Does the world’s smallest deer live in Peru?

South American biologists have described a “new” species of pudu, the first living member of the deer family described in the Americas for more than 60 years.

Northern Pudu (Pudu Mephisto File) is known as the world’s smallest deer, with an adult standing just over 30 centimeters tall at the shoulder, and is found in the Andes Mountains of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

Professor Guillermo Delia of the Australasian University of Chile (UACh) in Valdivia, Chile, explains this in a 2024 paper published in an international journal. Mammal Journal) with him By examining specific structural features of both and assessing genetic variation, his co-authors showed that the northern pudu is actually two distinct species.

Researchers said one species of northern pudu was found in Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru north of the Huancabamba depression in Peru, and another species was found in Peru south of the depression and is now named . Pudera Carlae.

Pudus serve a valuable ecological niche, serving as a food source for predators and dispersing plant seeds, Delia said.

“Pudus are herbivores of leaves, shoots, fruits, and flowers. It is certainly through these actions that they disperse seeds and form understory structures,” he says. In this way, their behavior and presence modulate or are related to different ecological processes. ”

From Uruguay to Chile

Born and raised in the South American country of Uruguay, Delia has always been in touch with the natural world, the countryside, the sea, plants and animals.

“I always loved and was curious about that world, but I was also interested in geography and history. It definitely influenced my decision to study biology in my last few years of high school. “I had a great biology teacher,” he says.

Delia earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of the Republic (UdelaR) in Montevideo, then her PhD in biology from the University of Michigan in the United States, and began working in Chile in 2005. Currently based.

“Knowledge knows no borders,” he said, adding that while some inequalities in the world are obvious, others are more subtle.

“Knowledge production cannot escape these global trends,” says Delia. “The best scientific infrastructure is in the North, the most influential journals are published there, and most research trends, not to mention hegemony, come from there” in English. “

Nevertheless, he explains that taxonomic and systematic studies of South American mammals have been carried out primarily by colleagues based in the subcontinent.

“This is not the reality in other parts of the Global South, such as Africa, where research continues to be carried out primarily by colleagues from the Global North, for example Europe,” D’Elia says.

Preserving Argentina’s adorable “living fossils”

Elsewhere in South America, Micaela Camino, a researcher at the National Council for Research and Technology (CONICET) and director of Project Chimirero, is focusing on the conservation of the Chacoan peccary (Catagonas Wagneri) and their habitats in the long term, while contributing to improving the well-being of local communities.

The Chacoan peccary, first discovered as a fossil and rediscovered in 1972, is classified as endangered by the IUCN.

“Previous research has shown that protected areas are insufficient, fragmented and too small to protect endangered and endemic species such as the Chacoan peccary, and current rates and patterns of deforestation “We now know that this species will become extinct in the wild before 2051,” she says, adding that if the dogs are properly managed and hunted, local people, including the indigenous Witi and Criollo people, will hunt peccaries. He added that they can coexist with each other.

In a paper published in 2023, Changes in the global environmentCamino and her team created the first maps of indigenous lands for the Dry Chaco and found that where indigenous peoples have recognized land rights, those areas act as barriers to deforestation. I discovered that there is. At least 44% of the remaining forests are in these areas.