On an ordinary summer night last year, a rare Formosan pangolin crawled out of her dugout to begin her nightly forage for food. Like other pangolins, or scaly anteaters, she was slow, but she didn’t have to worry about any larger mammals troubling her. If attacked, all she had to do was roll up into a ball and rely on the protection of her gray armor-like back. But as she went about searching for ants and termites, she suddenly came across something that her hard scales couldn’t protect her against—a metal spring trap hidden in the grass. Before she could react, the sharp teeth had sunk deeply into her leg. In a panic, she struggled to free herself, but the trap only became tighter. The loss of blood sapped her strength, and before long she was too weak to do anything but lie there and wait to die.
Then she got lucky—at least for a while. A farmer passing by found her and took her to a local government-run animal hospital in nearby Hualien, eastern Taiwan. The veterinarian was able to save her by amputating her leg, but he had no training in caring for pangolins. The animal refused to eat for two days and grew steadily weaker. Finally, the hospital staff decided to take her to the newly established wildlife emergency station set up by the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute (TESRI) in the central-island town of Chichi, Nantou county. But the seven-hour drive proved too much. Not long after arriving at TESRI she died.
But researchers at the institute still welcomed the arrival of the anteater, whom they nicknamed “Pan.” It gave them a chance to learn more about her rare subspecies, which is endemic to Taiwan. They decided to make her part of an educational display, along with the unborn baby that they found inside her. Both of them are now in the institute’s exhibition room in front of a poster telling their story. “We use Pan and her baby as teaching materials,” says Sheen Shyow-chiueh (沈秀雀), chief of TESRI’s interpretation and education division. “We want to tell visitors the crucial facts about how man harms wildlife.”
Pan was one of the emergency station’s more unfortunate cases. Others have been luckier. In the year since it began operating, the station has helped more than twenty injured or sick wild animals, including a Formosan black bear, several serpent eagles, crested goshawks, Formosan serows, and other rare or endangered species. After treatment, most of them survived, and many were returned to their natural habitat. “We want to send them home if at all possible,” says TESRI Director Yen Ren-teh (顏仁德). “They belong in the wild, not in a zoo or research organization.”
The wildlife emergency station is only a small part of TESRl’s work. “Our main mission is to focus on inventory, research, conservation, and education regarding flora and fauna,” Yen says. “And we concentrate most of our efforts on Taiwan’s endemic and endangered species.” The institute was established in July 1992 in central Taiwan, where the emergency station is also located. The man behind the project was Paul Ming-hsien Sun (孫明賢), chairman of the Council of Agriculture, who was then commissioner of the provincial government’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry. According to Sun, TESRI is an important attempt on Taiwan’s part to join global efforts in wildlife conservation. Its main purpose, he says, is to help promote the idea that all wild species should be able to live freely in their original habitats.
Taiwan is home to a vast array of endemic species and subspecies. According to TESRI, 25 percent of the more than 4,000 vascular plant species and 60 percent of the more than 18,400 species of wildlife on the island are endemic to Taiwan. The wildlife breakdown includes 60 species of mammals, 500 of birds, 30 of amphibians, 90 of reptiles, 150 of fresh water fish, and 17,600 of insects. “Taiwan is a small island,” Yen Ren-teh says. “But it has several different kinds of ecosystems that support a diversity of flora and fauna.”
But urban expansion, development of mountain regions, illegal hunting, and pollution are taking a toll. Many endemic species face an uncertain future. Some of them, such as the Formosan clouded leopard, can no longer be found in the wild. And a few, including the Formosan land-locked salmon and the Formosan black bear, are on the verge of extinction. “If any endemic species or subspecies become extinct in Taiwan,” Yen says, “they are gone from the earth forever.”
With a staff of more than one hundred research and technical personnel, TESRI organizes its work into five divisions. The zoology and botany divisions both concentrate on studying the population, distribution, behavior, and biological characteristics of Taiwan’s flora and fauna. The habitats and ecosystems division does research on the island’s coastal, wetland, river, forest, and grassland ecosystems. The management division focuses on the preservation and restoration of selected species and runs three TESRI experimental stations: one in Taichung county for animals and plants living in low-altitude areas, one in Kaohsiung county for those in middle altitudes, and one at the junction of Hualien, Nantou, and Taichung counties for high-altitude species. And the education division publishes research reports and educational materials, manages conservation data, and organizes educational and promotional activities.
