The Hunt for the Golden Mole (31 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Unbelievabilia

I
have a friend whose emails are always headed just ‘Stuff'. By ‘stuff' he means items of improbable interest, informational scraps that have caught his attention and come his way by chance. It is entirely random. Stuff can be jokes, quotations, absurdities from newspapers, news of acquaintances divorced, dying or falling off ladders. Mostly, though, it is
unbelievabilia
, odd bits of informational detritus scooped from the daily swill of news, stuff that it takes a beachcomber's eye to see. A recipe for deep-fried scorpions. The apparent fact that cracks in breaking glass move at 3,000 miles per hour (a snippet he traces back to
Popular Science
magazine in 1939). That kind of thing.

Zoology, I find, is full of stuff. It has been discovered, for example, that Canadian elk can be divided into two basic personality types – ‘bold runners' and ‘shy hiders'. In the age of bow and arrow it was the former that fled to safety and the latter that were stalked and killed. Now it's the other way about. In the age of high-powered hunting rifles, it's the runners that end up in the cross-hairs and the wallflowers that survive. For the first time, say scientists at the University of Alberta, we have proof that humans can affect the ‘personalities' of the species they hunt. It's
unbelievabilia
because, though I can see it might be true, it is not something I could have imagined. I dip
randomly into a pile of academic papers, and stuff comes out in handfuls:

Animals are like football teams, having a tendency to escalate their conflicts (more fouls, more fights to the death) when they are closely matched.

Chimpanzees have a formal ‘grooming handclasp', which involves two animals gripping each other's wrists or arms and using their free hands to groom each other. The grip varies between communities, which suggests that their social behaviour may be culturally as well as genetically influenced, just like our own. Stealing their mates' food, on the other hand, shows that they have little concept of honour.

Hyenas are determined problem-solvers. Confronted with steel ‘puzzle boxes' packed with meat, they will go on trying different ways of getting inside until they find the bolt. Researchers from the University of Michigan say it proves the advantages of a large brain.

There is a very good reason why ground squirrels habitually wave their tails in the air. According to the University of British Columbia, it keeps rattlesnakes away.

Mother goats can recognise their kids' voices even after a year of separation.

On average every month, pumas in Patagonia leave 232 kilograms of meat per 100 square kilometres to be eaten by condors and other scavengers. This is 3.1 times more than wolves leave in Yellowstone National Park.

The Philippine tarsier can communicate at an ultrasound level of up to 91 kHz. Researchers from Humboldt State University say this might represent a ‘private channel of communication' inaudible to predators.

The most ecologically distinct mammal in the world – the one with the fewest relatives – is the aardvark.

It is here that
unbelievabilia
begins to nudge up against something more serious. It is not before time. So far the ideas in my head have been like an intellectual construction kit with no assembly instructions. How am I to put all this together into a cogent narrative? My interest in the Somali golden mole has been easier to
feel
than to explain. The ‘quest', as I have rather romantically called it, can come across as bizarre or eccentric – pretentious even, a facile and useless specialism like collecting novelty teapots. It is Professor Jonathan Baillie, with a little help from the aardvark, who steers me back to coherence and a sensible appreciation of my own seemingly childish instinct. Jonathan is a fast-talking Canadian zoologist and a world expert on obscure mammals. Thankfully, he can see nothing silly in my mole obsession. He is, after all, surrounded by people fixated on solenodons, echidnas, freshwater dolphins, elephant shrews . . . We meet in a conference room at the Zoological Society of London, just across the road from the zoo. This is his domain, the command centre of a worldwide effort to bring relief to the deserving mammalian poor, the small, the weird and the unheard-of. In 2007, in what might be one of the most powerfully imaginative strokes in the history of conservation, Jonathan founded the EDGE Project. ‘Edge', no surprise, is both a word of literal meaning, as in outer margin, and an acronym –
Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered
. EDGE means
the aardvark. It means the woylie, the northern muriqui, the long-footed potoroo, the Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat, Perrier's sifaka, the Ethiopian water mouse. It means the Somali golden mole.

