These notes accompany the online story Dwindle: a Tapir’s Tale. Read them in context (loosely) by going there, clicking and checking display tapir notes (or pressing the N key).
Tapirs are mammals that look a little like pigs with prehensile snouts. They live in South America and parts of Asia. They’re generally docile, solitary creatures that are active at dawn and dusk, foraging for plants to eat. All types of tapir are endangered; the woolly mountain tapir is the rarest species.
There are four species of tapir alive in the world today:
A new species of tapir, Tapirus kabomani, or “the little black tapir”, was proposed in 2013.
Here is the academic paper declaring the new species, published on 16 December 2013.
It may well be a distinct species. But it could turn out to be a juvenile version of lowland tapir — the authors of the paper provide specific claims as to why this is not the case, but it is disputed. Part of difficulty is that the business of categorising animals into distinct species — not just tapirs, but any animals — is often far from straightforward.
Here’s a (2018) analysis of the situation on the TetZoo blog.
Woolly mountain tapirs have shaggier fur than the other (short-haired) species.
They have a characteristic white mouth, and white tips to their ears, and two bald patches above their rump.
The woolly mountain tapir is the smallest of the four species of tapir. (Although the “fifth species”, the kabomani tapir, is smaller, that species has not yet been universally accepted).
An adult woolly mountain tapir is around 1.8 m long and can be up to 1m high at the shoulder.
The snout or proboscis of the tapir is very flexible. It is prehensile and can move in all directions.
The Malayan tapir has the longest snout of all the tapir species.
Baby tapirs of all species are born with camouflage markings of spots and stripes. These start to fade after about six months and are gone before the tapir is one year old.
Baby tapirs tend to be reddish brown. Like the spots and stripes, this colour also disappears as they grow into their adult appearance.
Tapirs can spray urine for distances greater than their own body length. If you’re going to stand near a tapir, it’s best not to stand directly behind it.
This special skill is used for marking territory.
Tapirs in captivity like to be groomed, brushed, or scratched.
Tapirs are generally quiet creatures, but when they communicate they use squeaks, whistles, clicks, and snorts.
Here’s video of a baby tapir making its first calls.
A paper by Hunsaker and Hahn investigates the calls of the lowland tapir in more detail. The abstract summarises four distinct vocalisations:
“A shrill fluctuating squeal was recorded during pain and fear responses. Exploratory behaviour was characterized by a sliding squeal of lower frequency and short duration. The functon of this call appears to keep members of the population in contact with one another. The third type of call was a clicking noise produced by the tongue and palate. It appears to be used for a species identifying characteristic. A snorting response was observed as a threat sound in aggressive behaviour during encounters with other animals.”
Tapirs are found in South America, with the exception of the Malayan tapir, which lives in South East Asia.
Tapirs are the only kind of animal with this particular distribution.
Woolly mountain tapirs are great seed distributors: they travel considerable distances and seeds that pass through their digestion are often still capable of germinating.
Tapirs like to defecate in water.
Dwindle’s enclosure is, for artistic effect, oppressively small. In the wild, tapirs have large territories so this is already inappropriate. Tapirs are good swimmers, so it’s usual to include water deep enough to swim in.
If you’re thinking of building your own tapir enclosure, see these recommendations on tapir husbandry (.doc file).
The tapir is an odd-toed ungulate.
Their closest relatives are the other odd-toed ungulates (Perissodactyla), which include horses, donkeys, zebras and rhinoceroses.
Dwindle’s sign, declaring that he is a “three-toed ungulate”, is misleading — the correct classifaction is odd, not three.
Although the tapir is an odd-toed ungulate, it has 14 toes. The front feet have four toes each (although the fourth toe is vestigial); the hind feet have three.
The first recorded tapir in captivity was in London Zoo, in 1828.
Tapir teeth are low-crowned (brachyodont), like human teeth.
Dental formula for tapirs:
3.1.4.3
3.1.3–4.3
The bite of a tapir is powerful, and when they are being aggressive, tapirs will use their bite as a weapon.
