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  PlanetArk 19 Apr 05
Singapore's last unique animals face extinction

SINGAPORE - Singapore's only unique wild animals - one of the world' largest squirrels and a monkey that lives high in the forest canopy - are perilously close to extinction, a researcher said yesterday.

Peter Ng, the director of a museum on biodiversity at the National University of Singapore, said the Cream-coloured Giant Squirrel and the Banded Leaf Monkey have fallen victim to urbanisation and shrinking forests. "In the old days both animals were listed as common. They numbered in the comfortable thousands," he said.

Less than 20 Banded Leaf Monkeys and no more than four squirrels still live in what is left of the tiny island nation's forests, Ng said. Their likely extinction will mean the end of the last animal sub-species found only in Singapore.

"We're pretty sure they're kaput," he says.

A representative from Singapore's national parks board said the country is working with local groups to study and protect the animals.

But with only three percent of the island set aside for parks, efforts to breed the animals in captivity and reintroduce them to the forests will fail, Ng said. "Even if you do bring them back in the zoo, what do you do? You can't release them back into the wild because there's so little of it," he said. "It's the price of urbanisation."
links
More photos of our wild banded leaf monkeys on Kwok Wai's Wildlife Singapore
The Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research
Related articles on Singapore's biodiversity
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