Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"

Today I have for you two of the weirdest mammals in the world! This is a Malayan Tapir, Tapirus indicus, mother and baby. This must be one of the easiest scientific names yet in this column … it just means 'tapir from India'. They don't live in India as such, but in the 'East Indies', that is to say southeastern Asia, from Burma to Malaysia, as well as the island of Sumatra. In these regions they inhabit lush rainforest.

Weird and Wonderful

Tapirs are weird mammals, and the Malayan Tapir is the weirdest of the tapirs! First there's its 'nose'. It has the longest proboscis of any tapir. The skulls of tapirs are wonderfully modified to support these long hose noses. Since the proboscis is very mobile there is no bone in it. Indeed, the nasal bones in tapirs have been reduced and moved backward, so that all that remains of them is a small prong directly above the eyes. The bones that in most mammals house the nasal cavity have been lost, as well as the nasal cartilage. This leaves the entire proboscis as a large and dextrous muscular structure. They use the flexible snout to grab foliage and pull it to their mouths, like miniature versions of the trunk of an elephant. Tapirs also have a good sense of smell. You'll sometimes see them raising the proboscis high and exposing the teeth. This is called the 'flehmen response' and is a way to channel smells to specially sensitive scent receptors. It is especially used by bulls to sniff around to try and detect females in oestrus.

All tapirs have relatively small eyes and poor sight. In the case of the Malayan tapir, many adults seem to actually be blind, their corneas turning opaque and bluish. It's not yet known what causes this … exposure to light, or eye damage from vegetation, or just a natural process. But they make up for this with their excellent senses of hearing and smell.

One very weird aspect of tapirs is that the males are, ahem, heroically endowed. I'm not going to illustrate this! They have the largest equipment relative to body size of any large, land-living mammal.

Tapirs are quite big, this one being the biggest species. Average Malayan tapirs weigh about 250-300 kg, some exceeding 500 kg, and measure about a meter/yard at the shoulder. In this species, females are often larger than males. Tapirs have long, low, heavy bodies, which they use to barrel through dense undergrowth. All living tapirs have dark brownish or blackish bodies, but the Malayan species also has a white saddle-like patch encompassing most of its back and parts of its upper thighs. It is not known why it has this coloration … it seems to be the opposite of camouflage (although some people say it makes a sleeping tapir look like a boulder) and would as far as I see not 'break up' its outline much while it forages, the way zebra stripes have been supposed to work. Maybe it is actually to help a mother and baby tapir stay close, since the white patch in the gloomy undergrowth will give the baby something to focus on. A few Malayan tapirs that are all-black have been seen; this may be a similar phenomenon to the melanism that produces black versions of leopards, the so-called black panthers, in the same forests.

Woolly Watermelons

Baby tapirs of all species look strikingly different from the adults. They do have the tapir shape and nose, but their coat pattern is amazing, full of white stripes and lines on a reddish brown to blackish background. They make me think of a Gary Larson cartoon where a bunch of vegetarian cavemen celebrate their kill of an enormous woolly watermelon. Baby tapirs are quite watermelon-like in the shape of their bodies and the longitudinal stripes. They are woolly, too! Even though adult Malay tapirs are sleek and short-furred, the babies have longer hairs and look fluffy. (The mountain tapir has the fluffiest babies of all.) In the case of the babies at least, the lines and stripes can provide camouflage amidst the dappled patches of light on the forest floor.

Jungle Lives

All living tapirs are forest dwellers. The Malayan species likes to stay close to water. Like rhinos, it enjoys entering pools to bathe and swim. The water helps it cool down on hot days. These tapirs tend to be active in the cool morning and late afternoon hours, resting during the hottest parts of the day. They are also active during much of the night, but snooze for a few hours each night. They are herbivores, eating a wide range of plants, including aquatic plants. They can 'walk' submerged on a riverbed and browse the soft underwater plants. Their front teeth are sharp and their cheek teeth strong. They can inflict horrific injuries and must be considered dangerous to humans, though they seem peaceful. They use their teeth mostly as defense; their overall size and strength mean that only tigers (apart from humans) pose a danger to adults. They can run fast through dense vegetation to escape predators, or retreat into water.

