The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  With the echidna it worked perfectly. The descriptions were so precise, and so consistent from village to village, that Jonathan was in no doubt. Forty-six years after the first and only sighting, the animals were still there. After that, it was just a question of deciding where to set up camp and where to search. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna sets a number of challenges typical of EDGE species. It is small, nocturnal and confined to hard terrain, in a faraway country with an ambivalent attitude to conservation (the illegal burning of Indonesian forests to make way for palm oil plantations, a catastrophe for orang-utans, is a scandal without parallel). For a small search team working by torchlight, the difficulties are formidable. Diligence alone is never going to be enough. You need the gods to smile, and the best you can do is to be ready to capitalise on any stroke of luck.

  For the echidna team, luck came in the form of nose-pokes. This is not the rude awakening it sounds. Echidnas have a very distinctive way of feeding. Their preferred food is worms, which they find by prodding the ground with their long tubular beaks. Hence the nose-pokes, which they leave as evidence of their passing. There, however, the team’s luck ran out. The architects of the nose-pokes declined to show themselves, alive or dead. Even so, it was a result. Enough for the Red List to declare with confidence that Zaglossus attenboroughi still existed, though the impacts of hunting, its restricted range and shrinking habitat meant that it remained critically endangered.

  In terms of conservation status, an EDGE listing is a badge of honour. A species may gain enormously from its imprimatur, especially if it is highly ranked. In particular, it significantly improves the chances of funding. There is a real hope that Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna will be saved, though the current conservation effort is only ‘limited’ and there are no guarantees. The sad story of the baiji, Lipotes vexillifer, stands as stark evidence of the abyss that stands between recognising a species in need and doing something effective to save it. When EDGE published its first mammals list in 2007, the baiji stood where Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna now stands, at Number One. By 2011 it had slipped to fifth, though not because there had been any lessening of risk. On the contrary, by then its chances of survival were vanishingly faint. The alternative common name for Lipotes vexillifer is Yangtze River dolphin, which describes it perfectly. It is, or was, a freshwater dolphin found exclusively in the Yangtze, a species of beauty and grace, which, according to legend, was the reincarnation of a drowned princess. The lovely animal and the densely polluted shipping highway, booby-trapped with fishermen’s nets, in which it found itself struggling to survive were a gross mismatch, which, without intervention, could have only one outcome. Saving the baiji became an international cause célèbre. The tragedy, the disgrace, is that it should have succeeded. An appalled witness to the debacle was one of Jonathan Baillie’s colleagues at the Institute of Zoology, Dr Sam Turvey. An hour-long conversation with him, I now confess with some embarrassment, fell victim to my incompetence as a sound engineer, producing a fine recording of my questions but nothing at all of his answers. Never mind. Making no attempt to conceal his distress at what he had seen, Sam set it all down in a book with the no-frills title Witness to Extinction: how we failed to save the Yangtze River dolphin. Everyone knew what needed to happen. Baijis should be caught alive and transferred away from the unsurvivable river channel to breed ex situ in an oxbow lake. But the Swiss-funded rescue plan turned into a rolling farce of obfuscation, procrastination and tragi-comical bungling, exacerbated by a malign Chinese bureaucracy constitutionally unable to match actions to words. In effect, the baiji was talked out of existence. In late 2006, a year before EDGE came into being, Sam Turvey joined an expedition that combed the Yangtze from one end to the other of the baiji’s historic range, and back again. Not a single dolphin did they see. The baiji had gone, with the result that – ‘evolutionary distinctiveness’ meaning what it says – there was nothing like it left anywhere on earth. Biodiversity had just taken an almighty hit.

