Great Ape Experts Grapple With Ways To Save Species

May 12, 2000|By Laurie Goering, Tribune Environment Writer.

In Central Africa, Kinshasa's fanciest restaurants now offer chimpanzee and gorilla steaks on the menu. Hungry soldiers, camped in the middle of the range of the bonobo, or pygmy chimp, are decimating that species. In other areas of equatorial Africa, hunters are following new logging roads deep into gorilla territory, and in Indonesia, fires, corruption and runaway logging are driving orangutans to the brink.

Never have times been worse for the world's great apes, humankind's closest relatives. A few may slip close to extinction in a decade unless massive efforts to save them are mounted, say primatologists gathered in Lisle this week for a major international ape conference organized by Brookfield Zoo.

The groundbreaking meeting, aimed at finding proposals for a coordinated rescue effort, for the first time draws on the expertise of both field researchers and zoo experts from throughout the world.

What is especially frustrating, the primatologists say, is that plunges in ape populations--due to wars, logging, fires and hunting--come as scientists have made huge progress in figuring out how to protect and save them. Mostly, they lack the funds to do so.

"I've spent 30 years in the field, and we know what to do, how to stop them from going extinct, but we just can't get it implemented," said David Chivers, one of the world's leading Indonesian ape experts, and a keynote speaker at this week's conference.

Orangutans, which live only in Borneo and Sumatra, are perhaps in the deepest peril of any of the world's six species of apes. Runaway fires in the Indonesian peninsula have destroyed growing areas of the animals' already spotty habitat, and other areas untouched by fire have been devastated by illegal logging, which has reduced orangutan populations by half even in major national parks, like Gunung Leuser in northern Sumatra.

The loss of forest has forced the apes into farm fields searching for food, where many have been shot as invaders. At ape rehab centers in Borneo and Sumatra, workers are caring for hundreds of orphaned young orangutans.

In a decade, fire and logging have dropped orangutan populations by a third, to around 20,000 animals, and evidence is growing of worrisome genetic inbreeding in the survivors, isolated in increasingly small forest fragments.

With orangutan populations falling by about 1,000 a year, "It doesn't take much to figure out how soon they'll be gone," said George Rabb, director of Brookfield Zoo.

Things are nearly equally bleak in war-torn Congo for the bonobos. The small chimpanzee relatives, which live only in Congo south of the Zaire River, have found their range right at the front line of Congo's long and bloody civil war. Unsupplied troops have taken to hunting the animals for food, and unprecedented numbers of orphan young bonobos are showing up as pets in Kinshasa, Congo's capital.

Worse, half of the bonobo's rain forest territory has been granted as logging concessions, and while the war has temporarily cut timbering, peace is likely to bring a quick resumption of forest destruction, warned Gay Reinartz, a top bonobo researcher and expert at the Zoological Society of Milwaukee.

"That could be disastrous for the species," she said. "It's critical we be there now, setting new policy before the war ends."

Money is "absolutely" the key to saving the animals, she said--and not just to hire anti-poaching squads or educate locals about the value of the animals.

"We have to address African humanitarian need. When we do that, we help wildlife," Reinartz said, urging more spending on basic health, education and welfare in places like Congo.

Ironically, the bad news among wild apes comes as zoo apes are having some of their best years ever. Thanks to years of study in captivity and the wild, zookeepers are perfecting the art of keeping captive animals healthy and reproducing.

"We've figured out how to make the [zoo] populations self-sustaining, without bringing in outside genes" that could require the capture of additional wild animals, said Benjamin Beck, associate director of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park.

With lowland gorillas, in particular, "there's enough genetic diversity [within zoos] to last thousands of years."

The decline in wild populations of apes comes as researchers struggle to gather basic information on some of the animals, who may vanish before much is known.

The only census ever done on bonobos, for instance, was carried out in 1970 by a Japanese researcher who bicycled around the Congo, inquiring at villages whether anyone had seen any of the small apes.

To this day, "no one has any good idea how many there are," said Patrick Hamilton, a bonobo keeper at the San Diego Zoo, one of more than 350 participants in this week's conference.

Chivers, who studies gibbons, believes his workers in Sumatra have discovered an undocumented new species of ape, midway in appearance between an orangutan and a long-armed gibbon. The new ape, he says, walks upright.