Ah, Kipunji, We Hardly Knew You: Newly Discovered Monkey Already Threatened With Extinction
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 07.29.08
Kipunji drawing: National Science Foundation
Unknown to science until three years ago, the Kipunji—a three-foot tall, grayish brown monkey with a long tail and a black face which lives in the Southern Highlands and Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania—has a population of slightly more than 1,000 individuals. According to the World Conservation Union the primate should be now classified as “critically endangered”. This means that the animals is likely to go extinct in the wild if immediate conservation action is not taken.
The cause of the monkeys’ decline, and perhaps demise? Habitat loss due to illegal logging and land conversion, as well as poaching. Currently the animal’s habitat is confined to two isolated forest regions totaling 6.82 square miles.
When the kipunji’s DNA was analyzed in 2006, it was shown that it was the first entirely new primate genus to discovered since 1923.
Science Daily quotes Dr Tim Davenport of the Wildlife Conservation Society, “The kipunji is hanging on by the thinnest of threads. We must do all we can to safeguard this extremely rare and little understood species while there is still time.”
If a three-foot tall monkey can be discovered in 2005 and is threatened with extinction only three years later, how many other species has humanity steamrollered over, ignorant of their existence, their place within local ecosystems? It’s times like this that John Gray's suggestion that humanity should be renamed home rapiens seems most apt.
via :: Science Daily
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And it's so cute, too.
"Newly Discovered Monkey Already Threatened With Extinction"
No kidding! A monkey that is in such short supply that we didn't even know it was there until now is in danger of extinction? Think about that for just a minute.
I'd be interested to know how many species we lose to extinction per year, how many of those species are lost due to human-related causes, and how those losses impact the ecosystem.
In the past few months, I've read two stories about the loss of a mammal to extinction (or, in this case, critically endangered). They are significantly fewer stories on the loss of plants and non-mammalian species due to human impact.
Yes, this animal is cute. Yes it's cuddly. It's a primate for goodness sakes. But what this article does not tell us is how many original animals were counted when this animal was "discovered" by biologists, and what role it plays in it's ecosystem. Until I know these things, I can only go with the above poster's "Oh, it's cute" comment, which is to say, I have no real reaction.
@Allison: re: number of species going extinct per year: I read an article in a German newspaper recently about threats to biodiversity, and it said that one species (animal or plant) goes extinct about every twenty minutes. So that's three species lost forever per hour, which makes 72 per day. Multiply that by 365... [I think tha make's 26,270, but I suck at maths and I don't have a calculator with me, so the number may be wrong.]
Obviously, those numbers are not 'exact', but they're probably good (or rather, bad) enough to get a general idea of the magnitude of the problem.