The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  The Philippine tarsier can communicate at an ultrasound level of up to 91 kHz. Researchers from Humboldt State University say this might represent a ‘private channel of communication’ inaudible to predators.

  The most ecologically distinct mammal in the world – the one with the fewest relatives – is the aardvark.

  It is here that unbelievabilia begins to nudge up against something more serious. It is not before time. So far the ideas in my head have been like an intellectual construction kit with no assembly instructions. How am I to put all this together into a cogent narrative? My interest in the Somali golden mole has been easier to feel than to explain. The ‘quest’, as I have rather romantically called it, can come across as bizarre or eccentric – pretentious even, a facile and useless specialism like collecting novelty teapots. It is Professor Jonathan Baillie, with a little help from the aardvark, who steers me back to coherence and a sensible appreciation of my own seemingly childish instinct. Jonathan is a fast-talking Canadian zoologist and a world expert on obscure mammals. Thankfully, he can see nothing silly in my mole obsession. He is, after all, surrounded by people fixated on solenodons, echidnas, freshwater dolphins, elephant shrews . . . We meet in a conference room at the Zoological Society of London, just across the road from the zoo. This is his domain, the command centre of a worldwide effort to bring relief to the deserving mammalian poor, the small, the weird and the unheard-of. In 2007, in what might be one of the most powerfully imaginative strokes in the history of conservation, Jonathan founded the EDGE Project. ‘Edge’, no surprise, is both a word of literal meaning, as in outer margin, and an acronym – Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered. EDGE means the aardvark. It means the woylie, the northern muriqui, the long-footed potoroo, the Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat, Perrier’s sifaka, the Ethiopian water mouse. It means the Somali golden mole.

  Jonathan has no quarrel with the heavily backed and well-publicised campaigns for popular favourites – giant panda, Bengal tiger, snow leopard, black rhino, polar bear, elephant, orang-utan, gorilla and the rest. Their charisma is a powerful tool for attracting public and political support for wildlife. But these animals are not alone in needing help; nor are they uniquely deserving or uniquely important. Some consistency is needed. When human populations are at risk, we do not just rescue celebrities and high-earners. Our concern is for the Common Man, and so it should be for the Common Animal. But of course there is a vital difference. The common animal increasingly is not common at all, and unless we rally to its aid it will quickly decline from scarcity to extreme rarity and oblivion. Countless species already are queuing to cross the Styx like wildebeest at the Mara, and many already are on the other side.

  The EDGE Project’s selection criteria are somewhat different from the FFI’s or WWF’s, but the intention – to conserve life and biodiversity – is exactly the same. There are good scientific reasons why the first species on the EDGE list, its top priority, is not a popular favourite but a creature few non-zoologists will have heard of. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi, is classified by the IUCN as critically endangered and, most importantly, it is ‘evolutionarily distinct’, meaning that it has very few living relatives. Unlike a mouse, therefore, it carries what Jonathan Baillie describes as a ‘disproportionate amount of our evolutionary history’, having a whole limb of the phylogenetic tree to itself, or sharing it with very few others. It was this kind of unique evolutionary history that EDGE set out to identify and protect – a completely new way of establishing priorities. With its expert staff of phylogenists, ecologists and zoologists, the Zoological Society of London was the ideal platform from which to launch a new worldwide campaign. Working closely with the IUCN Red List, and inching their way carefully through the phylogenetic trees, Jonathan and his colleagues devised formulae to score each species for evolutionary distinctiveness and risk of extinction. By aggregating the scores they were then able to produce a table of species ranked in order of need.

  It is a very big league of often very small animals. The list of mammals (there is a similar list of amphibians) runs to nearly 4,500, from Attenborough’s echidna right down to the gray brocket (a South American deer) at number 4,436. Another 920 are unranked because they are too poorly known to be given a score, and sixty-five are already extinct. The emphasis on evolutionary distinctiveness – what a layman might call uniqueness – means that many of these animals combine extreme peculiarities of appearance with oddities of behaviour. All are in some way unique – ‘weird and wonderful’ is the common expression – and their loss ought to be unthinkable. Alas, at a time when extinction rates are a thousand times higher than the fossil record suggests would be normal, losing a species is all too easily imaginable. Rivet after rivet is popping out of Paul Ehrlich’s aeroplane wing, and the risk of a crash is becoming ever more acute. Hard choices have to be made. Not even the wildest fantasist could imagine that all 4,436 species can be rescued. The Icarus principle applies. Flying too high, trying to do what can’t be done, is a short cut to disaster. With heads ruling hearts, Jonathan and his team have to concentrate their efforts on the top 100 species in the list.

