100 Under 100

by Scott Leslie

  Cole Porter’s cowboy song “Don’t Fence Me In” would seem to be the perfect anthem for a species that freely roams the vast deserts of the America southwest, as el lobo does. Thousands of kilometres away, however, in East Africa, it may in fact be a fence that ultimately saves another mammal species, the mountain bongo.

  MOUNTAIN BONGO

  What is possibly the world’s longest wildlife fence was completed in Kenya in 2009. The 400-kilometre-long, 2.5-metre-high electric barrier, under construction for 20 years, encircles the Aberdare mountain range north of the capital city Nairobi. The Aberdare watershed supplies 90 percent of Nairobi’s drinking water and almost half its hydroelectricity, so protecting it is as important to people as it is to wildlife.

  The enclosed 2,000-square-kilometre upland forms the eastern rim of the Great Rift Valley and is East Africa’s most important mountain forest. It’s home to some of the continent’s most spectacular wildlife, including black rhinos, elephants, and lions. Living amid this who’s who of wildlife is one of the world’s rarest large mammals and Africa’s most endangered antelope, the mountain bongo.

  Although we typically think of antelopes running gracefully across the open savannah, the extremely shy mountain bongo is strictly a forest species that relies on its dense wooded habitat for food and protection. (There is also a less threatened lowland bongo subspecies in western Africa.) It thrives on steep wooded mountainsides where landslides and tree falls have left openings in the canopy, allowing sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor and support the densely growing plants and bamboo the bongo eats.

  The largest of the forest antelopes, bongos can weigh over 400 kilograms and stand 1.3 metres high at the shoulder. Add large spiral horns, vertical white stripes on a chestnut background, and a brushy mane running from shoulder to rump and it’s not surprising this striking animal was once a popular zoo acquisition. Ironically, with the completion of the megafence around the Aberdare range, most of the wild mountain bongos still in existence are in essence captive—though it’s an internment that might ultimately save them.

  The concept and construction of the fence was spearheaded by the group Rhino Ark, whose original intent was to protect the shrinking black rhinoceros population and its ecosystem by keeping illegal loggers and poachers out. But it also keeps much of the wildlife in, especially elephants and rhinos, which used to destroy local crops and gardens. Fewer such confrontations have reduced animosity toward the area’s large wild animals.

  The mountain bongo has also benefited from the fence. By the late 1980s, when its construction began, mountain bongos hadn’t been seen for years and were feared extinct. Before it was built, poachers and illegal loggers from the region’s crushing throng of humanity had decimated the bongo’s numbers and habitat, in spite of its preference for living in nearly impenetrable high-altitude forest.1

  In time, the fence reduced logging and poaching, resulting in ideal habitat for bongos. In addition, a cull of the large lion population in the Aberdares (many were actually introduced to the area, resulting in overpopulation), reduced predatory pressures on any of the animals that may have survived. Yet, despite such favourable conditions for the antelope, it would be years before one would be seen.

  A single carcass found in the Mount Kenya forest (a separate, unfenced habitat west of the Aberdares) in 1994, however, was a sign that the species still existed in East Africa.

  Hope for the animal’s survival was ephemeral, though, and that carcass would be the last anyone would see of a mountain bongo until 2004, when after a decade of searching, a population of some 30 animals was finally located in the Aberdare Mountains. The fence likely played a crucial role in their survival. Since then, more animals have been found in the Aberdares region, as well as a few in the nearby Eburu Forest and in the Mount Kenya forest.

  To determine the genetic health of the remaining population, conservationists have been recently collecting dung samples, which are preserved, then sent to the Cardiff University in Wales for DNA analysis. The results are worrying: it appears the entire population is descended from the lineages of just two females. This means the bongo has very low genetic diversity, likely the result of years of inbreeding among the small group. The upshot is that the recovery of the mountain bongo could be stymied by an increased susceptibility to disease. Such is often the reality of tiny, remnant populations.

  Yet there is another “pool” of the antelopes. Descendants of Kenyan mountain bongos sent to zoos in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s have returned home to Kenya. Eighteen of them arrived at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy in 2004. The original plan was to reintroduce some of the first-generation offspring of these animals into native habitat to strengthen the wild population. Unfortunately, since their return to Kenya, it’s been discovered that the captive animals have no immunity to some common African bovine diseases. Experts are now suggesting that any introduction to the wild be delayed until a second generation of bongos has been produced by these captive animals. By then a natural resistance to the diseases should have developed. Though it may be some time well into the future, an injection into the wild of the captive-bred bongos could result in a much-needed boost to the wild mountain bongo’s genetic diversity, thereby increasing its prospects for long-term survival.

  Unlike the bongo, some wild living things can’t rely on the practice of captive breeding to help with population recovery. The Javan rhinoceros, for one, fares quite poorly when pent up.

