Artificial canopy bridges in China’s rainforest will provide vital habitat needed to stop the first ape species from becoming extinct

Conservationists will begin constructing a series of treetop bridges later this year in a bid to save a critically-endangered species of gibbon.

Just 25 Hainan gibbons, Nomascus hainanus, are left in a small patch of rainforest on Hainan island in south China, where they live in three family groups and sing together at dawn. Their numbers and range dwindled so much last century due to human development that there are fears they could be the first ape species to go extinct because of people.

But experts at the Zoological Society of London believe that with large scale funding the last few Hainan gibbons could not only be saved but helped to expand and recover their former territories.

Artificial canopy bridges are just one of 44 proposed actions in a plan published on Tuesday on how to help the primates, which are agile and fast in the treetops but slow and vulnerable to predators when forced down to ground level.



“One of the key reasons that the gibbon population is probably not expanding as much as it should do is the forest landscape is quite fragmented,” said Samuel Turvey, a researcher at ZSL. New roads, power lines and land turned over for agriculture are to blame for the increasing number of gaps in the gibbon’s habitat, he said.

Hainan gibbon ‘clinging on’ with 25 left in China Read more

“If they [the gaps] are tens of metres across rather than hundreds of metres, there are different ways of bridging those. Longterm, it’s reconnections through forest corridors over 20 years or so. Shorter term, you can build canopy bridges,” said Turvey.

The first trial bridges, designed to resemble the natural forest canopy, will be built later this year in the hope that they encourage the gibbons into new habitat.

They will be accompanied by conservationists playing audio recordings of the primates’ song in unoccupied forests in a bid to find so-called ‘solitaries’ – males who should be forming new family groups but have failed to do so for the last few decades.



Turvey said gibbon-watchers did not know whether it was limited habitat, human development or some other reason that was stopping these solitaries starting up new family groups, but closer monitoring of them could reveal why.

Of the 25 remaining individuals, only around five are reproductively healthy females, prompting previous warnings that a single typhoon or outbreak of disease could wipe the species out.

Another key plank of the action plan will be efforts to better engage local communities.



People living in and around the forests recall fairytale-like legends of gibbons turning into people, and vice versa. In the past some local people boiled up whole gibbons to turn them into a sort of ‘gibbon jelly’ for use as a traditional medicine, while others told Turvey that if you made chopsticks out of gibbon arm bones, they can tell you if your food is poisoned or not.

“I think exploring that [cultural heritage] is a good way to explore more buy-in.”