1998 was a terrible year for coral reefs. Abnormally high sea-surface temperatures led to large-scale bleaching of corals around the world. The oceans lost over 15% of its coral cover and some countries —Maldives for example—as high as 90%. Indian waters, too, were affected: around the Lakshadweep islands, coral cover was reduced to 5-10%.
But this extreme weather event also had a silver lining: it provided scientists with a rare opportunity to answer to an important question—how is a biological community assembled from scratch? Most of the time, the answer involves much guesswork and uncertainty because it is based on reconstruction of past events that scientists weren’t direct witness to. In this case, however, they could document the process of community assembly as it unfolded. This is exactly what Arthur and his colleagues from India and Spain did, in the bleached reefs around the Lakshadweep islands. Through careful and regular monitoring spanning 15 years following the 1998 event, the team painted a detailed picture of the recovery of Lakshadweep’s coral reef fish. A picture that is, unfortunately, not pretty.
Arthur and his team classified fish species into feeding types—starting with algal feeders and working their way up the trophic levels to top predators that feed on other fish—and examined how each type fared in the recovery process. They found a clear and striking pattern of trophic downgrading: fish of higher trophic levels were much more likely to go extinct than those of lower trophic levels. We knew, earlier, that human activities in the oceans, such as targeted fisheries, can cause downgrading. Now, through the work of Arthur and his team, we know that natural disturbances can also result in similar downgrading. These results are especially significant and worrying given that most of the world’s coral reefs are subject to both human and natural disturbances—a double whammy for coral reef top predators.
Further reading:
Alonso D, A PinyolGallem, T Alcoverro and R Arthur. 2015. Fish community reassembly after a coral mass mortality: higher trophic groups are subject to increased rates of extinction, Ecology Letters, 18: 451–461 DOI: 10.1111/ ele.12426.
For many coral reef fish, life in the sea begins by drifting in the vast oceans as larvae, till they find a suitable place to settle down. Some find their way back to where their journey began. For others, welcoming homes with high chances of survival are hundreds of kilometres away from their place of birth. What is intriguing is how these larvae, who do not have maps to guide them, find their way around. In a study conducted in Papua New Guinea and published in 2008, authors Danielle Dixson and colleagues found that clown-fish use the smell of leaves and anemones to find suitable homes.
Clownfish usually live in coral reefs close to rainforest-inhabited islands. Dixson and colleagues decided to find out whether odours of the islands and their surroundings might serve as cues for the clownfish. They chose anemones- the mutualistic partners of clownfish, and rainforest leaves from the island as potential cues. They put young clownfish in the middle of an experimental chamber which had plain sea water on one side and sea water treated with the scent of either anemones or rainforest leaves, on the other. The treated sea water had been allowed to stand with anemones or rainforest leaves before they were removed, so that it was their smell that the fish would respond to. Spending a large chunk of time on one side of the chamber indicated that the clownfish preferred the water on that side.
The clownfish’s choices were clear: it preferred water laced with the smell of sea anemones and rainforest leaves. Given that leaves are likely to float fairly large distances away from the reef, clownfish larvae might be using use their smell to orient towards islands; once they get close they might be using the smell of anemones to home in. More importantly, these smells allow the clownfish to distinguish between reefs without islands and reefs near rainforest-inhabited islands, as it is only in the latter that they will find other clownfish and their mutualistic partners, the anemones.
I wonder, if the makers of Finding Nemo were aware of this, would the movie have turned out differently?
Further reading:
Dixson DL, GP Jones, PL Munday, S Planes, MS Pratchett, M Srinivasan and SR Thorrold. 2008. Coral reef fish smell leaves to find island homes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 275(1653), 2831-2839.
The beautiful stretch of Australian coast south of Batemans Bay, New South Wales is a region built on fishing, farming and forestry. In the early to mid-20th century, the area supported two tuna and salmon canneries, a large number of sawmills and a thriving dairy industry. The identity of the region was defined by its fishermen and forestry workers, its working wharves and its rural setting. The region has, however, undergone profound changes over the past few decades.Australia’s first cannery, located in Narooma, closed in the 1970s followed by the Eden cannery in 1999. In Batemans Bay, there remains only one operating sawmill, down from a peak of thirteen and a suite of new national parks have been declared. The dairy industry has also declined in importance and the area has become a popular retirement and holiday location for people from urban centres such as Sydney and Canberra, both of which are about a 2-3 hour drive away. For some of the longer term residents of the south coast, these changes have been traumatic and they have been left feeling bruised and battered by the experience. For the first residents in the area, the Indigenous traditional owners, many of the changes they have seen, have felt profoundly unjust. This is the context in which the Bateman’s Marine Park was declared in 2005.
