Tapirs and Climate Change Go Hand in Hand in Costa Rica

Esteban Brenes-Mora has been obsessed with tapirs — large, pig-like jungle dwellers — for as long as he can remember. It started with a sticker book his grandfather gave him as a child, and continued through zoo visits and into his university studies.

“I’ve always been passionate about tapirs,” he says. “When I studied biology I was aiming for tapirs, and since I graduated I’ve been looking for ways to study them.”

He got his chance around a year and a half ago, when he received funding from the Zoological Society of London to start Nãī Conservation (nãī is the word for tapir in the indigenous Bribri language of Costa Rica), an independent research group focused on the ecology, genetics and health of the tapirs in Costa Rica’s Cordillera de Talamanca highlands.

But it has proved to be an uphill struggle to gain support and attention for his work. Although tapirs are endangered, they just don’t figure highly in Costa Rican culture.

“If you come to Costa Rica you won’t find souvenirs of tapirs,” he says. And the local scientific community has all but abandoned them over the past 10 years. “There are not many research papers from Costa Rica related to tapirs since about 2005,” he adds.

Then, earlier this year, Brenes-Mora came across a new field of research that changed the way he thought about tapir conservation — research that links the loss of large herbivores like tapirs to the loss of a forest’s capacity to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in leaves, wood and roots.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/surprising-link-between-tapirs-and-climate-change-20687

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