The Endangered Fossa

The Fossa

The fossa is a small mammal endemic to the island of Madagascar, just off the southeast coast of Africa. For many years this animal was thought to be a cat, but recently has been confirmed to be a member of the mongoose family. Living in heavily wooded, hilly areas in the center of the island, the fossa is the largest carnivore on Madagascar, whose hunting traits and felinity have drawn comparisons to a small cougar. It is considered a top predator in its habitat, and can grow up to six feet long. The fossa is a terror to lemurs, who make up over half of its diet, as anyone who’s seen the movie Madagascar can attest!

Ha. But seriously these creatures are lethal hunters, active night and day. Unfortunately like most of the other animals on the world's endangered list, the fossa are losing their habitat in great swathes across the enormous island, losing almost 90% of the range they once used to enjoy. Logging companies, who make a killing off the many rare woods that grow in Madagascar as well as clearing huge tracts of land for farming, have deforested so effectively that in a relatively short time they’ve achieved near devastation of the island's once vast forests. Additionally, human fear has led to poaching of these animals, mostly due to worries about livestock. Unfounded fears of attacks on humans by fossa have also contributed to this continued decimation of the fossa population.

If the fossa are to disappear, the dwindling habitat they call home will experience what many such ecosystems suffer when they lose a top predator; primarily the explosion of populations of smaller animals that had been the predators’ prey; in this case lemurs and many other small rodents. These populations can in turn decimate populations of smaller creatures since there are so many of them, as well as destroying larger and larger amounts of flora in the former range of the top predator. In any ecosystem the delicate balance of predator and prey, or the food chain as it were, has taken millennia to evolve, and the sudden major changes that human destruction can have often cause extended devastation to an ecosystem that is so lasting and far-reaching it can be difficult to fully perceive.

What can be done to save the fossa? Most of these efforts must be made in place, in Madagascar itself: farmers must use the land they already have more efficiently instead of constantly destroying more forest for more acres of arable land. Additionally, the people in the regions bordering the fossa’s habitat must be better educated about the fossa’s almost non-existant threat to humans, as well as strengthening laws already in place against the hunting/poaching of this animal. What can be done internationally, most importantly, is the decrease our import of the rare, expensive woods from Madagascar (especially ebony) and be sure you are buying sustainably grown lumber.  Below are some links with more information about efficient farming and sustainable lumber.

 http://veganorganic.net/2012/06/what-is-efficient-agriculture/

http://www.therenewableplanet.com/green-building/green-building-materials/sustainable-lumber.aspx

The Borneo Pygmy Elephant

This species of elephant has only recently enjoyed a solid classification of which species it belongs to, or more specifically, whether or not it is a sub-species of elephant of its own. The point is moot, however, if we let this majestic line of creatures disappear from the earth, and they're well on the way to that ignominious fate. Perhaps 1,500 Borneo Pygmy Elephants remain in the wild today.
Maybe the most fascinating tidbit of information about this elephant is the mythology of their arrival on Borneo. It was thought by some that the Sultan of Sulu (from the Phillipines) brought a herd of domesticated pygmy elephants to the island of Borneo in the 17th century. It wasn't until 2003 that this myth was completely debunked: the WWF found that the Borneo Pygmy Elephants were different, genetically, from other elephants. At least 300,000 years separate this elephant, the smallest in Asia, from its cousins on Sumatra and the Asian mainland.

The Borneo Pygmy elephant sports larger than usual ears for an Asian elephant, its tail is longer and its tusks are straighter, too. But their numbers are dwindling fast, due for the most part to the rampant deforestation in their of the world. These gentle animals require wide, continuous swathes of forest to feed their voracious need for at least 150kgs of vegetation daily. Where the forests aren't being destroyed for urban expansion or for commercial farms, they are being converted to commercial logging plantations. This loss of habitat represents for the most part the same fate that nearly all the endangered species of this region (and many others) face.
The loss of this elephant species isn't a certainty, and there are research and conservation organizations that are striving to save it. You can help, too (see below). If the Borneo Pygmy Elephant does disappear, the ecosystems it once called home will lose a vital "keystone species". The concept of a keystone species, and how valuable they are, is best summed up by this bit from Think Elephants International:

"The loss of elephants [the Keystone Species in question] from one particular site would mean that all the biological interactions and ecosystem processes in which they are involved, would also be lost."
These "architects" and "gardeners" of the forests of Borneo are disappearing quickly, and without them, that ecosystem will likely never be the same.

