The blue wildebeest: incongruously straddling the 19th and 21st centuries

Everyone knows that the blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) looks incongruous: part buffalo, part cow, part antelope, and part clown. And everyone who has hunted it knows that it is incongruously tough: where it takes one bullet to drop a hartebeest, it takes three before the deceptively spindly legs buckle under a blue wildebeest.

But what few may realise is that - owing to a particular comedy of errors - the blue wildebeest is also chronologically incongruous. Part of it has remained pre-Great Trek, while for another part the Future has arrived with a bang.

At the beginning, the big game of southern Africa was hunted science-free. Then, gun-toters arrived and started to send specimens to European museums, so that the big game could be classified according to the Linnaean system. Once the species were formally named, subspecies became valuable in the chase.

Not only did landowners reintroduce big game for the purposes of hunting, but it mattered to tell a blesbok from a bontebok. About then, a new wave of foreign hunters began to fly to southern Africa just to hunt, ticking off lists of not only species but also varieties. In the hunters' sights, the exact identity of the quarry mattered more and more, and game owners started to add 'over-the-top' variety by artificially breeding mutant forms (https://www.somerbysafaris.com/album/hunting-a-golden-wildebeest and https://realorasafaris.co.za/product/king-wildebeest/).

This progression went from primitive (pre-1700) through crudely taxonomic (1700-1900) to finely taxonomic (1900-2000). Then it proceeded to 'post-taxonomic' (post-2000) in the sense that no scientist really knows how to 'classify' a gnutant created by breeding in a farm paddock since the turn of the millennium.

What makes the blue wildebeest incongruous in this progression is that, owing to the vagaries of historical accident and human fallibility, it has managed to remain lost in the nineteenth century even as it has become adulterated by the twenty-first century.

To this day, there survives in the wild a consistently recognisable, widespread and common subspecies of the blue wildebeest which hunters fail to realise is a subspecies at all: the western wildebeest (C. t. mattosi). Compare the western wildebeest (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5058324) with the 'standard' blue wildebeest (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11283917).

The western wildebeest is available to unknowing hunter-tourists in most of the hunting blocks of Botswana and Namibia. The outfitters and ranch-owners could charge more for this as a particular kind of wildebeest. However, they do not even know the kind exists, because the subspecies-names given to it, namely mattosi in 1925 and borlei in 1933, have both in turn, and for no good reason, fallen through the cracks of taxonomic recognition (see my Journal Posts of July 13 & 14, 2021, https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/milewski).

And even more incongruously, this ignorance may persist for decades to come, because of a reluctance by scientists to admit the embarrassment of a series of oversights which has lasted nearly two centuries.

Based on past trends, the scientists gate-keeping the nomenclature of big game may persist with a shifting of the onus of recognition of this obvious kind of wild wildebeest, based on little more than cognitive dissonance. "We haven't seen this as a different wildebeest, so how can we see it as such until you prove it genetically?"

Meantime, oblivious to the opportunity to stock their properties with western (taurinus mattosi) as well as nominate blue (taurinus taurinus) wildebeest, those catering to the hunting industry will continue to breed new kinds of gnutants (https://www.farmersweekly.co.za/animals/game-and-wildlife/rise-fall-future-colour-variants/), even if this compromises the genetic integrity of the nominate subspecies as a whole on private land (https://theconversation.com/conservation-versus-profit-south-africas-unique-game-offer-a-sobering-lesson-82029).

It seems inevitable that gnu-farmers will embrace hybridisation between the blue and the black (Connochaetes gnou) wildebeest as a source of extra genetic combinations, whether openly or secretively. And so we face a future in which even the gross distinction between the original species of wildebeest may be permanently blurred.

Are we not heading towards a clown-world 2030 in which hunters are still denied the realisation of a wild and natural subspecies, the western wildebeest, even as what is offered as the standard blue wildebeest has already become quasi-domesticated?

And the irony? Two of the first-ever (pre-1840) scientific paintings of the wildebeest are actually instantly recognisable - by virtue of the upright mane, long beard, and minimal brindling - as the western wildebeest (http://heritage-prints.squarespace.com/#/wildlife/ and https://www.prints-online.com/connochaetes-taurinus-blue-wildebeest-14238740.html#openModal and https://elizabethgordon.co.za/artworks/wildebeest-wch). William Cornwallis Harris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cornwallis_Harris) saw it for what it was in the nineteenth century, but this subspecies continues to hide in plain sight - in some sort of time-warp - as we photograph it on our smartphones today.

Posted on 22 de julho de 2021, 10:28 PM by milewski