Naturalists Try to Save Endangered Tagua, Once Thought to Be Extinct

Jakob and Maria Unger rise early each morning to feed the pigs, just like farmers all over the world.

But the Ungers’ 25 grunting, stiff-bristled charges are tagua, an endangered and little-known species of peccary, wild piglike mammals with sharp tusks and porklike flesh prized by jaguars, pumas and humans.

Also known as the giant Chaco peccary, the tagua was thought to have been extinct for 15,000 years, until accidentally discovered alive and well in the 1970s in the dense thorn forest of South America’s sparsely populated Chaco region, shared by Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.

Never numerous, the species’ population began to plummet a decade ago for reasons not entirely clear, although scientists largely blame poaching and encroaching civilization.

The Ungers, Paraguayan descendants of German Mennonite colonists, manage Project Tagua, a research and captive breeding effort funded by the San Diego Zoo in California with support from the Lincoln Park Zoo in Illinois and the U.S. Foundation for Endangered Animals.

Begun in 1985 by San Diego Zoological Society Trustee Kurt Benirschke, the project seeks to learn the animal’s habits, food preferences and family life and to serve as a nucleus for future release into protected Paraguayan parks.

“Man represents the principal danger to the tagua,” Unger, 37, said at his project home, a remodeled missionary school 22 miles by dirt road from Filadelfia, a farming community founded by Mennonite colonists in the 1930s.

“On the other hand, man can be the principal support for preservation of the species,” added Unger, an outdoorsman, naturalist and construction expert.

The tagua is one of three species of Western Hemisphere peccary. Its cousins, the collared and white-lipped species, found from Arizona and southern Mexico south to Argentina, are not endangered.

An adult tagua weighs close to 100 pounds and is not only tasty but “easy to kill due to its natural curiosity and lack of aggressiveness,” Unger said.

By contrast, the other two species either flee or attack when confronted by danger and “if you encounter a herd of white-lipped peccary, which can number up to 200, you had better be able to run fast or fly,” Unger said.

Thousands of acres of the tagua’s impenetrable forest habitat are being bulldozed for pastureland and fields and pierced by roads as agriculture expands into the Chaco, where temperatures range from near freezing in winter to 113 degrees Fahrenheit in summer.

Unger, who has logged 8,750 miles by four-wheel drive vehicle to track taguas, believes recent increases in the numbers of jaguar and puma, also has affected the species.

“Hunting the big cats was a profitable business from the 1950s through the ‘70s,” he said. “A farmer could earn as much from a single jaguar pelt as he made all year on his small farm.”

“Now many developed countries have banned importation of big cat skins, hunting has declined and the cats are coming back and feeding on their natural prey, the tagua.”

Unger estimates the number of tagua at 3,000 to 4,000, with the largest concentrations occurring on ranches where cattlemen control the cat population.

The tagua’s discovery in 1972 caused a stir among scientists, who believed South America’s large mammals had all been identified long ago.

Ralph Wetzel, a U.S. zoologist studying armadillos, is credited with the discovery. He found a skull, clearly belonging to neither the collared or white-lipped species, but similar to fossil remains dating from the Pleistocene Epoch, when much of the Earth was covered by glaciers.

By 1975 a sizable population of tagua had been found, and scientists already feared that poaching and habitat loss could wipe out the species before it could even be studied.

Benirschke obtained 18 acres of land from a cattle ranch to start the project in 1985.

Nearby lie cemeteries, collapsed trenches and command posts dating from the 1932-35 Chaco War, fought by Paraguay and Bolivia for control of the Chaco.

Wildlife abounds. South American ostrich feed in cow pastures, eagles and hawks perch in tall thorn trees, and armadillos scamper across rutted tracks.

Researchers, aided by U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, began buying baby tagua from local hunters and Indians to stock the project.

The first captive birth was recorded in 1988, and since then, 31 tagua have been born in captivity, but more than half died of pneumonia at early age.

“We haven’t been able to find the cause,” Unger said, adding that a possible cause could be that the mothers, all raised in captivity, never learned how to care for their young.

Unger hopes the San Diego Zoo will approve proposed expansion of the project with the purchase of 880 acres more.

“It would give us badly needed space and allow us to raise the animals under much more natural conditions,” he said.