  Sam chides international conservation organisations for failing to put their weight behind the baiji. ‘This looks like a good project. Good luck. Let me know how it goes,’ was a typical response to his plea for help. It led him to ask a sharp political question. Is extreme vulnerability actually a hindrance to conservation effort? Conservation charities like to be associated with success, and the risk of failure may be a powerful brake on their willingness to intervene. Could it be that some species of extreme rarity were deemed too high a reputational risk even to try to save? ‘On the other hand,’ he writes, ‘organisations which are too timid to put themselves on the line instead only fail passively, and can cover their tracks and justify their inaction without even needing to apply too much spin. Paradoxically, if conservation organisations are run like businesses, then maybe not trying at all might even become the better option.’ You could argue that the NGOs had a point. It’s no good throwing money at lost causes. But then the baiji turned into a lost cause only because the chance to save it was missed. If the world needed an object lesson in how not to protect a unique species, then this was it. As Sam persuasively argues, the triage system should not be an excuse for inertia. What the world did clearly need was a pro-active standard-bearer for threatened wildlife that would identify priorities, draw up action plans, lead and coordinate the efforts to see them through. Out of necessity, EDGE was born.

  The questions it raises have been unconsidered on such a scale since the authors of the Old Testament laid down their papyri. We do not know how many species the planet is home to, but we can reasonably suppose that the undiscovered ones are in no better shape than the ones we know about. By some estimates 20 per cent, and by others 30 per cent, of the world’s species are imminently threatened with extinction. At least one in five. That would be a shocking rate of attrition if it applied just to individuals. Imagine the outcry in England if, say, one in five dogs or donkeys were condemned to death. Consider the outcry that did occur when the government wanted to cull badgers – a policy of extreme prejudice to selected animals but of no threat to the species. We fix on these things because they are within our imaginative grasp. One in five species is way beyond our understanding. As a distinguished scientist will remark in the next chapter: ‘We don’t know what we are doing.’

  As I am writing these words, an email arrives from the Royal Society. Attached to it is a peer-reviewed paper from Stony Brook University, New York, whose title is a frequently asked question: ‘How does climate change cause extinction?’ You might expect a simple answer. It’s a heat-in-the-kitchen thing. Animals will die simply because they are physiologically unable to tolerate soaring temperatures. Look at what happens to humans when they are hit by extreme heat. In the European heatwave of 2003, when even Switzerland scorched at over 40°C, mortuaries ran out of space. Across Europe, perhaps 35,000 people died from the effects of heat. So there you have it. Species that evolved to live in cool conditions will have no answer to the blood-boiling temperatures of the next century.

  But of course (even if you accept that climate change will be that rapid and extreme) it’s not that straightforward. Nature is a complex weave of interactions and relationships in which causes and effects are rarely direct, and almost never singular. It is generally predicted that the number of extinctions due to climate change over the next hundred years will be measurable in the thousands. But what will kill them, the Stony Brook scientists argue, is not heatstroke but the secondary effects of an altered environment. Some spiny lizards, for example, have become locally extinct because higher temperatures shorten their daytime activity and they don’t have time to mate. Other species may die of starvation because they don’t have time to feed. Reduced rainfall causing water shortages will have the same effect. So will changes in vegetation, which eliminate food or habitat. So will forest fires. So will rising sea levels caused by melting icecaps. Much more important than all these, however, are relationships with other species. These, too, vary in complexity
. If a prey species becomes locally extinct, either by dying or by moving elsewhere, then predators will die out too, and so will the parasites and scavengers that depend on them. Some species may thrive in a warmed climate, or move successfully into new territory, where they may out-compete native species or infect them with diseases (Britain’s grey–red squirrel conflict provides the perfect example). Pollinating insects may move off. There will be mismatches in the changed seasonal behaviour of dependent or interdependent species – birds and insects hatching at different times, for example. Any or all of these can throw an ecosystem out of kilter, the loss of one species leading to the loss of others, a gathering avalanche of extinction.

  It so happens that these arguments have been made in a paper about climate change. But it doesn’t matter how a species dies – through breeding failure, starvation, habitat loss or persecution by humans – a dead species is a dead species and the result is another mortal blow. This is why EDGE matters. Without support, many of the world’s most distinctive animals will be gone within a decade. For us, the architects of mayhem, it is make-your-mind-up time. Do we care, or do we not? ‘If we do,’ says Jonathan Baillie, ‘then government, industry and the public should get behind these animals. If not, then society has decided it’s happy for much of the world’s diversity to go extinct.’ The great risk in writing in these terms, quite apart from the displeasing sound of one’s own unwonted querulousness, is that people will conclude that we are beyond a tipping point, and that nothing we do now can make a difference. All they can hear is pounding surf on the reefs of doom.

