The Hunt for the Golden Mole (16 page)

Moving from cabinet to cabinet, I am slowly adjusting to the idea that
Mammal Species of the World
, the
Red List
and all other attempts to gazette the world's fauna are best guesses rather than audited accounts. Estimates of the total numbers of plant and animal species vary so widely that they look less like science than a soothsayer's reading of entrails. Guesses roam between two million and 100 million, though most of them fall between five million and thirty million. Of these, only about 1.8 million have been described and catalogued, and only 3 per cent of these ‘known' species have the benefit of IUCN status reports. Fifteen per cent of mammals are classified as ‘Data deficient', meaning that we have very little idea of their range, number or chance of survival.

Complicating matters further, ‘new' species continue to turn up. Only a few weeks earlier, a previously unknown mammal had been named and announced to science and the world's press.
New Carnivore Discovered in Madagascar
, said the headlines, over pictures of something variously described as ‘mongoose-like' or ‘a scruffy ferret'. The holotype, consisting of empty skin, bare skull and mandible, now lies in a box in Paula Jenkins's office. It is small – only slightly larger than the hairy-eared dwarf lemur – but in death, with its fluffy tail and grizzled pelt, it looks rather sleeker than it did in life, a masterpiece of the mortician's art.

This is
Salanoia durrelli
, or Durrell's vontsira, named for the
eponymous Gerald, late naturalist, founder of Jersey Zoo and author of
My Family and Other Animals
. It comes from the wetlands of central eastern Madagascar, where it feeds on small mammals and fish. Only three have ever been identified, which – taking account of the limp skin now lying in front of me – leaves exactly two recorded in the wild. The unavoidable suspicion is that its discovery has only narrowly preceded its extinction. Like the dwarf lemur, which vanished again in 1989, it is one of the most endangered species on earth.

Even quite large animals can live beyond the reach of science. It was only in 1992, for example, that the saola, the uniquely beautiful antelope
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis,
was discovered among the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam. Then in 2010, in northern Myanmar, a team of international scientists happened across the previously unknown Myanmar snub-nosed monkey,
Rhinopithecus strykeri
. Let's not forget that the gorilla was first described only in 1848, and the okapi not until 1901 – extraordinary given their size, distinctive appearance and the intensity with which Africa had been searched. It is this very uncertainty that keeps alive the hopes of the thylacine-hunters and the indefatigable friends of Nessie. Their optimism holds a strange echo of religious faith – just because you can't see something, it doesn't mean it isn't there. Or, as scientists prefer to put it, absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Of course animals are ‘new' only in the sense that America was new when Christopher Columbus bumped into it. Local people in Myanmar were as surprised by the scientists' ignorance of the snub-nosed monkey as the scientists were by its discovery. The peculiar nasal arrangement that gives the species its name makes the animals easy to find in the rain – water trickling into their upturned nostrils makes them sneeze. The one predictable
thing about evolution is that it is very, very slow. New species do not pop up like mushrooms. Nor do they last for ever. Mammals typically survive for around a million years, though some may hang on for as much as ten times longer. Vague though this may be, it provides the basis for a bit of simple arithmetic. Given that there are around 5,000 known mammal species in the world, the extinction rate on average should be around one every 200 years. Over the last four centuries that rate has been exceeded by a factor of nearly forty-five. Even if a third of those missing did walk back out of the jungle, it would still be a catastrophic rate of loss.

Confusingly, too, ‘new' species sometimes are just old ones in a different guise. Science is always revising and reappraising itself. Re-examination with new techniques may show that what was once thought to be a single species is actually several different ones. Thus the number of species increases, but the number of animals remains the same. This ‘lumping and splitting' has been most dramatic in birds, where the list of species since the 1970s has soared from 8,600 to around 10,000. Albeit on a smaller scale, it has happened with mammals too. The echidna is a good example. Truly this is one of nature's strangest, a spiny, tube-nosed native of Australia and New Guinea, which, with the single exception of the duck-billed platypus, is the only mammal known to lay eggs. For years it was thought that there were just two species – short-beaked and long-beaked. Then scientists began to argue. Some reckoned that the long-beaked was not one species but six. Eventually, in 1998, they settled on three. All now are listed by the IUCN as critically endangered. One of them – Sir David's long-beaked echidna,
Zaglossus attenboroughi
, named after the world's favourite naturalist – must count as one of the rarest creatures on earth and, as we shall see later, has recently achieved a somewhat ambiguous celebrity
of its own. The entire species is known from just one individual seen in 1961. But even this disqualifies it as the rarest ever recorded. At least it has been seen alive. The Somali golden mole exists only as a fragment in an owl pellet.

