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After 13 Years of Fruitless Searching, Taiwan's Clouded Leopard Remains Extinct
By Derek Mead
A clouded leopard of a different subspecies, via Mehgan Murphy/ Smithsonian's National Zoo
The Formosan clouded leopard, a subspecies of the beautiful clouded leopard endemic to Taiwan, has been thought to be extinct for decades. But a team of zoologists from Taiwan and the United States gave a last-ditch effort to find the mid-sized felines, and after 13 years of trying, have announced that they've given up hope.
"There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan. There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers," zoologist Po-jen Chiang, according to Taipei Times .
Chiang was joined by Jai-chyi Pei, a professor who Taipei Times notes is "a leading figure in Taiwan's wildlife conservation movement," in first opening up Taiwan's forests to a team of zoologists trying to track down any sign that the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyurus) still exists.
Starting in 2001, they reportedly set up around 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps to try to find evidence of the cat, which once lived in the trees of Taiwan's mountain forests. While similar camera traps recently caught a super-rare snow leopard , 13 years of work produced bupkis.
Chiang wrote his dissertation on the subspecies while at Virginia Tech, in which he notes that an incredible amount of work starting in 2000 couldn't scare up any evidence that the cats are still alive. From the abstract:
The leopard was Taiwan's top predator , and as such habitat loss (and the resulting prey depletion) was likely a large factor in its demise. Not helping is the fact that the leopard's skin was extremely popular, and what cats could have remained in a diminished forest were likely hunted to death. (If that scenario sounds all too familiar, it's because it is.)
The Formosan clouded leopard isn't the last of the clouded leopards. A pair of 2006 studies in Current Biology found that the clouded leopard, which was traditionally split into four subspecies, all in Southeast Asia, are actually two distinct species. Based on molecular and geographic data, researchers found evidence that N. nebulosa remains on mainland Asia, while N. diardi exists in Indonesia.
Regardless, both species are listed by the IUCN as being on the decline. As the decade of work to track down the Formosan subspecies shows, these rare cats can disappear without us even realizing it, which is all the more reason we need to ensure their habitat (and pelts) are secure.
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Stuff like this fills me with overwhelming sadness. Such a beautiful animal gone forever.
By Derek Mead
A clouded leopard of a different subspecies, via Mehgan Murphy/ Smithsonian's National Zoo
The Formosan clouded leopard, a subspecies of the beautiful clouded leopard endemic to Taiwan, has been thought to be extinct for decades. But a team of zoologists from Taiwan and the United States gave a last-ditch effort to find the mid-sized felines, and after 13 years of trying, have announced that they've given up hope.
"There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan. There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers," zoologist Po-jen Chiang, according to Taipei Times .
Chiang was joined by Jai-chyi Pei, a professor who Taipei Times notes is "a leading figure in Taiwan's wildlife conservation movement," in first opening up Taiwan's forests to a team of zoologists trying to track down any sign that the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyurus) still exists.
Starting in 2001, they reportedly set up around 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps to try to find evidence of the cat, which once lived in the trees of Taiwan's mountain forests. While similar camera traps recently caught a super-rare snow leopard , 13 years of work produced bupkis.
Chiang wrote his dissertation on the subspecies while at Virginia Tech, in which he notes that an incredible amount of work starting in 2000 couldn't scare up any evidence that the cats are still alive. From the abstract:
During 2000-2004 I studied the population status of the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyurus) and the ecology of its prey and other sympatric carnivores in the largest remaining lowland primary forest in southern Taiwan. My research team and I set up 232 hair snare stations and 377 camera trap sites at altitudes of 150-3,092m in the study area. No clouded leopards were photographed in total 13,354 camera trap days. Hair snares did not trap clouded leopard hairs, either.
That the Formosan clouded leopard remains extinct isn't a huge surprise. Alan Rabinowitz, writing in a 1988 paper in Oryx , notes that his own survey in 1986 was fruitless, and writes that he'd discovered that the last reported sighting of the species came back in 1983.The leopard was Taiwan's top predator , and as such habitat loss (and the resulting prey depletion) was likely a large factor in its demise. Not helping is the fact that the leopard's skin was extremely popular, and what cats could have remained in a diminished forest were likely hunted to death. (If that scenario sounds all too familiar, it's because it is.)
The Formosan clouded leopard isn't the last of the clouded leopards. A pair of 2006 studies in Current Biology found that the clouded leopard, which was traditionally split into four subspecies, all in Southeast Asia, are actually two distinct species. Based on molecular and geographic data, researchers found evidence that N. nebulosa remains on mainland Asia, while N. diardi exists in Indonesia.
Regardless, both species are listed by the IUCN as being on the decline. As the decade of work to track down the Formosan subspecies shows, these rare cats can disappear without us even realizing it, which is all the more reason we need to ensure their habitat (and pelts) are secure.
Link
Stuff like this fills me with overwhelming sadness. Such a beautiful animal gone forever.
Very sad indeed.
