Lemurs, the long-tailed, tree-living creatures that share ancestors with man, are fighting for survival in Madagascar - which, apart from the neighbouring Comoros islands, is their only habitat in the world. Acccording to the World Conservation Union, four species of lemur face imminent extinction, and there may be others we don't yet know about. Russell Mittermeier, who chairs the union's primate species survival group, says "somewhere between 10 and 15" species remain undiscovered in the few remaining patches of primary forest in Madagascar. Last year, he found a new one - now known as Mittermeier's mouse lemur - with a bushbaby face and monkey hands, confined, he thinks, to a tiny region to the north-east. Whether this makes 52 known species, or 72, or 88, is a matter of dispute. It is agreed, though, that the rarest number only a few hundred in the wild. By the time primatologists discover the remainder of these amazing creatures, it may already be too late.
Almost 90% of Madagascar's 200,000 known species of flora and fauna are unique to it, which makes this huge island running along the eastern flank of Africa second only to Brazil in biodiversity. Lemurs range from the tiniest, with a head the size of a human thumb, to the hulking indri, which weighs in at 8kg.
The naturalist Gerald Durrell described the first lemur he saw in the wild as a "honey-coloured teddy bear", and that's no doubt part of their appeal, but I think it goes deeper. Lemurs are our long-lost cousins. African primates evolved in two distinct directions, one leading to monkeys, apes and eventually humans, the other to lemurs. All known lemur species originate from a single species that arrived from continental Africa some 47m years ago. Experts are split over how they made the 400km journey, but most think they clung to logs or buoyant plant material. From DNA tests, we know that lemur evolution proceeded from this single identifiable root, and as such represents one complete branch on the evolutionary tree. The species could not survive on mainland Africa in competition with more robust primates.
Madagascar is one of the world's poorest countries, and is hugely dependent on rice. In the past century, the island has lost 90% of its forest to slash-and-burn agriculture, or tavy. The once thickly covered central highlands are now a wasteland, scarred by soil erosion. Silted-up riverbeds are planted with rice, and cleared and terraced land is fertile enough to support just two rice crops. After the second harvest, it has to be left to pasture and burned annually to encourage the new grass shoots most palatable to cattle. Every year, one-third of Madagascar's land mass is set alight. And the fires spread to those pockets of forest that have not already been cleared.
As the forests have shrunk and fragmented, the lemur population has been pushed further towards extinction. The impact of forest clearance has been compounded by hunting: a good-sized lemur will fetch up to $3 as bushmeat. Local taboos protect some lemurs, notably the white sifaka, which is believed by the Sakalava people to be an ancestor spirit, and the indri, which the people of Betsimisaraka say once raised an orphan boy as their own. But other taboos are less forgiving. The devilish-looking aye-aye is condemned to death on sight. It is said to creep up on sleeping people, insert its long, ball-and-socket-joined middle finger into an ear and pull out their brains. (In fact it does nothing more sinister with this remarkable digit than pluck insect larvae out of trees.) It is now highly endangered; only its wide distribution and nocturnal nature have kept it from disappearing altogether.
At least 16 species have disappeared in the 2,000 or so years since man arrived here from Indonesia, among them the legendary kidoky, or giant lemur, described in 1658 by the explorer Etienne de Flacourt (later governor of the island) as an animal the size of a calf with a round head and the face of a man - another of our cousins, now for ever lost. One of the many by-products of the French colonial period, according to Jonah Ratsimbazafy of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust's Madagascar programme, was that Malagasy children were taught more about the wildlife of the Camargue than about that on their own doorstep.
For years, the country's long, unhappy experiment with communism kept away scientists, environmentalists and funds, and allowed the deforestation and destruction to continue unabated. In the past decade, however, and particularly in the three years since a new president, Marc Ravalomanana, took office, that has changed. Though still grave, the environmental situation is beginning to look up. Madagascar, says Mittermeier, has become the world's single highest conservation priority, with an influx of NGOs and funding. At the World Parks Congress in South Africa in 2003, Ravalomanana pledged to triple the size of the island's nature reserves to 6m hectares (nearly 9% of its land mass) by 2008, if international organisations could raise the $50m cost. The money will be used not only to create new parks, but also to reforest degraded areas to create vital bio-corridors across which animals can safely migrate. Some $35m of the $50m has already been raised.
All agree that the only way the lemur will survive in the long term is if local people become committed to its conservation. The Alaotran gentle lemur, or Bandro, is a case in point. The Bandro live among the papyrus and reed beds surrounding Madagascar's largest lake, Alaotra. To gain better access to the fish of the lake, local people began cutting the reed beds, flushing out and killing lemurs as they went. The population of Bandro went into freefall. By 2001 there were just 3,000 left in the wild. The lake began to silt up and its fish began to die. Sensing an imminent ecological catastrophe, the Durrell Trust stepped in. Twenty Bandro were taken into a captive breeding programme and field workers set about persuading local people to replant their reed beds. At the same time, they introduced fuel-efficient stoves and began to teach more intensive methods of rice cultivation. It was explained that the Bantro was unique and, crucially, of more value as a draw to tourists and primatologists than as a source of food. The trust plans to reintroduce Bantro into the wild in the near future.
Last year around 140,000 tourists came to Madagascar and 70% of them visited a protected area. This year, the figure is likely to be nearer 200,000. With their share of the modest fees levied on visitors to Isalo, the country's most visited park, locals built a hospital. The rest was spent on conservation. "If you could replace tavy with tourism, the lemurs would have nothing to worry about," says Frank Hawkins of Conservation International's Madagascar programme. "But in the end it's up to the Malagasy."
Ratsimbazafy has faith in his people: "The number of young Malagasy scientists and conservationists is growing and people are becoming aware that lemur conservation is a duty of all Malagasy citizens."The Guardian