Although tapirs are basically docile herbivores, they are surprisingly strong and can behave aggressively if their offspring are threatened. One example is of a keeper whose arm was severed close to the bicep by a tapir in Oklahoma Zoo in 1998.
More recently, a toddler in a petting zoo in Dublin had her arm stripped to the bone by a mother tapir protecting her calf.
These cases are from a tiny sample size from an unnatural (that is, captive) population. However, the well-known (in tapir circles) account by Carlos Manuel Rodriguez Echandi, the former Costa Rican Minister of Environment and Energy, of an attack by tapir (also with young offspring) shows this aggressive protective behaviour can also occur in the wild.
For details, see this Scientific American blog post on tapir attacks.
Quite the opposite: it’s the norm. Current estimates are that over 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
Here’s a list of recently extinct mammals.
Yes, they certainly do. Whether that is the fate of Woolly Mountain Tapirs remains to be seen — but there are a number of factors that make it likely. Really an “endling” is the last known individual, so a species is more likely to end in captivity if it is hard to locate in the wild. A mountain tapir’s territory will often be large and inaccessible, and the tapir itself is solitary most of the time: all of which mean it’s likely that the very last wild individuals may never be found. Therefore, if the species does go extinct, the last known individual may well be in captivity.
For example, the last known quagga died in Artis Zoo in Amsterdam in 1883. The last known thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger) died in Hobart Zoo in 1936. The Tasmanian government, too little too late, had granted the species official protection 59 days earlier.
A species is extinct when none of its individuals are left alive. The difficulty, of course, is in knowing when this has happened.
For animals with a widely distributed population, it is very hard to know if other individuals may be surviving, undiscovered, somewhere. A period of 50 years with no further sightings has sometimes been considered as a necessary confirmation that a species is indeed extinct.
For example, the Japanese wolf is considered extinct: the last confirmed sighting was about 100 years ago.
Tapirs mate in or out of water. The male will sometimes bite during the act, and afterwards it’s not uncommon for the female to aggressively chase the male away.
Newborn woolly mountain tapirs weigh about 6kg. The mother gives birth standing up. The baby tapir arrives in the world with its eyes open, and is able to stand within an hour or two of being born. The eyes are initially blue, but turn brown as the tapir grows.
Baby tapirs are also very, very cute. Follow @babytapirs on Twitter.
The word endling has been suggested as the noun for the last surviving individual of a species — it’s not yet been accepted by the Oxford English dictionary. The word was proposed in the journal Nature. See this New Yorker article about “endling”.
For more on the topic of endlings and what can follow after the end of a species, read this thought-provoking piece by Elena Passarello, extracted from her book Animals Strike Curious Poses.
A passage in The Book of Mormon refers to horses being present in the New World despite there being no indigenous horses on that continent (the events described are long before horses were imported by the Spanish). Some Mormons have justified the anomaly by suggesting that where the word “horse” had been used, the text was actually referring to tapirs.
Tapirs aren’t suitable for hauling chariots (as implied by Joseph Smith’s writing in the Book of Mormon), or for riding.
In the story, Dwindle is a male tapir. This manifests in one place, here in his memory of being a baby tapir, when the keeper calls him “little fellow”.
Why does this matter? In other tapir stories it would have been fine to leave it unspecified, but for this project I felt that was not the case. The last living individual of a species can expect to have a different experience in captivity depending on gender. It’s likely that a female would be subject to urgent, desperate (from a species point of view) programmes of artificial insemination. In an anthropomorphic tale, this would be a hard experience to ignore, and would plainly direct what that individual thought her “legacy” could be.
Also, I wanted the tapir in the story to be naively unaware — until the crow reads the sign out at the start of the story — of its “situation”. For the same reason as above, that‘s most plausibly the case if the tapir is male.
Luckily for Malayan tapirs, their meat is considered taboo by Muslims because they look a bit like pigs.
In 2012, Rinny (a Malayan tapir) escaped from her inner enclosure in Denver zoo for five minutes. Here’s the story in the Denver Post, or again from CBS Denver. Basically, Rinny got out, ran around a little, and then was back in the enclosure.
