General Rhino Facts about thinos from the Asian Rhino Project
Herbivores
All rhinoceros are herbivores – that is, they eat only plant material. Some primarily eat grass (grazers), some eat mostly leaves and branches (browsers) while others feed on a mixture of both.
Perissodactyls
Rhinoceros belong to the perissodactyl family of ‘ungulates’ (hoofed animals) indicating that they are large-hoofed animals with odd numbers of ‘toes’ (the rhinoceros has three per foot).
Relatives
The closest relative to the rhinoceros is the horse, ass and tapir.
Vision
Rhinoceros have very poor eyesight, relying instead on acute senses of smell and hearing.
Lifespan
In general, rhinoceros live for about 30-40 years in the wild and up to 50 years in captivity.
Gestation
Rhinoceros give birth to a single calf after a gestation of between 15 and 16 months. The interval between calves is generally two to three years. Rhinos become sexually mature anywhere between five and seven years.
Wallowing
Wallowing in mud is a favourite pastime of all five rhinoceros species. It is a great way for them to cool down in the heat of the day and it also protects their skin from the sun and from biting insects.
Agility
Rhinoceros are very agile animals. They may look slow and cumbersome – but don’t be fooled!! Rhinos can run at speeds of 40-50km/hr and can do a 180 degree spin in a single jump.
I REFER to the article “Puntung to be put to sleep” by Stephanie Lee (The Star, May 30).
I am deeply concerned about the fate of “Puntung”, the Sumatran rhino, and of her species in Malaysia generally.
I am of the view that breeding programmes ought to be planned with the cooperation and assistance of reputable foreign zoos and international conservation organisations.
I am perplexed as to why endangered wildlife in the African continent despite the pressures of poaching, deforestation and drought have been able to thrive with no known cases of animals going functionally extinct. Various TV channels, for example, Discovery and National Geographic regularly screen programmes on successful breeding and conservation efforts hosted by naturalists including by the famed conservationist Sir David Attenborough but the fate of the Sumatran rhinoceros has escaped international attention, assistance and collaboration and now appears to be a conservation failure.
The Sumatran rhino should never have been allowed to dwindle in numbers to this extent. The article “Our fatal blunders” by Tan Cheng Li (The Star, June 2, 2014) brought to our attention that between 1984 and 1995, a total of 22 Sumatran rhinos were captured in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah for a captive breeding project but all died without breeding. The reason why such an animal is functionally extinct has not been studied. Rhino dedicated forest reserve parks ought to be created and helicopter-flown veterinarians appointed to protect this species as well as the necessary biological research undertaken on this critically endangered animal.
It has become necessary to seek international help from reputable zoos and the cooperation of Indonesia for cross-border international conservation efforts and breeding programmes under the auspices of WWF jointly with Malaysia or else, not just the Sumatran rhino but various other species such as the Malayan tiger will be lost within this generation.
If necessary the last remaining rhinos should be flown to foreign zoological institutions like the Cincinnati Zoo – which successfully bred three Sumatran Rhinos – for state-of-the-art healthcare, management and research with the cooperation of the Malaysian veterinary authorities and non-governmental conservation organisations to ensure that a successful breeding programme is established. The Cincinnati Zoo later sent the rhino calves to the Rhino Sanctuary in Sumatra for Indonesia’s conservation efforts.
Euthanasia should not be the sole option as chemotherapy, radiation treatment and excision surgery without consideration as to costs and expense ought to also be considered to prolong the life of Puntung, a national living treasure. Her scheduled euthanasia on June 15 should be the last option. This should not affect the proposed removal of her mature eggs for future assisted reproduction which can still be carried out.
Overseas medical treatment must also be an available option irrespective of costs and expense.
The seemingly “disastrous” story of the world’s most endangered mammal – the northern white rhino – could be rewritten by IVF, scientists claim.
They used the method to produce rhino embryos with sperm from two dead males.
The embryos were made using eggs from a closely related sub-species, but the scientists say the method could save the northern white rhino.
One of the team said he hoped a baby that’s fully northern white rhino would be born “within three years”.
This could provide a way of “rescuing valuable genes” from a sub-species that is already functionally extinct; the last male northern white rhino, named Sudan, died earlier this year at the age of 45.
Only two females now remain, but the researchers who carried out this project say their carefully-developed method of assisted reproduction could work with eggs harvested from those two precious animals.
How do you carry out rhino IVF?
In the journal Nature Communications, Prof Thomas Hildebrandt, from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, and his international team of colleagues, described the complexities of safely extracting an egg, or oocyte, from a two-tonne female rhino.
“You can’t reach the ovaries by hand, so we developed a special device,” Prof Hildebrandt explained to BBC News. “We used ultrasound to very precisely inject a needle into [the area of the ovary that releases] eggs.”
This was done while the female southern white rhino was under general anaesthetic, but the process is still very risky. Very close to the ovaries, Prof Hildebrandt explained, is a “huge artery” that if punctured would probably cause the rhino to bleed to death.
But once viable eggs were safely preserved, the team then had the challenge of fertilising them with sperm from male northern white rhinos – animals that died several years ago. They injected each egg with the sperm and used pulses of electrical current to stimulate the egg and sperm to fuse.
The result – viable embryos containing genetic material from a sub-species that is already functionally extinct.
“Everyone believed there was no hope for this sub-species,” said Prof Hildebrandt. “But with our knowledge now, we are very confident that this will work with northern white rhino eggs and that we will be able to produce a viable population.”
Could this bring back the northern white rhino?
These researchers think so, and others around the world who have been involved in efforts to save the northern white rhino say it is an important step.
But Dr Terri Roth, from Cincinnati Zoo, said the team’s suggestion that they would have a “new baby on the ground” within three years was “optimistic”.
“Embryo transfer [into a surrogate mother] in rhinos is in its infancy and has not yet been successful in any rhino species,” Dr Roth told BBC News.
“And there are just two female northern white rhinos alive today, so acquiring white rhino [eggs] will be challenging and their number will be limited. Any embryos produced would likely need to be cryopreserved (or frozen) until a surrogate could be set up.”
Why are there so few northern white rhinos left?
As Dr Roth explained, poaching is the primary threat facing all rhino species.
“The most effective way to save rhinos from extinction is to stop the poaching, however, that has proven difficult,” she told BBC News.
“In the late 1990s, even the wild northern white rhino had a chance to recover from low numbers until civil unrest broke out in the DRC and the rhinos were all killed.”
Loss of habitat is the other primary threat to rhinos, and conservationists say that governmental protection of parks and reserves is now essential.
“The proper legislation must be passed, the resources to enforce the regulations must be provided and the law must be upheld,” said Dr Roth, who has worked in rhino conservation for more than two decades.
“It is important that we learn from the plight of the northern white rhino and we make sure what happened to it does not happen to other endangered species.
“As impressive as science can be, we should not reach a point where these hi-tech approaches are the only source of hope for rescuing genes of valuable individuals, sub-species or entire species.”
Read the full BBC News article by Victoria Gill, Science reporter
For Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA), the deaths of the last native rhinos in Malaysia has prompted us to consider our next steps. This process has forced us to contemplate all that we have worked towards over these past years and the remarkable support we have received in our mission to save the Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia.
