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Amami RabbitBy Yas Mamemachi Japan, the island country blessed with nature thanks to mountains and rainfall as well as semi-tropical weather, is a treasure island for many endemic species. Amami (Amami islands) and Okinawa, the two southernmost islands of the Japanese archipelago, are cases in point.The Amami rabbit in Amami and the Okinawa spiny rat in Okinawa have lived in the old-growth forests, kept away from human activities, for years. Since the early 1990’s, these two “living fossils” have been endangered, chiefly due to deforestation and the introduction of an invasive foreign species, the mongoose. Pursuing research mainly at night in mountainous areas on these islands requires not only physical but also psychological strength. Moreover, walking in the forests of these islands, particularly at night, is accompanied by fear of attack by deadly poisonous snakes called habu, which makes their habitat on these islands. Such patient and dangerous work is the least popular for many researchers, except for Fumio Yamada, mammalogist and research coordinator at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute’s Kansai Research Center in Kyoto. He calls himself a spokesperson for the Amami rabbit and the Okinawa spiny rat, and has felt destined to protect the lives of these small creatures.
The Amami rabbit is well known as an ancient species of rabbit among related researchers, including Yamada, and he was wondering if he would be able to study the animal someday. So, with no hesitation Yamada joined his friend’s studies about the habitat of the rabbit twice between 1992 and 1994, realizing that the number of rabbits declined when compared to a previous survey held in 1974. Such a decline over 20 years could be caused by two events: the complete deforestation of their habitat areas for pulp chip production as well as a new golf course. It is not easy to make a profit in the pulp chip production business, since the unit price of the chips is very low. In other words, the quantity of the chips is crucial in the business. That promotes the deforestation of larger forests. “I remember that I could see the surface of the ground which used to be covered by deep forests due to such deforestation. I was quite shocked,” says Yamada. Back then, a resort development project was also in progress, cruising from Okinawa to Kagoshima via Amami for playing golf for fun on a newly developed course that would be established in part of the forests where Amami rabbits made their habitat. The project scheme led to an enormous reaction, including opposing views and criticisms. The controversy arising out of the project made locals supporting the project, including those working for a local company taking the initiative of the project, very nervous. “I did not get directly involved in any opposing activities against the development of the new golf course. However, some locals thought that my field studies on the habitat of Amami rabbits would be part of the opposing activities, leading to some threatening calls,” says Yamada. The other event was introducing mongoose, an invasive foreign species in Amami in 1979. Mongoose was expected to become a natural enemy of hubu, the local poisonous snake that causes serious troubles with locals working in the fields and forests. It is true that mongoose kills habu if the animal is forced to fight against the snake in a small cage. But the reality is that mongoose rarely attacks habu, since mongoose is active in daytime while habu is nocturnal, and above all, two wild creatures do not like to risk fighting each other without any reason. The introduced foreign animals have become predators of local birds and small animals, including Amami rabbits, instead. In 1979, the first 30 mongooses were introduced in Naze city, presently called Amami city, the largest village area located lower land near the largest sea port of the island. Since then, most researchers have believed that no mongooses have expanded their territories in the mountain areas. In fact, mongoose field surveys were conducted for two to three days because almost no related researchers working in Japanese organizations were allowed to stay on the remote island for more than a few days for such business. Working in mountainous areas alone In 1994, after the research work for the distribution map of the rabbit was done, Yamada individually got involved in further research work on the Amami rabbit. “After all, as a mammalogist, I was not satisfied with making the distribution map of the Amami rabbit. I really wanted to capture the rabbits and equip a radio telemetry to each of them for tracking their behavioral patterns in the mountains.” Yamada alone had been doing such rabbit tracking work in the deepest mountainous area of the island for about 10 years. His lonely research work started to change his lifestyle to nightwork, since Amami rabbits are nocturnal. In daytime he slept in a local inn and did his routine work from dusk to done in the forests using a car as his head office. The routine work included checking 50 traps set up at various places in the forests, tracking the rabbits by chasing signals from the radio telemetry attached to them, and walking in the forests to count their dung, estimating a total number of the rabbits. It is already known that a single Amami rabbit leaves about 280 piles of dung per day (Later, in cooperation with other researchers, Yamada developed a new DNA-based technique, identifying an individual rabbit based on DNA samples from a piece of skin of the intestinal tract wall included in dung.) Even in the summer, he wore long sleeve shirts and long boots and carried a poison remover all the time because of the fear of habu. “Habu becomes more active as the temperatures increases. So, for instance, I worked in and around mountain runoffs, which are the areas where the snakes come down to capture small creatures, such as flogs, chiefly in winter,” says Yamada.
