The original author 丨 Zhao Xumao
Excerpt 丨 He An'an
Over-hunting and utilization is one of the main reasons why pangolins are endangered
When I was a child, I watched an animated film "Huluwa", and I remember that there was such a scene: in order to rescue the hulu brothers, the pangolin died tragically at the hands of the snake spirit. At that time, we were filled with endless admiration for the feats of the pangolin, and at the same time we hated the shameless snake spirit even more. Unfortunately, the real scene is even more tragic than in the anime! I had never seen a single live pangolin in the wild, but I could often see their bodies in pharmacies.
Pangolins are an ancient taxon that has lived on Earth for at least 40 million years. There are currently 8 species of pangolins in the world, which have footprints throughout Southeast Asia, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Pangolin is good at punching holes, the forelimbs dig soil, the hind limbs push mud, encounter disturbances, it will quickly escape the soil, so called "pangolin". The main product produced in China is the Chinese pangolin, which is distributed in the tropical areas of the southern provinces. In addition, the pangolin's distribution extends south to the Indochina Peninsula, Myanmar, Nepal and other places. Pangolins inhabit a variety of environments such as woods, shrubs, and grasses in hilly mountains, but rarely occur in the bald ridges of Shishan Mountain. Its caves are mostly built on one side of the mountain, and the place of residence changes with the seasons and food.
Source of this article: "Humans in the Eyes of Animals: Notes on the Investigation of Nature Reserves by an Animal Translator", by Zhao Xumao, CITIC Publishing House, November 2020.
Pangolins usually have no fixed shelter, live with the burrows dug when foraging, roost for one or two nights, if they find a large nest underground, the stay time will be longer, and the nest ants will leave after eating. Pangolins often curl up in caves during the day to sleep, and cannot spend the day without holes; go out to forage for food at night, and often move in several mountains at night, reaching 5 to 6 kilometers away. Chinese had a knowledge of pangolins as early as 2,000 years ago, and Qu Yuan wrote in the "Heavenly Questions": "If you don't die for a long time, why does your life stop?" Where are the mud carp? Where are the stings? "The mud carp here, also known as the carp, is actually a pangolin. The ancients believed that pangolins were covered with scales, like carp, so they called them "mud carp". In reality, pangolins are the only mammals covered in scales.
The main food of pangolins is termites, and whenever the nest ants in the cave are eaten, the pangolin will cover the dung pulled in the hole with mud to attract termites and dig up later. Pangolins can swim across large rivers, swim faster than snakes, and even if they carry young animals, they are not hindered by rapids. It can also climb oblique trees, often following ant traces up the tree, wrapping its tail around the branches, and sometimes sleeping on the branches after eating. But pangolins don't climb down from trees, they just throw themselves off the ground and curl up. Pangolins curl up in a ball when they encounter or are frightened, their heads are tightly wrapped in front of their abdomen, and they often extend a forelimb as a deterrent; if they encounter people in hidden places such as dense bushes, they often flee quickly.
Stills from the documentary Pangolin: The Animals Killed the Most.
Previous studies have concluded that the ecological value of pangolins is mainly reflected in the control of forest pest termites. In the past, termites were thought to harm many trees, water levees and house buildings, while pangolins, which mainly eat termites, naturally protect forests. In fact, this view is very one-sided. There is no distinction between pests and beneficial beasts in nature, all pests and benefits are judged by human beings according to their own interests, those that are in line with human interests are beneficial beasts, and those that are not in line with human interests are pests. But in the context of nature as a whole, human judgments are not valid. In the case of termites, they are pests to humans, but they are indispensable to nature.
In forests, the biggest role of termites is to decompose dead trees and accelerate the circulation of matter and energy. In addition to decomposing dead trees, termites also attack living trees, which humans may conclude is a pest. In fact, most of the trees attacked by termites are old, weak, sick and disabled. Healthy trees break down enough defensive compounds to make termites daunting. In Israel's deserts, termites per hectare can transfer 237 kilograms of carbon and 4.3 kilograms of nitrogen from dead plants. Termites are veritable forest cleaners. However, if termites overbreed, they can also bring serious harm. According to the 2017 work report of the National Termite Control Center, termites will harm housing construction, cultural relics and monuments, water conservancy projects, garden vegetation, agricultural and forestry crops, communications and electricity, municipal facilities and other fields.
