PECCARY HERDS VITAL TO THE FOREST BIOME
● The damage wreaked on the Amazon on Bolsonaro’s watch was profound and its impacts went beyond even the logging of trees or violence towards Indigenous tribes and mining-related pollution of their land.
The impact on one of the forest-floor-dwelling species, the white-lipped peccary ( Tayassu pecari), shows how intricate are the interdependent chains that come together to make the Amazon biome. White-lipped peccaries are pig-like animals that roam in herds that can exceed 100 individuals. They are an important source of protein for Indigenous populations and their ecological role is equally vital. But they are now extant in only around 21 per cent of the species’ historical range, according to the IUCN Red List.
Defined as ‘ecosystem engineers’, the peccaries regulate the growth of certain plant species and create breeding grounds, foraging habitat and drinking water for multiple species of amphibian and other animals when they create muddy wallows.
But peccaries require large tracts of land in which to roam and forage. With habitat loss, expanding farmland and hunting, comes the possibility for disease to spread between domestic animals and wildlife, according to
Maria Fernanda Menajovsky, a researcher at the Barcelona Autonomous University and lead author of a related paper in Biological Conservation, as reported on Mongabay.com. Parcelling out habitat into smaller areas can cut populations off from one another, while diseases can spread quickly among these highly social herd animals, which regularly rub their snouts on one another.