Silver-Backed Chevrotain Rediscovered
Runaway1956 writes:
"For those of us living in Vietnam and working in wildlife conservation, the question of whether the chevrotain was still out there and if so, where, has been nagging us for years," Nguyen said. Nguyen is an associate conservation scientist with GWC and a PhD student with the Leibniz-Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. "There was very little information available to point us in the right direction and we didn't know what to expect. That we were able to find it with so few leads and in a relatively short period of time shows how a little bit of effort and willpower can go a long way in finding some of these special species lost to science."
The rediscovery of the Silver-backed Chevrotain-also known as the Vietnamese Mouse-deer-is the first rediscovery of a mammal on GWC's 25 most wanted lost species list. The species was described in 1910 from four individuals collected in 1907 near the southern beach city of Nha Trang. A Russian expedition in 1990 in central Vietnam collected a fifth individual. With only this information on hand, Nguyen and a team that included GWC's Dr. Barney Long and Andrew Tilker, set out to figure out where to start.
"We had these two historical localities separated by quite some distance-one in the southern part of Vietnam and the other much further north," says Tilker, GWC's Asian species officer. "But we knew that many people have camera-trapped in the wet evergreen forests and hadn't seen it, so we thought we should look at the dry forest habitat that's really different and where not many people have looked."
The team also started to put out some feelers to investigate potential leads. Soon after, one colleague obtained a photo of what appeared to be a young chevrotain with silvery coloration. Although the photo had been taken more than 10 years ago and was not conclusively a Silver-backed Chevrotain, the animal was reportedly found near the dry coastal forests where the 1907 individuals came from. It was this clue and the process of elimination, Tilker says, that set the successful mission on course.
Photos and videos here - https://assets.globalwildlife.org/web/5288ea84a4ae858b/media-kit--miniature-fanged--deer--rediscovered-tiptoeing-through-vietnam-s-coastal-forests/
also at
https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/11/silver-backed-chevrotain-vietnam-found/
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/11/778312670/silver-backed-chevrotain-with-fangs-and-hooves-photographed-in-wild-for-first-ti
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