GPS collaring brings hope to migratory ‘jungle hipster’

KOTA KINABALU: It looks like a hipster and runs like an antelope. Borneo’s bearded pigs, shy yet charming all-star migrants, are increasingly under siege, but researchers are using innovative GPS technology to protect them and their vast, ancient migratory routes before it’s too late.

Researchers from Danau Girang Field Centre, UC Berkeley, and Cardiff University have just fitted a bearded pig in Sabah with a GPS collar for the first time, opening a new window into the fleet-footed, shaggy-bearded pigs’ astonishing, 200+ kilometer migratory routes across the world’s third-largest island.

A 65-kilogram female pig in the Kinabatangan has become a ray of hope for her species after successfully transmitting her first GPS locations to conservation biologists and government wildlife officials.

The pig, named Indah (Malay for “beautiful”), was captured in a narrow corridor of forest in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary in Sabah. She will be closely tracked to see where she moves and how she interacts with the fragmented habitat that has become common across Borneo due to deforestation and agricultural expansion.

Her behavior will provide important clues about the fate of her species’ storied migration, Borneo’s answer to the Serengeti’s wildebeest.

For eons, huge herds of bearded pigs have ranged over vast distances through Borneo’s forests, rivers and mountains to find food. Along the way, they have traditionally been hunted by many indigenous peoples on the island, and the pig continues to be the most important wild meat source in non-Muslim rural areas of Borneo.

Despite the pig’s staggering movements and cultural significance, almost nothing is known about their migrations.

“In my opinion, where these pigs are moving and what they are doing along the way is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Southeast Asian ecology,” says David Kurz, PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the collaring project.

Kurz is working with Danau Girang Field Centre, Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University to capture and collar 10 bearded pigs in the Kinabatangan region.

Together, the team is trying to understand the nature of the pig’s adaptation to human encroachment and what can be done to conserve its migrations.

“We are racing time, as the pig is already considered a ‘Vulnerable’ species and its migrations are thought to be disappearing before they have even been properly documented,” notes Dr Benoit Goossens, Director of Danau Girang Field Centre and supervisor of the project.

For the last 1.5 months, Indah has stayed in one river bend except for periodic foraging raids into a neighboring oil palm plantation. Each day she moves around quite a bit within this small, <2 square km home range, foraging along the river banks as well as in the forest interior.

So far, the researchers have seen Indah make eight short raids into oil palm, meaning she is probably obtaining extra food there 1-2 times per week on average.

Since she is usually staying very close to her core home range, Indah is behaving like a resident female. This is interesting because Kurz, Goossens and their team are investigating the hypothesis that bearded pigs are no longer migratory when they have easy access to abundant food, like oil palm or other crops. However, it will take several years to be confident about whether Indah is migrating or not, because bearded pig migrations are thought to be triggered by certain environmental and climatic conditions that only happen every few years, e.g. drought followed by large-scale fruiting of certain forest trees.

A team of sponsors have helped Kurz and Goossens acquire and deploy the cutting-edge GPS tracking technology they need to turn the tide for the pigs.

Thanks to support from the National Geographic Society, Waitt Foundation, Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Ocean Park Conservation Foundation Hong Kong, Mustard Seed Foundation, Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, American Philosophical Society, UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources, and US National Science Foundation, the team is fitting the pigs with high-powered GPS collars. The collars are specially designed with advanced tracking features that send the data directly to the team, allowing them to monitor Indah no matter how far she wanders. Indah’s brand new collar is currently recording almost 70 GPS points in a day. By analyzing the data, the team can see which habitats are most important to protect in order to save the pig’s unique migrations.

“Threats to the migrations include forest loss, over-hunting, and changing diets due to land-use change,” said Mr Peter Malim from Sabah Wildlife Department and Kurz’s local counterpart. “Traditionally, the pigs’ migrations have revolved around mast fruiting events, or irregular bonanzas of fruit and nuts that hungry pigs would feverishly seek out to grow and breed more quickly. But now, the old-growth forests that sustain mast fruiting events are being gradually lost and replaced by vast stretches of oil palm, a reality that can be seen throughout the Lower Kinabatangan region,” added Malim.

“Migratory animals have adapted to a specific natural diet needed to sustain their movements; when we alter their ecosystem and food sources, we may be changing their migratory behavior as well,” points out Danau Girang wildlife veterinarian Dr Navaneetha Roopan, who supervised Indah’s collaring.

“The threats are abundant, to be sure. But fortunately, these humbly charismatic ‘jungle hipsters’ have a dedicated team on their side fighting to protect them and their one-of-a-kind migrations. And with each brave step Indah takes with her collar, she is helping her kin adapt and thrive in a rapidly transforming world,” concludes Goossens.