>> |
Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer
"It's not that surprising, given the high population pressures, the level of habitat destruction, and the fairly extreme hunting of primates for food and medicinal purposes," he said in an interview. He added that some areas in Vietnam and Cambodia are facing "an empty forest syndrome," as even once-populous species such as the crab-eating macaque, or temple monkey, are "actually getting vacuumed out of some areas where it was common."
In some cases, the scientists have a precise sense of how imperiled a species has become: There are 19 Hainan gibbons left in the wild on the island off China's southeast coast, Mittermeier said, which actually counts as progress because there used to be just a dozen.
With others, including the beaked whale and the jaguar, researchers have a much vaguer idea of their numbers despite technological advances -- such as satellite and radio tagging, camera tracking and satellite-based GPS (global positioning system) mapping. The authors of the assessment wrote that most land mammals occupy "areas smaller than the United Kingdom," while "the range of most marine mammals is smaller than one-fifth of the Indian Ocean."
|