  By coincidence I switch on the radio this morning and hear Jonathan speaking from the IUCN World Conservation Congress in South Korea, where he has just launched another list. This one, titled Priceless or Worthless?, is both simpler and more complicated than EDGE. Simpler, because it concentrates solely on rarity, not evolutionary distinctiveness. More complicated, because it includes species of all kinds – plants, fungi, invertebrates, birds and fish as well as mammals. These are, quite simply, the 100 most critically endangered species in the world, identified through the combined efforts of 8,000 scientists involved in the IUCN Species Survival Commission. As I said earlier, I have had direct experience of the BBC’s mania for editorial ‘balance’: every action or idea, however exemplary, must have someone to talk it down. This morning we get a real corker. Jonathan is ‘balanced’ by a woman who says it is illogical to regard all these species as deserving of life. If that’s the case, she argues, then we should care just as much about the smallpox virus, and about species that are already extinct – Save Our Dinosaurs. Jonathan and the interviewer, James Naughtie, somehow manage to avoid the word ‘bonkers’ or any of its synonyms. No such restraint is shown in my kitchen, where the radio at this time in the morning is used to being shouted at. The key issue, which Jonathan patiently reiterates, is that the great majority of the PoW species have been brought low by humans, and in most cases humans could reverse the tide. Unlike the dinosaurs, which died as victims of nature, they are entirely dependent on the goodwill and mercy of humans. What could be our moral case for denying them? Do these animals have the right to exist, or do humans have the right to exterminate them? For non-contrarians, these are not difficult questions to answer.

  To hammer the message home, the IUCN also appends a long – a very long – list of species that have already disappeared: eight dolorous pages of squint-small print. Seventy-seven of these are mammals, their identities somewhat irritatingly (if I may carp for a moment) obscured by the absence of common names, as if they are of interest only to science professionals. But why should laymen be spared their morsel of grief for the aurochs, the Hispaniolan edible rat, the pig-footed bandicoot, the giant fossa, the Madagascan dwarf hippopotamus, the sea mink, the indefatigable Galapagos mouse, the Jamaican rice rat, the desert bandicoot, the broad-faced potoroo, the bulldog rat . . .? Wouldn’t even a zoologist find it easier to mourn the big-eared hopping-mouse than Notomys macrotis? Ironically, one of the most beautiful illustrated books in my possession is A Gap in Nature, written by the peerless Tim Flannery with paintings by Peter Schouten. Together they describe and illustrate 103 species of mammals, birds and reptiles that have become extinct since 1500, including some of the most distinctive species ever to have lived. There among others went Steller’s sea cow (declared extinct in 1768), the bluebuck (1800), the white-footed rabbit-rat
(1845), St Lucy’s giant rice-rat (1852), Gould’s mouse (1857), the large Palau flying-fox (1874), the Falkland Islands dog (1876), the eastern hare-wallaby (1889), the Santa Cruz tube-nosed fruit-bat (1892), the red gazelle (1894), the longtailed hopping-mouse (1901), Pemberton’s deer-mouse (1931), the desert rat-kangaroo (1935), the thylacine (1936), Toolache wallaby (1939), Caribbean monk seal (1952), lesser bilby (1950s), Ilin Island cloudrunner (1953), Little Swan Island hutia (1955), crescent nailtail wallaby (1956), Bavarian pine vole (1962), greater short-tailed bat (1965), Guam flying fox (1974) . . . And so it will go on until we find a way to stop it.

