- The western hoolock gibbon is a globally endangered species but in Bangladesh is considered critically endangered, due to continued habitat depletion, hunting and trafficking.
- According to a 2021 study, the country’s hoolock gibbon population dropped by around 84% over the past four decades, with the total estimated population now at just 469 individuals.
- Wildlife experts say the apes are hunted for food locally, and trafficked across the border to India and China for the illegal pet trade and for use in traditional medicine.
- They’ve called for an urgent conservation initiative to protect the gibbons and their habitats, including greater involvement by border guards and intelligence agents to crack down on trafficking.
The hoolock gibbon (Hoolock hoolock) had been captured from the forests of the Chattogram Hill Tracts (CHT). And it wasn’t the first of its species rescued from the trafficking trade.
On Sept. 26 last year, police recovered a baby hoolock gibbon from another bus, this one on the Dhaka-Chattogram highway in Comilla.
Bangladesh’s Wildlife Conservation and Security Act 2012 prohibits the sale, purchase, import or export of wildlife. This includes western hoolock gibbons, an ape species that’s native to northeastern India, Bangladesh, and western Myanmar.
On the IUNC Red List, the species is categorized as endangered. The Bangladesh population of the gibbon, however, is considered critically endangered, confined to just a few viable habitats and highly vulnerable to the loss of that habitat and to poaching.
Ongoing human encroachment into the forests that the gibbons rely on has fragmented their populations, cutting them off from other groups. Small populations of less than 10 individuals are in particular danger of going locally extinct.
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