The End Approaches For Wild Orangs - Numbers Down 99% From Last Century

[hatrack]

The orang-utan population in parts of South-East Asia has dropped by up to a hundredfold in the last century, according to a new study. The decline coincides with massive deforestation in the area and the influx of humans.

"This is the first time that a recent and alarming decline of a great ape population - brought about by man - has been demonstrated, dated, and quantified using genetic information," said Benoit Goossens, a wildlife geneticist at Cardiff University and an author of the paper published today in PLoS Biology. "Developing effective conservation and recovery programmes depends on determining when the decline of a population began, its trajectory, and the original population size."

The researchers identified 200 orang-utans from hair and faeces samples found near their habitats along the Kinabatangan river and used the amount of variation in the animals' DNA to simulate the history of the orang-utans' population in the area. "The methods infer a 50-100 times decrease in population size in the last 100-200 years," said Michael Bruford, of Cardiff University. "We don't know exactly how big the ancestral north Bornean population was but it is likely to have been in the 100,000s. An estimate of 315,000 is quoted for the beginning of the 19th century." These figures compare with around 13,000 of the Sabah orang-utans today.

"The genetic study shows that there is a high risk of extinction of the orang-utan in Sabah in the near future if this decline goes on unabated," said Marc Ancrenaz, of the Kinabatangan orang-utan conservation project in Malaysia, who also participated in the study. "The major threat to the long-term survival of orang-utans in Sabah is linked with oil-palm plantation development and forest destruction. Illegal killing also contributes to this decline."

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,13369,1693621,00.html?gusrc=rss