Marine Parks or Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are one tool in the vast toolbox of approaches to manage our marine environment. They can be highly beneficial to marine ecological systems by protecting habitat, providing refuge to threatened species and acting as scientific reference areas.Their success in many areas of the world in improving or maintaining marine biodiversity has led to a global campaign to maximise the level of MPA protection in the world oceans, including the development of a range of ‘targets’ specifying minimal MPA coverage. These targets have been actively pursued in Australia for the past decade and we are one of the few jurisdictions in the world that can claim to have achieved the 10% coverage of our oceans that the Convention of Biological Diversity (Aichi biodiversity targets) aspires to. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the Batemans Marine Park met bitter resistance which continues to this day, and resistance has characterised much of the MPA planning in Australia. In recent years, politicians have succumbed to (or capitalised on) pressure from vocal lobby groups and placed many of the most recent parks under review, or made significant changes to their management. Are we going wrong somewhere? The Batemans Marine Park provides some important insights into this question.
Making sense of complexity – the ‘rules’ of MPA planning
MPAs are incredibly complex tools and their overall success relies heavily on the combined successes of many individual elements of MPA planning and management. MPAs are often established in areas where very little is known about the marine environment, which makes ensuring these successes even more difficult. Biological scientists and policymakers have responded to these gaps in information by developing a range of techniques to make sense of the complex marine ecosystems they seek to manage.
These include quite sophisticated methods of making the best possible guess as to what should be protected and how including modelling programs and detailed seafloor and habitat mapping techniques. In Australia, biologists have attempted to corral the complexity of marine ecological systems by segmenting our oceans and coastlines into broad marine bio-regions which are then used as a framework for MPA planning. The Australian coast is therefore divided into a number of marine bio-regions (https://www. environment.gov.au/node/18075), each of which has unique combinations of geology, oceanography, climatic conditions and assemblages of fauna and flora. These bio-regions are then used as a guide for the placement of MPAs with an overriding aim of ensuring that every bio-region is represented within a network of MPAs and that each of these MPAs incorporates a reasonably sized sample of all the different types of marine ecosystems found within the bio-region. Most Australian MPAs are zoned for different types of use and while no official targets exist, the success of an MPA planning process is often judged by the proportion of the MPA which is ‘no-take’. In the case of the Batemans Marine Park, there seemed to be a common understanding amongst stakeholders that the Conservation sector and the Government were aiming for approximately 20% of the park to be included in no-take (sanctuary) zones (the final no-take zoning level achieved was around 19%). This figure is based on advice from marine scientists about optimal levels of protection for achieving desired biodiversity benefits.
These (often unwritten) ‘rules’ of MPA planning have been applied in Australia for many years. They are extremely effective means of managing biological systems in the absence of detailed knowledge. The problem arises when this biological system of planning is applied to the incredibly dynamic, diverse and complex social systems that exist within the human environment.
Biological planning in a human world
Fishing boats, New South Wales, Australia
The Batemans Marine Park was implemented using the same process applied in other NSW marine parks and commonly employed across the country. In the same way that biologists break down the biophysical world into manageable components based largely on habitat type, planners have tended to segment the community into stakeholder groups along the lines of the use type. This fits nicely with the biological approach to planning because it allows planners to directly assign specific ecological threats to a distinct group of people, and therefore managing the threat becomes a simple matter of managing those people. Unfortunately, this approach is problematic because it tends to assume these groups are distinct, homogenous collections of people with similar values, beliefs, ideas and practices. In fact, there can be as much diversity within user groups as there is across them. In addition, focusing on use type alone, and labelling some as being a ‘threat’ can lead to value judgements about some users as well as the use, thereby creating ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ within a debate, and polarising the community and mobilising lobby groups. This was certainly the case in the Batemans Marine Park where the animosity between fishers and the conservation sector became so intense that property was damaged, threats were made against individuals, a conservation group was ‘infiltrated’ and an attempted takeover staged and the local newspapers were flooded with enraged, often vicious letters from both sides.