Rinny’s adventure is nothing compared to Stanley the tapir over in Niagra Falls. He got out and was on the run for two weeks (presumably — and there is no proof for this — aided by crow accomplices). See this report in the Niagra Falls Review or this one in the Ottawa Citizen.
Several decades earlier, Trudy (another Malayan tapir) got out of her zoo in San Diego for a few days: see the zoo’s information page which includes stories about both her escapes.
According to this BBC report, “In 1851 a tapir broke out of its den at Wombwell's menagerie in Rochdale, causing panic among the spectators.”
Male tapirs have remarkably long penises in terms of their body size.
In Dwindle’s story the gender of the protagonist is mostly a distraction so the style of illustration has abstracted tapir genitalia away (as well as, more significantly perhaps, the characteristic line of the rear legs/hocks).
Tapirs’ perilous status is primarily due to human intervention. They’re hunted for their meat and skins (and, sometimes, for traditional medicine). But they are also affected by the destruction of their habitat, often due to deforestation (either for logging, or for palm oil plantations). Roads dissect the cloud forests, and tapir roadkill is such a problem that conservationists have attempted capturing wild tapirs, placing reflective collars on them, and releasing them.
Tapir reproduction cycles are generally slow, so casualties within a small population have a significant effect.
Tapirs, both male and female, reach sexual maturity after around two years.
Tapirs in the wild live mostly solitary lives, but of course meet to mate. Gestation lasts thirteen months to produce a solitary calf. (Twins are possible, but very rare).
A total of 27 tick species have been reported infesting New World tapirs (“tapirs are very significant hosts for the Neotropical tick fauna”).
A paper by Labruna and Guglielmone reports on an impressive piece of work picking ticks off tapirs. The woolly mountain tapir was only hosting two types of tick (although this may be influenced by the small sample size of woolly mountain tapirs in the study).
Baby tapirs generally shelter alone while the mother forages. After about a week, they start to venture out, following the mother.
Juveniles remain with their mother for the first 10 months. Typically they’ll leave and make their own way in the world some time before the second year is out.
A tapir mother will actively chase away weaned offspring if they are still around when she has the next calf.
When Carl Linnaeus encountered his first tapir (specifically, the lowland tapir) he named it Hippopotamus terrestris — the terrestrial hippo.
The name was changed to Tapirus by French zoologist Mathurin Brisson.
In Japan, baku are mythical tapir-like creatures who eat bad dreams.
The crow is being disingenuous when reporting only one name of the tapir.
Tapirs are sometimes called gardeners of the forest because of the role they play distributing plant seeds around via their dung. That each tapir’s territory is large makes them especially good distributors.
The wax palm (Ceroxylon quindiuense) is particularly dependent on the woolly mountain tapir for its seed dispersal.
Tapirs appear in the video games Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4, which the player can hunt. Tapir hides can be used (in the game) to increase carrying capacity by creating rucksacks, quivers or ammunition pouches.
Tapirs have versatile teeth for their vegetarian diet. They chomp fruit and nibble twigs and bite berries, but they can also graze grasses with their incisors (like horses do).
The difficulty of being certain that the last individual of a species has died means sometimes living individuals of a species declared extinct are found alive. This rediscovery is an example of a Lazarus taxon, that is, a taxon that is effectively brought back from the dead.
Perhaps the best-known example of a species that was thought to have been extinct but was subsequently rediscovered, is the coelacanth, which was believed to have become extinct 66 million years ago.
See also zombie taxon (whereby a species is discovered to have existed after it was believed to be extinct, such as in a more recent epoch, but nonetheless remains extinct), and the fabulously-named Elvis taxon (where an extinct species is replaced by a subsequently-evolved impersonator).
The woolly mountain tapir’s scientific name comes from “La Pinchaque”, an imaginary creature from the same region as the tapir.
Tapirs often exhibit the flehmen response: the tapir lifts its snout up and exposes its gums to detect scents. Males will often do this to detect signs of other males or females in oestrus in the area.
Other ungulates such as horses do this, as well as some felides including tigers and even domestic cats.
Tapirs appear in the opening shots of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in scenes of primitive Earth), albeit not in a starring role.
