The Hunt for the Golden Mole (29 page)

I abandon the aquatic metaphor and return to the branching structures of the phylogenetic tree. By noticing where branches end, or where they divide into twigs, scientists can work out which kinds of species in which kinds of environment are more or less likely to thrive or to diversify. Some of their conclusions would have been no surprise to the hunter-slaughterers of the nineteenth century or to the penitent butchers of the early twentieth. The tropics both literally and metaphorically are the hothouse of mammalian diversity, and –
pace
Ol Pejeta – concentrations are especially high in Africa's Great Rift Valley, where they peak at more than 250 species per 100-kilometre square. There are peaks also in Amazonia and, say the authors of ‘Phylogenetic trees', ‘in an arc running from the Himalayas into
south-eastern Asia'. This brings economics into the argument. Is it better to concentrate on areas with a relative abundance of life, relatively easy to protect; or to firefight where life is on the brink?

While a mob of unidentifiable black insects buzzes around my head, I read about ‘sister clades' – groups of closely related species within a genus. They are most common in genera with high populations and large litters, which may explain why 920 species have ‘mouse' in their name, and only three ‘giraffe' (the camelopard itself, plus a seahorse and a catfish). Having few close relatives is a strong indicator of risk. Less surprising is the news that wild mammals tend not to thrive in proximity to humans. The author of Genesis might have been a great stylist but he was no great seer. Dominion we have had for millennia, but we've yet to acquire the knack of looking forward with our eyes open. No biblical prophet ever came down from the mountain with a premonition of global warming, or even with any idea that there was a globe to be warmed. Still less did they have any idea of the destructive past. Some 10,000 years before the time of Christ, at the tail-end of the Pleistocene, climate change had already caused a mass wipeout. The species that vanished were mostly large – cave-bear, mammoth, mastodon, smilodon (sabre-toothed cat), woolly rhinoceros, giant beaver, giant sloth and many more, all now represented by stump-ends on the tree. The current mass extinction threatens to be similar. On average, say the authors of ‘Phylogenetic trees', declining mammals are an order of magnitude heavier than non-threatened ones. Thus the wood mice, which helped fill the void after the disappearance of mammoths, remain secure in their many niches while rhinos have struggled to cling on. The special vulnerability of big animals is pretty obvious. The smallest creature I have ever heard of being shot at was a spider, at which my grandfather (who enjoyed his beer)
aimed an airgun so unsteadily that he shot himself in the hand. Hunters on the whole prefer something easier to aim at, so it is the big beasts that have attracted the spears and bullets.

A big animal is a more serious loss to its species than a small one. Megafauna have smaller litters of larger (and so more vulnerable) offspring, which take longer than small animals to mature. A female black rhinoceros, for example, will reach sexual maturity at between four and seven years; a male at between seven and ten. Calves are born singly, after a gestation of fifteen to sixteen months, and then take two years to wean. The birth interval is between two and a half and four years. Now compare a wood mouse. Sexual maturity at two months; gestation twenty-one to twenty-six days; up to four litters a year, four to seven babies each time. Bigger animals also tend to be more specialised in their territory, and to need more of it for each individual, which makes them especially vulnerable to habitat loss as well as to hunting. Specialised habitats also tend to be localised, which puts whole populations at risk. This is why rhinos and elephants can go missing from entire countries.

There is actually a measurable threshold – 3 kilograms – at which the size factor kicks in. This is about the weight of a smallish red fox, the smallest animal regularly hunted for sport. But you only have to look at the
Red List
to see that smallness is not an absolute defence – at best a tin hat rather than a bomb shelter. Innumerable diminutive species driven from their ranges, out-competed by introduced species or robbed of their habitats, are heading for the cliff edge. Because it is rather easier to prove the non-existence of a large animal than a small one, much of the search effort for highly endangered or possibly extinct species is for animals of less than 3 kilograms. But it's the big stuff – the wild ox and horse, the thylacine – that gets the most attention.

