near extinction

MANKIND’S closest relatives are teetering on the brink of their first extinctions in more than a century, hunted by humans for food and medicine and squeezed from forest homes, a report on endangered primates said yesterday.

There are just a few dozen of the most threatened gibbons and langurs left, and one colobus may already have gone the way of the dodo, warned the report on the 25 most vulnerable primates.

“You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium — that’s how few of them remain on earth today,” said Russell Mittermeier, president of US-based environmental group Conservation International.

Primates include great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas, as well as smaller cousins ranging from gibbons and lemurs to monkeys. They are sought after as food or, pets, or for traditional medicines, and a few are still trapped for medical research.

Others are victims of competition for living space and resources as forests that are their habitat are chopped down.

“In central and west Africa primate meat... is a luxury item for the elite,” Mr Mittermeier said. “Here it’s even more for medicinal purposes, with most of the more valuable species going to markets in south-eastern China.”

Sumatran orangutans, one of two great apes on the list along with cross-river gorillas, are also threatened by a pet trade into Taiwan.

But just a few thousand euro could be enough to push up numbers of the most vulnerable animals, said Mr Mittermeier, who hopes publicity from the report will bolster the flow of funds to conservation groups and income from eco-tourism.

Primates survived the 20th century without losing a single known species — in fact, new ones are rapidly being found — and should be relatively easy to protect, he added.

“With what we spend in one day in Iraq we could fund primate conservation for the next decade for every endangered and critically endangered and vulnerable species out there,” he said.

China’s environment and its animals are suffering from its rapid, polluting economic growth that may already have pushed a species of dolphin to extinction, scientists say.

Mr Mittermeier said climate change may prove a “magnificent opportunity” if tropical forest protection projects were part of UN programmes to cut greenhouse gas emissions.