Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem--and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk - Softcover

TERRA
Part OneTHE WAY OF THE WORLDThere are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet1A CREATURE IN THE FORESTThe most precious things in the world may be the things we never see. Perhaps at this very moment in a rain-doused stand of pristine forest in the Truong Son Mountains in central Vietnam, one of the last and least explored wildernesses on Earth, a creature with long, slightly recurved horns is emerging from an undergrowth of bamboo, palms, and saplings in the shadow under the forest canopy. A fleeting sunburst between the trees highlights an elegant black stripe on a chestnut back that looks like a signature of ancient calligraphy. As the 220-pound animal bends its thick neck down to a stream, it plants the cloven hoof of each foot on the bank. The sun catches the sharp etch of a white band above the feet, an anatomical accoutrement that looks like a bad practical joke, as if the animal were sporting black-and-white spats. In the shadows a tricolor tail of brown, cream, and black whisks against the first battalion of morning flies.This scenario is entirely plausible but has probably never been witnessed. Yet the beast by the stream is not a fiction. This is the mysterious saola, scientifically known as Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, of Vietnam and Laos. The name saola is a local one, referring to the beast's horns (sao, spindle; la, post), which resemble the parallel posts on the spinning wheels used by people in the region.The saola is one of the rarest creatures on Earth; few specimens have been collected, and scientists have never seen this animal in the wild. Most biologists, like George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have tracked it by surveying the horns and other remnants of hunting forays in villages along the border between Laos and Vietnam. Most remarkably, thesaola was first discovered by the Vietnamese ecologist Do Tuoc during a field survey of central Vietnam's Vu Quang Nature Reserve in 1992. In 1812 the great naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier had declared that no more large, hoofed, herbivorous mammals would be discovered in any part of the world. But here is this creature whose discovery did not come until the last decade of the twentieth century.Aside from a few color markings and its long recurved horns, the saola looks like a typical hoofed mammal-say, a deer or an antelope. Indeed, its appearance is a helpful clue to its reasonable scientific identification. The saola is related to deer and antelope, but it is also very different from these animals. The scientific name Pseudoryx nghetinhensis is from the Greek, meaning "false oryx," suggesting the saola is deceptively similar in appearance, especially in its long curved horns, to the better-known oryxes; the second part of the name simply means "of nghetinh," a regional name that combines the names of two provinces in Vietnam, Ha Tinh and Nghe An, where the animal has been seen. Pseudoryx denotes the group, in traditional classification the genus, to which it belongs. The second name is meant to distinguish this species from all other species of Pseudoryx. Thus the horse, Equus caballus, and the donkey, Equus asinus, are separate but similarspecies that both belong to the genus Equus. The saola is so distinct, however, that it gets its own genus; there is as yet no other species of Pseudoryx.As for the broader affinities of Pseudoryx, the cloven hooves, the shapes of its grinding teeth, and the structure of its anklebones are giveaways, demonstrating that the saola belongs to a diverse order of mammals known as artiodactyls, the cloven-hoofed mammals that include antelopes, bovids, giraffes, deer, camels, pigs, and hippos. Surprisingly, there is new evidence from DNA and anatomical features that whales might have diverged from some very early and primitive artiodactyl group, perhaps from a lineage that also led to pigs and hippos. Artiodactyls, the dominant large plant-eating mammals of today, were even more diverse in the past. The saola fits clearly within the artiodactyl family Bovidae, the group that contains cows, bison, many African antelopes, goats, and sheep, but just where it fits within this family is a trickier problem. Some students of saola anatomy have assigned it to the tribe Caprini, which includes goats, chamois, musk oxen, and relatives, but recent studies based on DNA put it within the tribe Bovini, which includes cattle and buffalo. For now this alliance seems to stick, and more comprehensive studies of both genes and anatomy are anticipated.Since the saola was first discovered, researchers have accumulated only a small collection of twenty partial specimens, including three complete skins and two skulls. The saola has even taken pictures of itself, images snapped when the animal unknowingly tripped a camera as it trudged