The subtlety of nature lies in maintaining a dynamic balance through a complex food web that does not make a family too large. In a healthy environment, termites are difficult to become infested because there are many animals that feed on termites, such as pangolins, to control and restrain them. However, it is precisely because humans have disrupted the balance of nature that termites have become infested.
Since ancient times, people are familiar with the medicinal value of pangolins, as early as the "Compendium of Materia Medica" has been recorded: "Scales can cure bad sores, mad malaria, passage, milk." "Modern medicine believes that its scales have the functions of passing through the meridians, lower milk, ulcerative sores, swelling and pain relief. Therefore, pangolins are valuable raw materials for Chinese medicinal materials and are one of the 14 important medicinal endangered wild animals in China. In cartoons, pangolins sacrifice themselves for others, which is great enough; in reality, pangolins, pest control, cure diseases and save people, have immeasurable merit!
Although pangolins are so important, their treatment is extremely bleak. The gourd brothers in the cartoon know gratitude, and we humans are more fierce and greedy than snake spirits. In the past, pangolins were often sold in many local markets in southern China, especially in summer and autumn. However, in the past 10 years, the number of pangolins has decreased year by year, and the state acquisition department has basically failed to acquire them. According to the relevant departments of Guangdong Province, in the early years, only one area in Shaoguan could purchase more than 100 quintals of pangolins every year, and now the total number of pangolins in the province is only a few quintals, and most areas have been difficult to collect. This shows that pangolin resources have been severely damaged.
According to a survey by Liu Zhenhe and Xu Longhui of the Guangdong Institute of Entomology, hunters who catch pangolins use trained hounds to assist in hunting, or use methods such as tracking, hole hunting and re-digging, etc., to catch a large number of pangolins every year, especially in the summer and autumn, the two main breeding seasons of pangolins, and hunting is easier. On the other hand, mountain forests are heavily developed, pangolin habitats are decreasing, and effective protection measures are lacking, so the pangolin resources in most areas are currently facing a desperate situation! Over-hunting, habitat destruction, invasion of alien species and low fertility are the main reasons pangolins are at risk.
Over-hunting is one of the main reasons why pangolin resources are endangered, and this powerful destructive force far exceeds the ability of pangolins to maintain the stability of their own population structure, resulting in the gradual decline of pangolin populations. In addition, pangolins inhabit broad-leaved forests, mixed coniferous and broad-leaved forests and shrubs in subalpines and hilly areas, and are extremely selective about habitat selection. It is a narrow-feeding animal that eats only ants and is therefore particularly resilient to environmental changes, and once the habitat is destroyed, its population declines rapidly in a relatively short period of time.
In China's southeast coastal provinces (especially Guangdong) and Guangxi and Yunnan, at least thousands of pangolins are seized and released into local protected areas every year, involving mainly Chinese pangolins and Indian pangolins, of which Indian pangolins account for 1/3. Indian pangolins are a competing species with similar ecological niches to Chinese pangolins in local protected areas (mainly in terms of food habits, activity habits, and habitat selection). Once the Indian pangolin adapts to the local environment and grows, it will have a greater competitive repulsion, which will add another risk factor to the Endangered Chinese Pangolin in an endangered state and weak survival competitiveness, thus further aggravating the endangerment of China's pangolin resources.
Stills from the documentary In Search of the Last Pangolin.
There are also some factors of the pangolin itself. They are lowly fertile, generally one litter per litter, one litter per year, so the population grows slowly. Pangolins are narrow-feeding animals with low degrees of evolution and poor adaptability to new environments, which is one of the main reasons why they are difficult to domesticate. Once hunted in large numbers, it is difficult to recover after the population declines. If the population density is low, it may be extinct in a certain area. Coupled with the pangolin's weak ability to resist enemies, the escape speed is very limited, and most of the time is spent in the hole, the hunter catches it like catching a turtle in an urn, just digging a hole or smoking, so it is difficult to escape the hunter or prey.
