Sub-speciation (on the conservation benefits of coming from a small family)

By John Roberts 14 June 2008 02:46:00

It seems every time you open your copy of Elephant Monthly nowadays there's a new sub-species to remember, we were content and happy when all we had to remember was elephas and their ugly cousins over in loxodonta - Asian elephants and African elephants.

    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."

 

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