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.
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