Jonathan has no quarrel with the heavily backed and well-publicised campaigns for popular favourites – giant panda, Bengal tiger, snow leopard, black rhino, polar bear, elephant, orang-utan, gorilla and the rest. Their charisma is a powerful tool for attracting public and political support for wildlife. But these animals are not alone in needing help; nor are they uniquely deserving or uniquely important. Some consistency is needed. When human populations are at risk, we do not just rescue celebrities and high-earners. Our concern is for the Common Man, and so it should be for the Common Animal. But of course there is a vital difference. The common animal increasingly is not common at all, and unless we rally to its aid it will quickly decline from scarcity to extreme rarity and oblivion. Countless species already are queuing to cross the Styx like wildebeest at the Mara, and many already are on the other side.

The EDGE Project's selection criteria are somewhat different from the FFI's or WWF's, but the intention – to conserve life and biodiversity – is exactly the same. There are good scientific reasons why the first species on the EDGE list, its top priority, is not a popular favourite but a creature few non-zoologists will have heard of. Attenborough's long-beaked echidna,
Zaglossus attenboroughi,
is classified by the IUCN as critically endangered and, most importantly, it is ‘evolutionarily distinct', meaning that it has very few living relatives. Unlike a mouse, therefore, it carries what Jonathan Baillie describes as a ‘disproportionate amount of our evolutionary history', having a whole limb of the phylogenetic tree to itself, or sharing it with very few others. It was this kind of unique evolutionary history that EDGE set out
to identify and protect – a completely new way of establishing priorities. With its expert staff of phylogenists, ecologists and zoologists, the Zoological Society of London was the ideal platform from which to launch a new worldwide campaign. Working closely with the IUCN
Red List
, and inching their way carefully through the phylogenetic trees, Jonathan and his colleagues devised formulae to score each species for evolutionary distinctiveness and risk of extinction. By aggregating the scores they were then able to produce a table of species ranked in order of need.

It is a very big league of often very small animals. The list of mammals (there is a similar list of amphibians) runs to nearly 4,500, from Attenborough's echidna right down to the gray brocket (a South American deer) at number 4,436. Another 920 are unranked because they are too poorly known to be given a score, and sixty-five are already extinct. The emphasis on evolutionary distinctiveness – what a layman might call
uniqueness
– means that many of these animals combine extreme peculiarities of appearance with oddities of behaviour. All are in some way unique – ‘weird and wonderful' is the common expression – and their loss ought to be unthinkable. Alas, at a time when extinction rates are a thousand times higher than the fossil record suggests would be normal, losing a species is all too easily imaginable. Rivet after rivet is popping out of Paul Ehrlich's aeroplane wing, and the risk of a crash is becoming ever more acute. Hard choices have to be made. Not even the wildest fantasist could imagine that all 4,436 species can be rescued. The Icarus principle applies. Flying too high, trying to do what can't be done, is a short cut to disaster. With heads ruling hearts, Jonathan and his team have to concentrate their efforts on the top 100 species in the list.

By coincidence I switch on the radio this morning and hear
Jonathan speaking from the IUCN World Conservation Congress in South Korea, where he has just launched another list. This one, titled
Priceless or Worthless?
, is both simpler and more complicated than EDGE. Simpler, because it concentrates solely on rarity, not evolutionary distinctiveness. More complicated, because it includes species of all kinds – plants, fungi, invertebrates, birds and fish as well as mammals. These are, quite simply, the 100 most critically endangered species in the world, identified through the combined efforts of 8,000 scientists involved in the IUCN Species Survival Commission. As I said earlier, I have had direct experience of the BBC's mania for editorial ‘balance': every action or idea, however exemplary, must have someone to talk it down. This morning we get a real corker. Jonathan is ‘balanced' by a woman who says it is illogical to regard all these species as deserving of life. If that's the case, she argues, then we should care just as much about the smallpox virus, and about species that are already extinct –
Save Our Dinosaurs
. Jonathan and the interviewer, James Naughtie, somehow manage to avoid the word ‘bonkers' or any of its synonyms. No such restraint is shown in my kitchen, where the radio at this time in the morning is used to being shouted at. The key issue, which Jonathan patiently reiterates, is that the great majority of the
PoW
species have been brought low by humans, and in most cases humans could reverse the tide. Unlike the dinosaurs, which died as victims of nature, they are entirely dependent on the goodwill and mercy of humans. What could be our moral case for denying them? Do these animals have the right to exist, or do humans have the right to exterminate them? For non-contrarians, these are not difficult questions to answer.

