The Bornean ferret badger is a small carnivore with the slinky body of a ferret and a face mask like a badger. A new study confirms that it lives only in the mountains of Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo.
Ferret badgers are nocturnal carnivores, widespread across Southeast Asia, but the Bornean ferret badger (Melogale everetti) lives only in a narrow mountain range on the island of Borneo. A group of researchers from the Bornean Carnivore Programme, part of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), Sabah Forestry Department, and Sabah Parks set out to understand the Bornean ferret-badger’s distribution within Sabah.
Between 2021 and 2024, the research team set up 188 camera-trap stations across Sabah’s western highlands and recorded the badgers more than 400 times, discovering a new population in the process. The new population in the Nuluhon-Trusmadi Forest Reserve of Malaysian Borneo, expanded the known range of the species, but photo-traps and habitat modeling showed that Bornean ferret badgers are only found within the greater Sabah’s Kinabalu-Crocker-Trusmadi mountain landscape.
“I grew up in Tambunan and had never seen or even heard of the Bornean ferret badger,” said Mohammad Aliyuddin bin Jaini, field manager of the Bornean Carnivore Programme in a press release. “I decided to place some camera traps around my family’s farm simply to see what wildlife might be there, and I was amazed when a Bornean ferret badger appeared in the photographs. To discover that an Endangered species found only in Sabah was living right on our doorstep was a special moment.”
The researchers propose using the common name Kinabalu ferret badger, after its core range on Mount Kinabalu, to help people realize how special the species is. “[N]ames can play an important role in shaping how people perceive a species and their connection to it,” lead author of the study Andrew Hearn told Mongabay in an email.
“Several of these communities already have small-scale ecotourism initiatives, and we would like to explore whether the ferret badger could become an additional attraction for wildlife enthusiasts,” Hearn said. “If local communities can derive benefits from protecting the species, that could provide a powerful incentive for its long-term conservation.”
Benoit Goossens, an expert on Bornean wildlife who was not involved with the study, told Mongabay in an email that refining the habitat map for Bornean ferret badgers is crucial for their conservation.
“In a rapidly changing landscape where forests continue to face pressures from development and climate change, knowing where the species lives is the first step toward ensuring its long-term survival,” Goossens said.
Banner image: A Bornean ferret badger. Image courtesy of Surinkumar via iNaturalist. (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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