The tapir deserves a higher profile

WHEN a baby elephant, rhino or giraffe is born in Dublin Zoo there’s a huge response from the media.

The baby appears on television and its picture adorns the pages of newspapers.

Diego, the little Brazilian tapir, who was born in October, attracted rather less attention. The cult of celebrity extends to the animal kingdom and, when it comes to public adulation, the ‘big five’ animals steal the limelight. Tapirs aren’t well known and few people would be able to describe one. This is a pity because the ugly duckling of the hoofed fraternity is an interesting character who deserves a higher profile.

The Brazilian tapir is about the size of a donkey, with legs a bit too short for its body. An extra thick neck helps it survive jaguar attacks. Like pigs, tapirs have few hairs and their long pointed snouts look a bit like a snorkelling apparatus. The short trunk is used to search for leaves, nuts and fruit.

There are pros and cons to eating leaves: they are very plentiful, but contain little nutrient and an animal must eat huge quantities to keep body and soul together. Leaf cells are encased in cellulose, a very difficult substance to digest. The gut needs time to break down plant cells, which is why vegetarian animals tend to be big — they must keep large amounts on board for long periods.

Plants don’t like having their leaves eaten, so they grow thorns to protect them and fill leaf-tissue with poisons to upset a diner’s tummy. The tapir’s extraordinary nose has evolved in an arms race with plants. The snake-like tongue curls between thorns to reach the leaves, while the mini-trunk’s acute sense of smell separates edible from toxic items on the menu. Tapirs also take medicine, visiting pits which have clays containing kaolin, a substance we ourselves use to treat tummy problems. Kaolin absorbs and neutralises toxins in the gut.

Another, more exotic, use of drugs has been reported. Although tapirs are vegetarians, they may, very occasionally, take fish. It has been suggested that they eat plants containing a narcotic. Then, it’s claimed, they deposit their droppings in water and wait for fish, intoxicated by the drug, to surface. Tapirs are excellent swimmers. They bathe frequently and are equally at home on land or in water.

Hoofed animals are of two types, those with an odd number of toes and those with an even number. Tapirs, along with horses and rhinos, belong to the odd-toed group. Perhaps a tapir is what the horse might have become, had it chosen to live in the forest. Although odd-toed creatures are ancient, they are losing out, in evolutionary terms, to their more modern even-toed cousins, the cattle deer and goats. Accordingly, there are few horse and rhino species left in the world and, likewise, we have only four kinds of tapir, three in South America and one in South-east Asia. The odd-toed fraternity do most of their digesting in the hind gut. The bacteria which have broken break down the cellulose in plant cells are then expelled in the animal’s droppings, wasting a valuable resource.

The even-toed animals solved this problem by developing rumens, fermentation chambers up front. The cellulose is broken down in these and food may even be returned to the mouth for further pounding, as when cows ‘chew the cud’. When the cellulose-cracking bacteria die, their bodies pass along the gut and are digested in the animal’s large intestine. The front-end digestion approach is more energy efficient than the rear-end one.

Dublin Zoo has an extraordinary record in breeding tapirs. Diego’s father, Marmeduke, was born at Kilverston Wildlife Park, England, in August 1985. His mother, Hilary, was born in May of the same year in Edinburgh Zoo. The pair have been in Dublin since 1986. Prolific breeders, they have produced 16 calves over the years. Diego is a lively little fellow who enjoys playing with the little maras, South American rodents which share his facility. Baby tapirs have whitish stripes running horizontally along their bodies. These serve as camouflage, mimicking the sunlight patterns on a tropical forest floor.