Sime Darby Foundation had supported BORA’s work on the Hairy (Sumatran) rhino from 2009 to 2016 when, time and again, hopes were dashed and it became clear that the Foundation was supporting a unique but increasingly high-risk project. The Chairman, Tun Musa Hitam, and CEO, Hjh. Dr. Yatela Zainal Abidin, stuck their necks out repeatedly in the hope that the work being done would turn around the steady decline in options to save the species in Malaysia. Although they, and many others, may think that this support was wasted, they would be wrong.
Looking at just a seven-year window in a decades-long story misses the big picture. It is absolutely necessary to judge the work that the Foundation supported in a global and long-term context. Almost incredibly, when the Foundation decided that further funding could not be justified, the Government of Malaysia took over. Under a project entitled “Application of Advanced Reproductive Technology to Endangered Species in Sabah”, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment Malaysia (now Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources) has funded through Sabah Wildlife Department the development of many aspects of assisted reproductive technology, and a laboratory, Reproductive Innovation Centre for Wildlife and Livestock, located in the Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, in Sandakan.
This Centre is now unique in Malaysia in terms of skilled staffing, equipment and storage of the cryopreserved gametes of more than 10 endangered wildlife species. It has emerged as a Malaysian national centre which, due to the historical background, happens to be located in Sandakan, Sabah.
A Malaysian team able to safely capture, translocate and care for Hairy rhinos, and put them under and recover well from general anaethesia Knowledge on how to sustain Hairy rhinos that are chronically sick with cysts, tumours and associated bleeding, while at the same time allowing periodic, planned harvest of egg cells.
Some of the significant outcomes of the seven-year support by Sime Darby Foundation and Government of Malaysia from 2016 to 2020 include:
The pioneering assistance and continuing interest of world-class cutting edge rhino reproductive scientists in Germany (Professor Thomas Hildebrandt and team at Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin), Italy (Professor Cesare Galli of Avantea laboratory, Cremora) and Indonesia (Professor Arief Boediono and colleagues at IPB University, Bogor)
Living cell cultures of the last four Hairy rhinos in Malaysia, developed by Associate Professor Muhammad Lokman Bin Md. Isa of the International Islamic University Malaysia, as well as in Germany and USA, from which Bornean rhino gametes can potentially be made at any time in the future (genetically, the last four native rhinos in Malaysia – Gelogob, Puntung, Tam and Iman – are still alive)
The beginnings of a “frozen zoo” of wildlife genomes. Malaysia’s most skilled specialists in wildlife anaesthesia and handling of animal gametes for in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation
The potential to expand work to other critically endangered wildlife species including Malayan tiger and two critically endangered wild cattle species
If BORA stays open it has the opportunity to apply experience gained from the Hairy rhino story. Here are some thoughts and lessons learned which we want to share:
Rare wildlife species other than Hairy rhino are going to suffer the same fate – it is just a matter of time
We can do something before it is too late
Doing the same thing again and again will not be enough
Let us learn specific lessons from the Hairy rhino story
BORA will be re-branding by the end of 2020 to offer suggestions and resources that will help to implement these lessons learned.
By Avila Geraldine NST Online, November 24, 2019 KOTA KINABALU: Malaysia has done its level best to save the Sumatran rhinoceros since the 1980s, including mooting breeding programmes and pursuing conservation collaborations with key parties – all to no avail.
Iman in her paddock. Pic from BORA
Borneo Rhino Alliance (Bora) executive director Dr John Payne told the New Straits Times that many opportunities to save the species had been rejected by “people in positions of authority.”
“Starting with International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) experts in 1984, who argued that only non-breeding Sumatran rhinos should be brought into a global managed breeding programme,” he said today.
The IUCN is the world’s main authority on the species’ conservation. Payne observed that the same indifferent attitude prevails today.
“I am particularly disappointed that a letter of intent for collaboration signed by key parties in 2012 has been ignored by all parties, except the government of Malaysia and Sabah as well as Bora, despite our numerous repeated attempts to engage,” he said.
In August this year, Deputy Chief Minister cum state Tourism, Culture, and Environment Minister Datuk Christina Liew led a Sabah delegation to Jakarta to discuss a Malaysia-Indonesia rhino conservation collaboration.
Payne was part of the delegation, along with Sabah Wildlife Department director Augustine Tuuga and WWF-Malaysia conservation director Dr Henry Chan.
The meeting with Indonesia is said to have borne fruit with the proposed collaboration expected to be inked in September. But the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is still pending.
Prior to the Jakarta visit, the Sabah government initiated continuous efforts to push for collaboration with the neighbouring country.
“I do not want to add to the toxic Indonesia versus Malaysia (debate), but I do want to say that Malaysia is now far ahead of Indonesia in many aspects of Sumatran rhino conservation. The long-awaited MoU is now needed more than ever,” stressed Payne.
“Malaysia and our colleagues in Germany, Italy and the IPB (Institut Pertanian Bogor) University have much to offer, not least in management of female Sumatran rhinos with reproductive pathology, safe harvesting of gametes from living rhinos, and cell culture, as well as capture and translocation of Sumatran rhinos from remote areas,” he added.
Payne noted that Malaysia’s three female captive Sumatran rhinos – Iman, Puntung, and Gelobog – and male captive rhino Tam all live on as cell cultures.
“Technology already exists to make eggs and sperm from these cultures. Technology to allow embryos of one species to be successfully implanted into the womb of another will be with us in the not too distant future.
“But then, the need for this could have been avoided if the decision makers all decided to collaborate from the 1980s,” he added.
Yesterday, Malaysia’s last Sumatran rhino, Iman, died at the Borneo Rhino Sanctuary at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Lahad Datu.
Iman was the last wild rhino spotted deep in the jungles of Sabah in 2014. She was captured at Danum Valley and was taken to the rhino sanctuary for care until she died.
Puntung was captured in 2011 and euthanised in June 2017.
Tam was captured in Aug 2010 and died in May 2019. His body was preserved and is on display at the Sabah state museum.
Gelogob was captured in 1994 and died in 2014. She was the longest-living female rhino in captivity.
Sumatran rhinos in captivity, as listed by Bernama:
1987 – Linbar, male, was captured in Lower Segama, but died of internal injuries that same year.
1987 – Tenegang, male, was captured, but died at the Sepilok Rhino Breeding Centre in 1992.
1988 – Lokan, male, was captured, but eventually died in a pit trap that same year.
1989 – Lun Parai, female, was captured and successfully mated, but no pregnancy occurred. She died in Sepilok in 2000.
1991 – Tekala, male, was captured, but died following a tetanus infection in Sepilok in 1997.
1992 – Sidom, male, was captured, but died in Sepilok in 1997 with no success in mating.
1993 – Bulud, male, was captured and retained at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve in Lahad Datu but escaped not long after. However, he was sighted once in 1995 not far from Tabin.
1993 – Tanjung, male, was captured and retained in Sepilok, but died after a tree branch fell on it in 2006.
1995 – Malbumi, male, was captured, but died in Sepilok in 1997.
