Java Kantschil

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Java Kantschil
Java Kantschil (Tragulus javanicus)

Java Kantschil ( Tragulus javanicus )

Systematics
Superordinate : Laurasiatheria
Order : Artiodactyla (Artiodactyla)
Subordination : Ruminants (ruminantia)
Family : Stag piglet (tragulidae)
Genre : Tragulus
Type : Java Kantschil
Scientific name
Tragulus javanicus
( Osbeck , 1765)

The Java Kantschil ( Tragulus javanicus ) is a mammal of the family of mouse deer (Tragulidae). It is one of the smallest ungulates in the world and lives in forests on the Indonesian island of Java , possibly also on Bali . The animals are mainly found in the mountainous regions of Java. In addition to their small body size, their yellowish brown fur is characteristic. On the basis of the neck color, two types of shape can be distinguished, a gray-necked and a red-necked, which sometimes take the rank of subspecies. The Java Kantschil's way of life has not been adequately investigated. It feeds on a soft vegetable diet and conducts rival fights during the mating season. The scientific introduction of the species dates back to 1765. In the course of research history, however, it combined different forms of the deer piglets of Southeast Asia. Its current recognition, with restrictions on the island of Java, dates back to 2004. No information is available on the threat to the population, but the animals are often hunted.

features

Habitus

The Java Kantschil is one of the smallest cloven-hoofed animals with a head-trunk length of 50 to 53 cm, a tail length of 4 to 6 cm and a weight of 1.7 to 2.1 kg . The animals have a yellowish-brown to orange-brown body fur that is sometimes speckled with black. The head is similar in color, but has individual dark stripes over the eyes. The sides of the body, on the other hand, are more yellowish in color, the belly is whitish and is sometimes divided by a long, narrow orange strip. The insides of the legs also appear whitish, while the outsides of the legs are reddish-brown. Based on the color of the neck, two types of shape can be distinguished. One characterizes a reddish brown to orange-brown neck, with a dark stripe running along the nape of the neck. The other is characterized by a gray neck. The gray color starts just behind the ears and partially extends to the shoulders. It is caused by dark individual hairs with a narrow yellowish-brown band running around below the tip, in contrast to the hairs of the dorsal fur, which are only dark at the tip, otherwise have a whitish-yellow to gray-brown shaft. In the gray-necked form, the neck stripe is missing, but the dark tuft sometimes pulls back over the neck. The rear foot is between 10.4 and 10.6 cm long.

Skull and dentition features

The Java Kantschil's skull is on average 8.8 cm long and a good 4.2 cm on the zygomatic arches and around 3.1 cm wide on the skull. The height at the occiput is about 2.7 cm. Compared to the Kleinkantschil ( Tragulus kanchil ), the tympanic sacs and the skull are narrower, the rostrum is shorter and the lower jaw is longer and higher. As with all tragulus shapes, the dentition consists of 34 teeth, the tooth formula can also be specified. Typically the upper canine is enlarged and averages 1.6 cm long. The upper row of teeth extends over a length of 3.2 cm, the lower one over 3.6 cm.

distribution and habitat

The Java Kantschil is endemic to the island of Java, which belongs to Indonesia . There is still no clear evidence of the neighboring island of Bali , an unconfirmed sighting comes from the Bali Barat National Park . The animals inhabit tropical forests and wetlands in the western and central parts of the island, but also occur in a lower population density in the drier landscapes of the eastern section. As a rule, they use dense underground and bush vegetation as well as stands of salak palms . In general, they stay near water. The altitude distribution ranges from sea level to higher mountain areas. On the Dieng Plateau , the Java-Kantschil is rarely found in lowlands from 400 to 700 m, and there are hardly any sightings above 1500 m. The highest evidence so far comes from the Gede at an altitude of around 1600 m.

