Plant a Tree, Save a Mammal
5 November 2007
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It’s not easy to guess which species are going to be hit hardest by logging, climate change, and other threats to the world’s forests. Ecological data on many animals are scarce, and teasing apart tropical food webs can be next to impossible.
Erik Meijaard, an ecologist at the Balikpapan, Indonesia, branch of The Nature Conservancy, wondered whether a species’ age might shed light on how vulnerable it is to forest changes. So he and a team of researchers examined 41 species of mammals and checked for correlations between their phylogenetic age–how long since they had split from their most recent common ancestor, as indicated by DNA analysis–and their sensitivity to logging.
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Meijaard and his team report in an upcoming issue of Biotropica that 15 species were intolerant of logging, 12 were neutral, and 14 were tolerant. Notably, the oldest species, such as the lesser tree shrew and the banded civet–all of whom came on the scene during the Miocene Epoch 23.9 million to 5.3 million years ago–were much more sensitive to logging than species that appeared more recently, such as the Asian elephant and the long-tailed macaque.
The results may reflect a change in climate that took place 5 million years ago. During much of the Miocene, Southeast Asia was a warmer, wetter place with a vast intact rain forest; after that, the climate got colder and forests became periodically dryer and more fragmented as glacial periods came and went. “It makes intuitive sense that species that evolved in this colder time would cope better with the open conditions created by timber harvesting,” says co-author Douglas Sheil, an ecologist at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.
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“What they have done is to very usefully break apart the ecosystem into high- and low-risk species,” adds palaeontologist Lawrence Flynn of Harvard University. “This could lead to the very effective management of remote ecosystems around the globe, where the ecology of species is poorly understood but their evolutionary age is well-known.”
Hardy.
The long-tailed macaque, a relatively recently evolved species, is highly tolerant of timber harvesting.
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