Daily Express 27 Nov 2019 KOTA KINABALU: Former WWF Sabah Director Datuk John Payne (pic) said there were many missed opportunities to save the Sumatran rhino. Sabah’s last known Sumatran rhino, Iman, died last Saturday and questions were raised as to how the beast that managed to survive for millions of years in Sabah’s primeval forests was allowed to become extinct.“In 1980 IUCN experts discouraged Sabah from capture of rhino because it was considered too risky,” Payne said.
“They advised that only ‘doomed Sumatran rhinos, that is, the old, sick and isolated rhinos be captured for globally managed population breeding programme,” he said, adding that a proposal by the late Tom Foose of American Association of Zoos and Aquariums to initiate advanced reproductive technology for the species was also ignored. The idea was to send a Sabah rhino to America for captive breeding – everything thing was signed and agreed under the Berjaya Government but hue and cry followed a change of government (PBS) and the whole so-called Borneo Project was scuttled. With Sabah rebuffing the idea, Foose approached Indonesia and arrangements with Cincinnati Zoo under Dr Terry managed to sire two male rhino plus a third in Indonesia itself.
“In 2000, a warning by Nan Schaffer that over 70pc of female Sumatran rhinos have reproductive pathology was again ignored and later dubbed by the International Rhino Foundation as a Malaysian problem,” Payne said. Then in March 2012, a letter of intent for collaboration signed in the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry but was ignored until this day. “Between 2013 and 2019, repeated offer from Malaysia including sending Tam and eggs from Iman and Puntung were met with no response from Indonesia,” he said. He said in 2005, female Rosa, captured in Sumatra and never bred now has lelomyoma like Iman but there were no attempts to harvest her eggs or try IVF or artificial insemination. It is a pity that only hesitant and basic attempts at any aspect of advanced reproductive technology had occurred. “Again in November 2018, female Pahu was captured in East Kalimantan but until now there is no action to make use of her genome towards saving the species ,” Payne said.
Read the Daily Express article here
This Letter to the Editor appears in Pachyderm: Journal of the African Elephant, African Rhino and Asian Rhino Specialist Groups (Issue 60): June 2018-June 2019.
Dear Chair/Editor, This letter represents the views of Borneo Rhino Alliance, a not-for-profit company dedicated to taking all necessary steps to prevent the extinction of the genus Dicerorhinus, and does not necessarily reflect the views of any other party. The authors have about one hundred years of experience in detection, surveys, capture, translocation and husbandry of Sumatran rhinos, between them. Furthermore we invite urgent debate on this issue for the purpose of securing the Sumatran rhino.
The most ancient surviving rhinoceros genus is Dicerorhinus, represented by a species commonly known as the Sumatran rhinoceros. A glance through the sparse literature on Sumatran rhino from the 1930s to 1970s clearly shows that the species was by that time in deep trouble: very few animals, widely scattered in separate forest blocks in four or five nations, generally with fewer than ten or so individuals in any one place. A prior millennium or more of hunting to supply horns for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was the main reason for this accelerating decline. Clearly, the problem to be addressed by the 1980s was not of excessive mortality, which had already happened, but of the Allee effect: very low Sumatran rhino population density everywhere, very few rhinos, and not enough breeding to reverse the trajectory towards extinction.
The answer should have been obvious: launch a single programme of captive breeding in managed, fenced facilities to increase population density of fertile adults, boost birth rate and address the inevitable inbreeding depression developing in each isolated cluster. Similar concepts had worked for the white rhino in South Africa, for both species of bison and for the musk-ox, many decades earlier. But what should have been obvious was not to be. Only a few people wrote about the situation clearly, notably Tom Foose, Conservation Coordinator of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums from 1981 to 1990.
1981 marked not only the beginning of Foose’s prescient tenure, but also the beginning of the era of ”sustainable development”, when erosion of the profession of wildlife management began, in favour of justifying wildlife conservation in terms of human benefit and, paradoxically, a more emotional approach to wildlife. Surely, in 2019, we cannot continue to believe that small pockets of forest in protected areas, typically marginal for large mammals in terms of soil fertility, steep terrain and access to limiting resources, will be adequate to sustain tiny, unmanaged wild large mammal populations in the long term in the absence of specific human interventions? The late twentieth century also marked the beginning of the stakeholder consultation approach to wildlife management, which may work in some circumstances but can also lead to indecision or ineffective compromise. Most importantly now, the Sumatran rhino may be doomed by lack of leadership, and the accompanying need to make hard decisions, as well as the continuing failure to understand that the paramount need is to boost birth numbers.
To one of us (JP), having surveyed Sabah, the northern tenth of the island of Borneo for Sumatran rhinos from 1979 to 1983, as a WWF-Malaysia staff member in collaboration with Sabah Forestry Department, it was very clear that the species would soon be extinct. Foose visited Sabah in 1983, and the government at that time was warm to collaboration within the context of an international capture and meta-population management programme. It was our hope in 1984 that a single programme to boost Sumatran rhino births, prioritising capture of wild rhinos for ex situ management, would be realised.
The fate of Dicerorhinus was sealed on 4 October 1984, however, when a compromise was reached among 20 of the world’s designated Sumatran rhino experts. At an IUCN-brokered meeting in Singapore on Sumatran rhino at which John Payne was participating, Robert Scott, the then executive director of the Species Survival Commission and meeting facilitator valiantly and diplomatically did his best to reach a strong conclusion. Unfortunately, among the 20 persons present, there was a body of opinion, led vociferously by Professor Rudolf Schenkel, that all Sumatran rhinos should stay put in the wild.
The compromise reached was that where rhinos were in protected areas, or anywhere showing signs of breeding, they should be left alone, and only “doomed” rhinos would be captured for ex situ breeding purposes. The fatal flaw in this compromise became apparent in 2000, when Nan Schaffer of SOS Rhino pointed out that at least 70% of the 23 females captured between 1984 and 1994 (11 in Sumatra, 10 in Malaya and two in Borneo) suffered from reproductive tract pathologies at or soon after the time of capture, a feature that prevented or hindered pregnancy. The subsequent scattering of captured rhinos between facilities in five barely-collaborating regions added to the inevitable failure of this programme.
It is essential to understand that this first captive breeding programme failed because of a fatal constraint in the criteria for capture (namely selection of old, infertile and sub-fertile breeding stock), coupled with multiple weaknesses in execution, and not because the original concept was wrong.
The imperative to persist with a managed meta-population approach was dealt a major blow by the late Alan Rabinowitz in his 1995 essay Helping a species go extinct: the Sumatran rhino in Borneo. Despite having participated with the authors in a survey for rhinos in Danum Valley, Sabah, in September 1992, and concluding that only four to seven rhinos remained at that time, Rabinowitz persisted in the view that leaving the rhinos in situ was the best way forward.
By 2011, all except four of the forty Sumatran rhinos captured in the 1984-1994 IUCN-brokered programme were dead and only the young, compatible pair of Sumatran rhinos in Cincinnati Zoo had fulfilled Tom Foose’s dream. In 2011, two things were initiated in Sabah. Backed by Sabah government policy and funded by Sime Darby Foundation, Professor Thomas Hildebrandt and a team from Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, commenced in earnest, a programme to focus on use of
advanced reproductive technology to make Sumatran rhino embryos. This was initiated because it was clear that there would never be enough fertile Sumatran rhinos in captivity to be able to rely on natural breeding to save the genus. In 2011, too, the government of Sabah initiated contact with the Ministry of Forestry, Indonesia to collaborate on a programme for Sumatran rhino breeding.
