Endangered
Malayan tapir
Tapirus indicus
The Malayan tapir is the only living tapir species outside of the Americas.
Appearance
The Malayan tapir is easily identified by its markings, most notably the light-colored patch that extends from its shoulders to its hindquarters. Black hair covers its head, shoulders, and legs, while white hair covers its midsection, rear, and the tips of its ears. These white edges around the rims of the outer ear as is true of other tapirs. The disrupted coloration breaks up its outline, providing camouflage by making the animal difficult to recognize against the varied terrain and dense flora of its habitat. Potential predators may mistake it for a large rock, rather than prey, when it is lying down to sleep.
The Malayan tapir is the largest of the four extant tapir species and grows to between 1.8 and 2.5 m (5 ft 11 in and 8 ft 2 in) in length, not counting a stubby tail of only 5 to 10 cm (2.0 to 3.9 in) in length, and stands 90 to 110 cm (2 ft 11 in to 3 ft 7 in) tall.
Range and habitat
The Malayan tapir lives throughout primary and secondary lowland tropical forests of Southeast Asia, among them Sumatra in Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Pleistocene fossils were found in Java and other locations accompanied by herbivores more typical of grasslands, indicating that it evolved in more open habitats and retreated to closed forests in later times. It was found in Borneo until at least 8,000 years ago during the early Holocene in the Niah Caves of Sarawak, and some 19th century writers mentioned it as a contemporary species in Borneo, likely based on native accounts.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Malayan tapirs are primarily solitary, marking out large tracts of land as their territory, though these areas usually overlap with those of other individuals. Tapirs are mainly active at night, though they are not exclusively nocturnal. Because they tend to eat soon after sunset or before sunrise, and they will often nap in the middle of the night, they are considered to be crepuscular animals.
In crisis
It has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2008, as the population is estimated to comprise fewer than 2,500 mature individuals. The main threats to the Malayan tapir are loss and destruction of habitat through deforestation.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Malayan tapir is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Malayan tapir, Wikidata item Q192710. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
