Sub-speciation (on the conservation benefits of coming from a small family)
We read of a couple of eles possibly still hanging out in a small forest in South Africa, pygmy elephants hiding in the central African jungle and down in Borneo - scientists across the world have been poking around in damp dung in mosquito ridden jungles, rushing it back to the labs and sticking it under a microscope (or whatever they do to isolate DNA) and identifying differences between mainland populations - discovering that their project sample is, as they've always suspected, special.
I have to admit to being a sceptic in this game, I tend to think that if it looks like an elephant, smells like an elephant and charges like an elephant then, well, it is probably an elephant. I can look at an Asian or and African ele in silhouette and say, hand on heart, yep, that's a different animal - related but entirely different.
I'll need some convincing on pygmy races living within distinct populations even though Darwin pointed out that many subspecies evolved this way, trapped in isolated habitat they evolved special anatomical tools or behavioural patterns to fill a niche available in their habitat island.
Our friendly subspecies of eles (and tigers for that matter) have just kept doing what eles do, alright they tend to be smaller but might this not be due to climate and habitat type, or part of a geographical trend? The Asian elephants we find in Thailand tend to be smaller (or at least shorter) than those I knew in Nepal - how far down the Darwinian ladder do we have to go to become a subspecies? Even within our camp we've got long and short legs, large and small ears, sunken and pronounced foreheads; but then, I look very different to most of the mahouts and no-one's claiming we're a separate species - well the mahouts try to disassociate themselves from me frequently but that doesn't count.
But I'm not a DNA scientist and no matter whether the idea of subspeciation is justified on the grand scale of what we can see and touch the perception of being an entirely new, previously unrecognised, beast carries a great advantage.
If you're an isolated pocket of a large species, a few hundred eles living on an island, then it is sad if you are hunted out, your habitat dissappears and you have nowhere to go, your extirpation is an unhappy day for those who have given themselves the job of protecting you but as for the rest of the world, we tut and worry briefly, and move on - after all there are thousands of your cousins left on the mainland, let's concentrate on saving viable populations.
However, if you're the last remaining hundred of your kind, the last chance to see and study, if the world lets you go they've lost you forever, if the word is extinction rather than extirpation then imagine the arsenal of weapons that can be bought to your defence, the attention that can be pulled your way, the funds that can be raised for your protection and your study; imagine the tourists and elephant specialists who'll travel halfway around the world, stay in luxury hotels and pay guides just to catch a glimpse of you.
So, sceptic though I am, if I thought I'd get away with it I'd be out there DNA testing Nam Khong, Elephas maximus Goldentrianglensis anyone?
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PS. The piece below that inspired me to start thinking about this (below) turns out not to be a little more complicated as it covers the discovery that an apparently new subspecies may, in fact, be the last remnants of an already recognised but considered extinct subspecies moved from their native habitat a century ago. Techically an invasive non-native species I guess!
PPS. Shouldn't a pygmy Asian elephant carry the scientific name Elephas maximus minimus?
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Presumed Extinct Javan Elephants May Have Been Found Again - In Borneo
The Borneo pygmy elephant may not be native to Borneo after all. Instead, the population could be the last survivors of the Javan elephant race — accidentally saved from extinction by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, a new publication suggests.
The origins of the pygmy elephants, found in a range extending from the north-east of the island into the Heart of Borneo, have long been shrouded in mystery. Their looks and behaviour differ from other Asian elephants and scientists have questioned why they never dispersed to other parts of the island.
But a new paper published supports a long-held local belief that the elephants were brought to Borneo centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, now in the Philippines, and later abandoned in the jungle. The Sulu elephants, in turn, are thought to have originated in Java.
Javan elephants became extinct some time in the period after Europeans arrived in South-East Asia. Elephants on Sulu, never considered native to the island, were hunted out in the 1800s.
“Elephants were shipped from place to place across Asia many hundreds of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers,” said Mr Shim Phyau Soon, a retired Malaysian forester whose ideas on the origins of the elephants partly inspired the current research. “It’s exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges of a subspecies that went extinct on its native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries ago.”
If the Borneo pygmy elephants are in fact elephants from Java, an island more than 1,200 km (800 miles) south of their current range, it could be the first known elephant translocation in history that has survived to modern times, providing scientists with critical data from a centuries-long experiment.
Scientists solved part of the mystery in 2003, when DNA testing by Columbia University and WWF ruled out the possibility that the Borneo elephants were from Sumatra or mainland Asia, where the other Asian subspecies are found, leaving either Borneo or Java as the most probable source.
The new paper, “Origins of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,” published in this month’s Sarawak Museum Journal shows that there is no archaeological evidence of a long-term elephant presence on Borneo.
“Just one fertile female and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed in enough good habitat, could in theory end up as a population of 2,000 elephants within less than 300 years,” said Junaidi Payne of WWF, one of the paper’s co-authors. “And that may be what happened in practice here.”
There are perhaps just 1,000 of the elephants in the wild, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah. WWF satellite tracking has shown they prefer the same lowland habitat that is being increasingly cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations. Their possible origins in Java make them even more a conservation priority.