On 15 March 2012, a Letter of Intent for Collaboration on Ensuring the Survival of the Sumatran Rhinoceros was signed in the office of the Director-General for Forest Protection and Nature Conservation (Indonesia), by the Indonesian and Sabah authorities, the IUCN/SSC Asian Rhino Specialist Group and others. The objectives were: to “collaborate .. and endeavour to acquire additional fertile rhinos of both sexes from the wild for our managed breeding programme .. and share biological materials (including sperm and embryos) .. and share information, in particular concerning husbandry and reproduction ..”. This worthy intent still needs to materialise.
In November 2012, former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Tun Musa Hitam visited key people in Indonesia with the intention to drum up support for the intended Indonesia-Malaysia collaboration on the species. For several years, however, Indonesia seems reluctant to talk with Sabah directly, thinking incorrectly that the national government of Malaysia has policy-making authority over Sumatran rhinos in Sabah.
In April 2013, a three-day Sumatran Rhino Crisis Summit was held, initiated by Borneo Rhino Alliance, taken up by IUCN, and hosted by Wildlife Reserves of Singapore. Perhaps inevitably, there was much divergence in the views of the 100 people present, and the summit ended with expensive plans to “conduct more surveys” instead of the necessary immediate initiation of capture of fertile Sumatran rhinos for breeding. In October 2013, the first Asian Rhino Range States meeting was held in Indonesia involving Governments of Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal, under purview of IUCN, with the five Asian rhino range states committing to managing all the Asian rhino species to achieve at least 3% annual population growth rate through implementation of the actions outlined in the meeting’s Declaration. In February 2019, the second Asian Rhino Range Countries Meeting was held in India. Malaysia’s request to insert into the final Declaration the possibility to “pursue the application of advanced reproductive technology to make best use of infertile and sub–fertile Sumatran rhinos” was rejected in favour of rather bland wording that allows conservative elements involved in the species to do nothing new.
On 24 August 2014, Indonesia proposed that Sabah provide its sole male rhino, Tam, to Indonesia. The request was agreed to within 10 days, but then Indonesia backed down, seemingly shocked that Sabah had
responded so positively. The problem of Indonesia requiring engagement with the national government of Malaysia seemed to have been solved on 4 June 2015, when the National Biodiversity Council of Malaysia endorsed a proposal from Sabah. The proposal was to use advanced reproductive technology to help prevent the extinction of the Sumatran rhino, and that Malaysia should invite Indonesia to collaborate on Sumatran rhino conservation work. Since then, a consistently supportive national Ministry in Malaysia, right up to today, has done its best to attract interest in collaboration to save the genus. But all approaches from Malaysia have been stalled by Indonesia, both at governmental and NGO levels. An increasingly outdated Memorandum of Understanding, initiated in 2012, has yet to be finalised and signed at the time of writing this paper.
Collaboration does not necessarily have to be on the application of reproductive technology but can be on topics as diverse as sharing experience on safe capture, translocation by helicopter from remote areas, husbandry, treatment of reproductive tract pathologies, anaesthesia and so on.
Of the last four Sumatran rhinos captured in Sabah (female Gelogob in 1994, male Tam in 2008, female Puntung in 2011 and female Iman in 2014) two females and the male have died, leaving only Iman alive today. Puntung was euthanized in 2017 due to the pain she was suffering from squamous cell carcinoma. Tam died on 27 May 2019 of the effects of end stage renal failure. Both deaths drew widespread sympathy and comment both on social media and on supposedly reliable news feeds. The sympathy is touching to those close to the rhinos, but all the reporting from outside Malaysia demonstrates well the shifting baseline syndrome. There is a universal lack of understanding that the species’ current situation is the end stage of thousands of years of history and that extinction will be prevented only by decisive human intervention. Most of these recent authors continue to refer to poaching and habitat loss, unaware that it is not simply the overall small rhino numbers that has been the threat to the species for the past century, but instead the very thin scattering of individuals on the ground and the accompanying tendency for female reproductive pathologies.
Potentially good news is that the living genomes of all four of the last Malaysia–born Sumatran rhinos are sustained in cell cultures. At some time in the future, when the technology and politics are right, gametes can be made from these cell lines. But surrogate mothers will be needed for emplacement of the embryos. This is where Indonesia’s role is critical, but there has been no real commitment from government, and specialist rhino NGOs alike on the dire need to secure and manage the last few wild fertile females as the primary means to maximise rhino births.
Throughout the year 2018 up to now, BORA has waited for the signal from Indonesia to arrange from the Malaysia side the sending of oocytes from Iman for in vitro embryo production attempts using sperm from Andalas (the proven fertile bull rhino at Way Kambas). This procedure can be performed by Indonesian specialists in the Bogor Agricultural Institute in Indonesia. The Government of Indonesia seems to be under the false impression that, because Iman is periodically sick with her leiomyoma tumours, she has stopped producing eggs. Among the impediments that have been applied are the need to ensure that the provisions of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing are fulfilled and the non-issuance of a CITES import permit.
A strong and pervasive spirit of patriotism pervades all elements of Sumatran rhino work. It is difficult to know what a Malaysia-based NGO can usefully say at this juncture to dispel this insidious threat to action on Sumatran rhino. Millions of dollars have gone into Indonesia in recent years, with the only obvious result being two female Sumatran rhinos captured, one dead, the other unsuitable for reproduction. Apart from generous but small donations from individuals, almost all funding of Sumatran rhino work in Malaysia over the past decade has come from Malaysian sources. A Malaysian team and a German team respectively have
offered to harvest sperm and oocytes from Sumatran rhinos in Indonesia (both having done this successfully in Sabah); but approval has not been forthcoming.
Those in Sabah are disappointed that the Sumatran rhino rescue programme launched in September 2018 by National Geographic together with IUCN, WWF, International Rhino Foundation and Global Wildlife Conservation, focuses exclusively on the Indonesian populations, rather than the Sumatran rhino as a genus.
If the government of Indonesia, for whatever reason, does not want collaboration with citizens of Malaysia or Germany, we urge the authorities and their donors to implement the necessary urgent and over-due measures within Indonesia. In other words, forget about Malaysia and do what needs to be done independently.
At some time in the very near future a point will be reached when the sheer technical and logistical inability to capture and translocate the last rhinos from remote sites, coupled with the reproductive condition of all those remaining rhinos still able to mate, and bureaucracy amongst the indecisive decision-makers, will together conspire to condemn the 20 million year old genus Dicerorhinus to inevitable extinction. The precise week on which that will happen will, of course, forever remain unknown. Perhaps it has already occurred, but we must either assume not, or stop all further wastage of funds on the genus.
BORA entreats the conservation body that what is needed now (and what has been needed since the 1970s) is: (1) high level leadership, which has to come from within Indonesia, (2) one meta–population programme, (3) one team of competent and dedicated people, led by a capable implementation leader, (4) capture of as many Sumatran rhinos possible, while there is still time to do so, immediately, and consistently prioritising capture of fertile (not old or infertile) individuals, (5) minimise the birthing interval of all captive females that are not reproductively compromised, (6) ensure that every remaining Sumatran rhino, including the reproductively compromised individuals,—contributes its gametes towards making embryos through the application of assisted reproductive technology.