It won't be long before the entire turtle family will disappear from the earth
The same fate as the pangolin is the spotted turtle - the old turtle who once carried Tang Sanzang's apprentice across the river in "Journey to the West" is the spotted turtle. Today, they are also on the verge of extinction. The first time I saw the turtle was at the Suzhou Zoo, there was a female turtle in the pool, I didn't see the male turtle at the time, I didn't think it was the last time I saw it. On April 14, 2019, the only female turtle left in China passed away, and now there are only three spotted turtles left in the world. The remaining spotted turtles are now also in the wind and candle years, and the time is short, and it will not be long before the entire spotted turtle family will disappear from the earth.
Also known as the Turtle or Maculata, the spotted turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in the world, with a dorsal carapace of up to 1.5 meters and a weight of up to 115 kg. Long before the advent of humans, the spotted turtle existed on the earth, and once upon a time, the turtle family was very large, widely distributed in the Yangtze River Basin (Qiantang River, Taihu Lake) and the Red River Basin in China. In the long-established Chinese culture, the turtle family can be seen everywhere.
As early as 3,000 years ago, bronze inscriptions unearthed by the Shang Dynasty recorded: "Bingshen, Wang Yuhuan, obtained." The king shoots one, shoots three, and kills (none) the discarded arrow. Wang Ling (命)Sleeping (馗) Brother (贶) in the book, said: "Playing in Yong, as a female (Ru) treasure." It is said that the King of Shang shot a spotted turtle at the Huan River, and then ordered that a bronze turtle be cast based on the spotted turtle. At that time, the name of the spotted turtle was not called the spotted turtle, but the shrew. Although there is now a member of the turtle family called "Shrew", this shrew is not a shrew. The shape of the Bronze Shrew of the Shang Dynasty has two of the most obvious features - the huge head and the protruding nose snout, which is obviously a spotted turtle. The animal, now called the shrew, has a slightly smaller head, a non-prominent snout, and is not a species of turtle.
After the Shang Dynasty, during the Western Zhou Dynasty, King Mu of Zhou encountered the Jiujiang River blockade during his march and was unable to cross the river. In a hurry, King Mu of Zhou ordered the capture of spotted turtles and Yangzi crocodiles to fill in the river and build bridges. This is the origin of the later idiom "shrew is a beam". This allusion is enough to prove that as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty, the spotted turtle had a large family, otherwise it would not be enough to fill the river and build a bridge. In later interpretations, the spotted turtle also has a name called leprosy head shrew, especially in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In landscape architecture, humans often see a large turtle carrying a stone stele, which is based on the spotted turtle. In mythological stories, the spotted turtle is called bìxì (屃屃), also known as The Lord, and is said to be the son of a dragon. It was born with divine power and could carry the Three Mountains and Five Mountains, and was later recruited by Dayu to achieve a myth of water control.
The glory of the turtle family continues, and two of the four famous books mention the turtle. In "Journey to the West", it is the spotted turtle who rides the Tang monks and disciples across the river in the Tongtian River. Only later, Tang Sanzang did not keep his promises and did not do what he promised to the turtle, and the turtle was angry and threw it into the water. In addition, in the twenty-third episode of "Dream of the Red Chamber", "Xi Xiang Ji Miao Zi Tong Joke Peony Pavilion Yan Qu Police FangXin", Jia Baoyu said: "Ming'er I fell into the pool, taught a leper to swallow, became a big forgetful eight, and when you Ming'er did 'Lady Yipin' and returned to the west, I went to your grave to carry the monument for you for a lifetime." "The leper here is another name for the spotted turtle.
