And now there are two striped rabbits

Science News, August 21, 1999 by S. Milius

A new species of rabbit, with bold stripes and a reddish rump, has turned up in the Annamite mountains on the border between Laos and Vietnam.

The creature looks much like the world's only other known striped rabbit, Nesolagus netscheri from Sumatra, report Alison K. Surridge of the University of East Anglia in England and her colleagues. Yet a genetic comparison of hundred-year-old museum specimens of the Sumatran animal with Annamite rabbits killed by hunters reveals separate taxonomic groups. They diverged some 8 million years ago, the researchers say in the Aug. 19 NATURE.

Scientists first suspected a second striped species when they spotted unusual carcasses in the food market of a Laotian village in 1995. Recently, an automatic camera in Vietnam's Pu Mat Nature Reserve snapped a live rabbit.

The camera also recorded many human feet, notes coauthor Diana J. Bell, also from East Anglia. She frets that increased hunting threatens the species. "It's not a happy story," she says.

Scientists once feared that the Sumatran rabbit had gone extinct. However, a motion-triggered camera found one very much alive and surprised in 1998.

Bell is tantalized by the evolutionary questions the elusive animals raise. For example, the Sumatran rabbit carries an extremely unusual flea species. "We're waiting with bated breath to find a new rabbit with fleas," she says.

In the past decade, the Annamite area has yielded stunning finds--the deerlike giant muntjac, the bovine saola, the Vietnam warty pig--notes Joshua Ginsberg of the Asia Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. He rejoices that "there are a few places left that are still truly wild."