TY - JOUR
T1 - A National-Level Assessment of Lemur Hunting Pressure in Madagascar
AU - Borgerson, Cortni
AU - Johnson, Steig E.
AU - Hall, Emma
AU - Brown, Kerry A.
AU - Narváez-Torres, Pamela R.
AU - Rasolofoniaina, Be Jean Rodolph
AU - Razafindrapaoly, Be Noel
AU - Merson, Samuel D.
AU - Thompson, Katharine E.T.
AU - Holmes, Sheila M.
AU - Louis, Edward E.
AU - Golden, Christopher D.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the communities in which we work. Without them, this research would have been impossible. We would also like to thank the editor, Joanna M. Setchell; the organizers of this special issue, Alejandro Estrada and Paul Garber, and two anonymous reviewers; Steven M. Goodman for kindly providing protected area shapefiles; Marina B. Blanco for her expert advice on taxonomy; Richard J. Bankoff for his support in estimating densities within Rdistance; and the Republic of Madagascar and Madagascar National Parks for their continued support and permission to conduct research. This research was funded by grants from the National Geographic Society Conservation Trust (C135–08, C280–14, C021–17, and 55616C-20), the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation, Primate Action Fund, the National Science Foundation SBE-IBSS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (1513638), the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2015213765), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Global Wildlife Conservation, Lemur Conservation Action Fund (5095.005-0175), Primate Conservation Inc, Rowe Wright Grant (46), and International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Save our Species (IUCN-SOS 2018A-117).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Hunting is one of the greatest threats to nonhuman primates worldwide. Despite Madagascar’s status as a primate mega-diversity country, a critical lack of information on the hunting of lemurs at the national scale persists. Here, we synthesize the current state of knowledge of the annual rates of household-level lemur hunting near ten protected areas, representing most ecoregions in Madagascar. We examine geographic and taxonomic variation in lemur hunting, including an analysis of hunting relative to species density, extinction risk, and intrinsic ecological characteristics of species. We found that lemurs are commonly hunted across Madagascar; the rural households in our study ate, on average, more than one lemur each year, or a median of 4.1% of the lemur species’ population size where densities are known. However, this pressure varied significantly across sites and species, reaching its highest levels in the northeastern rainforest region. While hunting levels are concerning for numerous threatened species, hunting pressure was driven primarily by species availability, and among ecological traits, small body size was related to increased hunting; however, conservation status showed no such relationship. This first national-level assessment of hunting, including one-third of Madagascar’s lemur species and more than a tenth of the world’s primates, identifies regional variation and lemur taxa at acute risk from hunting—important steps toward developing targeted strategies to conserve one of the world’s most threatened groups of vertebrates.
AB - Hunting is one of the greatest threats to nonhuman primates worldwide. Despite Madagascar’s status as a primate mega-diversity country, a critical lack of information on the hunting of lemurs at the national scale persists. Here, we synthesize the current state of knowledge of the annual rates of household-level lemur hunting near ten protected areas, representing most ecoregions in Madagascar. We examine geographic and taxonomic variation in lemur hunting, including an analysis of hunting relative to species density, extinction risk, and intrinsic ecological characteristics of species. We found that lemurs are commonly hunted across Madagascar; the rural households in our study ate, on average, more than one lemur each year, or a median of 4.1% of the lemur species’ population size where densities are known. However, this pressure varied significantly across sites and species, reaching its highest levels in the northeastern rainforest region. While hunting levels are concerning for numerous threatened species, hunting pressure was driven primarily by species availability, and among ecological traits, small body size was related to increased hunting; however, conservation status showed no such relationship. This first national-level assessment of hunting, including one-third of Madagascar’s lemur species and more than a tenth of the world’s primates, identifies regional variation and lemur taxa at acute risk from hunting—important steps toward developing targeted strategies to conserve one of the world’s most threatened groups of vertebrates.
KW - Bushmeat
KW - Hunting
KW - Lemurs
KW - Madagascar
KW - Primate
KW - Wildlife
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107794708&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10764-021-00215-5
DO - 10.1007/s10764-021-00215-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85107794708
SN - 0164-0291
JO - International Journal of Primatology
JF - International Journal of Primatology
ER -