Little Time Left for the Tamaraw? Philippine Buffalo Species Down to Last 300 Animals

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/07/10/tamaraw-philippine-buffalo-species-last-300/



You see that drawing to the left there? It appears to be the world’s only public domain image of the tamaraw, or Mindoro dwarf buffalo (Bubalus mindorensis), a species endemic to a single island in the Philippines that is down to its last 300 or so wild individuals.

Oh sure, I could show you plenty of images of other things named after the dwarf buffalo. There’s the super-popular Toyota SUV called the Tamaraw, known as “the People’s Car,” which looks like a cross between a school bus and a Humvee. There’s also a basketball team, the Far Eastern University (F.E.U.) Tamaraws, that uses the endangered buffalo as its name and mascot. But images of the animal itself? Those are few and far between.

(Okay, here’s one photo, but it’s copyrighted, so you’ll have to click the link in order to actually see it.)

Anyway, let’s get back to the real tamaraw, the one those other things are named after. According to a recent report from the Philippine Star, tamaraws used to be quite plentiful in the forests and grassy slopes of Mindoro, the seventh-largest island in the Philippine archipelago. But human development in the past century has reduced the island’s forests by at least 70 percent. Domesticated cattle were introduced to Mindoro in the 1930s, bringing with them the deadly disease rinderpest (aka “cattle plague”), which killed tens of thousands of the animals. In the 1960s and ’70s sportsmen took a fancy on the buffalo, killing thousands more for trophies. Since then at least 2,000 people have illegally settled in Mangyan Heritage Park, further limiting the dwarf buffalo’s range in that area.