Candid Creatures by Roland Kays

Author:Roland Kays
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2016-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

A Sumatran striped rabbit hops through the dark forest of Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park at night.

Thomas’s Flying Squirrel Aeromys thomasi

CONSERVATION STATUS: Data Deficient

These two photos stirred up a frenzy of attention and controversy when they were published as evidence of a mysterious new species of carnivore from Borneo.

The publication of these two photos of an unknown reddish animal in 2005 stirred up a storm of interest and controversy. The photos were captured two years prior, in Kayan Mentarang National Park, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. The animal wasn’t familiar to the scientists or to locals. Some suggested that it was a new species, unknown to science, probably some kind of civet or mongoose. The discovery of new carnivorous species is big news and attracted a lot of positive attention for the national park, but also a lot of scrutiny from biologists. A team set live traps in the forest, hoping to catch the new carnivore, but had no success.

In 2006 three skeptical scientists published a comprehensive evaluation of these two photographs against 17 known species from the region, comparing 13 different morphological characters. They found that the Thomas’s flying squirrel was the best match, fitting every character except the way that the tail was held in the air as they walk on the ground, which is actually not known for this species. This little-known flying squirrel spends most of its time in the trees and so is rarely captured by camera traps on the ground. Using museum specimens and other photographs, an artist drew the squirrel in the poses shown by the images, offering a compelling and more likely interpretation. The squirrel in question is actually quite rare and unknown itself, so these two photos are still important in adding to our knowledge of their habitats.

This case illustrates the importance of vouchers in two ways. First, it shows how vouchered camera trap photographs can be examined by multiple experts to reach a consensus identification—this cannot be done for observations without photo documentation. Second, this shows the importance of having a physical specimen vouchered in a museum before describing a new species, as photographs alone typically do not provide enough evidence to adequately describe a new form of life.

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