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No monkeying around in quest to save gibbons
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IT is not without a sense of guilt that Wei Guang has been a watchman at a rainforest reserve on China’s Hainan Island for 10 years, protecting the world’s remaining 23 Hainan gibbons.
Typically living in rainforest trees over 10 meters tall, the Hainan black crested gibbon with long arms and legs but no tail rarely sets foot on the ground, making captive breeding difficult. They are more difficult to conserve than the giant panda, Wei says.
“It hurts that the gibbons had to run all the way through the rainforest to find food,” Wei says. “I always imagined that the mountains were thick with tall trees.”
One of seven gibbon species, they are endemic to the island and found nowhere else.
Much effort has gone into restoring their habitat, but helping the apes survive has proved harder than expected as uncontrolled logging and poaching has put the species on the brink of extinction.
Wei, a Hainan native, worked as a lumberman in the southwest part of the island for six years in the 1990s. To make way for rubber plantations and other commercial forest, large tracts of rainforest were destroyed.
The gibbons originally resided in the lowlands of the rainforest but were forced to move to less suitable habitats at higher elevations.
Gibbon bones are highly prized for their use in traditional Chinese medicine and mass hunts took place between 1960 and 1980. Surveys show that in the 1950s, more than 2,000 gibbons lived on the island, but by the 1980s only seven could be found — all in the Bawangling National Nature Reserve in Changjiang.
“When we were children, we didn’t know that we should cherish the ape. We even hunted them,” a villager surnamed Fu said. “There are only a few left now and no one wants to kill them anymore.”
On a visit to Hainan, Russell Mittermeier, president of non-profit Conservation International, stresses that the Hainan gibbon is the rarest primate in the world and faces a high risk of becoming extinct within the century.
Aware of the extinction risk, the local government has worked with international organizations to restore their habitat.
The Bawangling National Nature Reserve was set up to preserve the habitat in 1980 and was expanded from 6,626 hectares to 29,980 hectares in 2003. The new area is mostly secondary rainforest, or a forest that has regrown after deforestation.
In the same year, a conservation plan was published, backed by governments and international organizations such as Fauna & Flora International. The plan outlined reparative measures, including increasing forest patrols and growing plant species that the gibbons need for survival.
Wei’s logging career has provided him with good knowledge of the rainforest and he joined a 4-man squad set up in 2004 to monitor the apes and their habits. The squad was later increased to eight. They patrol year round to dissuade illegal logging. They see the gibbons regularly and keep tabs on their movements.
In the latest attempt to save the gibbon, experts from 10 countries and regions met on the island in March, the first step toward a protective action plan and conservation fund.
Thanks to the work of people like Wei, the number of gibbons is on the rise. A survey last year found at least 23 gibbons in three families in the reserve, but their reproductive habits remain something of a mystery. Researchers only know fertile females have only one baby every two years.
Zhou Jiang from Guizhou Normal University believes that close inbreeding may have suppressed their numbers.
According to the reserve management, logging and poaching have all but disappeared and locals now have a keen sense of environmental protection. The Hainan gibbon are at the top of forest food chain and hardly have any predators. No dead gibbon has ever been found in the reserve, management officials say.
In spite of the protection, humans remain a major threat to the gibbons. The human population in the area has boomed in recent decades. Residents with low incomes still depend heavily on the forest for firewood, food and herbs.
The primary rainforest that has been destroyed can never be replaced, but more than 30,000 trees have been planted in the reserve. However, trees take time to grow. It will take many years for the secondary forest to become a suitable home for the gibbons.
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