  JAVAN RHINOCEROS

  Imagine Manhattan practically disappearing from the face of the earth one day. That’s what happened to the similar-sized island of Krakatau off Java, Indonesia, on August 27, 1883. Among the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history, the explosion that let loose with a force of 13,000 atomic bombs hurled millions of tonnes of rock and ash into the air. It was heard thousands of kilometres away. A tsunami 40 metres high slammed into the shores of eastern Sumatra and western Java, killing 36,000 people. On Java’s Ujung Kulon Peninsula, just a few kilometres away, all traces of humanity disappeared. It was never repopulated.

  Free from human settlement, Ujung Kulon Peninsula rebounded to become one of the richest repositories of flora and fauna in Indonesia and the most important remaining refuge for the Javan rhinoceros. Protected since the early 20th century (comparatively easy to do because nobody lived there), Ujung Kulon would eventually be designated as a national park and a UNESCO world heritage site in the early 1990s. Ironically and fortuitously, the volcano helped keep the Javan rhino from going extinct. For without the eruption of Krakatau, people would still live on the peninsula, the national park may have never been created, and the already rare rhino would have long since been hunted to extinction.

  Once the most widespread of the rhinos, living throughout much of Asia, the Javan today is the rarest of the five members of its family. All told, between 50 and 60 of the extremely shy, forest-dwelling animals survive, 40 to 50 of them in Ujung Kulon National Park. Here, they’re safe because they are actively guarded against poaching within the 1,200-square-kilometre park. But with so few left, the status quo of merely a stable population is not enough. It might be only a matter of time before a disease or a natural disaster wipes out the rhino here. Its numbers need to grow, so scientists are hoping that another self-sustaining population can be established on Java using translocated animals from Ujung Kulon, thus improving the odds of the species’ survival.

  While the detonation of Krakatau may have been an unlikely saviour of the Javan rhinos on the island of Java, explosions of a more sinister kind had the opposite effect on the only other population of Javan rhinos, in Vietnam.

  The havoc wreaked on wildlife by the bombs and gunfire of the Vietnam War is unimaginable. Moreover, Agent Orange defoliator and napalm were dropped from American aircraft, destroying huge swaths of the country’s forests and grasslands, along with the animals that lived there. Many areas have never recovered. When the war was over, thousands of guns were
left behind to be used by poachers, so it’s no surprise that by the early 1970s most experts thought the Javan rhino was already extinct in Vietnam.

  However, as fate would have it, one was killed by a hunter in 1988, nearly two decades after it was presumed extirpated from the country. A few years after that, a survey of lowland forest in Cat Tien National Park, north of Ho Chi Minh City, found evidence of a small population of rhinos. Vietnam’s most important national park, home to sun bears, Asian elephants, gibbons, and langur monkeys, was later expanded to include the rhino’s habitat. But the story may not end well. The recent approval of a hydroelectric megaproject just a few kilometres from the rhinos may have sealed the species’ fate, as its last habitat will be flooded. An estimated 1,000 tonnes of explosives will be used during construction. This is bitter irony for a species whose original decline here was the result of the explosion of bombs during the Vietnam War and the din of poachers’ gunfire. The Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam faces a tenuous future, at best. (Sadly, the story of the rhinoceros in Vietnam has ended, the result of illegal hunting. The Vietnam subspecies of the Javan rhino was declared extinct in October 2011.)

  The Javan isn’t the only member of its family facing extinction. The Sumatran, black, and Indian species, as well as the northern subspecies of the white rhino, are also endangered.

  There’s nothing new about the plight of the rhinoceros. They’ve been on this one-way road of decline for as long as any animal on the planet, largely because of the millennia-old belief in traditional Asian medicine that rhino horns cure fever, rheumatism, headaches, typhoid, and a host of other maladies. That it is illegal to trade in rhino horn anywhere in the world—rhinos are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—hasn’t dampened demand. And, despite being totally disproved by modern medical studies as an effective treatment for anything, doctors and pharmacists throughout Asia continue to prescribe rhino horn to patients. Even if it were shown to be effective (which it is not), since rhino horn is nothing but keratin—the same protein found in birds’ bills, horses’ hooves, and yes, human fingernails—patients might just as well save themselves the time and expense of a trip to the doctor and stay home and nibble their nails.

  Records of trade in rhino horn go back as early as 2600 BC.

  During the Tang Dynasty (around AD 600–900), the animals had already become so scarce in China that they began importing horns from Africa and Arabia, as well as Java, Vietnam, Borneo, Sumatra, and Malaysia in Southeast Asia. Populations were being decimated very early on. Thus, China’s insatiable demand for horns from Southeast Asia thousands of years ago bears some responsibility for the sorry state of Asian rhinos today.

