The Hunt for the Golden Mole (33 page)

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
.