With the continuous expansion of human beings, people's hearts are not ancient, and the family of spotted turtles is gradually declining. Especially after entering the 20th century, the turtle's family was devastated. In the 1960s, as pollution increased, the environment deteriorated, and human overfishing, the turtle's family in the Yangtze River was wiped out, and soon after the entire army was wiped out. Another branch of the Spotted Turtle family lives in the Red River Basin and is not much better. In the 1850s and 1860s, Yunnan was still relatively rich in turtles, and there were still a certain number in the 1870s. However, in the 1950s and 1970s, the spotted turtles in the Red River Basin were large-scale fished by humans and were scattered to various zoos in the country.
On October 23, 2020, Vietnamese animal protection workers captured a spotted turtle in Dong Mo Lake, and after many inquiries by popular science writers, it was learned that the turtle had been returned to the lake after inspection.
Due to long-term overfishing, the spotted turtle disappeared completely in the Red River Basin after 2006. It wasn't until the 1990s that the spotted turtle was valued by humans. At that time, there were only three turtles in Suzhou and one in Shanghai. Soon after, two spotted turtles in Suzhou and one in Shanghai died one after another. There is only one spotted turtle left in Suzhou.
However, humans found that there was also a female spotted turtle in Changsha Zoo, so they pulled fiber in 2008 and married Changsha's wife to Suzhou spotted turtle. Since 2008, the turtle husband and wife have been foaming at each other. All along, the spotted turtle needed a baby to continue the incense for the whole family. However, due to physical reasons, the turtle couple has not been able to get pregnant. At this time, humans are more anxious than the spotted turtle, and they help the turtle couple to perform artificial insemination 5 times before and after, but in the end they are not successful. Just after the 5th artificial insemination, the female spotted turtle died, leaving the male spotted turtle alone. Before long, the male turtle will also leave this world.
The release of captive-bred salamanders could lead to the extinction of giant salamanders in the wild
According to the latest research from the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the giant salamander, the world's largest amphibian, can be divided into at least 5 species, and all of them are critically endangered. The situation is even more dire, as current conservation measures could lead to these different species interbreeding with each other and merging into one species, leading to the extinction of other wild species.
Giant salamander, commonly known as baby fish, mermaid, baby fish, belongs to the transition from aquatic vertebrates to terrestrial vertebrates, produced in China's inland rivers and streams, is a rare and protected animal unique to China. The giant salamander is up to 2 meters long and is the largest amphibian in existence. Giant salamanders were once very common in southern China, and were originally recorded in Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan (including Chongqing), Guizhou, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and other provinces (Hebei and Jiangsu are in doubt); in addition, Yunnan has also reported the distribution of giant salamanders.
Since the 1950s, due to excessive acquisition, illegal hunting and habitat loss, the population of giant salamander has declined severely, and the production of giant salamander in Hunan, Anhui and other places has dropped by more than 80% in the 1950s and 1970s, and the distribution area has also shrunk extremely, forming 12 island-like areas. Until the 1980s, giant salamanders were acquired as an aquatic resource. But now, the vast majority of salamanders are commercially farmed to satisfy customers' consumption on the table.
Poster for the documentary "Rare Species in China".
To restore populations in the wild, the Chinese government encourages the release of these farmed giant salamanders into the wild. But before the captive salamander can be released into the wild, it needs to be clarified about its genetic differentiation from wild populations. Otherwise, it is very likely that the hasty release will do bad things, resulting in the extinction of wild populations. As an ancient tailed amphibian, giant salamander has poor migration ability, great dependence on the water environment, and genetic communication between giant salamander populations of different water systems is very difficult, so the giant salamander in some local populations adapts to its own habitat and may form unique population genetic characteristics. Since Blanchard described the giant salamander in western China in 1871, many scholars have studied its taxonomic status.
In order to distinguish the genetic differentiation of farmed giant salamander and wild giant salamander, Zhang Yaping's team at the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) data from 70 wild giant salamander individuals and 1034 captive individuals - mitochondria and microsatellites, using simplified genome analysis. The team found that these wild salamanders had slowly differentiated into 5 distinctly independent genetic clusters (5 independent species) over a long period of time 5 million to 10 million years ago. In contrast, these farmed giant salamanders showed a wide genetic mix. This means that once farmed giant salamanders mate with wild populations, there is an increased risk of genetic contamination (genetic confusion), which can lead to the extinction of wild salamanders.
