[Animals] Scientists step up hunt for ‘Asian unicorn’, one of world’s rarest animals

[#Wittels-]

The saola is so elusive that no biologist has seen one in the wild. Now they are racing to find it, so they can save it

Weighing 80-100kg and sporting long straight horns, white spots on its face and large facial scent glands, the saola does not sound like an animal that would be hard to spot. But it was not until 1992 that this elusive creature was discovered, becoming the first large mammal new to science in more than 50 years.

Nicknamed the “Asian unicorn”, the saola continues to be elusive. They have never been seen by a biologist in the wild and have been camera-trapped only a handful of times. There are reports of villagers trying to keep them in captivity but they have died after a few weeks, probably due to the wrong diet.

It was during a survey of wildlife in the remote Vũ Quang nature reserve, a 212 square mile forested area of north central Vietnam, in 1992, that biologist Do Tuoc came across two skulls and a pair of trophy horns belonging to an unknown animal.

Twenty more specimens, including a complete skin, were subsequently collected and, in 1993, laboratory tests revealed the animal to be not only a new species, but an entirely new genus in the bovid family, which includes cattle, sheep, goats and antelopes.

Initially named Vu Quang Ox, the animal was later called saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) – meaning “spindle horns”, the arms or posts (sao) of a spinning wheel (la) according to Lao-speaking ethnic groups in Laos and neighbouring Vietnam.

The discovery was hailed as one of the most spectacular zoological discoveries of the 20th century, but less than 30 years later, the po[CENSORED]tion of the saola is believed to have declined enormously due to commercial wildlife poaching, which has exploded in Vietnam since 1994. Although saola is not the direct target of poachers, the intensive commercial trap providing animals for use in traditional Asian medicine or as bushmeat constitutes the main threat.

 

Despite efforts to improve patrolling of nature reserves in the Annamite Mountains, a major mountain range that stretches around 680 miles through Laos, Vietnam and northeast Cambodia, poaching has intensified. "Thousands of people use traps, so there are millions of them in the forest, which means that po[CENSORED]tions of large mammals and some birds have no way to escape and are collapsing in the Annamites," says Minh Nguyen, a student at Ph.D. from Colorado State University. , which studies the impact of traps on critically endangered great-horned muntjac.

In 2001, the Saola po[CENSORED]tion was estimated to be 70 to 700 in Laos and several hundred in Vietnam. More recently, experts have put the number at less than 100, a decline that led to the species being listed as critically endangered on the IUCN red list in 2006, the highest risk category a species can have before it. extinction in nature. The animal was last photographed in 2013 at the Saola Nature Reserve in central Vietnam. Since then, villagers continue to report their presence in areas in and around Pu Mat national park in Vietnam and in Bolikhamxay province in Laos.

 

In 2006, William Robichaud and Simon Hedges, a biologist and specialist in wildlife conservation and fighting the illegal wildlife trade in Asia and Africa, co-founded the Saola Working Group (SWG) with the goal of finding the last saolas in nature for a captive breeding program, in order to reintroduce the species to the wild in the future, in a natural habitat free of threats.

The SWG connects conservation organizations in Laos and Vietnam to raise awareness, gather information from the local po[CENSORED]tion, and search for saola. But the animals continue to elude the team. Between 2017 and 2019, the SWG conducted an intensive search using 300 camera traps in an 11-square-mile area of the Khoun Xe Nongma National Protected Area in Laos. Not one of the millions of photographs that saola captured.

 

According to the IUCN, only about 30% of Saola's potential habitat has had some type of wildlife study and potentially only 2% has been intensively searched for the species. Technologies limit capabilities: camera traps are not good at detecting individual animals that are scattered over a large area, especially in the dense and humid forest of the saola mountain range. In August this year, the IUCN Species Survival Commission called for more investment in the search for the saola. "It is clear that search efforts must increase significantly in scale and intensity if we are to save this species from extinction," said Nerissa Chao, director of the IUCN SSC Asian Species Action Association.

One organization, the Saola Foundation, is raising money for a new initiative that would train dogs to detect signs of saola like manure. Any samples would then be studied on-site using saola-specific DNA rapid field test kits that are being developed in conjunction with the Molecular Laboratory of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. If the kits test positive within an hour, expert wildlife trackers will start looking for saola in the forest.

If successful, the captured saolas will be taken to a captive breeding center developed by the SWG and the Vietnamese government in the Bạch Mã national park in central Vietnam.

"We are at a point in the history of conservation," says Robichaud, who is president of the Saola Foundation. “We know how to find and save this magnificent animal, which has been on planet Earth for perhaps 8 million years. We just need the world to come together and support the effort. It will not cost much and the reward, for Saola, for the Anamite mountains and for us, will be enormous ”.

Find more coverage on the age of extinction here and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for the latest news and reports.

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Link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/07/scientists-step-up-hunt-for-asian-unicorn-one-of-worlds-rarest-animals-aoe