And, equally important, it is important to dispense with time and money wasting distractions that are not needed, including (1) “surveys”, (2) superfluous staff with no experience and overly-specific tasks, (3) excessive camera trapping, which cannot tell a rhino’s reproductive status and is not necessary to decide where to place traps, (4) “awareness” and (5) “stakeholder consultation”. These needs are not impossible to achieve. But they are impossible within the current scenario. The alarm bells are ringing, we should all be awake and move forward.
John Payne (JP)*, Abdul Hamid Ahmad and Zainal Zahari Zainuddin Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA)
KOTA KINABALU: In vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment on an egg retrieved from Iman – the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia – failed earlier this month.
Specialists attempting to save the species from extinction saw the fertilised cell degenerate within days after thawed-out sperm – harvested from Tam, the last male rhino – was injected into it.
Tam himself has since died.
It is learnt that the egg cell had failed to divide after fertilisation, and no embryo was formed.
However, a source said that while the failure is disheartening, “The team believes efforts should continue and that we should learn from the experience”.
The treatment was led by Professor Arief Boediono, a world-class IVF practitioner from Universiti Pertanian Bogor, Indonesia; as well as the Centre for Wildlife and Livestock Innovation, Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture, University Malaysia Sabah (UMS) in Sandakan.
The process of retrieving the egg from Iman was conducted by a team of experts from the Leibniz Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, led by Professor Thomas Hildebrandt, at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve in Lahad Datu, together with the Borneo Rhino Alliance (Bora).
“We believe the quality of the sperm was low, and that to continue the IVF treatment effort, we need to try and get sperm from rhinos in captivity in Indonesia.
Despite the failed attempt of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment, there is still hope for Iman and Sumatran rhinos.
“For now, Iman is relatively healthy, and though she has a tumour in her uterus, she is still producing oocytes, or eggs,” he said, but added that there is worry that the rhino may stop ovulating.
It was previously believed that the poor quality of Tam’s sperm was a factor in similar failures in previous in vitro attempts. Experts in Sabah, however, will continue to collaborate with Indonesia in the pioneering efforts.
Sabah Wildlife Department director Augustine Tuuga had previously expressed hope in the attempt to produce an embryo through the in vitro process for the continuation of the species.
Tam’s sperm was retrieved, frozen and kept for breeding purposes before he died in May. However, Iman can no longer get pregnant due to the uterine tumour that is plaguing her.
In August, Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Christina Liew led a delegation of state representatives and the department to Indonesia to discuss conservation efforts for the Sumatran rhinoceros.
DNA of northern white rhino — of which only two remain — mixed with that of close subspecies in a bid towards growing population using surrogates.
Fatu, one of the last two northern white rhinos, lives in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.Credit: Nichole Sobecki/The Washington Post/Getty
Researchers have created hybrid rhino embryos as part of a ‘Hail-Mary’ attempt to rescue the northern white rhinoceros from all but certain extinction.
The embryos — which have now been frozen — contain DNA from northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) and a close relative subspecies and could be implanted into surrogates to yield animals that are a mix of both. The work is reported in a Nature Communications paper published on 4 July1.
The research “is an impressive step forward for the whole field”, says stem-cell biologist Jeanne Loring, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Her team hopes to use stem-cell technology to repopulate the rhinos.
A victim to poaching, the northern white rhino population is now down to only two females, making it the planet’s most endangered mammal. Earlier this year, Sudan, the last male of the subspecies, died of age-related disease (although his sperm has been preserved). His daughter Najin and her daughter, Fatu, live in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Najin has leg injuries that prevent her from becoming pregnant, and Fatu has fertility problems that prevent embryos from implanting into the womb.
Innovation versus extinction
Extinction of the northern white rhino would seem inevitable. However, a team led by Cesare Galli, a veterinarian and embryologist at Avantea, a biotechnology laboratory in Cremona, Italy, may have given the animal a second chance. Galli and his colleagues have developed a technique to extract eggs from female rhinos and fertilize them to generate viable embryos potentially capable of becoming animals.
Rather than test the procedure — which involves a risky anaesthetic — on Najin and Fatu, the researchers collected eggs from 12 southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum), a closely related subspecies whose numbers stand at around 20,000 across southern Africa.
The hybrid embryos were created with eggs collected from southern white rhinos and northern white rhino sperm.Credit: T. B. Hildebrandt et al./Nat. Commun.
Of 13 eggs injected with sperm from a now-deceased northern white rhino, four developed into blastocysts, or early embryos. These ‘hybrid’ blastocysts, which contain genes from both subspecies, can be frozen and later implantated into a surrogate to produce hybrid offspring. These hybrids could ensure that some of the northern white rhino DNA would be preserved.
The researchers injected 17 other eggs with sperm from a southern white rhino, to produce three ‘pure’ southern white rhino blastocysts.
To test the health of the blastocysts, the team generated stem-cell lines from two of the pure embryos. These showed all the signs of healthy embryonic stem cells, suggesting that the embryos from which they were generated would be viable once implanted.
Expand and diversify
The next step will be to harvest eggs from Najin and Fatu, fertilize them with northern white rhino sperm and implant the resulting embryos in a southern white surrogate — with an ultimate goal of having the first northern white rhino born within three years.
However, the offspring of this effort would lack the genetic diversity to sustain a healthy wild population of northern white rhinos, says Galli. A better, but more challenging, avenue is to use frozen tissue from a wider pool of northern white rhinos to generate stem cells that have the capacity to develop into eggs and sperm (see ‘Saving the Northern White Rhino’).
In 2011, Loring and her colleagues produced such cells, called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, from Fatu’s skin2. Since then, Loring and her team have created 4 more iPS cell lines from northern white rhino tissue stored at San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California.
In May, the researchers showed that this tissue — which comes from 12 male and female rhinos — contains enough genetic diversity to help save these giant animals3. “We expect to have cells that look like sperm and eggs in a year,” says Loring, “but there are still many challenges ahead.”
Humans versus nature
“It would be fantastic to see the northern white rhino back in its natural habitat,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. However, he is concerned that the underlying cause of the rhinos’ near-extinction has not been dealt with.
“Let’s celebrate this endeavour, but keep it in perspective,” Pimm says. “We still live in a world in which we have lost an enormous number of rhinos to poaching, and if we have any chance of putting their descendants back into the wild, we’ll have to prevent them from being killed the moment they’re released.”
Historic Press Release from Sabah Wildlife Department
Kota Kinabalu, 23rd August, 2008: The Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD) successfully completed a two week long rescue operation of a single male from the critically endangered Sumatran Rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni) subspecies.
The Sumatran Rhinoceros, recognised as being on the brink of extinction, was found wandering at an oil palm plantation neighbouring the forest on the East Coast of Sabah on the 5th of August.
“It was obvious that the rhino was injured to some degree as it left its forest which had difficult terrain to come out on the flat terrain of the oil palm plantation,” explained Dr. Senthilvel Nathan, Chief Field Veterinarian of the Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD).