Bending over the tiny skull of Durrell's vontsira, I realise that questions of existence and identity are far more complex than I have understood. The old-fashioned fifty-year extinction test – not finally abandoned until 1995 – was patently absurd. The Somali golden mole – any number of rare or uncatalogued small animals – might inhabit the thorny tangles around my garden, and I would have no idea they were there. I have never systematically looked. Nor, I would guess, has any previous occupant of this land, reaching all the way back to the Neolithic. Extend that thought to all the thorny tangles, remote forests, hidden valleys, plains and mountains of the world, and one can see why science is so imprecise. It is like one of Donald Rumsfeld's ‘known unknowns'. We know that in scattered populations or discrete enclaves in every continent, old species must continue to outlive their apparent deaths and ‘new' ones remain undiscovered. We don't know what or where, and we don't have the resources to find out.

Back at home I return to the document that first pricked my interest – ‘Correlates of rediscovery and the detectability of extinction in mammals' (authors: Diana O. Fisher and Simon P. Blomberg of the School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland). It tells me that 70 per cent of ‘purportedly extinct' mammals are known from fewer than five historic sightings. This is why the IUCN's extinction criteria now rest on search effort rather than time-lag. Now a species cannot be written off until there have been ‘exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times, throughout its historic range . . .'

Resources for this kind of thing are limited, and there is a bias towards large iconic species that engage the public interest. By 2010, as we have seen, at least twenty-five qualified search teams and many more amateurs had mounted expeditions in search of the thylacine. The wild horse,
Equus ferus
, had been sought twenty-two times since 1969; the kouprey, or grey ox,
Bos sauveli
, twenty-three times since 1986; and the baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin,
Lipotes vexillifer
, fifteen times in four years. As the authors point out, there is a serious risk of blind faith, of searches continuing long after the quarry is extinct.

The great majority of missing mammals have been accorded little or no search effort at all.
Calcochloris tytonis
even now might be tunnelling away in Somalia, or it might not. Who could know? Somalia of course is a special case, a rogue state which is no place for rambling zoologists. But it is not alone in presenting difficulties. There are plenty of governments whose commitment to freedom does not stretch as far as inviting foreign scientists (aka ‘spies') to explore their territories, and plenty of places where political obduracy is combined with remote and difficult terrain. It all militates against the small, the far-flung and the obscure – which of course is exactly what many ‘Extinct', ‘Critically endangered' or ‘Data deficient' animals are likely to be. It will be a while before anyone invites us to adopt a pygmy spotted skunk, a Sulawesi warty pig or a Sundaic arboreal niviventer. As the conservation charities very well know, public interest is a powerful arbiter, and the public likes big charismatic mammals it can easily recognise. This is why the likes of thylacine, wild horse and grey ox have been so ardently pursued, and why public appeals are slanted towards megafauna. It is an obvious truth, too, that a big animal with a limited range is a lot easier
to spot than a small one ranging widely, and that no amount of effort will reveal something that isn't there. On the Queensland evidence, it is search No. 12 that marks the point at which persistence turns to folly. No lost species sought more than eleven times has ever been found.

