Preuss’s Red Colobus, one of the 25 most endangered primates in the world

We hate poaching, so any novel method of preventing it is good news in our opinion. From Claire Salisbury for Mongabay’s Great Apes series, on a new project to particularly protect the Preuss’s Red Colobus, a severely endangered primate in Africa:

Cameroon’s Korup National Park is home to elephants, chimpanzees, red colobus monkeys, drill, and a myriad of noisy species, whose squawks, squeals and howls fill the forest air. For more than two years, twelve acoustic monitors were deployed there and recorded every sound covering a 54 square kilometer (21 square mile) area of protected tropical forest.

They were tuned to listen around the clock for just one sound: gunshots.

“Our ultimate goal is to improve the effectiveness of anti-poaching patrols in African tropical forest protected areas,” Joshua Linder, one of the lead scientists working on the acoustic monitoring project, told Mongabay.

Bushmeat is a major source of protein in Central Africa, with 4.5 million tons extracted from the Congo Basin each year. Taking bushmeat itself is not always illegal, and it can be a vital source of protein for the poor and a valued commodity for the rich. But hunting endangered species, especially within protected areas, is against the law. It can pose a real threat to the survival of animal populations, and particularly to rare species.

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