“If they came from Java, this fascinating story demonstrates the value of efforts to save even small populations of certain species, often thought to be doomed,” said Dr Christy Williams, coordinator of WWF’s Asian elephant and rhino programme. “It gives us the courage to propose such undertakings with the small remaining populations of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few to better habitats to increase their numbers. It has worked for Africa’s southern white rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant, too.”
Call to reforest elephant areas
KOTA KINABALU (NST) - Damaged areas at four sites inhabited by the Bornean Pygmy elephants should be reforested, said participants of an international workshop.The workshop participants recommended the creation of managed elephant ranges for Bornean Pygmies. NST
About 150 people who attended the International Workshop on the Conservation of the Bornean Elephant identified Lower Kinabatangan, Tabin, Deramakot-Sebuku and Ulu Kalumpang as sites that should be declared as "managed elephant ranges".
The Sabah Wildlife Department and its partners, including Cardiff University and French non-governmental organisation Hutan, said: "Issues such as human-wildlife conflict, elephant and habitat management, research, education, fundraising and tourism were discussed and (goals) were set.
"A major recommendation is to have managed elephant ranges which will include (reforesting) degraded areas in the four sites.
"Participants also resolved to establish a Borneo elephant conservation alliance to encourage collaboration and communi-cation between stakeholders involved in elephant management in Sabah. This alliance will coordinate information sharing."
The workshop was held here last month to present work carried out on elephants in the last eight years and to discuss directions for the species.
Participants - including experts from India, Indonesia, Thailand, Gabon, the United Kingdom and the United States - also recommended the production of biological information on the Bornean elephant to better understand the species.
Other recommendations included creating a 500m buffer zone between the banks of Sungai Kinabatangan and oil palm plantations, and gazetting forested state land into the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary.
The participants said: "More attention has to be given to the problem of elephant-crop raiding and conflict mitigation and there is also a need for a management committee responsible for elephant tourism, which should be chaired by the Tourism, Culture and Environment Ministry."
A genetic study done in 2003 showed that the Asian elephant in Sabah is native to Borneo. It was later named the Bornean Pygmy elephant.
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27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000 sifr="true"> A Sultan's gift?
In 2003, researchers published a paper in PLoS Biology that came to a conclusion often reached by biologists studying unique, island-bound species: Borneo's pygmy elephants - forest-dwelling pachyderms of diminutive stature and timid demeanor - are genetically distinct from other Asian elephant subspecies, and they've evolved for millennia separated from their cousins in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere. But then the researchers changed their minds.
Since that paper, they've fleshed out an alternate scenario that's decidedly more exotic. Specifically, wildlife biologist Junaidi Payne, based at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Malaysia, and colleagues now suspect that the elephants are remnants of a population believed to be extinct for more than 200 years.
Their theory goes like this: The sultan of Java gifted a few hundred elephants native to the island of Java (now part of Indonesia) to the sultan of Sulu more than 600 years ago. The sultan of Sulu kept the Javan elephants on Jolo island, the capital of Sulu, which is an archipelago that is now part of the Philippines. The elephants were presumed extinct on Java by the end of the 18th century, but the small population sent to Sulu ended up in Borneo, and the six- to seven-foot-tall animals persist there today.
"It's a very appealing theory," says Michael Stuewe, a World Wildlife Federation biologist who studies Borneo's elephants and coauthored the 2003 paper. "If it turns out that [the Javan elephant] really made it in one little corner of Borneo, it would be a remarkable discovery."
The conclusion from the 2003 paper was based on mitochondrial DNA data, which suggested that Borneo's elephants had evolved on the island since the Pleistocene. But there were some nagging issues. "That [2003] paper made the non sequitur conclusion that the Borneo elephants are different from the other elephants of Southeast Asia, and are therefore native to Borneo," admits Payne. "They're clearly different, but that doesn't automatically mean they're native." Moreover, Borneo is essentially devoid of elephant fossils.
Approximately one year ago, Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, the Earl of Cranbrook, rediscovered a Borneo elephant tooth that Bornean villagers found in a cave and sent to him in the 1970s. "It had been sitting at the bottom of my inbox," says Gathorne-Hardy, who is the honorary curator of mammals at the Sarawak museum. He sent the tooth to researchers at the British Museum of Natural History, who radio-dated it and found that it was not "of any great antiquity." The tooth, one of the very few elephant remains found in Borneo, couldn't have been from the Pleistocene.
Then, Gathorne-Hardy discovered a 1908 account by a Syrian-born American living in the Philippines that, according to Payne, says the ruler of Java sent the Sultan of Sulu a small number of elephants in 1395. Gathorne-Hardy then found other historical accounts from British explorers that placed elephants on Jolo. He shared his findings with Payne.
Benoit Goossens, a Cardiff University conservation geneticist, says that mitochondrial DNA he's collected from Borneo's elephants supports the newest theory. For example, the population appears to contain only one mtDNA haplotype, suggesting that it came from a single female. "If they were there since the Pleistocene, we would expect more matrilineages."
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