Baird’s tapir (not the woolly mountain tapir) is the national animal of Belize, where it’s known as the “mountain cow”.
Tapirs tend to zig-zag their way forward, with their snouts down to the ground.
Tapirs can swim well, and use their snouts as snorkels. They also trot along riverbeds fully submerged, and can hold their breath for up to 90 seconds.
Tapir ears are rounded and white-tipped. They have a strong sense of hearing.
Woolly mountain tapir’s scientific classification: (links to Wikipedia)
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Perissodactyla
Family: Tapiridae
Genus: Tapirus
Species: Tapirus pinchaque
Tapirs have poor eyesight.
Their eyes, in common with many herbivores, are set far apart on either side of their heads. This is a classic example of monocular vision — meaning that they have a very wide field of vision, at the expense of precise depth perception (compared with the binocular vision of creatures — like you — with eyes on the front of their heads).
Tapirs in captivity usually live for 25–30 years.
The primary threat to tapirs is, of course, human. But they have some natural predators too.
The specific predators tapirs face depend on what kind of tapir they are, and hence the fauna in their habitat. Woolly mountain tapirs live at relatively high altitudes, so large cats (such as puma) are probably the main (non-human) threat. Tapirs living in lowland environments may be preyed upon by jaguars, pumas, anacondas, crocodiles and (in Asia) tigers.
Tapirs are relatively large mammals so are too large for many predators to bring down. Their bulk, and their tough hides, offer protection against claws and bites. But they can also run surprisingly fast, and swim well — so can escape or shake off a determined attacker by running through undergrowth or diving into water.
Tapirs crave salt and in the wild will seek out natural salt licks. Consequently these can be good places to set camera traps when monitoring tapir populations.
Salt licks are also useful for eating clay to help with the digestion of potentially poisonous plants.
“Mango and Bambang” is a series of children’s books about Mango Allsorts and her tapir friend Bambang, written by Polly Faber and illustrated by Clara Vulliamy. See Mango and Bambang on Goodreads.
When fully grown, female tapirs are larger than male tapirs.
The doctor in young children’s book A Day With the Animal Doctors, by Sharon Rentta, is a tapir in a white coat (with a baby tapir assistant).
Mayo is a young mountain tapir, rescued from illegal trade and taken to southern Colombia’s Cali zoo for recovery early in 2015.
Some excellent photographs of Mayo are available at the Tapir Gallery. See also this article by the Tapir Preservation Fund.
The 2016 StudioCanal animated film Robinson Crusoe (released in the US as The Wild Life) features a tapir character called Rosie, voiced by Ilka Bessin as Cindy aus Marzahn.
A tapir also appears in the feature-length animation Rio 2. Here is the tapir’s audition.
In June 2016, a Malayan tapir was spotted on the roads of Singapore. Its origin isn’t certain. It almost certainly swam over from Malaysia. This was the first time a tapir had been sighted on Singapore (outside of the zoo) for thirty years.
Some tapirs have short, bristly manes: Baird’s tapir and the lowland tapir (and the Kabomani tapir).
Tapirs were once widely distributed. Fossil evidence has been found in regions of the world where tapirs are no longer found: in China, North America, and Europe. The remaining distribution — that is, in South and Central America, with a single species in Asia — is unique to tapirs.
According to the IUCN, there are 1,500 to 2,000 Malayan tapirs in Malaysia.
Tapir polkensis, which lived about five million years ago (late Miocene age), was about the size of a domestic sheep. The scientific name comes from Polk County, Florida, where the fossil evidence for pygmy tapirs was found.
For more extinct tapirs, see World Tapir Day’s list of “other species”.
Megatapirus augustus, the giant tapir, roamed the Earth up until around 4,000 years ago. Fossil evidence in southern China. It was considerably bigger than today’s tapirs — about 2.1 metres long, and probably weighing around 500Kg.
For more extinct tapirs, see World Tapir Day’s list of “other species”.
Really ancient. Fossil evidence from the early Miocene Epoch around 20 million years ago shows tapirs virtually identical to modern tapirs were living in North America.
