100 Under 100: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Living Things

PART ONE

TROUBLE WITH THE NUMBERS: UNDER 100

We usually think of populations of species as being in the billions (humans), millions (white-tailed deer), or thousands (American black bears). But under a hundred? This is the realm of the rarest living things. They are all critically endangered. With such small numbers, from 1 to 99, it wouldn’t take much—a disease, a bad storm, a little poaching, or habitat destruction, say—for any of them to disappear completely. In fact, a few of these species may be already gone, having not been seen in years, sometimes decades. But the odd one might still hang on, so they haven’t been declared extinct under the IUCN’s criteria that there is no reasonable doubt that its last individual has died.

Besides their vanishingly small populations, almost all of these animals and plants have another thing in common: their survival is being championed by people (sometimes many, sometimes a few) who want to see them flourish once again.

OUR CLOSEST KIN: MAMMALS

As a rule, most mammal species are small, shy, nocturnal, and rarely seen. But not all. Some, like the big cats, the great whales, rhinos, and antelopes are among the most spectacular living things inhabiting the planet with us, while our primate cousins share virtually our entire genetic code. As a mammal species barely 100,000 years old, we are still wet-behind-the-ears newcomers, junior players to practically all others on the evolutionary stage.

Unfortunately, we happen to be, by far, the most abundant species of mammal ever to exist on the face of the earth. And it’s precisely owing to this success that many of our fellow warm-blooded, live-bearing, young-suckling mammalian relatives are hurting so badly. Twenty percent, or 1,134, of all wild mammal species are in danger of extinction worldwide according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Essentially, we are crowding them off the planet as we make room for an additional 80 million people, every year.

HAINAN GIBBON

The primates have flourished since the first shrew-like ancestor climbed into a tree eons ago and never left. There are now more than 600 species. The bad news is that over 300, or more than half them, are at risk of extinction.

Gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gibbons, and humans are all members of the Hominoid super-family, commonly referred to as the apes. How closely related are we? Humans’ and chimpanzees’ DNA—the blueprint of life—is more than 98 percent identical. Everything that sets us apart from our chimp cousins—hairlessness, upright walking on two legs, complex language, abstract thought, and so on—can be accounted for by a mere 2 percent difference in our genes. To put this into perspective, that’s less than the genetic difference between the white-eyed and Philadelphia vireos, two very closely related songbirds of eastern North American forests.

Even the DNA of the gibbons, our most distant cousins among the apes, is about 95 percent identical to ours. In fact, the ancient Chinese (whose country was the stronghold of gibbons before most were wiped out due to habitat loss) referred to gibbons as the gentlemen of the forest, and Taoists believed they lived for 1,000 years and could turn into humans.

Today, gibbons have the distinction of being the most endangered family of primates in the world. Of the 16 surviving species, 15 are either endangered or critically endangered. It’s not as if these are creepy insects or obscure plants that might be hard to empathize with; after all, gibbons are highly intelligent, warm-blooded animals. Because gibbons are smaller at about 60 centimetres in length and weigh just seven kilograms or so, they are referred to as the lesser apes. Perhaps this is why they get little media attention compared with the great apes and receive just a fraction of the conservation funding of gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans.

The most critically endangered of all gibbon species lives on the 13,000-square-kilometre island of Hainan in the South China Sea. Only about 20 Hainan gibbons survive. Their last refuge is the Bawangling National Nature Reserve, the site of some of the last virgin tropical forest in China, where they live in two matriarchal family groups in undisturbed forest on the northeastern side of the reserve. Here, the seven-kilogram apes swing through the trees on their long arms, a way of getting around known as brachiation. Spanning gaps of 15 metres at speeds of up to 50 kilometres an hour, the agile apes travel gracefully through the canopy, stopping often to eat fruit. No animal surpasses them in their mastery of arboreal travel. Yet, as spectacular as their tree-top peregrinations must appear, a Hainan gibbon is much more likely to be heard than seen.

Songs are socially important to gibbons. The all-black males and the yellow-coated females form long-term pair bonds and sing duets that echo through the jungle for up to a kilometre. But no matter how strongly they profess their love for one another, their reproductive output is inevitably low. Hainan gibbons have just one young every two years; therein lies one of the biggest hurdles to rebuilding the population.

In the 1950s, about 2,000 gibbons survived throughout the island. Then the state converted 8,000 square kilometres of Hainan’s lowland rainforest to rubber plantations, wiping out about half of the little apes’ habitat. What’s more, they had to endure relentless hunting for traditional Chinese medicine by the local Miao people of Hainan. Entire subpopulations of the animal were exterminated by the hunt.