  But it’s not like that. Just listen. Wherever you are, you won’t have to go far to hear birdsong. Even in biologically depleted Britain, gardens teem with life. In every continent at every degree of latitude, in mountains, forests and plains, enthrallingly beautiful creatures still live as they have done for millennia. Like the baiji once was, they are savable. Like the baiji’s, their direct ancestral lines are far longer than our own, way older than anything imaginable to the scribes of Genesis. I run my eye once again down the list of threatened mammals, like names on some predictive war memorial, lifted from a nightmare. Sumatran rhinoceros, riverine rabbit, wild Bactrian camel, Asian tapir, Mediterranean monk seal, pygmy hippopotamus, Gilbert’s potoroo, dugong, western gorilla, blond titi monkey, Amazonian manatee, Ethiopian water mouse, blue whale, giant golden mole . . . Who would pull the trigger on any of these? Who would pull the trigger on any of the thousands of others? It is no fault of theirs that we regard so many of them as obscure – their obscurity is our ignorance. The first priority is to plug the gaps in our knowledge, which means winning the long-term support of governments. That requires commitment, training, and a concerted effort, which, like nature itself, is blind to political boundaries. Knowledge is all, which is why EDGE has established its own Fellowships and a highly developed training programme whose graduates are already working across the globe. ‘So,’ says Jonathan Baillie, ‘we’re trying to build up a generation that can respond, that cares about these species. What we ask them to do is create a blue-print for survival, which is really the initial stages of an action plan, trying to identify what needs to be done. Sometimes we know a species is very scarce, but we don’t know what caused the decline. Just understanding the basic threat is sometimes a big step forward.’

  Surveying endangered species can have unexpected benefits too. When ‘new’ species are discovered, it is almost always the result of having looked for something else – an unknown mammal by definition cannot be sought. If you’re lucky, you just happen across one. This enticing possibility was in the back of Jonathan Baillie’s mind as he hunted for Attenborough’s echidna. In such unexplored terrain you literally never know what might turn up, and in no other science is serendipity so important. Often, says Jonathan, discoveries happen when a villager brings out of his house something he has just caught – familiar to him, who might have been stewing it with vegetables all his life, but a novelty to science. Or you might spot something for sale in a market. Down in the basement of the EDGE list, whose denizens are too few or too obscure to rank, is the red gazelle, Eudorcas rufina, which, as I mentioned in Chapter Six, is famously known from three male specimens bought in the late nineteenth century at markets in northern Algeria. It has never been seen in the wild, and its provenance is a matter of some doubt. At the other end of the list, in fifteenth place just below the Javan rhinoceros, is the kha-nyou, Laonastes aenigmamus, sometimes known as the Laotian rock rat, or rat squirrel. Had it been discovered in the early nineteenth century, it would have been exactly the kind of species at which the learned sceptics in London would have tutted. With the body of a large rat and the tail of a squirrel, it looks exactly like a Phineas T. Barnum stitch-up, classic unbelievabilia. Today there may be questions about its phylogeny, but none about its authenticity. The kha-nyou was first discovered in 1996, laid out in a meat market in Laos. Three more specimens were supplied by villagers in 1998, along with some remains in an owl pellet, and others have been found at roadside stalls. It was originally assigned to a whole new family of its own, the Laonastidae, but has since been awarded a much more exciting pedigree as the only living representative of the primordial family Diatomyidae. All its known relatives exist only as fossils. The kha-nyou is, quite literally, a living fossil, the rodent coelacanth, evolutionary distinctiveness on stilts. If EDGE ever wants an emblematic species, then it need look no further than this.

