Cape Town - South African scientists have found a blind mole with supersonic hearing thought to be extinct since 1936.
The rediscovered De Winton’s golden mole, which is from South Africa, is the 11th of the world’s most wanted lost species to be rediscovered since the Search for Lost Species launched in 2017.
The mole was found by a team of conservationists and geneticists from the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) and the University of Pretoria using eDNA, a technique that collects skin cells from living creatures as they move through the environment.
Esther Matthew, senior field officer at EWT, said the discovery of the mole was an exciting project with many challenges.
“Luckily, we had a fantastic team full of enthusiasm and innovative ideas. That is exactly what you need when you have to survey up to 18 kilometres of dune habitat in a day.”
EWT said golden moles have extremely sensitive hearing and can detect vibrations from movement above ground, which helps them avoid being seen from the surface. They also rarely leave tunnels behind that are visible from the surface as they move under the sand.
“Extracting DNA from soil is not without its challenges, but we have been honing our skills and refining our techniques—even before this project—and we were fairly confident that if De Winton’s golden mole was in the environment, we would be able to detect it by finding and sequencing its DNA,” said Samantha Mynhardt, conservation geneticist with the EWT and Stellenbosch University.
After collecting more than 100 soil samples in June 2021 from beaches and dunes on the northwest coast of South Africa—including Port Nolloth beach, the only place where De Winton’s golden mole had ever been found—and conducting a complex and comprehensive genetic analysis of each sample, the team determined that there were several species of golden mole living in the sand along the stretch of coast.
Cobus Theron, senior conservation manager for EWT, said, “Though many people doubted that De Winton’s golden mole was still out there, I had good faith that the species had not yet gone extinct. I was convinced it would just take the right detection method, the proper timing, and a team passionate about finding it.
“Now not only have we solved the riddle, but we have tapped into this eDNA frontier where there is a huge amount of opportunity not only for moles but for other lost or imperilled species.”