Normally tapirs move at leisure through the forest, browsing and picking food up from the ground, using well-worn regular paths. They can also climb well and will ascend fairly steep mountain slopes. They are solitary creatures, marking out territories by spraying urine over plants. Tapirs that meet one another might communicate with squeaking and whistling sounds. Babies and youngsters will accompany their mothers. A newborn tapir weighs about 7 kg/15 lbs, and grows rapidly. Its stripes fade at around four to seven months, it is weaned at six to eight months at which point it is almost fully grown, and it reaches sexual maturity at around three years. Tapirs can live for 20-30 years.

Evolution and Distribution

It is very strange that, today, tapirs are found in southeast Asia and in Central and South America – regions very widely separated – and nowhere else. In the past, though, tapirs were much more widely distributed. They seem to have originated in North America about 40-50 million years ago, fossils having been found on what today is Elesmere Island in the Arctic! Back then it had a mild climate and supported lush forests.

Tapirs are relatives of horses and rhinos. Back when they originated, horses and rhinos indeed were very similar to them, all being fairly small, forest-living creatures with four or five small-hooved toes per foot. Early tapir ancestors also did not yet have the proboscis-snout. As they evolved, horses and rhinos clearly differentiated from them. Modern horses have a single hoof per foot, and rhinos have three hooves per foot. Tapirs have four pointy hooves on their front feet, and three on their hind feet. Some ancient rhinos were very tapir-like, being hornless and their retracted nasal bones suggesting that they, too, had proboscis-like snouts.

From America, early tapirs spread to Europe and Asia. They did not diversify quite as much as horses and rhinos did, most of them being quite similar in appearance. A giant form lived in China and only went extinct very recently, about 4000 years ago. Many species of fossil tapir are known from North America. Some of these, too, went extinct quite recently.

Today three species of tapir are known from South America. All of them are relatively recent immigrants, having entered the continent over the land bridge of Central America, which only formed around 3 million years ago. The evolutionary divergence between them and Baird's Tapir of Central America seems to have happened about five million years ago. The Malayan tapir in turn separated from the group now living in the Americas at around nine million years ago. All the European and North American tapirs have died out, leaving the remnant species widely separated.

Tapirs in Human Culture

Although as far as we know tapirs have never lived in historical times in Korea or Japan, there are legends of a creature known as a Baku, said to have the snout of an elephant, which might have been inspired by Chinese legends (Chinese having had a better opportunity of encountering living tapirs in its southern regions and adjoining countries). In these cultures, tapirs are said to eat people's nightmares! A tapir features in one of Tintin's adventures, almost trampling Captain Haddock while charging through the forest. In the film '2001: A Space Odyssey' tapirs feature prominently, peacefully lounging around with primitive ape-men, at least until one of the ape-men discovers how to kill them with a tapir thigh-bone. Actually as far as we know, tapirs never lived in Africa, where the ancestors of humans lived around the time they discovered how to use weapons. (The ape-men portrayed in the movie also look pretty much nothing like what actual human ancestors back then looked like.)

Tapirs in Peril

The surviving tapir species are in a bit of trouble due to humans. Some of them are hunted. Interestingly, the Malayan Tapir is safe from hunting in those countries that are mainly Islamic, since they look so much like pigs, the consumption of which is forbidden. But they and all other tapirs suffer from deforestation. Rainforests are still being destroyed on a large scale. Tapir populations have been broken up into numerous small patches, each suffering from very low genetic diversity which might cause problems due to inbreeding. There are conservation efforts directed towards preserving all five living species, which holds out some hope for the tapirs.

Colours of Wildlife Archive

Willem

16.06.14 Front Page

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