Along Laos-Vietnam Border, a Menagerie
12/17/99
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Title: Along Laos-Vietnam border, a menagerie
New mammal species are being found where access was once
blocked. Is there something special about the area?
Source: Washington Post
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 17, 1999
Byline: Guy Gugliotta
The hunters carry AK-47s. Along stream beds, unexploded ordnance pokes
through the encroaching jungle. Villagers use shell casings for
planters and have made fish ponds in the craters left by 500-pound
bombs that blew up long ago.
Back then, the paths that wound through the Annamite Mountains were
known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail - the backwoods supply train for
communist insurgents during the Vietnam War.
Today, the Annamites, which mark the border between Vietnam and Laos,
are rapidly gaining notice for another reason. Since 1992, scientists
working there have found six large mammal species that had either
never been seen before except by local people or were believed to be
extinct. In a world that supposedly had few such secrets left, the
Annamites are rapidly becoming a zoological El Dorado: "It's always
amazing to find a big animal that nobody's ever seen," said the
Wildlife Conservation Society's George Amato, who conducted DNA
testing on many of the new species.
"In these remote areas of Asia, mostly because of the war, we don't
have any surveys," Amato continued. "Perhaps the Annamites shouldn't
have been such a surprise, except that it's such a large number."
The discoveries began in 1992, when Western scientists in central
Vietnam heard about a 200-pound, cow-like animal unlike any other on
Earth. Others have since been reported in Laos, and several have been
captured. Laotians call them saola - or spindlehorns. This "false
oryx" represented a new mammal genus.
Since then, scientists on both sides of the border have documented the
existence of three other species never before seen outside the region:
a striped hare; a giant muntjac, or barking deer, that weighs about 75
pounds; and a much smaller Truong Son muntjac, from the Truong Son
range of the Annamites, that weighs about 35 pounds.
In addition, researchers have rediscovered Roosevelt's muntjac, first
described during a 1929 hunting trip by former President Theodore
Roosevelt's sons, and a wild pig, known as a warty pig or yellow pig,
reported by a missionary at the end of the 19th century.
To give a sense of the significance of the discoveries, scientists
note that the number of new or lost large mammal species encountered
in the Annamites in the last decade equals the number found in the
rest of the world during the entire 20th century.
"And it's not just that they're new; it's that what we're finding is
very different," said Josh Ginsberg, Asia program director at the
Wildlife Conservation Society. "These are very unusual animals."
The World Wildlife Fund's Steve Osofsky, senior program officer for
species conservation, said the recent successes were largely "an
access issue," noting that Vietnam and Laos were closed to Western
scientists until recently. The Laotian government did not let outside
researchers into the country until 1992.
Also, continued Osofsky, Vietnam and Laos have become interested in
conservation and wildlife habitat in recent years. He noted that the
first photographs of Vietnam's rare Javan rhino, taken by tripwire
camera in a game preserve north of Ho Chi Minh City last summer,
prompted an outpouring of national publicity.
Still, Ginsberg said, access is not everything: "The critical question
we're kicking around is whether we are finding species only because
[the region is] unexplored, or is there something interesting about
the Annamites?" Ginsberg said. "I think the answer is both."
The Wildlife Fund's Eric Wikramanayake, one of the researchers who
reported the discovery of the Truong Son muntjac last year, explained
that the Annamites have areas of lowland dry forest interspersed with
areas of highland rain forest that over time have isolated pockets of
habitat for individual species.
The Annamites, rising to more than 8,000 feet in some places, extend
for more than 700 miles down the spine of Indochina along the entire
length of the Laos-Vietnam border.
Wikramanayake said scientists theorize that during ice ages beginning
about 1.8 million years ago, the mountains alternated between
relatively cool and dry periods when the sea receded, followed by
warmer and rainier periods when the ice melted and the sea level rose.
During the wet periods, animals migrated freely; during the dry
periods they were stuck in their mountain oases: "As climates
fluctuate over time, sometimes species that were more widespread
become more isolated," Amato said. And in isolation there is genetic
drift and differentiation, leading to new species.
Alison K. Surridge, of Britain's University of East Anglia, noted that
a rabbit similar to the striped hare she described in August in the
journal Science has a distant cousin in Sumatra, as does the warty
pig, suggesting that the two species may have had common ancestors
when land bridges linked what is now Indonesia to the Asian mainland.