Because the entire remaining population lives within a protected area, the apes should be safe, but illegal poaching in the reserve is reportedly still an issue. With only 20 gibbons left, even the death of one animal is devastating to the species. Because all of their typical lowland forest habitat has already been destroyed, the reserve is at a less fertile, higher elevation than gibbons naturally prefer, and they must work harder to get enough food. The human population continues to grow, and the collection of firewood and clearing for farming is fraying the edges of even this last sanctuary. With so few individuals left, a severe typhoon, disease, an imbalance in the ratio of males to females, inbreeding, or any number of non-human related causes could wipe out the species. If there’s anything here to hang some hope on, it’s that the Hainan gibbon’s population, though still tiny at 20, was even smaller in the 1970s, when there were only 7 left.

CAT BA LANGUR

Across the Gulf of Tonkin, just 200 kilometres west of Hainan Island, Cat Ba Island is the home of the Cat Ba langur monkey, also known as the golden-headed langur for the gorgeous, brightly coloured mane of fur surrounding its black and expressive heart-shaped face. Although it displays the usual outward characteristics of other monkeys, such as long limbs and a very long tail, its exclusive taste for vegetation has resulted in an unusual adaptation that is more reminiscent of a cow. In order to digest the tough cellulose of their strictly herbivorous diet, langurs have a multi-part, complex stomach similar to hoofed grazing animals. This adaptation allows these leaf-eating monkeys to consume just about any tough vegetation, such as fibrous leaves, bark, shoots, flowers, and fruits, some of which are even poisonous to other animals.

As bulletproof as the Cat Ba langur’s digestive system is, it is bullets themselves that have made it one of the world’s most endangered primates. Poaching for the traditional Asian medicine trade has decimated its numbers. A population of nearly 3,000 in the 1960s had collapsed to a low of just 53 in 2000. Today, fewer than 100 individuals remain. They live only on Cat Ba Island in the archipelago of the same name in northern Vietnam. The archipelago has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2004.

Nearly 2,000 islands, islets, and rocks make up the archipelago, which was formed when the sea level began to rise about 10,000 years ago, creating Halong Bay. This left the tops of cave-ridden limestone hills and small jagged peaks stranded as islands. Many of these karst formations rise vertically from the shallow marine waters, creating a distinctive landscape that draws thousands of international tourists each year. Verdant evergreen tropical monsoon forests cover most of the larger islands, including Cat Ba Island itself, the largest in the archipelago at 130 square kilometres. Over half the island is a national park, protected for its phenomenal biodiversity, which includes more than 20 endangered species. However, with 13,000 people living on such a small island and hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting each year, there’s little room left for wildlife (or humans, for that matter).

Cat Ba’s limestone forest, the langur’s preferred habitat, has been highly fragmented by the cutting of trees by local people for firewood and building materials. The result is that no single block is large enough to sustain its whole population at once, so the monkeys have been forced to split into seven tiny subpopulations scattered throughout the island. Only four of the seven groups include both males and females, so animals in the remaining ones can’t reproduce. As a result, the species is falling short of its reproductive potential, as the number of baby langurs born each year is lower than it should be given the overall population.

In 2000, when the Cat Ba Langur Conservation Project was begun by conservation organizations from Germany, the population was just over 50 animals. They’ve had success against poaching, and in the last decade, numbers of the Cat Ba langur have grown somewhat, to 65 animals—still critically endangered, but a move in the right direction. To boost the population further, future plans include relocating some monkeys into other groups to balance the sex ratio and establishing protected natural corridors so non-breeding individuals and groups have access to breed with other subpopulations.

NORTHERN SPORTIVE LEMUR

While lemurs are primates as surely as gibbons and langurs, eons of evolution in geographical isolation have taken them in a different physiological direction, so there’s no mistaking these iconic Madagascar species for apes or monkeys.

Ever since it separated from India 80 to 90 million years ago (and from Africa and Antarctica before that), Madagascar has been host to a giant evolutionary experiment. Isolated from mainland populations, the animals on the world’s fourth-largest island have evolved in unique ways, free from the influence of species living in the rest of the world. One of the most fruitful experiments has been the lemurs, today with over 90 species. Lemurs, named after the Latin word for ghost—in homage to their eerie vocalizations, often nocturnal habits, and strange facial expressions that make them looked eternally spooked—first appeared 50 to 65 million years ago in Africa. They arrived on Madagascar soon after, possibly floating across from the mainland on rafts of vegetation. In fact, recent evidence suggests that ocean currents at the time would have been just about right to deliver early lemurs from the mainland of Africa.

It is lucky for lemurs that monkeys never made it to Madagascar, though, because everywhere else on earth where the two coexisted in the distant past, monkeys out-competed their ghostly cousins, driving them to extinction. Although lemurs had thrived for millions of years on their island sanctuary, these days Madagascar is not a good place to be a wild animal. With a burgeoning population of 21 million people and crushing poverty, out of necessity the island’s forests are being rapidly stripped with little heed for the future of either humans or wildlife.