Way of life

Territorial behavior

The Java Kantschil's way of life has not been adequately researched. He probably lives nocturnal. During the day it rests in shady and quiet places. The activity begins after observations on animals in human hands around 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. No information is available on social organization or migration movements.

nutrition

As with other deer piglets, the Java Kantschil's diet consists of soft vegetable foods. According to investigations on Nusa Kambangan off the south coast of Java, it mainly feeds on fruits , buds and leaves from 14 different plant species. The animals often eat fallen fruit, including figs . Other food crops include palm trees as Pinanga or Salak , spurge family as Homalanthus and sapotaceae as Planchonella . Captive animals disdain grasses and prefer the peel of bananas and jackfruit, as well as the remains of rambutan and mangosteen fruits . In addition, they consume leaves of nettle leaves and morning glory , as well as those of the genera Leucaena and Manihot .

Reproduction

The Java Kantschil is fertile all year round. During the mating season, the males fight over the females. They circle each other with raised lips and bared teeth. Mostly they try to approach from the side and get under the enemy. The canine teeth serve as weapons, with which they prick and slit and thereby injure the abdominal wall. Fighting to the death has been reported for animals in captivity. The female watches the fight in a crouching position. The sexual act takes place immediately after the fight. The females sometimes suffer from injuries caused by the pointed hooves of the male when they sit up. The gestation period lasts for several months. As a rule, a young is born that is dark brown in color and has a small head and slender limbs. It can run and jump shortly after birth. The suction time is limited to the night, is irregular and only lasts for a short time. The switch to solid plant food is relatively quick. Neither the mother nor the father animal have a developed defense instinct for the offspring.

Systematics

The Java Kantschil is a kind from the genus Tragulus within the family of mouse deer (Tragulidae) and the order of the cloven-hoofed animals (Artiodactyla). The deer piglets are assigned a total of three genera. They are among the smallest of the ungulates. Within the group of forehead weapon bearers (Pecora) they occupy a basal position, which is also genetically verifiable. Special features of the stag piglets can be found in the lack of forehead arms and in the development of the tear duct as a single, but elongated opening on the inner edge of the orbit . The genus Tragulus includes a total of six species together with the Java Kantschil. Their distribution area is in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asia . The best-known forms are the Großkantschil ( Tragulus napu ) and the Kleinkantschil ( Tragulus kanchil ). All species are inhabitants of dense forests.

Pehr Osbeck

The Swedish pastor Pehr Osbeck is considered to be the first scientific describer of Java Kantschil . In his travelogue about his expedition to East and Southeast Asia, published in German in 1765, he presents in detail the "Javanese deer" under the name Cervus javanicus . He describes the teeth and notes the missing antlers and the small size. The sighting site he gave for January 19, 1752, was Nieu Bay on the Ujung Kulon peninsula in the southwest of Java. Osbeck mentions Cervus javanicus as early as 1757 in the Swedish version of the travelogue. At times this was also given as the first description of the species. Some scientists doubted in the past that Osbeck depicts a stag pig in his writings and suspected it was a muntjak deer . Therefore, Johann Friedrich Gmelin was sometimes given as the first descriptor. From 1788 he had published an expanded edition of Carl von Linné's work Systema Naturae and mentioned an animal called musk javanicus . His information on this was based on the Spicilegia zoologica by Peter Simon Pallas from the year 1774. In it Pallas reports on an anonymous animal from Java, which was extremely small and corresponds to the gray-necked variant of the Java Kantschil. Gmelin later recognized a new animal species and created the name musk javanicus . He saw the shape close to the musk deer .

The position of the Java Kantschil as an independent species was hardly doubted in the course of research history, but sometimes changed in meaning. The reference to the genus Tragulus comes from John Edward Gray in 1843. Richard Lydekker then combined numerous forms within the Java Kantschil in 1915, including the Großkantschil and the Balabac-Kantschil ( Tragulus nigricans ). He separated this group from the Kleinkantschil. Lydekker took a paper by J. Lewis Bonhote from 1903 as a basis, which listed a comparable breakdown. Frederick Nutter Chasen came to a similar view in the 1930s and 1940s , who in a series of articles on the mammalian fauna of Southeast Asia brought together all known representatives of the genus Tragulus in the two most well-known species, the large and the small Kantschil. Here he equated the Java Kantschil with the Großkantschil. It was not until 1949 that Adriaan Cornelis Valentin van Bemmel noted that the Großkantschil is not native to Java. The Großkantschil was then renamed again to Tragulus napu as the next available name, the Kleinkantschil was given the name Tragulus javanicus due to the priority of the name .