For context, the modern horse’s most recent common ancestor dates back around 7 million years, although many species of equus are more recent than that.
The earliest fossil record of tapirs belong to the Early Oligocene/Early Miocene up to 33 million years ago. Fossils have been found in North America and Europe.
For more extinct tapirs, see World Tapir Day’s list of “other species”.
The extinct tapir Tapirus californicus died out at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 BC.
For more extinct tapirs, see World Tapir Day’s list of “other species”.
HMS Tapir (P335) was a British T class submarine, launched in 1944 (that is, close to the end of World War II). Subsequently, the boat was commissioned in the Dutch navy for five years under the name "Zeehond" (which means seal, not tapir).
HMS Tapir was scrapped in 1966.
Hybrids of the Baird’s and the Brazilian tapirs were bred at the San Francisco Zoo in 1969.
Portuguese tapir, tapira, from Tupi tapiíra.
First known use: 1774.
Source: Merriam-Webster.
Ungulates walk on the terminal bones of the toes that end in hooves, which are in fact enlarged toenails. Tapirs (like rhinos) walk on three such hooves, unlike horses which now walk on one.
Today there are only about seventeen species of odd-toed ungulates; there used to be many more.
Tapirs are herbivores who digest their food with hindgut fermentation. They have an active cecum in which bacteria break down food at the start.
This is different from foregut fermentation, such as that used by cattle or sheep, where the bacteria breaks down food at the start of the digestion process.
From the CITES guidelines for the non-air transport of live wild animals:
Tapirs may be transported loose in trucks, trailers or rail cars. Trucks, trailers and rail cars must meet the minimum requirements for container construction regarding strength, stability, safety, and size.
Tapirs may not be shipped together in groups if they:
This shall not apply to animals from proven compatible groups, animals that are accustomed to each other, animals where separation will cause distress, or females accompanied by dependent young.
Tapirs are mentioned in the Futurama episode Love and Rockets:
“Bender is a lone wolf. A solitary eagle. A cuddly baby tapir!”
English – Mountain Tapir, Woolly Tapir, Andean Tapir
Spanish – Danta de Montaña, Danta Cordillerana, Danta de Páramo, Danta Lanuda, Danta Negra, Gran Bestia, Pinchaque, Tapir Andino
French – Tapir des Andes, Tapir pinchaque
The population of mountain tapirs is estimated to be falling more than 50% in the past 3 generations (33 years). Furthermore the causes of population decline have not ceased and are inferred to be greater than 50% decline in the next 3 generations (33 years).
A woolly mountain tapir “generation” is considered to be around 11 years, since they are relatively long-lived animals and breed slowly (that is, normal gestation is for 13 months to produce a single calf).
The woolly mountain tapir is classified “Endangered” because the best available evidence indicates that it is facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild.
See the IUCN Red List categories and criteria.
The definitions of the IUCN’s Red List statuses are, by necessity, not simple. But without deliberate intervention to save the species, the prognosis for the woolly mountain tapir is from (currently) “Endangered” → “Critically Endangered” → “Extinct in the wild”.
The lower elevation limit for woolly mountain tapirs is 1,400m.
That’s higher than the highest mountain in the UK.
As of 2017, only four sites hold woolly mountain tapirs in captivity:
There are no woolly mountain tapirs in any zoos in Europe or Asia.
In 2007, Malayan tapir twins were born in the captive breeding programme in Sungai Dusun, Malaysia: the world’s first tapir twins to be born in captivity.
Baby tapirs move from milk onto grass and seed — the start of their entirely vegetarian diet — when they are around six months old.
Tapirs are herbivores, and typically eat grasses, aquatic plants, leaves, buds, soft twigs and the fruits of low-growing shrubs.
A tapir can eat up to 75 pounds (34 kilograms) of food per day.
Tapirs in captivity seem to be especially fond of bananas.
One of the problems facing tapirs is that their populations are fragmented, with no opportunities for these separate populations to connect. The lowland tapir is the species with the broadest range.
The woolly mountain tapir is only found in certain parts of the Andean regions of Columbia, Ecuador and Peru.
The tail of a tapir is short (around four inches long) and stubby.