In his 10-year field work only 10 Amami rabbits were captured, while about 100 mongooses were done in the first three to four years. That was a wake-up call for Yamada. “The difference in the number of the two animals captured would possibly mean that Amami rabbit has been endangered by the introduced predators. Only I knew the reality. Though I am a researcher, not an environment activist, I think I have to do something. Otherwise, I felt like my name would remain in history book as one of the worst Japanese researchers, ignoring the possible extinction of a Japanese endemic species,” says Yamada. Yamada started working with national media based in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, having the chance to tell as many people as possible what was going on with Amami rabbits on Amami. He accepted almost all the interviews from any Japanese media anytime, as long as their topics were related to Amami rabbits. Moreover, he sent his reports on Amami rabbit endangered by mongoose on Japan’s remote island to two international academic organizations: Lagomorph Specialist Group (LSG), an international research organization which is responsible for the conservation and management of rabbits and International Union Conservation Nature (IUCN), making a list of the worst 100 invasive alien species. His activity met the current of the times. In and around the turn of the century, both the Ministry of the Environment and the Kagoshima Prefecture (including Amami) government had seriously concerned the issue of invasive foreign species, including mongoose introduced in some southernmost islands of Japan for the greater good. In terms of mongoose, they reached a conclusion that an organized system must be established for mongoose capturing activities. The remaining was how much an estimated budget was required and what level of achievement could be expected. Any action taken must be rationally explained to Japanese tax payers. Yamada was chosen to explain the situation with mongoose on Amami by Ministry of the Environment. Speech at Upper House In 2004, Yamada showed up in front of the Upper House’s environment committee for his presentation. The researcher had a speech on not only a mongoose busting system, which should be urgently established, but also the system required for protecting Amami rabbits, one of the Japanese endemic species, before lawmakers and leading members of the environmental ministry A crucial point of his speech was that Amami rabbits, not found anywhere but in Japan, should be protected by the Japanese. Such remarks with shocking pictures of the rabbit killed by mongoose impressed the participating lawmakers from Left to Right and made the policy makers happy. “I heard that a staffer of the Ministry of Environment whispered `a significant amount of budget for the activities would be confirmed’,” says Yamada with a smile. In the same year, the Invasive Alien Species Act was passed and it became effective in the next year (2005) with a budget of about 300 million yen (≒US$2.55 million based on yen-dollar exchange rate, then). About half of the budget went to Amami rabbit protection, a model activity of the Act. Yamada left Amami when the Act became effective. The activities established by Yamada have been taken over by Amami Wildlife Protection Center, established by the Ministry of the Environment in 2000. The Amami rabbit protection activities are on the right track, with planning to eradicate mongoose by 2015. Yet, he says that we should keep tightening our grip for such activities for three more years by 2018, since a number of mongooses are easily recovered. Also, he is concerned about another deforestation of the Amami rabbit’s habitat areas for pulp chip production, since the forests cleared in the 1980s has regenerated to a proper size of trees to cut down for the production. Amami has had nothing but public works and the Amami rabbit since the islands returned to Japan 30 some years ago. Recently, it was disclosed that the Japanese government is planning to nominate the Amami Islands as a World Heritage, an important site for natural heritage or cultural heritages listed by the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO. “This movement may change the social as well as natural statuses of Amami, since locals taking an initiative of protecting the endemic species of the islands is an important point for the islands to be chosen as another World Heritage Site,“ says Yamada. |
(part 1)
lthough he studied wild rabbits since he was a university student, Fumio Yamada happened to get involved in research work on the Amami rabbit. In 1992, when he was asked by his friend, also a researcher, to help make a distribution map of the rabbits on Amami Oshima island of the Amami islands (Amami in what follows) by studying their dung.
