Phil McKenna, The New York Times 22 Sep 08;
CHONGZUO, China — Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children’s parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.
To their surprise, their offspring had adapted to forest life remarkably well; the children’s white headdresses had dissolved into fur, tails grew from their spines and they refused to come home.
At the Nongguan Nature Reserve in Chongzuo, Guangxi province, the real-life descendants of these mythical children — monkeys known as white-headed langurs — still swing through the forest canopy.
As the langurs traverse a towering karst peak in a setting out of a Chinese landscape painting, they appear untouched by time and change, but it is remarkable that they and their tropical forest home have survived. In 1996, when the langurs were highly endangered, Pan Wenshi, China’s premier panda biologist, came to study them in Chongzuo at what was then an abandoned military base. This was at a time when hunters were taking the canary-yellow young langurs from their cliff-face strongholds, and villagers were leveling the forest for firewood.
Dr. Pan quickly hired wardens to protect the remaining animals but then went a step further, taking on the larger social and economic factors jeopardizing the species. Dr. Pan recognized the animal’s origin myth as legend, but he also believed that alleviating the region’s continuing poverty was essential for their long-term survival.
In the 24-square-kilometer nature reserve where he has focused his studies, the langur population increased to more than 500 today from 96 in 1996.
“It’s a model of what can be done in hot-spot areas that have been devastated by development,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International. “Pan has combined all the elements — protection, research, ecotourism, good relations with the local community; he’s really turned the langur into a flagship for the region.”
Part of what makes Dr. Pan’s achievements so remarkable is the success he is having compared with the fate of primates elsewhere. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s most recent Red List, nearly half of the world’s 634 primate species and subspecies are in danger of extinction. “If you look at the Red List, Asia has by far the highest percentage in the threatened categories,” Dr. Mittermeier said.
When Dr. Pan arrived in Guangxi, the challenges of studying langurs, much less protecting them, seemed insurmountable. He and a student spent their first two years living in collapsing cinder block barracks with no electricity or running water.
At that time, the langur’s population was in freefall, dropping from an estimated 2,000 individuals in the late 1980s to fewer than 500 a decade later. Historically, local farmers had occasionally killed langurs for food, but then teams of outside hunters began taking a serious toll on the population.
“In the 1990s, the Chinese economy started booming, and those with money — governors, factory owners, businessmen — all wanted to eat the wildlife to show how powerful they were,” said Dr. Pan, 71.
A breakthrough in protecting the species came in 1997 when he helped local villagers build a pipeline to secure clean drinking water. Shortly thereafter, a farmer from the village freed a trapped langur and brought it to Dr. Pan.
“When you help the villagers, they would like to help you back,” he said.
As self-appointed local advocate, Dr. Pan raised money for a new school in another village, oversaw the construction of health clinics in two neighboring towns and organized physicals for women throughout the area.
“Now, when outsiders try to trap langurs,” Dr. Pan said, “the locals stop them from coming in.”
But the villagers were still dependent on the reserve’s trees for fuel.
“If I told them they can’t cut down the trees, that wouldn’t be right,” Dr. Pan said. “They have to feed their families.”
In 2000, he received a $12,500 environmental award from Ford Motor Company. He used the money to build biogas digesters — concrete-lined pits that capture methane gas from animal waste — to provide cooking fuel for roughly 1,000 people.
Based on the project’s success, the federal government financed a sevenfold increase in construction of tanks to hold biogas. Today, 95 percent of the population living just outside the reserve burn biogas in their homes.
As a result, the park’s number and diversity of trees — the langurs’ primary habitat and sole food source — has increased significantly.
“When I first came, the hillsides were very rocky,” Dr. Pan said. “Now it’s hard to see the rocks and even harder to see the langurs because of all the trees.”
Nearly all money for Dr. Pan’s development projects has come from outside the region, but his efforts have not gone unnoticed by local officials. In 2001, the county government built a research center in the reserve with accommodations for Dr. Pan and his students, a guesthouse and a yet-to-be completed education center to showcase the region’s biodiversity.
Still, those who would like to exploit the scenic beauty of the park remain. One recent proposal included a five-star hotel that would turn the would-be education center into a gambling hall and cockfighting pavilion.
In 2002, when Dr. Pan inaugurated the Chongzuo Eco-Park, a small part of the Nongguan Nature Reserve that is open to the public, he had a quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius carved into stone at the front gate. The phrase, “In an ideal society, everyone should work for the well being of others,” was a subtle reminder to local officials that the park should not be misused for their own financial gain. But the quote also reminds those looking to protect the langurs that they must consider the area’s human community.
“This is the most important thing we can do,” Dr. Pan said. “If the villagers can’t feed themselves, the langurs don’t stand a chance.”
Dr. Pan is a charismatic leader who is as quick to lead his students into the field under grueling conditions as to don a langur costume at local festivals to raise awareness about the species.
He got his start in wildlife conservation in 1980 studying the giant panda in Sichuan province with the biologist George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. Mr. Schaller left China in 1985, but Dr. Pan spent 11 more years in the field, and his resulting work proved instrumental in conserving critical panda habitat.
Yet his greatest achievement may well be what he has passed on to the next generation. In 1991, he founded Peking University’s department of conservation biology — now the Center for Nature and Society — one of the first institutions in China dedicated to studying and protecting endangered species.
Currently staffed by 10 of Dr. Pan’s former students, the department conducts fieldwork on everything from dolphins in the South China Sea to snow leopards on the Tibetan Plateau.
Dr. Pan became interested in langurs in the early ’90s after reading “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” a groundbreaking book by Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, environmentalist and writer. It suggested that certain social behaviors were evolutionarily advantageous. Dr. Pan wanted to test Dr. Wilson’s ideas in the field, but needed a more gregarious species than the panda, which lives primarily in solitude.
He has been studying langurs since 1996 and has observed numerous cases of infanticide — where an adult male that had taken over a family group killed all newborns sired by the prior reigning male. The primary intent of infanticide is not to kill, but to induce nursing females to start ovulating quickly and thus increase the usurping male’s chances of reproducing. Infanticide had been documented in other species, but he was the first to observe it in white-headed langurs.
Based on observations of male langur succession events that did not involve infanticide, Dr. Pan suspects the animal’s reproductive strategy may be evolving to include negotiated settlements between males. In such cases, two males have divided adult females and territory among themselves without killing any newborns.
“I’d like to know how closely related the males are,” says Patricia C. Wright of Stony Brook University in New York of Dr. Pan’s latest observations, “but it opens up a lot of interesting theoretical possibilities.”
Back in Chongzuo, Dr. Pan led a small group into a meadow of tallgrass surrounded by limestone karsts. Above them, a family of langurs leaped across a forested cliff face toward a rock ledge where they would spend the night. He hopes descendants of these monkeys will spread beyond the reserve to repopulate nearby mountains just as other scientists will continue the work he has started.
“I cannot do all of the conservation work that is needed here in China,” Dr. Pan said, “but my students and many others will continue toward this goal.”
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