  Twenty-two mammals are cited by PoW, of which fifteen also feature in the EDGE top 100 – not only rare, but members of the evolutionary aristocracy. ‘Rare’ is a word of almost pathetic inadequacy. The northern muriqui woolly monkey is reduced to fewer than 1,000 individuals, the pygmy three-toed sloth to below 500, the vaquita to below 200, Javan rhino to below 100, and Santa Catarina’s guinea pig to between forty and sixty – as near to extinction as a living species can get. The idea of fighting for these beleaguered minorities came to Jonathan Baillie while he was studying for a Masters at Yale. During an internship at IUCN he worked on the Red List (he is now one of its principal editors) and realised that there were huge numbers of distinct and uniquely wonderful species which hardly anyone knew or minded about. Necessarily he is an optimist. A whole generation of environmentally attuned people had grown up caring about tigers, gorillas, pandas and the rest of the megafaunal pantheon, and Jonathan believed they might now be helped towards a deeper awareness of the full diversity of life, and might even share his sense of urgency about protecting it. The result of that belief is EDGE.

  All conservation bodies like to make emotional appeals on behalf of our as-yet-unborn grandchildren. But EDGE is bigger than that. As Jonathan says, the listed species embody a disproportionate amount of the world’s evolutionary history and, hence, of its biological diversity. This is why they hold out the best hope for the future of life on earth, far beyond the short-term horizon of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. For a range of reasons – natural as well as man-made – some of these species will not survive. Given the right kind of help, however, there could be decent chances for the majority. There may be a soft glove of sentiment, but there is a hard fist of science inside it. The planet will go on changing as a perturbed climate inexorably alters the ranges and habitats of species which will have to adapt and evolve to meet new circumstances. The wide biological diversity and varied ecological tolerances of the EDGE species maximise the likelihood that this will happen. The more species, the better.

  In one way Jonathan’s optimism was fully justified. Before EDGE was launched, sceptics told him not to expect much in the way of interest from an apathetic media. In the age of celebrity, they said, people were not going to care about species they had never heard of. Aardvark, schmaardvark. What does it matter? But the pessimists were wrong. For two whole weeks, Jonathan had to clear his diary for interviews. ‘It was just madness,’ he now says. ‘People loved hearing about these creatures and were really shocked that they were threatened.’ Talk, however, runs out of the radio like water. Turn the knob and there it is, a constant stream of catastrophes, good causes and special pleadings. People may be shocked by the rate of extinction, and fascinated by oddities like the poisonous solenodons, but converting interest into action calls for something closer to alchemy. The scale of the challenge is enormous. Against each species in the EDGE top 100 is an assessment of the conservation effort being devoted to it. There are three categories – active, limited and none. For the top five species – Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, the eastern long-beaked echidna, western long-beaked echidna, New Zealand greater short-tailed bat, baiji, all of them critically endangered – the conservation assessments read none, limited, none, none, none. In all, forty-four of the top 100 have no ongoing conservation of any kind; twenty-two have limited action and only thirty-four are active.

  We should remember that the EDGE scores are composites, taking account of both evolutionary distinctiveness and vulnerability. This is why the aardvark – world champion for distinctiveness, but of ‘least concern’ to the IUCN – is only 313 in the list. Like many of the golden moles it is not often seen but is relatively common in its local habitats. In fact three species of golden mole rank higher than the aardvark. One of them, Marley’s golden mole (Amblysomus marleyi), is only two places outside the favoured top 100. Juliana’s (Neamblysomus julianae) comes in at Number 295, and the rough-haired (Chrysospalax villosus) at 304. The Somali golden mole, being in IUCN terms ‘data deficient’, is listed but unranked. Low rankings may be reassuring. It’s encouraging for friends of the gray brocket to know that its numbers around the forest margins of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay are sufficient for it to arouse little or no concern and to be EDGE’s lowest ranked species at Number 4,436. But much depends on your standpoint. It’s not much consolation for a British wildlife-lover to see the red squirrel down in 4,123rd place as a species of least concern. In Britain it’s a goner. Nor is one cheered by the fact that the highest ranked British terrestrial mammal, the common dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, comes no higher than 840th. It simply reminds us that we have so few species left to care about.

