A team of 14 Chinese and foreign zoologists began Thursday a 20-day probe of the wild Bactrian camels in a nature reserve for the critically-endangered creatures in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

"The probe will focus on the number of wild camels and the ecological environment in which they live at the Kumtag Desert and northern Arjin Mountain, two places in the Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve in southeastern Xinjiang," said Zhang Yu, deputy head of the management center of the nature reserve.

John Hare, founder and chairman of the UK-based Wild Camel Protection Foundation (WCPF), Yuan Guoying, a research fellow with the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Regional Environmental Protection Institute, and two other experts from Mongolia are among the investigators in the group.

The wild Bactrian camel, or Camelus bactrianus, a two-humped ancestor of domesticated camels, are now only found in their native habitat in the harsh deserts of northwest China and Mongolia. There are approximately 800 left in the world, of which about 400 live in the Lop Nur nature reserve, with an area of 780,000 square kilometers in Xinjiang.

The wild camel has been labeled "critically endangered" according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and is now in China's wild animals top protection list.

The current survey is jointly organized by the nature reserve and the WCPF, and will end in early November.

(Xinhua News Agency October 14, 2005)