In a nation known for the desperate straits of its fauna, the status of the northern sportive lemur ranks among the most dire. Named for the sportive upright, boxer-like stance it takes when threatened, the northern sportive lemur is a small primate about 30 centimetres tall, not including its long tail. Large, round, forward-facing reddish-brown eyes, small erect ears, and a coat of rich grey-brown fur give it the look of a forever-surprised plush toy. It uses its powerful hind legs to jump from branch to branch through its home in dry forest. By day it sleeps the hours away in hollow trees, where it might occasionally be seen poking its head curiously out of a hole. As a nocturnal animal, its life history is still very much a mystery. A few things are known, however. Northern sportive lemurs tend to be solitary and eat mostly leaves and other kinds of difficult-to-digest vegetation. In a curious twist on the theme of waste not, want not, they will eat their own droppings—a behaviour also practised by rabbits—to glean every last bit of goodness from nutritionally poor food by digesting it a second time. They reproduce slowly, giving birth to just one young at a time, so increasing the population is a slow process.

A few scattered scraps of dry forest in the far north of Madagascar are the last refuges for the northern sportive lemur. Hunting and the harvest of trees for charcoal production put the small primate at an especially high risk of extinction. A small group of 20 individuals lives in the Andrahona mountain forest. This tiny forest is sacred to local people, though not legally protected. That the sportive lemurs continue to inhabit Andrahona suggests they may be able to sustain themselves on very little land, providing some hope that small protected patches of habitat (which is pretty much all that’s left in Madagascar) might be enough to save the species in the long run. Scientists believe there could be fewer than 100 left on earth, tying it with the greater bamboo lemur as Madagascar’s most endangered primate.

GREATER BAMBOO LEMUR

Why is it that some wildlife species, like racoons, crows, and gulls, to name a few of the more familiar ones, thrive, while many others can barely hang on to existence? What do they have going for them that so many others don’t? Generally, they are generalists. If one type of food becomes rare or unavailable, they can survive on another. And they can more readily adapt to new habitats if old ones are destroyed. Adaptability to a wide variety of food types equals adaptability to a wide variety of habitat types equals healthy, widespread populations. To see this played out to the nth degree, look no farther than our own species, the ultimate generalist. We eat practically everything and live practically everywhere—and are followed into every nook and cranny and to the ends of the earth by generalist parasites, such as rats and cockroaches.

Madagascar’s greater bamboo lemur is the antithesis of a generalist. It fits the definition of a specialist perfectly, depending on pretty much one kind of food and one habitat type. Its name says it all: this cute, woolly, bushy-tailed, wide-eyed, and gregarious primate survives on an abridged menu featuring the parts of one bamboo species and the occasional flower, leaves, or fruit. This exclusive taste limits greater bamboo lemurs to living only in forests of the outsized grass, which are rapidly disappearing.

Today, the greater bamboo lemur’s range may be as small as 1 percent of what it used to be. Slash-and-burn agriculture, bamboo harvesting, mining, and hunting have nearly wiped out the species and its habitat. Global warming is likely also playing a part as the climate becomes drier and water scarcer. Although there are other bamboo-dependent lemurs in Madagascar, none is as endangered as this one. The greater bamboo lemur is also distinct for being the only species of lemur where family units (some with as many as 28 individuals have been seen) are dominated by males. Keeping these large social groups together may be the reason for the species’ varied vocal repertoire.

On the upside, a hitherto unknown population of greater bamboo lemurs was recently confirmed in the Torotorofotsy region of the country, about 400 kilometres north of the animal’s previously known range. Several family groups totalling up to 60 animals inhabit this area, which borders an important protected wetland and a national park. One family unit appears to live within the wetland itself. As encouraging as this new find is, the other populations to the south are declining. Most greater bamboo lemurs live outside protected areas, so establishing formal reserves for them is a priority. It is estimated there could be 100 or fewer greater bamboo lemurs left in the wild. Yet even this population dwarfs that of the next primate discussed, possibly the rarest on the planet.

MISS WALDRON’S RED COLOBUS MONKEY

Willoughby Lowe, an employee of the Natural History Museum in London, did what good collectors do: he shot animals for a living. Before the mid-20th century, when museums finally became enlightened to the havoc they were wreaking on the natural world, all shapes and sizes of animals were shot or trapped to be taken back to London, Berlin, New York, or wherever, to be added to museum collections. It isn’t known exactly how many have been killed to fill the drawers of such institutions. However, if you combine the collections of three of the largest natural history museums in the English-speaking world, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) in Washington, and London’s Natural History Museum, you’re closing in on 100 million, including insects. Among these are thousands of specimens of African colobus monkeys.