Near the temple of Wat Phnom in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh stands what many visitors might suppose is a larger-than-life statue of a charging bull. With its huge curved horns and corded musculature, it looks far too big for its tiny railed enclosure, like a shark in a shrimp net. Tourists kneel to get the most dramatic, head-on image of this seemingly mythical monster. Braver souls have taken almost absurd risks to track down the real thing. Giant it may be, but mythical it is not. The kouprey, or wild grey ox,
Bos sauveli
, is the biggest and most virile of Cambodia's several national animals. Its short acquaintance with humanity contains all the elements of tragedy and near farcical comedy that can descend on science like moths on a wardrobe. There are times when you can't see the substance for the holes. Does the kouprey still exist? If it does, is it a bona fide species of genuine scientific value, or some kind of wild/domestic cross-breed of no more than passing interest?
Passing
, certainly, is the
mot juste
.

The kouprey is, or was, every bit as imposing as the statue implies. It stands over 6 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs up to 2,000 pounds, or 0.89 imperial tons. It was ‘discovered' – i.e. brought to the attention of western zoologists – only in 1937, and was believed to range through northern Cambodia and parts of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. An American zoologist, Charles Wharton, managed to film some in 1951 but that, pretty much, was that. The last verified sighting was in the 1960s. Wharton did catch five live specimens in 1964 but the mission ended in disaster when three of them escaped and the other two died.

Cambodia for most of the time since has not been a happy hunting ground, or indeed any kind of hunting ground, for zoologists. The most heroically mad expedition was mounted in 1993 by the daredevil American journalist Nate Thayer, whose apparent blindness to danger earned him comparison with
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Marlon Brando's crazed maverick in
Apocalypse Now.
According to an account by two of the participants, Robert K. Brown and Robert MacKenzie in
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, Thayer led a terrifying twenty-five-strong posse including journalists, jungle trackers, former Khmer Rouge guerrillas, a British photographer, a Thai television cameraman and an Italian expert on camels. Not all the journalists might have passed drug tests, but they did have the foresight to complement their notebooks with walkie-talkies, AK-47s and a rocket-launcher. Together, riding on elephants and eating lizards, they set off into one of the most inaccessible parts of one of the most dangerous countries on earth, successfully tempting exhaustion, illness and the curiosity of the Khmer Rouge. They survived, but not a kouprey did they see. And not a kouprey has anyone seen since.

Worse was to follow. In 2006, scientists from Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, citing DNA evidence from two kouprey skulls, argued that
Bos sauveli
was not a proper species at all but the bastard offspring of domesticated banteng (another species of wild ox) and zebu cattle (otherwise known as Brahmins, progenitors of Ol Pejeta's Borans). ‘It is surely desirable,' said their team leader, ‘not to waste time and money trying to locate and preserve a domestic breed gone wild. The limited funds available should be used to protect wild species.' This stuck like a thistle in the craw of conservationists who had been trying for decades to find the kouprey, and who now found themselves relegated from legitimate scientific investigators to a mere breed society. This is the great dilemma of the Anthropocene. When man and nature dance together, it is not always clear who leads.

Happily in this case the tune would soon change again. By a miracle of synchronicity, a fossilised kouprey skull suddenly turned up. As is the way with fossils, its age was a bit slippery,
probably somewhere between the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, giving it a range of between 5,000 and 125,000 years. But it didn't matter. As the Northwestern team-leader himself conceded: ‘You can't have a fossil kouprey skull if the kouprey is a recent hybrid.' Scientists from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris then did some further analysis and concluded that a female kouprey and a male banteng had mated some time during the Pleistocene, and that it was this – not modern hybridisation – that explained the discovery of kouprey DNA in bantengs. The dancers reversed,
Bos sauveli
got its status back and a branch high up on the phylogenetic tree stopped quaking.

But the consolation was academic. The kouprey recovered its dignity but not its life. Loss of its forest habitat had taken the inevitable toll. So had diseases transmitted from domestic cattle. But the decisive genetic cleanser was hunting – initially for meat and then, as scarcity ramped up the value, for skulls and horns. The IUCN
Red List
reports horns for sale at Ban Mai, on the Thai–Lao border, for up to 12,000 US dollars a pair. It is hanging fire on declaring the species extinct, but with no confirmed sightings for nearly fifty years the time cannot be far off. ‘Its extinction, if not yet upon us, is certainly sealed,' it says.

