Calls to protect wild animals from COVID

Experts from the Australian National University (ANU) studying the impact of tourism on wild gibbon populations are recommending visitors don PPE masks and have health and temperature checks before entering forests where wild populations live.  

While tourism to wild gibbon populations halted with the first COVID-19 lockdowns, tour operators in Cambodia and China are gearing up to resume visits.

The recommendations build on world-first research on wild gibbon populations in Cambodia and China, which shows the apes significantly alter their behaviour, to their own detriment when tourists are present.

Instead of resting and socialising, gibbons spent more time on the look-out for danger and displayed stress and anxiety behaviours when tourist groups followed them.

ANU researcher Jessica Williams said her studies showed gibbons were trading off their rest time to monitor an unfamiliar situation.

“Scanning the landscape is one way animals monitor their environment and detect danger. When tourists are present, we observed the gibbons spent more time scanning compared to when tourists were absent,” Ms Williams said.

“This increase in scanning was coupled with a decrease in time spent resting and rest is essential to maintaining normal brain function and immune responses.

“If the gibbons’ immune system is affected it can have negative side-effects. It can lead to shortening their life or making them more susceptible to catching diseases – and because we’re all primates, they may be able to catch something from us.”

Ms Williams said COVID-19 might be one of the diseases gibbons could be susceptible to.

“Due to a lack of research, we don’t know for sure if the small apes; gibbons and siamangs can catch diseases like COVID-19 from humans. But disease transmission from and to humans is well-documented in the great apes like gorillas and chimpanzees,” she said.

“Because gibbons being used for tourism could suffer reduced immunity in the face of large and frequently changing groups of people entering their environment, we can’t take any chances.

“Once a disease has been transmitted it spreads through the entire population.”

As well as temperature checks and wearing protective gear, Ms Williams’ guidelines recommend limiting visits to once a day, with total group numbers of eight and only when the gibbons are naturally active.  

Have you seen gibbons in their natural habitat in China or Cambodia? Do you have any pictures you would like to share?

1 comments

I really get annoyed when people call out the "Cute Factor" in dealing with threatened species. Bloody bilbies, koalas and so on. Nobody cares about rare plants, insects, reptiles or many other biota.  All of it is a part of an interlocked natural world, and all we can do is destroy their habitat.  

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