There is another complicating factor, too. Research interest and public support have been heavily concentrated on animals hit by persecution or exploitation. This is how the international conservation movement began, and it is how many people still perceive it. More than twice as many searches are mounted for animals that have been shot as for those that have lost their habitats or been displaced by alien species. Perhaps the guilt is sharper, the issue more emotive, but it's a mistake to imagine that the lanyard of a chainsaw is any less lethal than the trigger of a gun. Lingering, attritional deaths may not be as dramatic but the animals in the end are just as dead. On the other hand, as animals that range very widely are harder to exterminate by gunfire than those whose ranges are small, it follows that roaming species reduced by habitat-loss are much more likely to be rediscovered than victims of the gun. The good news, according to Queensland, is that the number of species thought to have been eliminated by loss of habitat ‘is likely to be overestimated'. But of course the truth of this can't be tested without a huge global research effort, and huge global research efforts are few and far between.

I think again of ‘my' long-lost mole. Somalia, formed in 1960 by merging a former Italian colony with a British protectorate, was still a young country when Alberto Simonetta found his owl pellet there in 1964. It developed rapidly into one of the most chaotic and violent countries in the world, literally ungovernable. There has been no effective central government since the overthrow of the socialist President Siad Barre in 1991.
Tribal, political and religious factions have been at war ever since, at the cost of at least a million lives and a persistent headache for neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya. Somali poachers are notorious plunderers of Kenyan wildlife, especially elephants, and pirates have put coastal waters off limits to any sailor without either a death wish or a naval escort. The British Foreign Office warns against all travel to Somalia, and advises visitors to Kenya not to venture within 60 kilometres of the border. Would I – would
anyone
– go there in search of a mole, even one as rare as
Calcochloris tytonis
?

Speaking for myself, the answer is no. Risks have to be in proportion to the likely gain. If I am to search anywhere, it will have to be well inside the Kenyan border, or in Florence, where Alberto Simonetta took his now apparently lost specimen in 1964. It is too much to expect that anyone in Kenya will be able to find a living example of
Calcochloris tytonis
, but the country has a very long relationship with golden moles. Fossil remains of a bygone species known as
Prochrysochloris miocaenus
date back to the Miocene epoch, between 23 and 5.3 million years ago. These days Kenya is known to harbour Stuhlmann's golden mole,
Chrysochloris stuhlmanni
, which lives also in Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Its IUCN category is ‘Least concern', which makes it considerably more common than some of the other animals I hope to see. Golden moles are usually described as a family of ‘ancient' species which are distinct from ‘true' moles, though they look and behave very like them. They have the same burrowing habit and powerful claws for digging, and spend most of their lives under ground. They are blind, and use their ears to locate the small insects and worms that are their preferred food. They conserve energy in cold weather by going into a torpor,
and have such efficient kidneys that most of them do not need to drink. These extreme specialisations seem to argue against the idea, put forward by some, that they are undeveloped primitives, but the absence of a scrotum in the males, and possession of a cloaca – a single orifice through which they pass both urine and faeces, like a bird – are not exactly marks of sophistication. Pictures of Stuhlmann's golden mole show a densely furred, eyeless and iron-clawed creature with a long sleek body like a swimmer's (desert species are indeed described as ‘swimming' through the sand). Kenya might not offer
C. tytonis
, but to see one of these cousins would be a major consolation. As yet I don't know how likely it might be but, even with my optimism still undimmed, I have to reckon it's odds against. Huge landscape, tiny subterranean animal. Who am I kidding?

Which of course leaves the riddle of Professor Simonetta, the Florence Institute of Zoology, and the animal unluckily named after a failed state. Is Simonetta still alive? As he published his paper on the Somali golden mole in 1968, it's clearly possible. I search for him on Google and find what appears to be a short biography written in Italian. From this, though I can't understand much else, I gather that he was born on 26 March 1930 and so would be in his early eighties. I gather also that his wife died in 1999, but there is no date for his own demise. It's a good start, which becomes better still when I scan the document again and spot the key word, ‘Somalia'. Next I find an undated paper written by him in English, promisingly titled ‘Control of poaching and the market for products such as ivory, rhino horn, tiger and bear body products.' It identifies him as Professor of Zoology at the University of Florence. Looking further, I find that this is a chapter from a book,
Biodiversity conservation and habitat
management (Vol II)
, published in 2008. I might not get to read it – Amazon is asking £146 for the paperback – but it's an encouraging sign. All it should take is a call to the Università degli Studi di Firenze . . .