One of the most important areas of current research is simply establishing basic information on endemic species. Although some valuable studies were done in this area before 1945, during the Japanese occupation, they were incomplete and covered only select species. “A biological inventory is the most fundamental and most important step for all research,” Yen says. “But there has never been a systematic inventory of the population, distribution, biological and ecological characteristics, and survival problems of Taiwan’s plants and animals.” Although setting up such a databank involves merely recording observations made by field researchers, it is time-consuming work. The institute finished its inventory of Nantou county in June, after two years of work, and recently began on Yunlin and Changhua counties in west-central Taiwan. An islandwide wildlife inventory should be finished by 2002, although follow-up studies will remain a regular part of the institute’s work.
TESRl’s restoration projects are currently limited to several plants, including the Rhododendron kanehirai, a species of azalea that grew only in a very small area in the northern part of the island. After the 1984 completion of the Feitsui Reservoir, which supplies water to metropolitan Taipei, the plant’s only known habitat was submerged. It has not been found in the wild since. Under a three-year TESRI project set up in 1992, researchers found several garden-grown Rhododendron kanehirai. The plant is now being grown in a greenhouse at one of the institute’s experimental stations and will be restored to selected areas in the wild by mid-1995.
The institute has not yet tried restoring rare animals to the wild, which is a much more difficult task. Only one such project has been tackled in Taiwan, a long-term undertaking by Kenting National Park to restore the population of Formosan sika deer, which had disappeared from the wild by 1969. The park released its first group of ten farm-raised deer in January, but it will take time to determine if they can adjust to a natural habitat.
An important part of TESRl’s mission is to promote nature conservation among the public. It holds slide and video presentations, lectures, and field activities for children, parents, and schoolteachers, and also visits indigenous tribal communities to encourage residents not to hunt rare animals or to take tourists on hunting expeditions. Individual visitors to the institute are also welcome. Sheen Shyow-chiueh estimates that several thousand people have participated in TESRI activities or have visited the institute, and she is optimistic about the influence of these programs. “Many parents bring their kids, or kids bring their parents,” she says. “Afterward, they feel they’ve learned something and are willing to bring more people to the next activity.” Director Yen also feels that such programs have helped to raise conservation awareness. “Stronger law enforcement is a major factor,” he says. “But education definitely plays an equally important role.”
Eventually, TESRI plans to help in the difficult task of restoring animals to the wild. One species in need of urgent attention is the land-locked salmon. Only 700 are left in the world, all in northern Taiwan.
TESRI has also begun a training program for police officers involved in enforcing conservation laws, such as those governing illegal hunting or the selling of endangered animals. Nearly 350 officers attended the institute’s first such course in January. The two-day camp included classes on conservation related regulations and basic wildlife knowledge, including how to distinguish various species of wild animals. In addition, national park police met with the trainees and related their firsthand experiences in dealing with wild animals.
Continuing on-the-job education for its own staff is also a priority, and TESRI often invites professors to give lectures or consult on various projects. But maintaining a well-qualified staff, or even one that is large enough, is not easy. “What we are doing here is time-consuming work,” Yen says, “and it requires a lot of manpower.”
To help overcome its staff shortage, TESRI often works with private conservation groups. In one project to inventory the black-faced spoonbill, a rare migratory bird, the institute cooperated with the Tainan Wild Bird Society. While TESRI researchers concentrated on the ecosystem of the bird’s habitat, the bird society collected information on biological behavior and population distribution. As a follow-up, TESRI produced a 22-minute educational videotape on the spoonbill for primary- and secondary-school science classes.
With small steps such as this, TESRI is contributing to Taiwan’s newly developing ecological awareness. “It is true that we started late in nature conservation,” Yen says, “but we are overcoming problems and steadily moving forward.”