The two-way concept for the genus tragulus remained the favored classification scheme in the 20th century. In 2004, Erik Meijaard and Colin P. Groves carried out a comprehensive study on the skulls of stag piglets based on morphometric and morphological characteristics. They came to the conclusion that the genus Tragulus can be divided into more than two species. Therefore, they limited the Java Kantschil to the island of Java and separated the Kleinkantschil from large areas of Southeast Asia and some of the Great Sunda Islands , just as they also endured the Thailand Kantschil ( Tragulus williamsoni ). At the same time, they fanned out the Greater Kantschil and divided the newly recognized species into a Tragulus javanicus group with the smaller forms and a Tragulus napu group with the larger representatives. This approach has endured to this day and found its way into volume two of the standard work Handbook of the Mammals of the World from 2011, which mainly deals with ungulates , as well as being taken into account in the new taxonomy of the ungulates presented by Groves and Peter Grubb in the same year .

Sometimes several subspecies of the Javal-Kantschils are distinguished. In 1827 Charles Hamilton Smith named musk pelandoc , a red-necked species that he compared to the Greater Kantschil. Gerrit S. Miller could not exactly assign this form around 75 later, but saw closer ties to the Kleinkantschil. Since he brought Tragulus javanicus together with the Great Kantschil , he coined the new name Tragulus focalinus for the Javanese animals . Due to the gray neck, later authors referred to similarities with the shape defined by Osbeck and Gmelin and the synonymized Tragulus focalinus with this. After examining numerous individuals from the Java-Kantschils from the Berlin Natural History Museum , Ludek J. Dobroruka presented five specimens in 1967, which were characterized by a reddish neck. They came from the area around Cirebon on the north coast of Java. The clear difference to the other representatives of the Java Kantschil caused Dobroruka Hamilton Smith's designation Tragulus pelandoc to restore, but to assign it the status of a subspecies. To this day, the question of the systematic structure of the Java Kantschil has not been clarified. The aforementioned morphological-morphometric analyzes from 2004 revealed a clear breakdown into two types of shapes. However, it is not possible to associate these with the subspecies described, as the respective type material was not included. The discrepancy between the two types of forms is so great that they can possibly be separated from one another at species level.

Threat and protection

Due to human influences such as habitat destruction and hunting as a food resource or sale as pets, the Java Kantschil population was greatly reduced. This can be seen, among other things, from the decline in sightings between the 1970s and 1990s. The animals are prone to human hunting at night as they freeze when exposed to torch or headlights. Individuals, dead or alive, are regularly traded in the markets of various cities in Java. The IUCN lists the Java Kantschil in the category “insufficient data” ( data deficient ). This assessment takes into account that little information is available about the animals' way of life. This fact can be traced back to the little attention given to the small ungulates in scientific field studies. As a result, it is hardly possible to make any statements about how the individual threats affect the population. Another important point is the unclear taxonomy of the Java Kantschil and the related question of how many species occur on Java. The animals are present in several nature reserves, including the Gunung Gede-Pangrango National Park .

