A distinctly two-tone Vietnamese mouse deer that was feared lost to science has been captured on film foraging for food by camera traps set up in a Vietnamese forest.
The photographs of the rabbit-sized animal, also known as the silver-backed chevrotain, are the first to be taken in the wild and come nearly 30 years after the last confirmed sighting.
“We had no idea what to expect, so I was surprised and overjoyed when we checked the camera traps and saw photographs of a chevrotain with silver flanks,” said An Nguyen, a scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC) expedition team leader.
Photo: AFP / Southern Institute of Ecology / Global Wildlife Conservation / Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research / NCNP
“Discovering that it is, indeed, still out there is the first step in ensuring we don’t lose it again, and we’re moving quickly now to figure out how best to protect it,” he said.
The silver-backed chevrotain is a half-painted beast: Behind the russet head, neck and front legs lies a silver-gray body and hind legs with by a white, grizzled bottom.
Though probably preyed on by leopards, wild dogs and pythons, scientists fear that hunters’ snares have pushed the species to the brink of extinction.
Despite the name, they are neither mice nor deer, but the world’s smallest ungulate (hoofed animal).
Nguyen and his team began their search by interviewing villagers and government forest rangers in provinces of Vietnam where the animals had previously been spotted.
Some recalled seeing gray chevrotains, suggesting the species might not have died out in the wild.
Based on the information, the scientists installed three camera traps in a lowland forest in southern Vietnam. Over five months, they captured 275 photos of the animal.
These were classified as 72 separate events, since multiple photos taken within the space of an hour are considered one event.
Buoyed by the sightings, the researchers set up 29 more cameras in the same area and took 1,881 more photographs, comprising 208 independent events.
It is unclear how many individual animals the photos represent.
The findings, reported in Nature Ecology and Evolution, have increased calls for action to protect what remains of the population.
A priority is to reduce the widespread use of snares to capture animals for the wildlife trade.
“Stopping snaring will not only protect the silver-backed chevrotain, but also numerous other species, including several ... that are only found in the Greater Annamites ecoregion and are threatened with extinction,” GWC team member Andrew Tilker said.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS