Lemurs under threat

ENDANGERED: WARNING THAT MADAGASCAR’S PRIMATES ARE AT RISK

More than 40% of island’s forests lost between 1950 and 2000.

Almost all species of lemur, the small saucer-eyed primates native to Madagascar, face extinction, an conservation body has warned, adding to its growing list of animals and plants under threat.

Of the 107 surviving lemur species there, 103 are threatened, including 33 that are critically endangered – the last stop before extinct in the wild – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said.

It called for a fundamental reimagining of the way humanity interacts with the natural world, in an update to its Red List of Threatened Species.

The list assesses 120 372 species and classifies more than 30 000 as at risk.

The report comes amid growing alarm that the planet may have already entered a period of so-called mass extinction, only the sixth in 500 million years.

The United Nations’ biodiversity panel last year warned that up to one million species faced extinction as a result of humanity’s insatiable desire for land and materials.

Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN’s acting director-general, said the updated list showed “Homo sapiens needs to drastically change its relationship to other primates, and to nature as a whole”.

Lemurs, Madagascar’s “treasure”, are among the many precious species unique to the Indian Ocean island. But the impoverished country is struggling to combat deforestation, poaching for food and the illegal pet trade.

More than 40% of its forest cover was lost between the 1950s and 2000. Among the lemurs newly listed as critically endangered are the Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, the smallest primate in the world, and the Verreaux’s sifaka, part of the “leaping lemur” family.

Both have seen “substantial declines” because their habitats have been destroyed by slash-andburn agriculture and logging.

Verreaux’s sifaka, known in one region as “sifaka of the cooking pot”, is threatened by hunting.

“If you destroy or drastically modify their forest habitats, they cannot survive,” said Russ Mittermeier, of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group.

Across other parts of Africa, 53% of primate species – 54 of 103 – are now threatened with extinction, the report said.

Remco van Merm, from its Global Species and Key Biodiversity Areas Programme, said the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic was leaving some communities with “no choice but to resort to using natural resources to meet their daily needs”. – AFP

People need to change relationship to nature