Scientist at Work Blog: A Forest Denizen at Risk

Mary E. Blair is a postdoctoral researcher in the American Museum of Natural History?s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, where she coordinates the Enhancing Diversity in Conservation Science Initiative.

April 4, 2013

In the dark quiet of a Vietnamese forest at night, it is easy to feel completely alone. But unfortunately, we are not the only ones going out to look for small, wide-eyed primates in these forests. Although my research team seeks only to study and take photographs of the slow lorises we find, others want to take the animal itself.

Local, regional and international commercial trade in wildlife is one of the most important threats ? if not the most important ? to the survival of many species in Asia. Indeed, trade in wildlife is the third most profitable illicit industry in the world, behind narcotics and human trafficking.

Primates like slow lorises are especially vulnerable to even low levels of hunting for the trade because of their biology. Unlike rodents and some other mammals, primates generally live longer and have slow reproductive rates. And relatively speaking, they are older when they first reproduce, they spend more time raising young and they have fewer offspring at a time.

It?s a game of numbers ? and slow lorises have bad odds to start. The death or removal of even just a few individuals as pets or for traditional medicine can have devastating effects on primate populations. Local extinctions of slow lorises have been reported recently in parts of India, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the wildlife trade is often considered a major reason for the decline in slow loris populations, combined with forest loss.

So why would someone want to trade in slow lorises? Here at the final protected area we are visiting on our journey, Bu Gia Map National Park, rangers have told us that slow lorises in this region might be killed, dried, ground up and mixed with rice wine or honey and used to treat stomach disease. This is very similar to what other researchers have reported in Cambodia.

By contrast, in northern and central Vietnam, it is more common to keep slow lorises as pets rather than using them in traditional medicine. Bu Gia Map National Park is very close to the border between Vietnam and Cambodia, so it was really interesting to find out that the cultural values related to slow lorises here are perhaps more similar to those from Cambodia than those in northern or central Vietnam. After hearing the park employees? stories, it was with a renewed sense of urgency that our survey team pulled back to the task at hand.

Our two teams headed out to survey as the sky turned dark gray. When we met up back at the station around midnight, everybody had good news. My team saw a beautiful pygmy loris, pictured above, and the other team saw some as well.

It was hard to sleep after such an exciting night, and being field biologists, we were anxious to see what other wildlife we might come across at this beautiful site. So we headed out early the next day to explore some more. Park workers had said that if we were lucky we might see black-shanked doucs (Pygathrix nigripes) at this site. We were amazed when we came across a group of them ? and also wild red jungle fowl, a green dove, a green barbet and many other wonderful animals.

In this beautiful place, packed with life of all kinds, I feel inspired to continue my work and especially to try to better understand the links between human cultural diversity and the biological diversity present here. The conservation of biodiversity depends on these links ? on the relationships between social and ecological systems

On Twitter: @marye_blair

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/a-forest-denizen-at-risk/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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