through the steep thick forest of the Truong Son. Yet these animals have not been observed up close by anyone except the people of the forest who have hunted them. Today locating the whereabouts of the saola is both a scientific mission and a sacred one, for this precious animal is making its last stand. It is estimated that only a few hundred saolas may be left in the forests of Vietnam and Laos, in a total area of about two thousand square miles (five thousand square kilometers). Sadly ironic is the increased local effort to find and kill these animals because of their great interest to outsiders and their presumed monetary value. In the Vu Quang Reserve twenty-one saolas were killed and three were taken alive and brought to Hanoi between 1992 and 1994. In Laos seven saolas were caught, but only one survived, and then just for three weeks. This individual, a female, was shy and docile, allowing herself to be petted and hand-fed. The Hmong people of Laos call the saola saht supahp, "the polite animal." Unfortunately, it may be too polite for its own good; its numbers are dwindling as it falls prey to hunters andits habitat is winnowed away by loggers and farmers. In recent years measures have been taken to establish more nature reserves and to strengthen their protection; a new initiative extends some of these protected areas across the international border between Vietnam and Laos.In the spring of 2002 I had a chance to observe at close range the efforts to preserve Vietnam's wildlife, though that was not my primary assignment. At the behest of my employer, the American Museum of Natural History, I traveled to Hanoi with the museum's president, Ellen Futter, and several other officials to announce the opening of the first major U.S. exhibition on Vietnamese culture since the Vietnam War. The exhibit, to be curated by Dr. Laurel Kendall of the American Museum, an expert in Asian religious and cultural ritual and practices, was jointly developed with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, and its director, Nguyen Van Huy, was cocurator. The topic turned out to be as complex as it was fascinating. Vietnam has more than fifty ethnic groups, not all of which could be fairly represented in one exhibit. Nevertheless, the exhibition opened to wide acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in New York in the spring of 2004, and by spring 2006 it had been installed in Hanoi.I was also in Vietnam for a second, biological purpose. Soon after arriving, I joined Dr. Eleanor Sterling, the talented director of the American Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC), launched in 1995 to link the formidable effort being made by the museum's curators to discover diverse species all over the world with conservation needs and action. Vietnam, with its cultural diversity, its dynamic economy, and its unique but threatened natural habitats, was a logical target. In 1998 the CBC had joined forces with the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources (IEBR) in Hanoi, the World Wildlife Fund Indochina Programme, and BirdLife International's Vietnam Programme to make an exhaustive survey of important forestland and to apply the findings to help the government establish secure reserves. In addition to the research and conservation applications, the project was intended to enlighten and educate people about the tenuous natural wonders of Vietnam. To this end, Eleanor wrote, with coauthors Martha Maud Hurley and Le Duc Minh, Vietnam: A Natural History, a comprehensive and handsomely illustrated volume which was published in 2006.Vietnam and Laos for decades had been responding to local and international demand for timber. During the 1990s, Vietnam ranked secondonly to Thailand in exports of wood from mainland Southeast Asia to the European Union and Japan. By the end of the century logging in Vietnam had reputedly declined; there had been a sharp decrease in economically retrievable timber, and the government acknowledged that runaway depletion of forestland would soon deprive the country of this resource entirely. Deforestation, a complex process not simply confined to logging, is not always easy to estimate, especially when reliable records of past forest cover and forest loss are nonexistent. The real rate at which deforestation in Vietnam slowed is controversial, and reports about it are conflicting. Of main concern to us were the primary forests, or those that show little or no evidence of past or present human exploitation. Vietnam purportedly lost a staggering 51 percent of its primary forests between 2000 and 2005.The logging industry is the blunt edge of the wedge into the forest. Logging roads become lifelines for migrating people who slash and burn, grow crops, hunt for meat, establish villages, carry on commerce, build dams and irrigation systems, and develop towns and cities-in other words, do all the things people normally do when they colonize new land. We have seen this pattern of i...