If wild populations go extinct, the world will lose not just one species of salamander, but all five species, and the salamanders that remain in the world will be a mixture of species from these farms.
Nature has its own laws, and if you don't respect the laws of nature, release is equivalent to "releasing death"!
The white sturgeon did not wait until the day when human technological progress could save it
Recently, the news of the extinction of the white sturgeon has made headlines in the major media. The white sturgeon is a cartilaginous scaly fish, which is typically characterized by a long snout. The white sturgeon is an ancient fish that has existed on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
In 1991, Lu Liwu of the Geological Museum of China found a fossil fish with a long snout in Lingyuan, Liaoning Province, with characteristics similar to that of the ancient white sturgeon. It was also found with fossils of the Northern Sturgeon, the Wolffin Fish, and some other typical Rehe fauna. This fossil has an extremely long snout consisting of a series of longitudinally distributed snout pieces, and the head has a pronounced anterior and posterior long hole, which is distinct from the Sturgeon family and the cartilage hard scale family. Paleontologists have identified this fossil as belonging to the family White Sturgeon. This discovery suggests that sturgeon, like other sturgeons, appeared in the Jurassic period. In the Early Cretaceous period or earlier, the Sturgeon family had been systematically and evolutionarily separated from the Sturgeon family and the Northern Sturgeon family.
In today's world, there are only two species left under the family Sturgeon: Sturgeon and Spoon Sturgeon. White sturgeon is found only in the main tributaries of the Yangtze River in China, such as the Tuojiang, Minjiang, Jialingjiang, Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake and Qiantang River. Spoon sturgeon is found in the Mississippi River Basin of the United States. The most significant difference between the white sturgeon and the spoon-sturgeon is the morphology and feeding habits of the snout: the white sturgeon has a thin tip and feeds on fish; the spoon-sturgeon has a broad and flattened snout and feeds on zooplankton.
In Search of Super Big Fish: White Sturgeon poster.
White sturgeon, also known as Chinese swordfish, is endemic to China. The ancient Chinese white sturgeon is known as the "sturgeon". Because of its long kiss, it resembles a duck's beak, and is also commonly known as a duck-billed sturgeon. The body of the white sturgeon is long and fusiform, and the body of the anterior part of the pectoral fin is flattened, and the posterior part is slightly flattened. The back of the fish is grayish yellow , the abdomen is white , the fins are grayish white , and the outer edge of the caudal fin is bluish gray. The most notable feature of the white sturgeon is the length of the snout, which can account for 1/3 of the body length. The proportion of the snout to the body of the white sturgeon changes with growth and development, and the proportion of the snout to the body before sexual maturity decreases with the growth of the individual, and is basically stable after sexual maturity.
The white sturgeon is a middle and lower fish species that are distributed in the main stream of the Yangtze River and some of the larger tributaries. Juveniles mostly feed in the middle and lower reaches of the river estuary and ancillary water bodies, and spawn after sexual maturity, and their spawning site is in the Yibin River section of the lower reaches of the Jinsha River. The breeding season for white sturgeon is from February to March, and they go back to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River to spawn. The eggs of the white sturgeon are sticky and can sink into the water, and a 30 kg female can lay 200,000 eggs. After the construction of the Gezhouba hub of the Yangtze River, the middle and lower reaches of the white sturgeon were blocked by the dam and could not be traced upstream to breed.
When the dam was first shut down, a large number of white sturgeon and immature individuals were stopped under the dam, causing the upstream population to decline. But because the spawning grounds are not destroyed, the broodstock on the dam can still reproduce and grow. Subsequently, scientists found that after the Interception of the Gezhou Dam of the Yangtze River, a white sturgeon spawning field appeared under the dam, and from June to July every year, a large number of white sturgeon juveniles appeared in the river sections of Wanxian in Sichuan, Yichang in Hubei, Yueyang in Hunan and Chongming in Shanghai. However, the dams on the Yangtze River are not only Gezhou Dam, if there are too many dams, they will divide the habitat of the white sturgeon into isolated islands, which is extremely detrimental to its survival.
