This is what the world’s rarest animal sounds like.
Source: SoundCloud / National Geographic
When dawn breaks on Futou Ling, a mountain on Hainan Island off China’s south coast, the last remaining gibbons begin to sing.
Males climb to the treetops, where their voices will carry the farthest, and start warbling, hooting, and shrieking. Females and youngsters join in, creating an intense musical cacophony that fills the tropical forest.
Samuel Turvey and Jessica Bryant are ready at their listening posts. When they hear the song of the gibbons, they run toward it.
“The Hainan gibbon,” says Turvey, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, “is the world’s rarest ape, the world’s rarest primate and, almost certainly, the world’s rarest mammal.” (Only three northern white rhinos remain, but that is a subspecies of white rhino.)
Some 28 gibbons survive in a six-square-mile (16-square-kilometer) patch of rainforest in Bawangling National Nature Reserve, in western Hainan. They are found nowhere else. With such a tiny population, there’s a high risk of a random catastrophic event—a typhoon, a forest fire, an outbreak of infectious disease —wiping out the entire species.
On November 24, when the International Union for Conservation of Nature released its latest report on the world’s 25 most endangered primates, the Hainan gibbon figured prominently, with the lowest recorded numbers of any species. Turvey and Bryant’s sprint through the forest is part of an international conservation effort to prevent the gibbons becoming the first primate to be driven extinct by humans. The researchers’ aim is to fully understand the lives and needs of these little-known apes, so they can work out the best plan to save them.
But first they have to find them.