Okapi at London Zoo. The species was not discovered until 1901, when first reports of its existence were dismissed as a hoax

The death of a newly discovered species is practically a self-fulfilling prophesy. My mind goes back to the Natural History Museum and the ‘new' Madagascan carnivore, Durrell's vontsira – largely forgotten since its Warholian fifteen minutes of fame in 2010. When a species escapes detection for as long as this one did, the likeliest explanation is that it is vanishingly rare. So it was with the kouprey. So it is with its near neighbour the saola. Earlier I described it as an antelope, which is what it looks like, but
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis
is actually closer to cattle. One biologist described it as ‘a cow that behaves like a goat'. When it was discovered in 1992 it was the first previously unknown large mammal to have been found anywhere in the world since the kouprey in 1937 (which in its turn was the first since the okapi in 1901). Its fate is testimony to both the strength and the weakness of human interference. Such is the dominance of
Homo sapiens
over his environment that the power of gods looks feeble by comparison. Mythology cringes in the shadow of the supreme creator and destroyer. There is nothing ironic in the title of Mark Lynas's challenging but well-argued book,
The God Species.
He intended it to be taken literally. In the orthodoxy of the anti-GM, anti-nuclear green mainstream, ‘playing god' is the ultimate act of hubris by which we will render ourselves into dust. Like other independent thinkers, Lynas, once a powerful voice for the green consensus, now argues the opposite. Playing god, in the sense of being intelligent
designers, is essential if creation is not to be irreparably harmed. The earth is out of kilter, but by calculated and cooperative acts of benign intervention we can help it to regain its stability. Essentially, however, we're talking about damage limitation. Human genius might find some technological fix to the life-threatening problems of climate change and ocean acidification, but – aside from the wilder fringes of scientific fantasy – the evolutionary clock cannot be turned back. We have several very effective ways of exterminating species, but no very effective way of bringing them back. Unlike the kouprey, the saola is still clinging on, but its grip is weak. Numbers already may be so low, says the
Red List
, that no viable populations remain. Following the kouprey through the limelight and out again, the saola is into the last act before the final curtain.

It is a classic victim of sizeism. Throughout its range in the Annamite Mountains, all species heavier than 20 kilograms have been hard hit. Even animals as commonplace as muntjac, Sambar deer and wild pig are rare here, and wild cattle, elephant and tiger are all but extinct. One way or another it is hunting that has done the damage. Much of it has been straightforwardly for meat. The IUCN reckons that eight million Vietnamese people ‘with the propensity to eat wildlife' live within 100 kilometres of the saola's forests. But this is not the only, or even the worst, threat to its existence. The supply line for many of the animal ingredients in Chinese traditional medicines begins here, in these very same forests. Although the saola has no direct role in the Asian or Chinese pharmacopeia, it makes very little difference. The snares are indiscriminate. The cost in lives can only be guessed at, but the IUCN has come up with some figures that hint at their enormity. More than a billion people live in China, and more than seventy million in Vietnam, a vast, proximate and hungry market for animal extracts and body parts, with increasing
wealth and a growing population only intensifying the demand. (It is a myth that wildlife trafficking is linked to poverty.) The IUCN concludes that every square kilometre of the saola's range has snares in it, and that hunting in some areas is so intense that it amounts to ‘many thousands of snare-nights per square kilometre per year'. As stocks of deer, civet and pig far exceed those of saola, hunting will continue until well after the saola is gone. The process is accelerated by logging, farming, road-building and hydropower, all of which are taking large bites out of the forest. In the circumstances, we should perhaps be surprised that any saolas survive at all. Not even captive breeding can stop the rot. Twenty or so have been caught alive, but eighteen of them died and the other two had to be released. Meanwhile, scarcity has only increased the saola's value as a trophy – in Hanoi as long ago as 2000, horns were being quoted at 600 US dollars a pair. When extinction comes, as it must, there will be a few headlines around the world, but the obituaries for a species few people have heard of are likely to be brief. Like the kouprey, the saola will simply slide off the page and be forgotten.