  I made some resolutions when I began this book. I would not pretend to knowledge I did not possess (resolution kept); I would not write in anger or deliver homilies (resolutions failed or wavering); and I would not heap opprobrium on men of the past who inhabited a different moral landscape (resolution kept). But a question remains: through what moral prism should we view the behaviour of our own generation? How might we be regarded by generations in the future? Let us not be lured into making false comparisons. It is on the basis of mens rea – the guilty mind – that the old-timers may be acquitted. They did not know – indeed, they had no way of knowing – that they might be stripping the planet of life or, through their God-given technological genius, putting an intolerable strain on the climate. They might have been immodest in dealing with their fellow man, but they knelt to God and saw no possibility that they could undo the work of Genesis. This is an opinion that now survives only in the minds of extreme libertarians who would rather boil the oceans than submit to regulation of the free market. Whatever we do, we do it in the full knowledge of its likely consequence. We cannot plead ignorance.

  Modern warfare is wholly impersonal. No one sees the whites of their enemies’ eyes any more. Remote push-button deaths are a mathematical abstraction, swiftly escalating beyond the point at which the numbers can be visualised. They are always there, a muffled drumbeat in the broadcast news. ‘Yesterday in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia. . . .’ Self-censoring news media spare us the kind of film and photography that would rub our noses in the reality of it. The war on wildlife is just as impersonal and even less visible. There is no ‘Yesterday in Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, China, Brazil, Indonesia . . .’ Just occasional round-ups of numbers pushed to the brink. Even these are wildly theoretical. To make such a calculation we would have to know how many species there were in the first place, and have some reliable idea of what existed where. This is extremely difficult – one might better say impossible – and it’s an uncertainty that gnaws at the soul of everyone seriously involved in conservation. You can’t conserve a critically endangered species unless you know where it is. You can’t know where it is unless you mount a very expensive – and very likely inconclusive – expedition to find it. The obstacles are financial, logistical, political, physical and technological.

  Jonathan Baillie spends more time on management now than he does on field work, but he did lead an expedition in 2007 to search for Attenborough’s echidna, now the EDGE list’s Number One species. The echidna had a significant advantage over the Somali golden mole in that a specimen, just one, had actually been seen alive, though this was a very long time ago – in 1961, three years before Alberto Simonett
a found his owl pellet. The animal was collected 1,600 metres above sea level, on Berg Rara in the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia. It earns its position at the top of the list by being both extravagantly rare and, as Jonathan puts it, ‘one of the most distinct mammals on the planet’ – a small, spiny creature that looks superficially like a hedgehog but with a long, bird-like beak. It amazed him that so little effort had been made to find it.

  Jonathan Baillie in Papua New Guinea

  But the looking is the easy bit. First you have to define the field of search (not especially difficult in the case of an animal seen only once), and then you have to get yourself there. This is difficult in all the ways you would expect – steep, thorny, unmapped and treacherous mountain terrain – and in many ways that you perhaps would not. Particularly in tribal lands, where there are often invisible layers of bureaucracy and a variety of spoken languages, the territory is full of diplomatic tripwires. This was certainly the case with the echidna. ‘You have to speak to the Indonesian representatives,’ says Jonathan. ‘You have to speak to the local forestry representatives, you have to speak to the local tribal leadership, and you have multiple conservation groups that you’ll be working with, so you have to meet with the head of each one, and then you have to deal with the military, because they have a base on the side of the mountain.’ You then need transport (including, in this case, a boat to reach the coastal villages), guides, interpreters, all the paraphernalia of a scientific expedition. Then it comes down to talking; moving from village to village, each one with a different language and cultural traditions, trawling for news of the species. ‘You have to make contact. You can’t just walk in and start demanding things. You have to see if they’re interested in the species. You get them to tell about their history and the animals and the different things they hunt and how far they go in the forest.’ The questioning has to be indirect. You can’t just show pictures, or describe an echidna, and say, ‘Have you seen one of these?’ Leading questions produce biased results. You have to get people to describe all that they’ve seen, and it takes time. ‘There’s tons of local knowledge if you sit and listen, and it doesn’t always come out right at the very beginning. You have to build trust. You’re building also an understanding of all the other species and what their ecological parameters are. And you’re looking at opportunity. What’s the best and most feasible route to get in and start looking? And obviously listening to where they’ve seen the animals last.’