It’s Monkey Month!
With apologies to the apes and prosimians—yes, we know they’re not monkeys—iWild is about to go hog-wild for all things primate, highlighting a different endangered simian every day this month. Sadly, there are plenty to choose from: One in four primates may become extinct without drastic conservation intervention. Some are already gone. But hope remains: For example, Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus, thought to be lost forever, may survive in small numbers in a small corner of the Ivory Coast—although not even a photograph of that beautiful but imperiled animal exists.
Earlier this year, the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) issued a list no self-preserving monkey wants to be caught dead on, identifying the top 25 most endangered primates on earth. It has been impossible to survey areas wracked by war or conflict to ascertain the whereabouts and population of certain species. That’s no reason to forget about them: Our nearest relatives, from lemurs to langurs, are part of the family too. We can’t spare a single one.
Professor E. J. Milner-Gulland, the chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance, describing the discovery that 12,000 Saiga, our Endangered All-Star #26, have died in western Kazakstan over the past week. Speaking in a news release from the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), the professor noted, “It’s particularly unfortunate that the population was just emerging from an unusually harsh winter, and that those struck down are mostly females and this year’s calves.”
The cause of the mass mortality is not yet known.
Bavarian Pine Vole
Our final day of Rodent Week takes us to densely-populated Europe, where the Bavarian Pine Vole was thought to be extinct. In fact, this gorgeous rendering of the vole was produced by Peter Schouten for A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals, with text by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001). One of three vole species that evolved after the glaciation of the last ice age split a single population into isolated groups, Microtus bavaricus was thought to be extinct after the last sighting of it in 1962: By the 1980s, its last known Bavarian meadow was paved over and turned into a hospital. But testing done in 2000 revealed that an existing vole population in the northern Tyrol, near the border between Germany and Austria, was in fact the Bavarian Pine Vole. Around the same time, an Austrian researcher at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, Frederike Spitzenberger, discovered individuals belonging to the Tyrol population in live traps she had placed in the area, and genetic testing has determined that they are, indeed, members of the species once believed to be extinct. She told a newspaper: “All the voles look like sausages with four legs. They all have tiny ears and short tails. You have to look at their teeth to tell them apart. But the only real way to tell is to examine the genetics.”
Now listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, the vole occupies a single alpine site of mixed forest which may be threatened by habitat loss due to changes in landscape use. Despite the E.U.’s commitment to biodiversity programs such as the Natura 2000 Network, there is currently no conservation management plan for the vole. Yet Spitzenberger remains “optimistic,” telling The Guardian in 2004, “The mouse is extremely rare. Probably only a few hundred of them exist. We now have to make sure that they don’t die out.”
Illustration: Peter Schouten