Senthilvel led the rescue operation to translocate the rhino safely out of the palm oil plantation and settle it in the rhino paddock at the Tabin Wildlife Reserve (TWR) located east of Lahad Datu.
“It was a delicate operation as we had to make sure that the rhino was not stressed by having human’s so close to it. When we first got there, the rhino showed signs of aggression and made mock chargers at us but we kept our distance and left leaves and fruits for it to eat as the oil palm environment is not suitable for wildlife,” explained Senthilvel.
For 10 days, a team of SWD Ranger’s and veterinarians stayed close to rhino at the plantation to habituate their presence to it before getting close enough to check on its condition and to prepare it for its translocation.
“We had to make sure it was getting enough water and food and was healthy because moving wildlife can be very stressful for them,” said Senthivel.
Also on the ground providing support was Sabah based Non Government Organisation (NGO) SOS Rhino Borneo and international NGO WWF-Malaysia.
WWF-Malaysia believes that the rescued rhino is also the same rhino that was captured on their camera and video trap in February of 2007 as part of their rhino tracking efforts in the same area.
Working together, the group of 24 undertook the task to monitor the rhino for 24 hours a day and the delicate operation to move the rhino from the plantation to its new home.
“The morning we moved the rhino, myself and Veterinarian Dr. Roza Sipagkui made an assessment to see if he was healthy enough for the four hour journey by road and barge to Tabin,” said Senthivel.
Remarkably their was no need to sedate the rhino as he was easily coaxed into the crate with fresh leaves and fruit.
“After a few attempts to coax the rhino into the crate, it finally walked in effortlessly and without the need for any type of sedation,” according to Senthivel.
Roza rode in the back of the truck with the rhino in the crate for the journey monitoring the rhino closely for any signs of stress and aggression.
“We had sedatives on standby the entire time but as the rhino remained remarkably calm we did not use it all which was also good for the rhino,” explained Senthivel.
According to SWD Director, the rhino has been translocated to the Tabin Wildlife Reserve as it has been designated as the new Bornean Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary.
“The rescue of this adult male rhino in his prime is timely as the Department is addressing the rhino population issue by launching a semi-captive rhino breeding programme based in Tabin,” shared SWD Director, Laurentius Ambu.
The decision to carry out a rhino breeding programme in semi-captivity was made by the State Rhino Task Force (SRTF) which was formed following the Fourth Sumatran Rhino Conservation Workshop held in July last year.
“At that Workshop, Datuk Masidi Manjun made a firm commitment of the State Government to address the issue of the rapidly dwindling number of rhino and this Task Force was established due to his commitment in saving the rhinos,” said Laurentius.
Datuk Masidi Manjun, the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Environment had stated that, every possible action gear toward the preservation of the rhinoceros and propagation of their population had to be taken.
To ensure the survival of the species, Masidi said people need to be educated to look at the rhinoceros as a national treasure.
“It is an uphill battle. But I hope everyone including scientists and NGOs will come together and work for the conservation of the rhinos which we all should consider our natural heritage,” said Masidi, adding that that the cooperation of plantation owners and the hunters was also imperative.
Laurentius also commended the quick action of the Unico Estate General Manager, Chew Beng Hock and Temenggong Estate Manager, Gucharan Singh for immediately informing and assisting the Department in transporting the rhino.
“The fact that the rhino was not harmed and that the Department was informed immediately tells us two things. First, that people are aware that the rhino is a totally protected species and that if anyone had harmed him, it would be a mandatory jail time for them and secondly they recognise how it is a really unique and special animal that needs to be saved,” said Laurentius.
“We must do everything we possible can to save the remaining population from the brink of extinction. The Rhino Task Force is working in collaboration with worldwide rhino experts to carry out this semi-captive breeding programme,” explained Laurentius who’s Department chairs the Task Force with member being from the Sabah Forestry Department and NGOs, SOS Rhino Borneo and WWF-Malaysia.
The State Government is currently working to raise the estimated RM20 million needed to set-up the fully fenced and protected area which could be up to 1000 hectares in size.
“It is a huge undertaking financially, but we must do this because this is most likely our last chance to save this Sumatran Rhino sub-species which is only found here from going extinct,” said Laurentius.
It is estimated that only 30 individuals of this Sumatran Rhino sub-species remain in the wildlife in Sabah.
KOTA KINABALU: Puntung, one of three remaining Sumatran rhinos in Malaysia which was reported to be critically-ill last month, is recovering following surgery this morning.
Sabah Wildlife department director Augustine Tuuga said the female rhino underwent a two-and-a-half hour operation to extract two molars and a premolar from the upper left side of her jaw, which had been causing a severe abscess.
The surgery was performed by veterinary dentist Dr Tum Chinkangsadarn from Thailand, who found that the source of the abscess was a formation caused by an accumulation of bacteria on the severely-calcified molars.
The calcification also loosened two adjacent teeth.
For the past two weeks, Puntung had not shown any signs of recovery, despite being administered antibiotics.
“This was a remarkable and successful operation that came about as a result of global discussion and multi-national collaboration over the past two weeks.
“Sabah thanks Dr Tum and the team who did a fantastic job, as well as Dr Abraham Mathew, senior veterinarian at the Singapore Zoo, who had helped with anaesthesia,” Augustine said in a statement, adding that the department was also assisted and supported by South Africa’s ‘Saving the Survivors’, the Wildlife and National Parks department in Peninsular Malaysia and the Borneo Rhino Alliance (Bora).
He added that the procedure began at 7am, with X-rays taken under sedation for 110 minutes.
“She started feeding two hours after the operation.
“But we are not done yet, as there will be a period of post-operation care, by keeping Puntung clean, stress-free and medicated, including for pain relief,” Augustine added.
Puntung, along with female rhino, Iman, and male, Kertam, are being cared for by Bora at the Borneo Rhino Sanctuary in the Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Lahad Datu
Humans are susceptible to the shifting baseline syndrome. We imagine that what we see from our childhood up to today is what is normal … what has been so for a long time, and what will be so for the foreseeable future. This view can be more dangerous to wildlife than poaching and habitat loss. It is a view that can lead to preventable extinctions, through faulty analysis and wrong actions to remedy the problem. What we see now is a small and essentially random snapshot of the panoply of history from, say, 20 million years ago to 100 years from now. For poor old Dicerorhinus (the Sumatran rhinoceros), a fifty year period of no decisions and wrong decisions is the problem.
In reality, Dicerorhinus is the Asian rhinoceros. Only 5,000 years ago, the species was present throughout Southeast Asia including what is now central China. Rhinos are not equatorial rainforest specialists. In fact, equatorial rainforest is probably a poor habitat for Dicerorhinus: poor quality and sparse food, leached soils depleted in minerals, and too hot and humid for a bulky, large mammal to be comfortable. It has ended up in these marginal habitats at the very southern end of its range, in Sumatra and Borneo, from about 1,000 years ago, through various historical sequences of events, not least the 100 meter rise in sea level between 18,000 to 7,000 years ago, and the 2,000 year old madness of the Chinese belief that rhino horn has medicinal properties.
