Mystery or myth : a review of history and conservation status of the Malabar Civet Viverra civettina Blyth , 1862

Abstract

Malabar Civet Viverra civettina, one of only two small carnivores in the world listed as Critically Endangered, is considered endemic to the Western Ghats, India. However, it has never been sighted with certainty in the wild and its ‘known’ ecology is based on speculation, not fact. We reviewed the history of its collection and published and unpublished literature on the species, and collated and interpreted results of recent surveys in order to review critically some persistent uncertainties about the species. All known skins have changed hands before reaching their current destinations, and the primary origin of each remains unknown. Malabar Civet is so close morpho- logically to the disjunct Large-spotted Civet V. megaspila of South-east Asia that the two are often considered conspecific. Four early skins have been identified as both V. megaspila and V. civettina at different times. Discrepancies in the early field descriptions attributed to Malabar Civet suggest that they refer to other, non-congeneric, species (no other Viverra is suspected to occur in southern India), yet most of these descriptions have been repeated as applying to Malabar Civet almost verbatim until the present, with no additional information from the wild. We present a novel possibility that the genus Viverra does not occur in the wild in southern India and Malabar Civet is not a taxon. If the latter is a valid taxon, the results of recent surveys suggest that it may be either extinct or near extinction across its small world range.