Resources:

http://thinkelephants.blogspot.com/2012/10/elephants-ecosystems-engineers.html
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/elephants/asian_elephants/borneo_pygmy_elephant/

Organizations dedicated to helping Asian elephants:

http://worldwildlife.org
http://www.wcs.org/saving-wildlife/elephants/asian-elephant.aspx

The Mountain Plover

This curious little bird, one of very few endemic such species to North America, makes its nests on the ground, preferably in tall grass. Its habitat is actually a fairly large strip of land (not entirely unbroken, however) reaching from the southern region of Alberta in Canada all the way down in a slight southeasterly band throughout the Rocky Mountains into New Mexico and western Texas. Many of the endangered species on the world's lists tend to have extremely small habitats by comparison to the mountain plover, but this species' numbers are declining nonetheless. To begin with, the chances of survival of a mountain plover nest are never particularly good, sometimes being as low as a 25% survival rate. The nest being on the ground rather than in the relative safety of trees is a large contributor to this danger. But by far the biggest threat to the mountain plover is the encroachment of humans.
The prime locations for this bird is level ground, and unfortunately such flat areas are often the first areas to be developed; turned into croplands or are lost to urban expansion. As of 2009, the mountain plover moved from the Threatened list to the Endangered Species list.
The fate of the mountain plover seems irrevocably tied to that of prairie dogs. The favored nesting areas of these bids are typically prairie dog towns and when those disappear to development, as they have been in many parts of the western United States, so too go the plovers. Preservation efforts aimed at saving prairie dog habitats have the effect of also preserving nesting areas for the plovers.
The loss of the mountain plover would be grievous, as we'd be losing another of the only 12 remaining grassland birds native to North America. Efforts have been made to help protect the nests of the plovers, helping to raise survival rates of the chicks.

These organizations, while not having a direct mountain plover support link, do list the bird as one of the species it works to protect. Contributing to them is always a good investment. If you live in one of the states where the plovers make their habitat, you can look for local conservation organizations or look right out your back door and see if there are plovers nesting on your property, and try to leave them in peace and leave the tall grasses be!

www.worldwildlife.org

www.wildearthguardians.org/site/PageServer?pagename=species_birds_mountain_plover#.VX-Oi0Yd03g

Below is a link to a website where you can learn a lot about the mountain plover, and many other birds besides.

www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Mountain_Plover/id

Blink and you've missed it. Wait...there it i-....oh, nope. It's gone again.

The Saola is one of the world's rarest creatures, and was so (we think) even before humans hunted it and other factors contributed to its decline from an already small population. Another part of the reason for its rarity is that this creature makes itself very difficult to find...which in my mind makes it one of the smartest creatures in the world, in addition to one of the rarest. Any creature that deliberately hides itself away from humans has a crucial advantage.
But it may not be enough for the saola.
The saola is also colloquially known as the Asian Biocorn (or Asian Unicorn), or Spindlehorn, because of the long, straight horns it grows (sometimes reaching up to 50cm long in some cases (the picture I have below is of a younger saola.) The first photograph of a saola wasn't even taken until 1999! So up to that time, all we knew about them from hunters' trophies and researchers' stories and sketches.

The entire population of this rare, bovine creature lives in a fraction of the Annamite mountains, straddling Vietnam and Laos. Such a small habitat is already a major threat to its continued existence. The exact number of the current living population of saolas is unknown, but it is on the Critically Endangered Species list nonetheless. Their tiny habitat is and will continue to be threatened by human interests, and where it is not wholly destroyed, the habitat can be fragmented so that the breeding pools of saola will be isolated and this will result in a decline of healthy offspring. Additionally, the animal is hunted for the trophy of its horns. The saola feeds on leafy plants and undergrowth in the forests, but little more is known about its role in the ecosystem than this.