In 1933, Lowe was in what is now Ghana, West Africa, where he collected eight curious specimens of a type of red and black colobus monkey never before recorded. He was assisted on the expedition by one Miss F. Waldron, a fellow employee of the same museum. It wasn’t until three years later that the monkeys were examined and described scientifically as a new subspecies by British Natural History Museum mammalogist R.W. Hayman. He named it Procolobus badius waldroni in honour of Miss Waldron because, in his words, she contributed much to the success of the expedition. Apparently, in the old days you could have a species named after you for just helping somebody shoot it!

Western red colobus monkeys were once found in their millions across much of Africa. Overall, they are now considered the most threatened group of primates on the continent. In addition to Miss Waldron’s, the Pennant’s red colobus, Preuss’s red colobus, and the Niger Delta red colobus are all threatened with extinction. The Bouvier’s red colobus hasn’t been seen in 30 years and may already be history.

Standing about a metre tall, sporting a silky black body and tail and a bright auburn forehead and thighs, Miss Waldron’s red colobus is a noisy species, in constant communication with others of its kind using loud calls and shrieks. Family troops of 20 or more individuals (if they still exist) live in the high canopy of rainforests, where they feed on up to 100 kinds of leaves. As a group they’re all eyes and ears, as each one acts as a sentry against danger and warns the entire group if something threatening lurks.

Possessing a multi-chambered stomach like a cow, the monkeys can digest the tough cellulose found in coarse vegetation that few other species can. This specialized diet allows them to live high above the ground among the luxurious greenery of tall old-growth forest trees. And therein lies the trouble for the Miss Waldron’s monkey: 90 percent of the rainforest in Ghana and Ivory Coast where they live is already gone. What’s left are fragmented islands of forest surrounded by a sea of farms and villages. To make matters worse, as the human population grew, so did the appetite for bush meat, so everything that moved in the forest was fair game for the gun, including monkeys. But more than just monkeys are dodging bullets to survive in these dwindling scraps of original woodland; other iconic species, such as forest elephants, leopards, and chimpanzees, are also feeling the crush of habitat destruction and the bush meat trade here.

Miss Waldron’s monkeys were already becoming rare less than two decades after they were discovered. Logging and poaching had taken its toll on yet another of the planet’s treasures. By 1978, one hadn’t been seen in decades. After six years of searching the forests of Ivory Coast and Ghana, the authors of an article in the October 2000 issue of the journal Conservation Biology concluded that the Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey was probably extinct. If true, it would be the first primate wiped off the face of the earth in 200 years. So was Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey gone only a matter of decades after it was first described? Maybe not. Soon after the Conservation Biology article, a series of small but intriguing discoveries had cast some doubt that the monkey was extinct.

Between 2001 and 2003, three bits of evidence surfaced: a tail, a skin, and a photo of a dead red colobus monkey. All three pointed to the continued existence of the Miss Waldron’s monkey in Ivory Coast. It appeared the species was still hanging on, if only by the slimmest of threads. Even though later searches between 2004 and 2006 failed to turn up anything other than one claim of a single vocalization, the IUCN listed the Miss Waldron’s monkey as critically endangered and possibly extinct. The species simply did not yet meet the criteria for extinction.

If Miss Waldron’s monkey still survives somewhere, it may be in Ehy Forest of eastern Ivory Coast. It was near here, on the edge of a large lagoon surrounded by villages, that scientist Scott McGraw—who had been searching for years in vain for the elusive animal—found that aforementioned skin of a Miss Waldron’s monkey. Whether this individual monkey was the last of its kind isn’t known. So, as scant as the evidence is, Ehy Forest may nevertheless contain the last vestiges of the Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey. It might be a long shot, but an awareness and education campaign has been ongoing in the villages around Ehy Lagoon in the hope that more information about the existence of this curiously named monkey will come to light.

SOUTH CHINA TIGER

While primates such as the red colobus and other monkeys and apes might be charismatic because of their close evolutionary relationship to us, the big cats are known in scientific circles as charismatic megafauna for their size alone. They are spectacular animals. In fact, it’s because of their universal appeal that they are often chosen as flagship or umbrella species representing the broader biodiversity around them. The theory goes that if you protect the large habitat of, say, a tiger, you’ll also save all the smaller, more obscure species that live in the same ecosystem. Therefore, if these big cats can be saved, so might countless organisms they share the land with.

The South China tiger is thought to be the mother of all tigers—known as the stem tiger—from which all other Panthera tigris subspecies have descended. In other words, it appears the world’s biggest cat has been living in this part of China longer than tigers have lived anywhere else on earth. As recently as the 1950s, 4,000 of them roamed the humid, mountainous forests of south-central China, where they hunted anything from mice to wild cattle (and the occasional local farmer,