To hammer the message home, the IUCN also appends a long – a
very
long – list of species that have already disappeared: eight dolorous pages of squint-small print. Seventy-seven of
these are mammals, their identities somewhat irritatingly (if I may carp for a moment) obscured by the absence of common names, as if they are of interest only to science professionals. But why should laymen be spared their morsel of grief for the aurochs, the Hispaniolan edible rat, the pig-footed bandicoot, the giant fossa, the Madagascan dwarf hippopotamus, the sea mink, the indefatigable Galapagos mouse, the Jamaican rice rat, the desert bandicoot, the broad-faced potoroo, the bulldog rat . . .? Wouldn't even a zoologist find it easier to mourn the big-eared hopping-mouse than
Notomys macrotis
? Ironically, one of the most beautiful illustrated books in my possession is
A Gap in Nature
, written by the peerless Tim Flannery with paintings by Peter Schouten. Together they describe and illustrate 103 species of mammals, birds and reptiles that have become extinct since 1500, including some of the most distinctive species ever to have lived. There among others went Steller's sea cow (declared extinct in 1768), the bluebuck (1800), the white-footed rabbit-rat (1845), St Lucy's giant rice-rat (1852), Gould's mouse (1857), the large Palau flying-fox (1874), the Falkland Islands dog (1876), the eastern hare-wallaby (1889), the Santa Cruz tube-nosed fruit-bat (1892), the red gazelle (1894), the longtailed hopping-mouse (1901), Pemberton's deer-mouse (1931), the desert rat-kangaroo (1935), the thylacine (1936), Toolache wallaby (1939), Caribbean monk seal (1952), lesser bilby (1950s), Ilin Island cloudrunner (1953), Little Swan Island hutia (1955), crescent nailtail wallaby (1956), Bavarian pine vole (1962), greater short-tailed bat (1965), Guam flying fox (1974) . . . And so it will go on until we find a way to stop it.

Twenty-two mammals are cited by
PoW
, of which fifteen also feature in the EDGE top 100 – not only rare, but members of the evolutionary aristocracy. ‘Rare' is a word of almost pathetic inadequacy. The northern muriqui woolly monkey is reduced
to fewer than 1,000 individuals, the pygmy three-toed sloth to below 500, the vaquita to below 200, Javan rhino to below 100, and Santa Catarina's guinea pig to between forty and sixty – as near to extinction as a living species can get. The idea of fighting for these beleaguered minorities came to Jonathan Baillie while he was studying for a Masters at Yale. During an internship at IUCN he worked on the
Red List
(he is now one of its principal editors) and realised that there were huge numbers of distinct and uniquely wonderful species which hardly anyone knew or minded about. Necessarily he is an optimist. A whole generation of environmentally attuned people had grown up caring about tigers, gorillas, pandas and the rest of the megafaunal pantheon, and Jonathan believed they might now be helped towards a deeper awareness of the full diversity of life, and might even share his sense of urgency about protecting it. The result of that belief is EDGE.

All conservation bodies like to make emotional appeals on behalf of our as-yet-unborn grandchildren. But EDGE is bigger than that. As Jonathan says, the listed species embody a disproportionate amount of the world's evolutionary history and, hence, of its biological diversity. This is why they hold out the best hope for the future of life on earth, far beyond the short-term horizon of our grandchildren's grandchildren. For a range of reasons – natural as well as man-made – some of these species will not survive. Given the right kind of help, however, there could be decent chances for the majority. There may be a soft glove of sentiment, but there is a hard fist of science inside it. The planet will go on changing as a perturbed climate inexorably alters the ranges and habitats of species which will have to adapt and evolve to meet new circumstances. The wide biological diversity and varied ecological tolerances of the EDGE species maximise the likelihood that this will happen. The more species, the better.