A glance through the sparse literature on Sumatran rhino from the 1930s to 1970s clearly shows that the species was by that time in deep trouble: very few individuals, widely scattered in separate forest blocks in four or five nations, generally with fewer than ten or so individuals in any one place. A prior millennium or more of hunting to supply horns for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was the main reason for this accelerating decline. Clearly, the problem to be addressed by the 1980s was not of excessive mortality, which had already happened, but of the Allee effect: very low Sumatran rhino population density everywhere, very few rhinos, and not enough breeding to reverse the trajectory towards extinction. The answer should have been obvious: launch a single programme of captive breeding in managed, fenced facilities to increase population density of fertile adults, boost birth rate and address the inevitable inbreeding depression developing in each isolated cluster. Similar concepts had worked for the white rhino in South Africa, for both species of bison and for the musk-ox, many decades earlier. But what should have been obvious was not to be. Only a few people wrote about the situation clearly, notably Tom Foose, Conservation Coordinator of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums from 1981 to 1990.
The fate of Dicerorhinus was sealed on 4 October 1984, when a compromise was reached among 20 of the world’s then designated Sumatran rhino experts and government representatives from Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah. At an IUCN-brokered meeting in Singapore on Sumatran rhino, the executive director of the Species Survival Commission and meeting facilitator valiantly and diplomatically did his best to reach a strong conclusion. Unfortunately, among the 20 persons present, there was a body of opinion, led vociferously by two elderly European professors, that all Sumatran rhinos should stay put in the wild. The compromise reached was that where rhinos were in protected areas, or anywhere showing signs of breeding, they should be left alone, and only “doomed” rhinos would be captured for ex situ breeding purposes.
The fatal flaw in this compromise became apparent in 2000, when Nan Schaffer of SOS Rhino pointed out that at least 70% of the 23 females captured between 1984 and 1994 (11 in Sumatra, 10 in Malaya and 2 in Borneo) suffered from reproductive tract pathologies at or soon after time of capture, a feature that prevented or hindered pregnancy. The subsequent scattering of captured rhinos between facilities in five barely-collaborating regions added to the inevitable failure of this programme. It is essential to understand that this first captive breeding programme failed because of a fatal constraint in the criteria for capture (namely selection of old, infertile and sub-fertile breeding stock), coupled with multiple weaknesses in execution, and not because the original concept was wrong.
Fast forward to 2019 and we see “new” ideas and new people. In fact, the “new” ideas are a replay of the early 1980s. Many of the people involved in Sumatran rhinos now, including high profile people in positions of directing policy, seem doomed to repeat the mistakes of 35 years ago.
I quote here from the minutes of the 4 October 1984 meeting, the words of the late Tom Foose : “Zoos in North America and Europe have experience and expertise in the management and breeding of three Rhinoceros species, Indian, White, and Black Rhino. They have active research programs on exotic species in reproductive technology including artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cryopreservation. Transfer of this technology is possible but will take time”.
Wise words, ignored by the 1984 decision-makers. Then, there were several hundreds of Sumatran rhinos alive in the world, many obviously fertile breeding animals, some in sites easy to carry out captures. Now, there are fewer than 50 Sumatran rhinos, with perhaps about five or so breeding females left alive. And a new generation of advisers who seem frozen to a standstill.
Sumatran rhino has been ill-served, right up to today, by people in key positions, who not only lack knowledge and understanding, but have jostled to suppress those who do, and prevented a single targeted leadership role to allow for a genus recovery programme.
So, do we give up?
No. Our lessons (ignored so many times) are the white rhino (paradoxically, close to extinction in 1890 but much safer now, despite noise to the contrary), the European bison (down to 27 individuals in 1927, bred from 12 animals) and the team led by Thomas Hildebrandt and Cesare Galli (the people kept out of Indonesia by the International Rhino Foundation), who in June 2019, transferred a test tube white rhino embryo into a female whose eggs were fertilized in vitro.
The array of “protected areas” that the Earth will end up with a few decades from now, due to a surfeit of Homo sapiens, are TOO FEW, TOO SMALL, TOO SCATTERED, AND OF MARGINAL SUITABILITY for almost all endangered species. Whether we like it or not, some endangered species will be saved from extinction only if private land owners play a role, in allocating space and resources to help sustain breeding of those species, so that the fate of the Sumatran rhino is not played out again and again. Who are the private land owners? They can be anyone. But three stand out in the context of Malaysia and Indonesia : oil palm plantations, industrial wood plantations and zoos.
We also need always to remember : wildlife will survive only if we can imagine how populations can be sustained and, if necessary, actively managed in the long term. Wild animal welfare programmes are noble and needed, but are usually marginal and rarely relevant to a species population conservation programme.
The overall lesson that needs to be learned from the fiasco of the Sumatran rhino is : the need for thinking by experienced practitioners, to convince governments to put in place rational, long-term, big picture species-specific programmes designed save other endangered species.
Beginning the paradigm shift
The first thing to do is to acknowledge and embrace the idea that, while traditional “protected areas” (such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries) are essential to conserving wild species, they will never be sufficient to save all species from extinction. In much of the “western” world, due primarily to a long history of forest loss and allocation of land to private interests, privately-owned lands play a key role in nature conservation. But this scenario tends not to apply in the equatorial regions, where tropical rainforests are most prominent. Both Malaysia and Indonesia have a tradition (from the colonial era) of separating (on the one hand) forests, biodiversity, protected areas and government as one conceptual clump, and (on the other hand) business, corporations, land titles, leases, plantations, and private enterprise as a different clump. There is also, of course, a third clump, of indigenous people and rural communities, but we will leave these out of the discussion here.
To save as much biodiversity as possible, the second clump has to play a role. While many, probably most, rainforest species of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms need forest as their habitat, there are some that do not. Those that do not include rare large animal species. These are the ones with which to start. The most significant way in which land-owners and lease-holders other than governments, therefore, can play a role is to allocate portions of their land to conservation. If thought out carefully and practically, even small portions of titled or leased land can have disproportionately huge positive impacts of saving rare species. The days of automatically moving all wild animals out of plantations, of getting governments and NGOs to do the work at other peoples’ expense, and giving donations to NGOs to perform “projects” that have no long-term purpose, are numbered. And the number of those days should not be large.
One of the pioneers in this new paradigm is PONGO Alliance (www.pongoalliance.org), a partnership of visionary oil palm growers and conservation practitioners, which aims to assist oil palm growers to achieve their mandated sustainability goals by “making resilient landscapes for wildlife and people a reality”.
The initial ground engagement of this new initiative is in the lower Kinabatangan region of eastern Sabah, Malaysia. Here, PONGO Alliance aims to restore a much-depleted wild orangutan population (formerly around 8,000, now around 800 individuals). The region has about 42,000 ha of protected but highly fragmented forests. Much of the rest of the area was converted to oil palm monoculture 20-40 years ago and many estates are now undergoing second planting. The current orangutan population is at a critically tipping point such that without oil palm industry cooperation, viability of this critically endangered and fully protected species in the wild is not assured in the long term.
Female orangutans live in communities of related females and are intolerant of unrelated females, so simply relocating a female from her current location elsewhere is not a definite solution. Because females have been preferentially lost during land conversion, any remaining female still residing on her ancestral land is of critical genetic value to the species. Males require access across agricultural landscapes between now fragmented protected forests and any remaining natural forests on private lands.