The saola doesn't have the extensive legal protections in place that other critically endangered or endangered animals do, like some tigers and bears, for instance.

It's hard to say what cascading effects the loss of the saola would be, since we know so little about it, and its very presence is so nearly invisible that the effects of its continued existence, even, are difficult to sketch out. If you want to help, below are a couple of links to organizations that are fighting to save this beautiful creature.

http:\\www.savethesaola.org

Save Our Species has a saola page: http://www.sospecies.org/sos_projects/mammals/saola/\

http://www.worldwildlife.org/species/saola


Ref: worldwildlife,org, wikipedia.org

Stranded in Shrinking Islands in the Indonesian Jungle...

The Sumatran tiger is a magnificent animal, prowling the steaming jungles of Indonesia, now mostly in spots on the island of Sumatra and in some places on Borneo, little islands of reasonably safe existence in a region that once swarmed with them. The tiger, known formally as panthera tigris sumatrae, is the orange and black-striped beauty that most of us picture when we think of tigers, very much like the Bengal tiger (a popular image here in Cincinnati) but its numbers have dwindled to less than 400 in Indonesia. Let that number sink in for a moment...four hundred. If only one of them died each day, without any new ones being born, then they would be extinct before August 2016. To make that even more clear, if just two died per day, they would be gone forever before next spring. These beautiful creatures are perilously close to extinction, having acheived the dubious status of "Critically Endangered", which translates to "Most likely it will go extinct, and soon." This means that only very stringent measures, taken immediately, can stop this from happening, and that might not be enough. Even non-human threats could be enough to wipe them out. Say, a viral disease peculiar to their species might be enough to do it. But that's no reason to give up. The American bald eagle was taken off the critically endangered least, as was the brown pelican, once thought to be all but extinct.

The Sumatran tiger is, like all animals on this tragic list, threatened by a number of factors, and the biggest threats come from us. We tend to think of poaching and senseless slaughter when we imagine a species going extinct, and that is certainly happening with this tiger. Many of the most ancient cultural practices from China down through Malaysia, Indonesia and New Guinea, among other countries, put absurdly high values on pelts and delicacy meats, teeth and other parts of this tiger and many other animals, too (we all know about the slaughter of sharks for that ridiculous soup.) Rhinos are slaughtered for a tiny part of their horn which, when ground to a powder, is sold to fools as an aphrodisiac. How can animals compete against the peoples who live in this part of the world, many of them impoverished, and who can fetch an enormous sum for simply taking a rifle and shooting down a tiger? If you thought you could feed your family, always in danger of getting sick from malnutrition, by killing an animal, would you? Most people would, because here in America and other places we have the luxury of worrying about the animals on the extinction lists. So a major factor in the mass slaughter of these tigers is economic; people are desperate and driven to killing tigers in order to put food on the table. Or sometimes it's just greed. But another factor that gets less consideration outside of conservation circles is loss of habitat. Slash-and-burn ground clearance for human expansion, as well as logging operations and forests leveled for farmland, is destroying huge chunks of the habitat these tigers (and many other animals and plants, beside) need to survive. Again, money and greed pair up to sign the death warrant of the Sumatran tiger. This map shows the decline in the forests and, subsequently, the tiger's habitat on the island of Sumatra.

There are some strong legal protections in place for this smallest of all tiger populations, with both heavy fines and jail time for poachers, but it will not be enough to stop to disappearance of the Sumatran tiger. Like all other extinctions, including our own, it will take an economic and cultural shift the likes of which humanity has never before achieved to save this animal, other animals and habitats, and even ourselves.

Look at the picture of the tiger above...study it. It will probably be gone before your kids are born. Maybe before you even finish college.

Welcome to my Endangered Earth blog for Summer 2015.