A female-only lizard species which reproduces by cloning and was only discovered after a scientist spotted it on the menu of a Vietnamese restaurant was among more than 200 new species identified in the Great Mekong area in just 12 months in 2011. Spanning Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and China’s Yunnan province, it is of the world’s most bio-diverse regions and has produced hundreds of species new to science over the past decade. Their discovery, often the result of increased human activity, is a double-edged sword, according to the World Wildlife Fund: while building roads opens up remote habitats to scientists who can then venture into previously unexplored areas, it can also result in greater exploitation of the land which destroys these fragile ecosystems. Continuing our series investigating the plight of the region’s rarest fauna and flora, a nod to the work of British author Douglas Adams, Southeast Asia’s most dedicated conservationists describe the here-today-gone-tomorrow creatures that inspire them.
Forest fool: Tonkin’s
snub-nosed monkey
This extremely rare skull-faced primate, Rhinopithesus avunculus, has yet to be seen alive by any Western scientists. Captured on camera for the first time in 2011 by wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden, who works with Fauna and Flora International, this Old World monkey’s stubby snout has a peculiar side-effect: when it rains, the water falls straight into the creature’s upturned nostrils, triggering convulsive sneezing fits.
The species photographed by Holden, first discovered in Myanmar and known locally as mey nwoah (‘monkey with an upturned face’), spends most of the monsoon season with its head tucked miserably between its knees. Sadly, rain is the least of its problems: of the estimated 300 in the wild, the only scientifically observed specimen had been killed and eaten by local hunters by the time researchers found it. Holden also spotted them with their young in the remote mountain jungles of Kachin, on the border with China.
“I still have a vivid recollection of the first time I saw them in the wild,” says Michael Dine, of the People Resources and Conservation Foundation. “The survey team had stopped for a break. A group of four passed directly overhead through the canopy, allowing us to see this wonderful animal close-up. Due to extremely high hunting pressure, such a close encounter is extremely rare and we thought ourselves most fortunate.
“Tonkin’s snub-nosed monkey is an intriguing and unusual-looking animal. It could be described in the same breath as most beautiful and incredibly ugly, but I prefer the first adjective. This is in particular due to its unique facial features, which include a small upturned nose with the tip nearly reaching the forehead, pale blue around the eyes (think somebody has given them black eyes without the swelling), and bluish-black around the mouth, with large, juicy red lips. It’s the monkey version of the clown.”
Gentle giant:
Asian elephant
Although revered by many Asian cultures, the Asian elephant – Elephas maximus – is today tusk-to-tusk with extinction. “Asian elephants were previously found across 8.6 million square kilometres of southern Asia, from Iran to China south to Indonesia, but recent reviews suggest they are now only found in 10% of their original range and only a small proportion of that range is adequately protected,” explains Dr Hugo Rainey from the Wildlife Conservation Society.
For thousands of years, domesticated Asian elephants have been used in traditional ceremonies, to haul felled trees, for milling during harvest season and even as weapons of war. They boast the greatest volume of cerebral cortex available for cognitive processing in the animal kingdom, ranking their intelligence alongside that of the great apes when making and using tools.
Eating as much as 136 kilograms of roots, grasses, fruit and bark every day leaves little time for sleeping and these gently lumbering behemoths are almost constantly on the move. Herds are matriarchal: the dominant elephant is female, usually the oldest, largest or most experienced, and they communicate via low-frequency rumbles that can carry distances of up to 16 kilometres.
Their numbers, warns Dr Rainey, are rapidly dwindling. “The situation in Southeast Asia is particularly acute because large agro-industrial concessions are being developed rapidly in forested areas. Strategic planning of economic development rarely takes into account the needs of elephants for large contiguous areas of forest and wetlands which provide them with food, water and shelter throughout the year. For example, elephants may feed in open forest in the wet season when plenty of water holes and lush vegetation are abundant, but they may retreat to dense evergreen forest in the dry season where permanent water is found.
“Cambodia has probably five remaining populations of elephants scattered across the country and only three of these receive effective conservation protection. These populations are small, but they are some of the few remaining in Southeast Asia and should be saved to maintain Cambodia’s natural heritage.”
Leggy alarm clock:
giant ibis
Cambodia’s national bird is a relative monster. The giant ibis, Thaumatibis gigantean, stands a towering one metre in height, yet despite its imposing size it is rarely seen in the wild, where only 100 breeding pairs are thought to survive. So it was with much excitement that Wildlife Alliance announced in 2012 that a camera trap in Cambodia’s Koh Kong province had successfully captured an image of one ambling nonchalantly past the lens – the first definitive record in Koh Kong since 1918.
Found mostly in northern and eastern Cambodia, giant ibises are extremely sensitive to habitat disturbance and hunting – key factors in the declining population. The bird has a distinctive, alarm-like call and its preferred habitat includes marshes, pools, wide rivers and seasonal water-meadows in open lowland forest, generally at least 4km from the nearest humans.
Kampong Som valley, where the most recent image was captured, is an amazing ecosystem of flooded grasslands, wetlands, small lakes and a wide river mixed with regenerating deciduous and semi-evergreen forest. The area has been protected by the Cambodian Forestry Administration and Wildlife Alliance for the past 10 years in a bid to restore the corridor link between the western and eastern forests of the Southern Cardamom Mountains. The next steps for conservationists are to determine the size of the population and whether the bird photographed by Wildlife Alliance indicates the presence of a breeding population and, thus, new hope.
“The giant ibis shuns people,” Jonathan Eames, programme manager for BirdLife International in Indochina, has previously noted. “It’s a magnificent bird that, with its evocative call, will only be saved from global extinction when more people recognise that the economic values of the dry dipterocarp forests of Cambodia extend beyond cassava plantations and poorly conceived biofuel projects.”