Environment news: orang-utan decline, mass mortality events, elephant crisis

Dramatic decline in orang-utan numbers 

Borneo’s orang-utan population has halved in the past 16 years, according to a paper published in Current Biology. Their numbers fell by 100 000 from 1999 to 2015 due to combined pressures of hunting and habitat loss driven by mining, logging, palm oil and paper industries. The researchers predicted a further loss of 45 000 animals by 2050, but they suggested that there was cause for some optimism thanks to stable populations in protected areas. The two species of orang-utan, both critically endangered, inhabit the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in south-east Asia. Read more 

Climate change link to mass mortality events 

Climate change could increase the incidence of mass mortality events (MMEs), when vast numbers of a single species die in a short period of time, according to a research paper published in January in Science Advances. Events such as the sudden death in 2015 of 200 000 critically endangered saiga antelope on the Kazakhstan steppe can be attributed to a variety and combination of factors, including disease, human impact and climate-related conditions. In the case of the saiga, researchers found that a rise in temperature and humidity in the days preceding their deaths caused bacteria that normally live harmlessly in the tonsils of some antelope to pass into and poison their bloodstream.  Co-author of the report Professor Richard Koch, professor of wildlife health and emerging diseases at the Royal Veterinary College in London, expects climate change to lead to more MMEs in the future. “Evolution takes millions of years and if we have a shift in environmental conditions, everything that’s evolved in that particular environment is under different pressures. Microbes adapt and can respond to changes quickly, but mammals take hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years to adapt,” he told The Guardian. 

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Elephant crisis: killings in Cameroon; Hong Kong bans ivory sales; investigator killed 

• Eight soldiers and rangers died in attacks in February by elephant poachers in northern Cameroon. The attacks happened in Bouba Ndjida National Park, some 17 km from the border with Chad. Forest ranger Lamza Abdoulahi reported that the rangers’ weapons and those of village self-defence groups were no match for the poachers. The park was the site of a brutal elephant massacre in early 2012, when poachers killed hundreds of elephants in a three-month period. 

• Hong Kong lawmakers voted in January to ban sales of ivory, closing an effective loophole since China enacted a ban on the trade in ivory in 2017. Ivory sales in Hong Kong – considered the world’s largest ivory market - will be phased out progressively, to end completely in 2021.  

• Esmond Bradley Martin, a world-leading investigator into the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn, and former UN special envoy for rhino conservation, was killed at his home in Kenya in February. Martin, 75, was known for his undercover work investigating the black market. He had recently returned from a research trip to Myanmar. He died from a stab wound to the neck, thought to be during a robbery attempt.