Hunting rates are already unsustainably high across vast tracts of tropical forests, averaging sixfold the maximum sustainable harvest in Central Africa (Fa et al. 2001). Consumption is both by rural and urban communities, who are often at the end of long supply chains that extend into many remote areas (Milner-Gulland et al. 2003).
The rapid acceleration in tropical forest defaunation due to unsustainable hunting initially occurred in Asia (Corlett 2007), is now sweeping through Africa, and is likely to move into the remotest parts of the neotropics (Peres and Lake 2003), reflecting human demographics in different continents. Hunting for either subsistence or commerce can profoundly affect the structure of tropical forest vertebrate assemblages, as revealed by both village- based kill-profiles (Jerozolimski and Peres 2003; Fa et al. 2005) and wildlife surveys in hunted and unhunted forests. This can be seen in the residual game abundance at forest sites subjected to varying degrees of hunting pressure, where overhunting often results in faunal biomass collapses, mainly through declines and local extinctions of large-bodied species (Bodmer 1995; Peres 2000). Peres and Palacios (2007) provide the first systematic estimates of the impact of hunting on the abundances of a comprehensive set of 30 reptile, bird, and mammal species across 101 forest sites scattered widely throughout the Amazon Basin and Guianan Shield. Considering the 12 most harvest sensitive species, mean aggregate population biomass was reduced almost eleven-fold from 979.8 kg/km2 in unhunted sites to only 89.2 kg/km2 in heavily hunted sites.
In KilumIjim, Cameroon, most large mammals, including elephants, buffalo, bushbuck, chimpanzees, leopards, and lions, have been lost as a result of hunting (Maisels et al. 2001). In Vietnam, 12 large vertebrate species have become virtually extinct over the last five decades primarily due to hunting (Bennett and Rao 2002). Pangolins and several other forest vertebrate species are facing regionalscale extinction throughout their range across southern Asia [Corlett 2007, TRAFFIC (The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network) 2008], largely as a result of trade, and over half of all Asian freshwater turtle species are considered Endangered due to over-harvesting (IUCN 2007). In sum, game harvest studies throughout the tropics have shown that most unregulated, commercial hunting for wild meat is unsustainable (Robinson and Bennett 2000; Nasi et al. 2008), and that even subsistence hunting driven by local demand can severely threaten many medium to large-bodied vertebrate populations, with potentially far-reaching consequences to other species. However, persistent harvesting of multi-species prey assemblages can often lead to post-depletion equilibrium conditions in which slow-breeding, vulnerable taxa are eliminated and gradually replaced by fast-breeding robust taxa that are resilient to typical offtakes. For example, hunting in West African forests could now be defined as sustainable from the viewpoint of
urban bushmeat markets in which primarily rodents and small antelopes are currently traded, following a series of historical extinctions of vulnerable prey such as primates and large ungulates (Cowlishaw et al. 2005).
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