What Habitats Owe To The Under-celebrated Peccary

When people think of the Amazon rainforest, they likely think of roaring jaguars, jumping monkeys, marching ants, and squeezing anacondas. The humble peccary would hardly be among the first animals to cross their mind, if they even know such pig-like animals exists! Yet new research on the peccary is proving just how vital these species are to the world’s greatest rainforest. As seed dispersers and seed destroyers, engineers of freshwater habitats and forest gaps, peccaries play an immense, long overlooked, role in the rainforest.

“Peccaries have the highest density and biomass of any Neotropical mammal species. Obviously these fellows have quite an appetite for almost anything, but primarily they consume fruits and seeds. Their specialized jaws allow them to crush very hard seeds. The cracking sounds can be heard through the thick vegetation long before we could see them. As peccary herds bulldoze through the leaf litter in search for insects, frogs, seeds, and fruits, they destroy (i.e. snap and trample) many seedlings and saplings, sometimes leaving only the bare ground behind,” Harald Beck, assistant professor at Towson University in Maryland, told mongabay.com in an interview. While such a description makes peccaries sound wholly destructive, Beck has identified that the species are closely linked to the survival of a wide-variety of tropical species from frogs to insects to plants. Beck says that his research shows that peccaries are ‘ecosystem engineers’, like more widely known species such as beavers.

Dr. Harald Beck with a baby white-lipped peccary. Photo courtesy of Harald Beck.

“In a nutshell, ecosystem engineers are species that physically create or modify existing environments, thereby changing the availability of resources for other species. […] Everybody knows at least one species that functions as ecosystem engineer: us—we, humans, are the ‘master’ in changing the environment. Every time a tropical rainforest is converted into a highway, we can see the immediate negative effects on species abundance and diversity. Classic examples of ecosystem engineers are beavers and corals.”

Much in the way that beaver dams shape an environment by providing new space for some animals, Beck has found evidence that peccary wallows provide a stable ecosystem for a wide variety of species. For example, these wallows, which are maintained for years—sometimes decades—by big peccary groups, contained higher density of tadpoles and frogs than natural ponds. Beck also found that the wallows were used by a wide-variety fauna: “numerous aquatic insects (e.g. beetles, dragonflies, mosquito larvae, and even a semi-aquatic cricket!), and spiders that glide across the water surface and hunt prey. We also found mussels, at least nine different species of fish, and two species of snakes. This year we installed motion-triggered cameras and captured bats skimming across the water surface.”

Beck and other researchers are in the process of deciphering just how many species are dependent on these wallows for survival. To date he has recorded ten frog species that depend on wallows either for breeding or foraging.

However, not only do peccaries create stable habitat for other fauna, they also play a major role in the structure of the forest. According to Beck, peccaries consume 250 different kinds of fruits, destroying 150 of these in the act of consumption.

“These are two world records and no other tropical mammal even comes close to these numbers. But what does that mean in the big picture? Well! Clearly peccaries play an ecologically critical role as seed predator by being able to prey on small seeds (e.g. Ficus) to very hard seeds (e.g. Mauritius palm). Peccaries prevent common plant species from taking over and outcompeting rare species,” Beck says. By also spreading 50 different types of seeds, peccaries are thought to “play critical non-redundant roles (no other species could substitute their roles) as seed predators and dispersers, meaning that in forests where peccaries have become extinct, the plant species composition changed dramatically.”

A collared peccary. Photo courtesy of Harald Beck.

Of all the species in the Amazon, none is probably hunted so widely and so vehemently as the peccary. Add this to the ongoing problem of deforestation and peccaries have seen precipitous declines in their population and their range. As Beck points out, many Neotropical forests have already been emptied of peccary. Yet if the loss of peccaries sends such ripples through the forest ecosystem, why is their conservation not a priority?

Beck blames it on the politics of conservation, where a big cat like the jaguar is a much more attractive ‘keystone’ species of rainforest ecosystems than the lowly peccary. Yet, as Beck points out jaguars can survive in greater human-impacted habitats than white-lipped peccaries. In other words, if we only save jaguars we won’t save the less noble yet just as important peccary.

“I believe that we need to raise awareness of the ‘Peccary Dilemma’ by conveying ecological information much more effectively to the general public, policy-makers, and resource managers. We need to develop partnerships with the media, governmental agencies, NGOs, and private foundations to secure sufficient resources and develop realistic conservation strategies,” says Beck.

In a September 2010 interview with mongabay.com Harald Beck spoke about the importance of peccaries as ‘ecosystem engineers’, their role in seed dispersal and destruction, and the threats, including being long overlooked, to the conservation of abundant peccary populations.
Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0920-hance_beck.html#eex3trFdrHoFGZhZ.99