For 120 years, scientists considered the Omiltemi rabbit extinct. Meanwhile, in Sierra Madre del Sur they were hunted for food.
When in 1904 Edward William Nelson identified the first Omiltemi rabbits, he did not know that this was going to be one of the last confirmed sightings of what, for decades, has been considered one of the most endangered mammals in the world. The bug. It was a large, nocturnal rabbit, with dark reddish hair, long ears and a short tail. But not much else was known because zoologists had frepeatedly scratched in finding and studying it. And yet, if they had asked the inhabitants of the Sierra Madre del Sur (in the Mexican state of Guerrero), they would have been able to add one more thing: that they are very rich. Because while scientists were looking for these bugs, neighbors hunted them and integrated them into their usual diet. Where are those rabbits? We must not fall into simplifications, since 1998 we already suspected that the rabbit was still alive and there. That year, some local hunters gave researchers the skin of a killed specimen: that is, we had physical proof that the species still existed. Therefore, the species was not officially extinct; What appeared in the species lists is that we did not have enough data to know what was happening with it. Now, after a long investigation with traps and sampling, we do have them. He wasn’t dead… Between 2019 and 2024, a team led by José Alberto Almazán-Catalán (the Institute for the Management and Conservation of Biodiversity) carried out a specific search for the rabbit under the program Search for Lost Species by Re:wild. They visited 10 areas and obtained records in 7 of them. The conclusion of this work (and I quote verbatim) is that the Omiltemi rabbit “is a rare species, but not only is it not extinct, but it is much more common than previously believed.” The data matches with the graphic material that Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez published in the Mexican Journal of Mastozoology. And then? Well, although the situation has not changed, it has revealed everything that we do not know. It is now evident that the distribution reaches an area up to three times larger than previously suspected. It is also true that, without suspecting it, the communities in the area have been hunting (and even breeding) these rabbits for decades without knowing that they were Omiltemi rabbits. And it is curious how this type of news helps make clear how little we know about the world around us. The initiative Search for Lost Species from Re:wild has already ‘recovered’ 13 species around the world. Some of them, like Winton’s golden molethey had gone 86 years without confirmed records. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophy dreams of,” Hamlet tells Horatio and, if we apply it to contemporary science, we see that this is still the case. Image | Re:Wild In Xataka | Spain is witnessing a shocking phenomenon: three invasive species are feeding each other to conquer the country
