Washington, Oct 14 (ANI): A population survey of West African chimpanzees living in Cote dIvoire (Ivory Coast) has revealed that this endangered subspecies has dropped in numbers by a whopping 90 percent since the last survey was conducted 18 years ago.

The few remaining chimpanzees are now highly fragmented, with only one viable population living in Tai National Park.

This alarming decline in a country that had been considered one of the final strongholds for West African chimps suggests that their status should be raised to critically endangered, according to Genevieve Campbell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The booming human population in Cote dIvoire is probably responsible for the chimpanzees demise.

The human population in Cote dIvoire has increased nearly 50 percent over the last 18 years, said Christophe Boesch, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Since most threats to chimpanzee populations are derived from human activities such as hunting and deforestation, this has contributed to the dramatic decline in chimpanzee populations. Furthermore, the situation has deteriorated even more with the start of the civil war in 2002, since all surveillance ceased in the protected areas, he added.

In the 1960s, the population of chimpanzees in Cote d”Ivoire was estimated at about 100,000 individuals.

At the end of the 1980s, when the first and last nationwide chimpanzee survey was carried out, the total population of chimpanzees was estimated at 8,000 to 12,000 individuals.

While that already represented a drastic decrease from the expected numbers, it nonetheless meant that Cote dIvoire harbored about half of the worlds remaining West African chimpanzee populations.

In the new study, Campbell and Boeschs team conducted another nationwide survey, revealing a 90 percent drop in the chimpanzee nest encounter rate since the time of the last survey.

That catastrophic decline in chimpanzees is especially strong in forest areas with low protection status, where the researchers saw no sign of the chimps.

The only remaining refuge for the dwindling West African chimpanzees is Tai National Park.

According to Boesch, the comparisons between the results within national parks in Cote dIvoire and compared with the classified forest sends a very clear message: populations of wild chimpanzees living in protected areas with constant funding for conservation activities can survive even during period of rapid increase in human populations and political unrest.

We must appeal to the international conservation community to invest in sustainable funding of conservation activities in national parks with known importance for chimpanzee populations. Our results show that this works, he said. (ANI)