White sturgeon grow very fast, especially in juvenile fish hatched that year. Juveniles in October are 53 to 61 cm long, and the average body length of one-year-olds is 75 cm. There is no significant difference between male and female sturgeon before sexual maturity, and after sexual maturity, the length and weight of females are greater than those of males of the same age. In the folk, fishermen circulate the saying "thousand pounds of wax and ten thousand pounds of elephants", of which the wax refers to the Chinese sturgeon, and the elephant fish refers to the white sturgeon. However, in reality, there is no record of white sturgeon weighing up to 10,000 pounds. A white sturgeon, about 3.6 meters long, was captured in 2007 and was the largest known in recent years. However, according to zoologist Bingzhi, fishermen caught 7-meter-long white sturgeon in Nanjing in the 1950s, weighing 908 kilograms, which is the highest record for the body length of freshwater fish in the world.
The white sturgeon is a carnivorous fish that feeds on other fish. In 1983, the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences dissected a 3.54-meter-long white sturgeon weighing 148 kilograms, and removed a 3.7 kilogram bluefish and a 4 kilogram carp from its stomach. The diet of white sturgeon changes with the season and environment, and in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, seabream is the main fish in spring and summer, and gobies and shrimp are the main foods in the autumn and winter; in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the white sturgeon mainly feeds on sturgeon and shrimp and crabs. The white sturgeon is a big belly, it can eat 5% of the body weight at a time, and it can not eat for a long time after one feeding.
Stills from In Search of Super Big Fish: White Sturgeon.
As early as 1983, the State Council promulgated the "General Order on the Strict Protection of Rare and Rare Wild Animals", which had listed the white sturgeon as a class of unique and rare animals in the country. Unfortunately, after decades of hard work, it still failed to save the white sturgeon. Many people may ask, why not carry out artificial breeding and then release? The reality is not so simple. In the 1990s, it was possible to catch juvenile white sturgeon, but at that time we had not yet explored the breeding technology of white sturgeon. After the breeding technology of white sturgeon, it is no longer possible to catch fish. That is to say, the white sturgeon did not wait until the day when human technological progress could save it.
In 2003, Chinese scientists rescued and released a white sturgeon for the last time, and the white sturgeon disappeared since then. In 2009, the IUCN classified the white sturgeon in the "critically endangered" category. Recently, Dr. Wei Qiwei and Dr. Zhang Hui, chief scientists and researchers of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, published an article in the international academic journal "Holistic Environmental Science" that the white sturgeon was extinct between 2005 and 2010.
So, how to define whether a species is extinct?
The IUCN defines extinction: "The last individual of a species of a taxon is considered extinct if that taxon is considered extinct." If it is not possible to determine that the last individual died, and the individual is not found within 50 years, the species of that taxonomy is considered to be extinct. "In practice, it is very difficult to determine the last individual of a species to die. Scientists then came up with a new concept: functional extinction. The so-called functional extinction means that even if the species still exists, it will not be able to maintain reproduction in its natural state. Genetically, a species needs a minimum effective population if it wants to survive and reproduce without inbreeding. The number of minimum effective populations for different species is not the same. As a result, as early as 1993, the white sturgeon had been identified by scientists as functionally extinct.
Throughout evolutionary history, every species could go extinct. The extinction of old species provides a chance for new species to survive, and if none of the species on Earth go extinct, this Earth is obviously unbearable. However, human activities have broken the evolutionary mechanism of nature, and some species (such as white sturgeon) could have continued to survive in nature, but they became extinct due to human interference and destruction, which affected the diversity of species and then negatively affected the ecosystem. Humans are also part of the ecosystem, and if the ecosystem goes wrong, humans are not immune. That's what it means to protect species.
This article is selected from "Human Beings in the Eyes of Animals: Notes on the Investigation of Nature Reserves by an Animal Translator", which has been abridged and modified from the original text, and the subtitle is added by the editor, not owned by the original text, and has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
Author 丨 Zhao Xumao
Edited by 丨 安也
Proofreading 丨 Wu Xingfa