  As a booming Chinese economy puts more money into more people’s hands, the demand for rhino horn grows. As the beleaguered animals become rarer and harder to find and kill, basic supply-demand economics kicks in: a very low supply and a high demand have pushed the price of rhino horn to US$60,000 per kilogram (in 2010), making it worth roughly its weight in gold. Such prices have drawn organized crime into the illegal trade in rhino horn. In the first half of 2011, criminals using automatic assault rifles from helicopters killed nearly 200 southern white rhinos in South Africa alone. Sadly, it is in the criminals’ interest that rhinoceros are pushed toward extinction, for each kill that makes the animals rarer drives the market price even higher, increasing profits in the short term (poachers and thieves aren’t noted for looking at the future with an eye on sustainability!). Despite ever-shrinking populations and stronger conservation efforts, more rhinos were killed in 2009 than in any of the previous 15 years, and 2011 looks poised to surpass it.

  Excessive killing for whale oil, another animal “commodity” that was as valuable in its day as rhino horn is today, is responsible for the dire straits of the eastern North Pacific right whale, whose population is only half that of the Javan rhino.

  EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC RIGHT WHALE

  Why did whalers call them right whales? They were abundant. They were slow. They didn’t sink when dead. And most importantly of all, a single animal could yield 100 barrels of oil. They were the “right” whales to kill.

  Eighteen metres long and weighing in at 100 tonnes, the right is a chunky, grey-coloured whale with no dorsal fin and a tail that measures four metres across. Its enormous head is about a third of its body length. Its mouth, big enough to fit a small car, is full of long slats of cartilage, known as baleen, that hang like vertical window blinds on either side of its gaping maw. Several tonnes of food in the form of shrimp-like zooplankton are filtered out by the baleen every day.

  There are three species of right whales: the southern, found off Argentina, Australia, and South Africa; the North Atlantic species along the US Eastern Seaboard and eastern Canada; and the North Pacific right whale. There may be up to 10,000 rights living in the southern hemisphere, but the northern species are faring poorly. Both the western North Atlantic and western North Pacific Oceans are home to small populations of just a few hundred animals each. Even worse, the eastern North Pacific right whale of the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands has barely one-tenth that number, making it the rarest whale in the world. (Right whales off Peru and Chile, and in the eastern North Atlantic, have already disappeared, the victim of the whaler’s harpoon. And so have the bowhead whales of Svalbard in the Scandinavian Arctic, a closely related species.)

  Eastern North Pacific right whales were rediscovered in 1996 after an absence of decades. Based on genetic analysis published in 2010, the current population is just 28 animals, only 8 of them females. Most are lone individuals dispersed over a vast area of the Bering Sea. Just a few calves have been seen since 2002.

  The story of the right whale’s decline in North American waters began nearly 500 years ago on the Labrador coast. Centuries of slaughter along the European coast, and around Iceland and Greenland, had already made the species scarce, so to make a profit in the 1500s, there was little choice but for European whalers to sail great distances across the Atlantic to the coast of North America.

  In 1550, Basque whalers from the Bay of Biscay set off looking for whales to kill. They found lots of them in Labrador and subsequently built seasonal butchering and oil-rendering stations on its southern coast. The largest facility, at Red Bay (named not for water turned red by whales’ blood but for the colour of shoreline rocks), was the first industrial complex in the New World, hosting as many as 15 ships and 600 men every summer for half a century.

  Thousands upon thousands of right whales were slaughtered here so that tens of thousands of barrels of oil could be shipped back to the Old World for use in lamps and as candle wax. By the beginning of the 17th century, the animals were no longer plentiful enough to make the whalers’ yearly 8,000-kilometre round trip from Europe worthwhile. The “right” whale would have to be found elsewhere. Eventually, it was.

  In the 19th century, primarily American whalers but also Japanese and Russian began pushing into the remote North Pacific to find their quarry. They discovered right whales in abundance in the 1830s in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. It is estimated that up to 37,000 of the animals were taken in these waters, nearly 30,000 of them between 1840 and 1849 alone.

  No population of such slowly reproducing animals—a female gives birth to only one young every three to five years—can withstand this kind of pressure without collapsing. And collapse it did. North Pacific rights were scarce by the late 1800s and early 1900s. Just a few hundred were legally taken between 1911 and 1946, the year right whales finally became fully protected around the world.

  That they were protected meant nothing to the Soviet Union whaling industry. It illegally killed nearly 400 of them during an intensive hunt in the Bering Sea in the 1960s. This war against the gentle animals was especially brutal in 1965. That year, the giant factory-whaling ships Dal’nii Vostok and Vladivostok steamed into the Gulf of Alaska and secretly slaughtered 300 eastern North Pacific right whales. This wiped out mos
t of the remaining population at a time when the species was finally beginning to rebound from the American-led hunt of the previous century. The Soviet Union and Japan also “legally” killed 10 and 13 of the endangered whales respectively during the 1950s and 1960s for “scientific research.”2

  Almost nothing is known about the biology of eastern North Pacific right whales. Is the tiny population increasing or decreasing? Where do they migrate during the winter? How large is their range? Where are their calving grounds? How long do they live? What are their specific habitat requirements? How do you protect a species you don’t really understand? These questions remain unanswered. Nevertheless, early steps are being taken to try to safeguard the population.