Endangered Madascar Lemurs: Raw Video

Endangered lemur species found only in Madagascar are being slaughtered and served up in local restaurants as poachers take advantage of a security vacuum on the island after a coup earlier this year.

Pictures of the blackened remains of scores of crowned lemurs and golden crowned sifakas, smoked in preparation for transport, have been released by the environmental protection group Conservation International.

James Mackinnon, technical director at the group's Madagascar office, said gangs were pillaging the forests of precious hardwoods and trapping rare animals for Asia's pet market, unwinding hard-fought conservation gains on the island.

"Yeah, so this is new information that we have had on a new problem that's emerging which is the question of bushmeat, the collecting of lemurs and hunting them really for restaurants in two major towns that quite far away from the new protected area of Daraina itself," said Mackinnon.

Conservationists say biodiversity on the world's fourth largest island is being wiped out on a shocking scale.

Foreign donors, who provided the bulk of funding for the country's national parks and environmental programmes, suspended aid after Andry Rajoelina toppled the island's president with the help of renegade troops in March.

Operating on a shoestring budget, the authorities have been unable to control the surge in criminal activity.

The Indian Ocean island, isolated from other land masses for more than 160 million years, is a biodiversity "hotspot" and home to hundreds of exotic species found nowhere else in the world.

Poachers are using slingshots and traps to hunt the lemurs in Daraina, a newly-protected region in the far north of Madagascar. The golden crowned sifaka found only in Daraina, risks being wiped out in weeks.

"The golden crowned lemur, Propithecus tattersalli, is just restricted to this area, the Daraina forests and there's only about 8,000 of them thought to exist in the wild. And so a situation like this where maybe 50 animals have been hunted at one time is a huge impact on the population of this incredibly endangered species," added Mackinnon.

Eco-tourism is the backbone of Madagascar's 390 million US dollars a year tourism industry, which has been wrecked by months of political turmoil.

Decades of logging, mining and slash-and-burn farming have destroyed up to 90 percent of the island's natural ecology.

Conservation International described the move to cut environmental aid as a "knee-jerk reaction". To deny conservation funding was counter-productive, it said, as it simply encouraged poor governance of natural resources.

Mackinnon warned of impending environmental catastrophe, saying there was a real danger parks would be forced to lay off rangers and cease to function before the end of the year.

"Well I think the real problem is if things like particularly the national park service, if there are no longer rangers in the park, which is a real possibility because they are so dependent on donor funding, then I think we are going to see a lot of problems," said Mackinnon.

The island's wildlife was popularised in the 2005 DreamWorks animated movie Madagascar and its 2008 sequel, voiced by stars including Ben Stiller and Sacha Baron Cohen as the lemur king.