#CHIMPANZEE MONKEY APE FULL#

At a single market in Kisangani, the country’s third-largest city, one study found more than 8,500 primates over the course of four months-including many critically endangered ones, such as the Dryas monkey and, yes, the Grauer’s gorilla. Almost every primate known to inhabit this country has at some point ended up for sale in its bushmeat markets-even the tiny talapoin, which weighs about as much as a teacup Yorkie. The DRC has some of the planet’s most important great ape conservation areas-places like Virunga National Park, home to the mountain gorillas that Dian Fossey made famous, and Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where you’ll find the rare Grauer’s gorilla (as few as 17,000 are thought to remain).Īs in the other Big Four nations, logging and agriculture threaten the DRC’s wildlife, but poaching is the biggest problem here. From 2005 to 2012, the country reduced its rate of forest loss by a whopping 80 percent. (For a related Brazilian primate success story, check out my earlier piece on golden lion tamarins.)īrazil is also capable of halting its deforestation habits and has done so in the past. While northern muriquis are still critically endangered, one population has risen from just 22 individuals to at least 354 as of 2015. Further, the large tracts of Atlantic forest they once inhabited have been sliced and diced to the point where only pockets of the monkeys remain.īut in recent decades, organizations like the Muriqui Institute for Biodiversity, the Pro-Muriqui Institute, and the National Institute of the Atlantic Forest have formed to give these monkeys a boost. Also known as wooly spider monkeys, they can grow to more than four feet tall, and people often hunt them for meat. Take the northern muriquis, the largest monkeys in the New World. He attributes this to the work of the country’s large community of primate conservation professionals. According to Russell Mittermeier, coauthor of the new study and chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group, Brazil is the most successful among the Big Four at maintaining its primate diversity.

#CHIMPANZEE MONKEY APE FULL#

Twenty people died in 2015 when a large mine-tailings dam collapsed on the Doce River.)īut for all of Brazil’s environmental woes, the country is also full of hope. (Mining dam collapses are dangerous for non-endangered primates, too. A 2017 study found that the country has at least 126 dams holding back mining-contaminated water and that these structures are “vulnerable to failure in the forthcoming years.” And when these dams do burst, they befoul every waterway for hundreds of miles downstream with a wave of toxic sludge. Mining is also threatening Brazil’s primates, and not only because it’s tearing up the land. (The next closest, Indonesia, lost half as much.) Even more concerning, Brazil has recently shifted toward more environmentally exploitative government policies and looser conservation laws, which scientists suspect will lead to even more deforestation. Unfortunately, Brazil allowed agriculture and timber operations to clear 114 million acres of this prime primate habitat between 20-the largest loss of forest over that period among the Big Four. The South American country is nearly as large as the United States, and within its borders lies 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, which accounts for more than half of all the rainforest left on earth. That more primates-crested capuchins, dwarf marmosets, red-bellied titis, sakis, uakaris, night monkeys, and so on-live in Brazil than anywhere else should come as no surprise. Let’s see how the humans in the four most primate-heavy countries are managing (or failing) to save their cousins. And the places these animals call home are just as diverse. Primates can be loosely defined as mammals with opposable thumbs, but they come in all sizes and dispositions, from timid, one-ounce pygmy mouse lemurs to stately, 550-pound Grauer’s gorillas, to drunk 12-pound vervets. And nearly two-thirds of the primates living in those hot spots (we’ll call them the Big Four) are facing extinction. In truth, just four nations-Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)-harbor 65 percent of all primate species. That might make you think of Earth as the Planet of the Apes (plus monkeys, lemurs, tarsiers, and lorises), but according to a large study published last month, those statistics are a little misleading. At last count, there were 505 nonhuman primate species living in the wilds of 90 countries across the globe.

Chimpanzee monkey ape