To best serve both an industry and a species that is too often misrepresented by incendiary and polarising special interest groups, PONGO Alliance engages industry with a holistic, and non-judgemental approach on an individual basis, company by company and even estate by estate.
By working together, PONGO Alliance aims to arrive at creative and collaborative solutions to create a paradigm shift in agricultural practice that reframes the oil palm industry as one that supports rather than destroys orangutan habitat.
With ongoing implementation of Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) and Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) standards in Sabah, the time is right to help support orangutans to survive and breed in the mixed oil palm and forest landscape. Land along rivers, on steep slopes and non-productive swamps can be used to increase orangutan habitat within plantations. This is done by planting the most important orangutan food plants, either under old oil palms that are not intended for replanting, or on cleared land. There are many plants favoured by orangutans as food, but two sorts stand out as of great significance: Figs and lianas. Lianas, particularly those of the legume family, supply a big proportion of the protein requirements of wild orangutans, which feed on their shoots, leaves, bark and fruits.
The magic of ficus
The most fundamental biological requirement of all animals is food and water. In the context of Malaysia and Indonesia, we could imagine under a different array of historical and current human attitudes that Sumatran rhinos could live in oil palm plantations, feeding on woody weeds, with wild cattle feeding on the grasses, together avoiding the need for herbicides. That is unlikely to happen now, but we can imagine other scenarios where plantations can play a role in conserving other rare wildlife species.
A typical strangling fig
One of the most interesting plant genera in Borneo is Ficus. Commonly known as fig in English, ara in Malay and Indonesian, and nunuk in Sabah, there are over 150 species in Borneo, including tall trees, small trees, stranglers (hemiepiphytes if you are a botanist), epiphytes and climbers. A fig “fruit” is actually an arrangement of many small flowers within a receptacle, known as a syconium, but for convenience we call them fruit. Ficus is “keystone”, meaning a genus that has a disproportionately large effect on the functioning of its natural environment relative to its abundance. The main importance of Ficus lies in the fact that in any one area, there are almost always a few or many Ficus plants bearing fruits, and the fruits are eaten by many mammal and bird species. The young leaves are also eaten by some wildlife, including orangutans.
Borneo Rhino Alliance started planting Ficus in 2012, as a means to supply leaves to the rhinos, which favour Ficus leaves as food over many other kinds of plants. At that time, it was imagined that there would be several rhinos living in the Borneo Rhino Sanctuary facilities in Tabin Wildlife Reserve. Sadly, that was not to be. There were probably only four or five rhinos still alive in Sabah at that time, and three were already in captivity at Tabin. Now, BORA has living, planted Ficus of over 30 species on land occupied by the rhino food garden and old rhino facilities.
A significant feature of Ficus is that planting materials can be propagated vegetatively, without the need to wait for, harvest and plant seeds. Vegetative propagation is simpler and quicker than production of seedlings from seeds. Two vegetative propagation methods can be used : marcots (also known as air layering) and cuttings with application of rooting hormone. If marcots or cuttings are taken from mature fig plants and planted out as if they are seedlings, fruiting will occur much sooner in the planted-out marcot or cutting.
Marcot ready to be cut and planted
Trials are ongoing to seek optimum details of propagation methods, as well as requirements of the various species, and matching of species to sites.
What BORA offers
BORA can supply marcots or cuttings of many of the species now being grown in Tabin, each ready for planting, in a soil-compost matrix in black plastic bags. Orders should be placed in advance. Prices range from RM20 to RM50 per plant, depending on species (some are more difficult to propagate than others) and size. Sales come with advice, if needed, on optimum planting and maintenance methods.
Ficus saplings in polybags
BORA also offers short, customised courses on how to produce marcots.
Focus marcot Planting ficus marcots onto old oil palm Naturally seeded ficus on oil palm Preparing ficus marcots for planting
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CONTACTS
BORA thanks Quentin Phillipps for his outstanding contribution to Ficus identification in the field (https://borneoficus.info/) and for supporting us via the Borneo Fig Project; and PONGO Alliance for providing the impetus to pursue development of the nursery at Tabin Wildlife Reserve, with an emphasis on Ficus and vegetative propagation.
KOTA KINABALU: After a successful dental surgery, Puntung, one of the only two female Sumatran rhinos still alive in Malaysia is showing signs of improvement.
She has started eating and wildlife officials and rhino conservationists in the state breathed a big sigh of relief after the surgery by Thai veterinary dentist Dr Tum Chinkangsadarn, State Wildlife Department director Augustine Tuuga said.
Puntung has been suffering since mid-March from an abscess inside her upper jaw that would not heal despite treatment.
Augustine said that Dr Tum extracted two molar teeth and one premolar from Puntung’s left upper jaw during the operation that lasted two hours and twenty minutes on Wednesday morning.
“This was a remarkable and successful operation that came about as a result of global discussion and multi-national collaboration over the past two weeks,” he said.
“Sabah thanks Dr Tum and the team who had not worked together before but who did a fantastic job. Dr Abraham Mathew, senior veterinarian from Singapore zoo helped with anaesthesia. Dr Johan Marais and Dr Zoe Glyphis of South Africa-based ‘Saving the Survivors’ initiated the planning, advised on procedures and provided major financial support to ensure that the team got together in Tabin.
“We had vets in attendance and assisting from my department as well as Wildlife Department and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo Rhino Alliance,” he said.
The procedure started at 7am with X-rays done under sedation. Then Puntung was put under general anaesthesia for 110 minutes.
Dr Tum noted severe calcification of one large molar, which is where bacteria initially accumulated and led to the abscess. The calcification has also loosened two adjacent teeth.
Borneo Rhino Alliance veterinarian Dr Zainal Z Zainuddin said, “We are so relieved and very grateful to Dr Tum, ‘Saving the Survivors’ and the specialist vets who had given Puntung a new lease of life.
“Incredibly, she started feeding within two hours of the operation ending. But we are not done yet. There will be a period of post operation care which will mean trying to keep Puntung clean, stress-free and under medication including for pain relief,” Dr Zainal said.
To a question if the removal of Puntung’s molar would affect her survival as she won’t be able to chew properly, Augustine replied, “We hope for the best.”
Wallowing
The seemingly “disastrous” story of the world’s most endangered mammal – the northern white rhino – could be rewritten by IVF, scientists claim.
Iman in her paddock. Pic from BORA
Despite the failed attempt of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment, there is still hope for Iman and Sumatran rhinos.
Fatu, one of the last two northern white rhinos, lives in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.Credit: Nichole Sobecki/The Washington Post/Getty
The hybrid embryos were created with eggs collected from southern white rhinos and northern white rhino sperm.Credit: T. B. Hildebrandt et al./Nat. Commun.
For 10 days, a team of SWD Ranger’s and veterinarians stayed close to rhino at the plantation to habituate their presence to it before getting close enough to check on its condition and to prepare it for its translocation.
Ficus saplings in polybags
Focus marcot Planting ficus marcots onto old oil palm Naturally seeded ficus on oil palm Preparing ficus marcots for planting