Rare Pig Species in Indonesia Likely to Enter Endangered List

The Indonesian island called Bawean had been confirmed by scientists to have a population of fewer than 250 mature Bawean warty pigs. This makes the said pig species one of the rarest in the world.

According to a new study published in PLOS One, a journal composed of worldwide community researchers, Bawean warty pigs or Sus blouchi were found only on the island of Bawean in the Java sea. Female Bawean warty pigs have a resemblance to wild boars. Its male species, however, have three pairs of large warts and golden hair fanning out from the sides of their head.

Previously, most details about this pig species' appearance and behaviour had been anecdotal. To get an estimate of the Bawean warty pigs population that inhabited the island, Mark Rademaker, a student at VHL University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands installed camera traps in 100 locations all over the island between November 2014 and January 2015, according to a feature from National Geographic.

The Indonesian island camera traps recorded videos of Bawean warty pigs on the island for the weeks that came. The camera traps had captured the first-ever footages of the elusive pigs. Overall, the team estimated that the area was home to a population of 172 to 377  pigs. And this likely made this specie the rarest one in the world. With such a small population, the author insisted that the Bawean warty pig be listed as an endangered specie in Indonesia under the IUCN Red List. 

The Bawean was a small island with a land mass less than 200 square kilometers and there were people living on it as well, around 90,000. The forest that was left on Bawean was almost all in the five protected parts of the island, which only totaled around 46 square kilometers.

The Indonesian island had limited forest cover, so the pigs regularly came out at night and foraged in the agricultural fields. They mostly lived on nutrient-rich food such as tubers and roots, Discovery reported.