Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Endangered creatures great and small
Conservationists warn of the need to address the threat to many smaller species in peril, SHEREE BEGA reports
NO ONE loves worms more than Savel Daniels. He is especially fond of the secretive, enigmatic kind. The kind that rank among the rarest on Earth, like the pink velvet worm, which was so imperilled that it was declared extinct in 1996.
It was Daniels, a Stellenbosch University zoologist, who would discover a new population of the hard-to-find bugs concealed inside a cluster of rotten logs in the moist Ngele mist-belt forest in KwaZuluNatal just over a decade later.
“They are older than the dinosaurs,” says the evolutionary biologist, who still sounds awed by the critically endangered ancient creatures that resemble skinny caterpillars and who have changed little over the past 550 million years.
“It’s so exciting to find one because their lineage is so old. I don’t think most zoologists in the world have seen a velvet worm.”
To catch its prey, the velvet worm shoots a sticky string-like liquid from two tubes on its head, paralysing its prey. The worm then secretes digestive juices in the prey’s body, devouring it.
The enamoured Daniels is the first to tell you that up against the continuing slaughter of charismatic mammals such as rhinos and elephants, the plight of his favourite little worms, so named because of their velvet-like skin, largely goes unnoticed.
Critically endangered and endemic creatures like these often lead a fragile existence restricted to small pockets of South Africa. The pink velvet worm’s forest patch is encircled by the N2 in KwaZuluNatal.
For these creatures, their smaller distribution ranges put them at much greater risk, because they are that much more susceptible to habitat destruction but they are often act as key flags for changing environmental conditions.
“We should look more holistically at what constitutes biodiversity in South Africa,” Daniels says.
“We typically only look at the money-spinners, the Big Five that attract tourists.
“But we need to study every level of the ecosystem to get a picture of the functionality of the ecosystem… at what services these little bugs provide.”
Daniels’s research has revealed how a large number of genetically distinct individuals can be found in one decaying log.
“It really emphasises the value of forest patches for conservation in South Africa. If these small little animals are highly endemic to these forest patches, it suggests other taxa (a unit used in biological classification) that have not been examined using genetics… also probably have a high level of endemicity,” he says.
Daniels, who is part of the university’s evolutionary genomics research group, studies velvet worms, limbless skinks, freshwater crab fauna and tortoises to document the “spectacular biological diversity of South Africa”.
Considering the country is rated as one of the most biodiverse-rich countries in the world, this is key “to aid their conservation”.
According to the latest Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), of the 76 199 species that have been assessed so far, 22 413 are threatened with extinction. The IUCN believes there could be millions more species that are awaiting discovery. But for over a quarter of the known species, their future is uncertain, and the IUCN warns that their loss has a price for humanity.
“Biodiversity loss is linked to so many of society’s ills, including increased frequency of natural disasters, climate change and food insecurity,” it says.
What most worries local conservationists like the scientific co-ordinator of the SA National Biodiversity Institute, Michèle Pfab, is the focus on saving charismatic species like the rhino while ignoring the precarious fate of so many more animals, plants and invertebrates.
“At the moment, we’re focusing on one species, the rhino. There’s no money for anything else. All the other species are neglected. Do we want a world with rhinos and nothing else? Or a lot of other stuff and no rhinos? Because we’re heading for a world with rhinos and nothing else. That’s very dangerous. That’s a very biodiverse-poor world without species.”
Provincial conservation authorities are severely underresourced and under-capacitated. “What little money, what little people we have, is distracted by the rhino cause. The white rhino is not critically endangered. There are over 20 000 left. For some species, there are literally a handful of individuals left.”
She cites a rare, and ancient, blue-leafed cycad confined to a single granite mountain in Limpopo, which “nobody even knows”, that is being obliterated “to feed the demand of local cycad collectors”.
“Cycads go back to the time of the dinosaurs and have already survived three mass extinctions in Earth’s history but unless we do something about it they will not survive the advent of humankind,” Pfab says.
Beyond the rhino poaching crisis, there are thousands of other species threatened by urban development, mining and agriculture.
“If all our efforts are placed on one charismatic species – the rhino – we’re in danger of losing all the others.
“These smaller, lesser-known species are actually much more amazing, if you look at the plants, the invertebrates, at their crazy behaviour and how they reproduce.
“People are coming into our country to collect beetles, scorpions, reptiles, birds, which they sell on the internet or take out of the country. Often these creatures don’t survive. How many of the smaller things are going in the post, in parcels, at the bottom of suitcases, that we don’t even know about?”
Rynette Coetzee, a senior field officer of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), echoes these sentiments. “We need more funding to employ more people to find out what is happening with species such as the Colophon beetle, baboon spiders, flap-necked chameleons (and) leopard tortoises. We need to highlight the plight of wildlife in general not just certain species.
“One of the biggest problems is that our government departments that are mandated to protect our wildlife and ecosystems are battling with huge budget cuts, lack of staff capacity and lack of capacity in terms of vehicles, equipment and training to enforce the legislation that we have adequately.
“These departments are basically forced then to focus on certain species and because the rhino issue is so topical globally most of their resources are concentrated on trying to stop the eradication of one iconic species.”
Lientjie Cohen, a zoologist at the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency, who studies subterranean critically endangered golden moles, says creatures like these help “maintain the balance underground”.
“For us, it doesn’t look significant, but soil is the base of everything,” says Cohen.
“They perform a valuable ecosystem services, but we don’t know even know what they do for us.”
Matthew Child, a conservationist, who is compiling the EWT’s red-data list for mammals, says smaller animals “are not as sexy” as the larger mammals, the tourism drawcards. “This means, firstly, there is not a lot of money going around to survey them and, secondly, our protected areas are managed for the charismatic megafauna and often, in the process, can mismanage the microhabitats that are key for small mammal survival. This may have knock-on effects for our mesopredators (such as the serval, carcal and African weasel).
The “huge” lack of information, knowledge and intelligence on many local species makes their future that more unclear, according to Coetzee, who cites the removal of mountain aloes by “the truckload”, which are then sold at the roadside.
“Besides the fact we have no idea how many are left… because the opinion is that they are of least concern, nobody is paying attention to their removal.
“This is what happened with some of our cycads until it was too late and three species are now extinct. The old adage (applies) of while we were sleeping they quietly disappeared.”