Kuala Lumpur, June 10: Malaysian authorities are trying to trap a female mate for Tam, a rare Borneo Sumatran rhino, in a last-ditch effort to produce an offspring in captivity and save his species from extinction, an official said on Thursday.
Laurentius Ambu, a top wildlife official, said Tam’s current mate is too old to reproduce. Tam was rescued from the jungles of Sabah state on Borneo island two years ago and is one of the handful of Borneo Sumatran rhinos believed to be alive.
“We are looking for a reproductive fertile female,” said Ambu, the director of Sabah’s Wildlife Department. “The female that we have is quite old now.”
Hopes for saving the Borneo Sumatran from extinction were raised following the recent spotting of a rhino believed to be a female, whose image was captured by a remotely controlled camera, Ambu said. The trap is in an area on Borneo island where the solitary rhinos, indigenous to the island, are known to roam.
Only 10 to 30 Borneo Sumatran rhinos – a subspecies of the bristly, snub-nosed Sumatran rhino – are known to remain in the wild. So it is crucial that the breeding-in-captivity programme launched two years ago when Tam was rescued bears fruit.
–Agencies