The Atlantic rainforest in Brazil is losing its species at an alarming rate, reveal researchers.
Once a part of the Amazon basin in South America, the Atlantic forest used to be a haven for jaguars, tapirs, giant anteaters, and spider monkeys. However, presently, the animals have become "virtually extinct" due to fragmentation and deforestation by farmers and hunters. Other species have also disappeared faster than previously thought.
According to research published in Plos ONE on Aug. 14, white-lipped peccaries, a pig species, have been completely wiped out from the Brazilian forest while jaguars, tapirs, woolly spider-monkeys, and giant anteaters are on the verge of extinction.
The research, led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), tried to find out 18 mammal species in 196 fragmented areas of the forest but could find only four populations.
The forest, that looked absolutely healthy before the research, is currently in a perilous state, believe the researchers.
"The situation was worse than we thought," says Gustavo Canale, one of the researchers.
According to another team member Carlos Peres, ecologist with England's University of East Anglia "All the charismatic species, the large primates, the large ungulates, brocket deer, tapirs, giant anteaters, jaguars, the large cats, all of those things are pretty much gone from even fragments that look on the surface of it, okay, in terms of forest cover."
Peres, criticizing the Brazilian law that protects forest cover, but not wildlife in the fragmented forest patches, says that the law has to be changed to control the immense loss. "Essentially what we are calling for is a wholesale revision of the Brazilian legislative code that protects wildlife within these remnant forest patches. Because these remnant forest patches are essentially going out of business, if you like, in terms of the wildlife."
He also added that the Atlantic forest is not the only one falling prey to forest fragmentation. Peres believes that the species are disappearing "throughout most of the world's heavily fragmented bio-diversity forest hotspots, where overhunting is also widespread."