literature

  • Erik Meijaard: Family Tragulidae (Chevrotains). In: Don E. Wilson and Russell A. Mittermeier (Eds.): Handbook of the Mammals of World. Volume 2: Hooved Mammals. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona 2011, ISBN 978-84-96553-77-4 , pp. 320–334 (pp. 331–332)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Gerrit S. Miller: Descriptions of eleven new Malayan mouse deer. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 16, 1903, pp. 31-44 ( [1] )
  2. ↑ a b c L. J. Dobroruka: On the nomenclature and taxonomy of the Lesser mouse-deer of Java. Mammalia 31 (3), 1967, pp. 456-458
  3. ↑ a b c d e Erik Meijaard and Colin P. Groves: A taxonomic revision of the Tragulus mouse-deer (Artiodactyla). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 140 (1), 2004, pp. 63-102, doi: 10.1111 / j.1096-3642.2004.00091.x
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h Erik Meijaard: Family Tragulidae (Chevrotains). In: Don E. Wilson and Russell A. Mittermeier (Eds.): Handbook of the Mammals of World. Volume 2: Hooved Mammals. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona 2011, ISBN 978-84-96553-77-4 , pp. 320–334 (pp. 331–332)
  5. ^ A b J. W. Duckworth, R. Timmins and G. Semiadi: Tragulus javanicus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2015. e.T41780A61978138 ( [2] ), last accessed on July 24, 2020
  6. ↑ Wartika Rosa Farida, Lily Endang Setyorini and Gozali Sumaatmadja. Habitat dan Keragaman Tumbuhan Pakan Kancil (Tragulus javanicus) dan Kijang (Muntiacus muntjak) di Cagar Alam Nusakambangan Barat dan Timur. Biodiversitas 4 (2), 2003, pp. 97-102
  7. ↑ Alexandre Hassanin, Frédéric Delsuc, Anne Ropiquet, Catrin Hammer, Bettine Jansen van Vuuren, Conrad Matthee, Manuel Ruiz-Garcia, François Catzeflis, Veronika Areskoug, Trung Thanh Nguyen and Arnaud Couloux: Pattern and timing of diversification of Cetartiodactalia, Lauriala (Mammia ), as revealed by a comprehensive analysis of mitochondrial genomes. Comptes Rendus Palevol 335, 2012, pp. 32-50
  8. ↑ Juan P. Zurano, Felipe M. Magalhães, Ana E. Asato, Gabriel Silva, Claudio J. Bidau, Daniel O. Mesquita and Gabriel C. Costa: Cetartiodactyla: Updating a time-calibrated molecular phylogeny. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 133, 2019, pp. 256-262
  9. ↑ JJM Leinders and Erik Heintz: The configuration of the lacrimal orifices in Pecorans and Tragulids (Artiodactyla, Mammalia) and its significance for the distinction between Bovidae and Cervidae. Beaufortia 30 (7), 1980, pp. 155-160
  10. ^ Pehr Osbeck: Journey to East India and China. Rostock, 1765, pp. 1–552 (p. 357) ( [3] )
  11. ↑ Pehr Osbeck: Dagbok Öfver Ostindisk Resa Åren 1750, 1751, 1752. Stockholm, 1757, pp. 1–376 (p. 273) ( [4] )
  12. ↑ Peter Simon Pallas: Spicilegia zoologica: quibus novae imprimis et obscurae animalium species iconibus, descriptionibus atque commentariis illustrantur. Tomus 1. Berlin, 1774, chapter 12, p. 18 ( [5] )
  13. ^ Johann Friedrich Gmelin: Caroli a Linné, Systema Naturae per Regna Tria Naturae, secondum Classes, Ordines, Genera, Species. Tomus 1. Leipzig, 1788, pp. 1–500 (p. 174) ( [6] )
  14. ^ John Edward Gray: List of the specimens of Mammalia in the collection of the British Museum. London 1843, pp. 1–216, (p. 173) ( [7] )
  15. ↑ Richard Lydekker: Catalog of the ungulate mammals, Vol. IV. London, 1915, pp. 1–438 (pp. 268–280) ( [8] )
  16. ^ J. Lewis Bonhote: On three new races of Tragulus kanchil, Raffles, with remarks on the genus. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 7 (11), 1903, pp. 291-296 ( [9] )
  17. ^ Adriaan Cornelis Valentin van Bemmel: On the meaning of the name Cervus javanicus Osbeck 1765 (Tragulidae). Treubia 20, 1949, pp. 378-380
  18. ↑ Colin P. Groves and Peter Grubb: Ungulate Taxonomy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, pp. 1–317 (pp. 56–59)
  19. ^ Charles Hamilton Smith: The Ruminantia. In: E Griffit (Ed.): The animal kingdom by the Baron Cuvier. Volume IV London, 1827, p. 66 ( [10] )

Web links

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