For thirty years there had been no news of the rat deer but now a group of researchers has found it in the Vietnamese forests
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himThe scientists they believed it was now extinct, instead a camera has immortalized it in a Vietnamese forest: it is the mouse deer, a species of which there has been no news for nearly thirty years.
The last known scientific record of the animal dates back to 1990, when a hunter killed one and donated the sample to scientists.
The mouse deer (Tragulus versicolor) is a small animal, about the size of a rabbit, with the coat of two colors. The head and the front part of the body are in fact rust-colored, while the rear is silver-gray. The animal then has whitish spots, generally at the level of the neck and two particularly developed canines, similar to two small fangs.
The rat deer is a prey to leopards, wild dogs and pythons, but scientists believed that traps set by hunters, who killed these small specimens.
Following reports from local residents and Vietnamese forest rangers who claimed to have spotted some specimens of mouse deer, a team of scientists has positioned three photo traps in different areas of the forest. For five months the traps have caught well 275 photos of the animal in 72 separate events.
The researchers then installed 29 other cameras in the same area and took another 1.881 photographs, recording 208 independent sightings.
It is not clear how many specimens are represented in the photographs and what the number of animals in the forest is, but certainly the mouse deer still lives in the wild, contrary to what was believed.
The research results were published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, and the researchers point out that the surprising discovery raise the need for urgent action to protect what remains of the mouse deer population.
One of the main priorities is that of reduce the use of traps to capture wild animals, a measure that will protect not only the mouse deer but also the rest of the fauna, including numerous mammals and birds found only in this area and which are threatened with extinction.
This kind of illegal hunting, driven by the demand for bushmeat in East Asia, and has led to the disappearance of numerous species because traps can indiscriminately capture and kill almost anything that walks on the forest floor.
The rediscovery of the rat deer also has rekindled hopes for other species which scientists consider now extinct but could be found again in nature.
To find the lost species you need the collaboration of local communities, as was the case with the rat deer. The reports and the knowledge of the territory of the residents are fundamental for the work of scientists, who otherwise would not know where to start to find species believed to be lost forever.
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- The boy who rescued the species of the harlequin frog, considered extinct
Tatiana Maselli
cover photo
