Subject: BIOD: Decline of Great Apes *********************************************** WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS Great Apes Face Growing Threat of Extinction *********************************************** Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises http://forests.org/ 4/10/97 OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE The World Wide Fund for Nature reports on the seemingly imminent demise of the great apes. The culprit is largely humankind's destruction of habitat, and hunting for wild meat. Continued decline of large mammals and keystone predators are symptomatic of the more widespread ecological decline occurring throughout the globe. Following is a photocopy of a Reuters report on the matter. g.b. ******************************* RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE: Great apes face growing threat of extinction - WWF Copyright 1997 by Reuters 4/10/97 GENEVA (Reuter) - The world's few remaining great apes, humankind's nearest living relatives, face a growing threat of extinction from man's destruction of their territory and the hunt for wild meat, a new report said Thursday. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said unless there was coordinated action by governments in central Africa and south-east Asia there could be no halt to the dramatic decline in the numbers of great apes -- chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orang-utans -- and their eventual disappearance. The report said major culprits were the growth in logging and "a dramatic escalation in the bushmeat trade." Wildlife meat could be found on restaurant menus from Cameroon to the Congo republic, as well as in Paris and Brussels. "We must act swiftly, we must act now, and we must plan on acting indefinitely," said the report, entitled "Wanted Alive: Great Apes in the Wild" which argued that richer countries in Europe and North America should help poorer states with protection programs. Elizabeth Kemf, one of the authors of the report, said most endangered of the four great ape species were the mountain gorillas of central Africa. The last home of the animals, who once ranged wide across the continent's misty uplands, is the wartorn area along the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and Zaire -- where the remaining 620 live, according to the report. Although earlier efforts at conservation by the three governments had enabled the animal to make a comeback from around 370 a few years ago, they had come under serious threat from recent fighting and refugee movements. Around 700,000 Hutus who fled into Zaire after the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in their homeland destroyed much forestland where the gorillas roamed, and Zairian soldiers killed some to sell their meat. But the some 200 in Zaire's Virunga National Park had their prospects for survival improved, Kemf told Reuters, after rebels of the Alliance of Democratic Forces took control of the region late last year. The sprawling refugee camps emptied out as hundreds of thousands returned to Zaire or fled westward. The insurgents, with WWF help, started repairing the infrastructure of the park and retraining its guards, she said. But years of civil strife across central Africa and the Great Lakes region had also put chimpanzees, whose numbers had dropped from several million at the start of the century to between 100,000 and 200,000 today, and bonobos, in great peril. The western lowland gorilla became extinct in Zaire, and across the region bonobos -- a smaller species closely related to chimpanzees -- declined by 30 to 50 percent over the last decade and now totaled around only 25,000, the report said. In South-East Asia, home to orang-utans, less than two percent of their original forest habitat in Malaysia and Indonesia remained, reducing the population from an estimated 100,000 half a century ago to around 30,000. At the current rate of logging, the WWF declared, forests could disappear within 70 years in Zaire, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. Until recently, African timber had largely gone to the European Union but was now increasingly exported to Asia. "Unsustainable logging and road construction for the logging industry, agricultural expansion, oil exploration, mining and human migration into ape habitat are all causing the animals' forest home to shrink as never before," the report said. ###RELAYED TEXT ENDS### This document is a PHOTOCOPY for educational and personal use only. Recipients should seek permission from the source for reprinting. All efforts are made to provide accurate, timely pieces; though ultimate responsibility for verifying all information rests with the reader. Check out our Gaia Forest Conservation Archives at URL= http://forests.org/ Networked by Ecological Enterprises, grbarry@students.wisc.edu