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What's in a name? Common name misuse potentially confounds the conservation of the wild camel Camelus ferus
ANNA M. J EMMETT,J IM J. GRO OMB R I D G E ,JOHN HARE,ADIY A YAD AMSU R E N PAMELA A. B URGER and JOHN G. EWEN
Abstract Common names allow species diversity to be acknowledged by experts and non-specialists alike; they are descriptors with both scientific and cultural implica- tions. However, a lack of clarity when using a common name could risk altering perceptions of threatened species. This is the case for the Critically Endangered wild camel Camelus ferus, which, despite extensive evidence of its species status, is frequently referred to in English as wild Bactrian camel. However, the wild camel (Mongolian: хавтгай, khavtgai; Chinese:野骆驼, ye luo tuo) is not a wild version of the domestic Bactrian camel Camelus bactrianus but a separate species near extinction, with an estimated population of c. 950. Failure to clearly separate Bactrian and wild camels in name risks masking the plight of the few remaining wild camels with the visible abundance of the domesticated species. Here we advocate the use of the accurate English common name wild camel for C. ferus ideally alongside its Indigenous names to correctly represent its cultural and conservation importance.
Keywords Camelus ferus, common name, conservation, wild camel
Introduction
camels Camelus dromedaries and Bactrian camels Camelus bactrianus were used by these armies, the Romans did not deem it necessary to distinguish between the two species
T ANNA M. JEMMETT*† (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0002-4696-
8266,
amj36@kent.ac.uk), JIM J. GROOMBRIDGE,JOHN HARE* and JOHN G. EWEN‡ Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NZ, UK
ADIYAYADAMSUREN Wild Camel Protection Foundation, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia
PAMELA A. BURGER Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
*Also at: Wild Camel Protection Foundation, Benenden, UK †Also at: Wild Camel Protection Foundation, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia ‡Also at: Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK
Received 25 May 2021. Revision requested 27 October 2021. Accepted 27 January 2022. First published online 22 June 2022.
he Roman Empire’s camel-riding armed forces were named the Dromedarii. Although both dromedary
(Nefedkin, 2012; Tomczak, 2016). It could be that the Romans did not need to distinguish between one-humped and two-humped camels as they performed similarly in war. Descriptions of camels from Pliny the Elder and Aristotle (Bostock&Riley, 1855) portray their similar tempera- ment and endurance in contrast to that of the horse (one of the roles of the Dromedarii was to counter enemy cavalry). Even today, the global database for livestock (FAOSTAT, undated) does not distinguish between domesticated one- and two-humped camels (Faye, 2020). However, failing to distinguish the two species of two-humped camels could have conservation ramifications given that one is at risk of extinction.
Camel evolution and distribution
After dispersing from the North American continent to Eurasia, the ancestors of modern camelids diverged into the New World camels, Lamini, which include the llama Lama glama, alpaca Vicugna pacos, vicuña Vicugna vicugna and guanaco Lama guanicoe, and the Old World camels, Camelini (Burger et al., 2019). There are three species of Old World camels: the one-humped domestic dromedary Camelus dromedarius, the two-humped domestic Bactrian camel Camelus bactrianus (the species that the Romans came into contact with first; Nefedkin, 2012) and the Critically Endangered two-humped wild camel Camelus ferus (Mongolian: хавтгай, khavtgai; Chinese: 野骆驼, ye luo tuo; Hare, 2008; Fig. 1). The one- and two-humped camels are estimated to have diverged c. 4.4 (CI 1.9–7.2) million years ago (Wu et al., 2014). Divergence estimates for the wild camel and Bactrian camel vary depending on whether maternal or paternal DNA is used but range from 0.7 (Ji et al., 2009)to 1.1 (CI 0.6–1.8) million years ago (Mohandesan et al., 2017) from mitochondrial studies to c. 27,000 years ago based on the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (Felkel et al., 2019). The Bactrian camel is monophyletic (Ji et al., 2009) and so originated from one wild population, with a single domestication pro- cess having occurred c. 4,000–6,000 years ago (Burger et al., 2019), leaving no wild C. bactrianus population, which is similar to the domestication process of the dromedary (Almathen et al., 2016) or the horse (Gaunitz et al., 2018).
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2023, 57(2), 175–179 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605322000114
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