  Thirty-one places below the kha-nyou, at Number 46, is the golden-rumped sengi, also known as the golden-rumped elephant shrew, Rhynchocyon chrysopygus, a rabbit-sized native of north-eastern Kenya. (In the interests of unbelievabilia, I check to see how many species listed by the IUCN have the word ‘golden’ in their name. The answer is 295.) In 2010, during an expedition to survey the sengi, an EDGE Fellow, Grace Wambui, spotted another species she could not put a name to. Camera traps revealed an animal about two feet long, with large eyes and ears, spindly legs, wiry tail and a long trunk-like snout. Its upper parts were a grizzled yellow brown, its thighs maroon and lower rump black. It was evidently a giant elephant shrew, but not one of the four species already known to science. (There are also thirteen species of the smaller, soft-furred kind.) Thus did the elephant, aardvark and golden moles acquire a new cousin. It will be a challenge for EDGE to make sure that they hang on to it. The animal’s obscurity until now was guaranteed by its confinement to what was in effect a scientific no-go area, dangerously close to the border with violent and lawless Somalia. Now improved security means that loggers are moving in and doing their lethal worst.

  Camera-trap photograph of a new species of giant sengi in Boni Forest, Kenya

  In 2012, a new monkey – Cercopithecus lomamiensis, known by the Congolese as the lesula – was discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a blond-maned species with the long, lugubrious face of a Roman magistrate. New monkeys in Africa are rare. The previous discovery was the kipunji, Rungwecebus kipuniji (Tanzania, 2003), and the one before that the sun-tailed monkey, Cercopithecus solatus (Gabon, 1984). Their hold on life is slippery. The kipunji is hunted for meat and losing habitat to loggers and charcoal burners. The IUCN lists it as critically endangered. The sun-tailed monkey, subject to similar pressures, is listed as vulnerable. So, already, is the lesula. For the conservation community, the ultimate test is to prevent the celebration of discovery from turning immediately into the mourning of loss. Recent history offers some doleful examples. The baiji’s ancestors lived on earth well over 100 times longer than humans have been here, but the baiji itself was a stranger to science until 1918, when it had less than ninety years left to live. After the great whales, the fabulous Steller’s sea cow was the biggest mammal to survive into the modern historical era. It stretched up to 8 metres from nose to tail, and weighed 10 tonnes. The story has a typically serendipitous, almost romantic beginning. In 1741 the naturalist George Steller was shipwrecked on the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea, where he observed
these huge animals living in herds around the coast. Peter Schouten’s painting in A Gap in Nature shows a long, torpedo-shaped animal with an amiable, soppy-dog face and skin like tree-bark. Steller’s own description of it, quoted by Tim Flannery in the same book, has a prophetic poignancy:

  They are not in the least afraid of human beings . . . they have an extraordinary love for one another, which extends so far that when one of them was cut into, all the others were intent on rescuing it and keeping it from being pulled ashore by closing a circle around it. Others tried to overturn the yawl. Some placed themselves on the rope or tried to draw the harpoon out of its body, in which indeed they were successful several times. We also observed that a male two days in a row came to its dead female on the shore and inquired about its condition.

  ‘Not afraid of human beings . . . cut into . . . rope . . . harpoon . . . dead . . .’ For hunters looking for meat, oil and skins, the sea cows were as easy a target as their terrestrial namesakes in a field. By 1768, just twenty-seven years after its discovery, the species was extinct. At least we have the small, salutary consolation of knowing that it once existed: we know and can regret our loss. It is fair to assume that in the beleagured forests and poisoned waterways, many others will perish without ever bearing a name. For all the species I have mentioned, I could have substituted a shockingly large number of others. My choices have been arbitrary, but so too are the processes by which we drive animals to the edge. For the baiji, Steller’s sea cow, bluebuck, kouprey, Caribbean monk seal, Japanese sea lion, Sardinian pika, and all the others from the obituary pages of the last 500 years, there is no possibility of return. For all those still clinging on, there is hope worth investing in. Habitat protection, translocation and captive breeding can all work to stop the dreaded code-letter E appearing with such awful frequency in the IUCN Red List.