Segmentation based on the use-type alone also greatly disadvantages smaller, disenfranchised, vulnerable or marginalised user groups. Smaller, or less organised user groups, are less likely to have the political or social capital to defend themselves against a system that assumes that any users involved in extractive use are a threat, and any that are not are benign. The Batemans Marine Park is seen as a huge success amongst conservation groups and some recreational fishers, while at the same time it is viewed as a disaster for Indigenous cultural fishers and small scale commercial fishers. The debate over MPA management in this park was clearly dominated by the conservation sector and recreational fishers and both groups walked away with big wins at the expense of these smaller groups. Do the benefits as perceived by some in the community outweigh the negatives for others? Who should have the power to make this determination? And what wider impacts are felt within the community when these small, yet important sectors take the brunt of the impacts? The Batemans Marine Park example raised concerns about wider social costs including the ability to access local seafood, depression, marriage breakdowns, suicide and declines in mental and physical health amongst sections of the commercial fishing and Indigenous communities.
An alternative approach to sector-based planning is to think about segmentation that also includes consideration of values, beliefs and attitudes rather than use type alone. Preliminary work in this area highlights a surprising number of shared values across use types and has provided some key insights into where differences occur that do not always neatly correlate with use types. More importantly, however, it points to clear commonalities that can be used as the basis of consensus building and empathy. An understanding of the different value systems that operate within the community can help to break down misunderstandings and stereotypes across different sectors, ensure representation of a greater diversity of voices in MPA negotiations and begin to challenge the value judgements of sectoral interest groups based solely on their type of use.
Is knowledge the exclusive domain of science?
Some of the most significant objections to the Batemans Marine Park were rooted in the way it elevated scientific knowledge as the superior or primary knowledge source. Locally based traditional and cultural-ecological knowledge were regarded as secondary or lower-order sources and were turned to only when there were gaps in the scientific knowledge or insufficient resources to adequately apply a science-based approach to knowledge generation. This was personally offensive to many of the stakeholders I interviewed in this area who considered themselves authoritative voices in relation to their local marine environment and fisheries. Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) are a more ‘messy’ form of knowledge generation and application in that they involve the vagaries of human memory, the willingness of the knowledge holders to share information and, of course, the anathema to scientists – ‘subjectivity’. Yet embracing this complexity can have many benefits not just in providing highly localised, fine-scale data on environmental conditions and environmental change over time, but it can also build relationships of mutual respect, enable community members to feel engaged and valued in the process of MPA planning and build a sense of community ownership in the management systems that are developed. It can also facilitate direct engagement of community members in making the trade-off decisions that are an inevitable feature of MPA planning.
It’s all the media/politicians fault
My interviews with stakeholders in the Batemans Marine Park uncovered a tendency to blame the political process and/or the media for many of the problems associated with its planning. Unfortunately, MPA planning is inherently a political process. As much as we may wish for politics to be left out of MPA planning, it is unrealistic to expect it ever will. Instead, we need to think carefully about how we can work within the political system to ensure equitable and effective management responses. The political will to establish an MPA is an extremely influential determinant of whether an MPA goes ahead, in what form and whether it is successful in the long term. This political will is extremely susceptible to the influence of well organised, vocal lobby groups and, of course, the media. As was seen in the Batemans Marine Park, the media can exacerbate existing tensions by its preference for stories that focus on conflict and drama. Media coverage is often simplistic, sensationalist and thrives on controversy and conflict. Lobby groups are increasingly using social media to influence politicians, calling on members of the public to ‘save’ sections of the ocean from fishing or from ‘lock out’ by the click of a button.
Embracing the complexity of politics and its uneasy bedfellow, the media, involves allowing democratic processes into MPA planning rather than attempting to circumvent it. This involves embracing the incorporation of ‘bottom up’ participative planning right from the outset. This is particularly important in the earliest stage of MPA planning – the setting of the MPA objectives.
Again, the Batemans Marine Park provides an important lesson. A marine park in this area was always going to be very, very hard. The area was already struggling on the back of so much social change and had a heightened sensitivity to any outside interventions that might impact its declining primary production capabilities. Despite these sensitivities, the Government of the day supported by the conservation sector, pushed ahead with its plan using the same techniques and ‘rules’ that it had applied elsewhere in quite different settings. There was little or no explanation as to why the marine park was considered necessary, other than that it formed part of the Government’s commitments under the Convention of Biological Diversity. One of the inherent dangers of focusing on MPAs as an end rather than a means is that the community is left baffled as to what the MPA was meant to achieve. In the Batemans example, the park was planned and is now managed to maximise biodiversity conservation but all the public messages were about improvements in fishing opportunities. So the entire process degenerated into a debate about whether no take zones do result in improvements to fishing, with lobby groups, scientists and politicians lining up on both sides. Locals provided alternative suggestions on how to improve fishing opportunities which were largely ignored (because the park was never intended as a fisheries management tool) further undermining an already fraught relationship between Government and the community.
Different groups within the community will have different ideas of the values they wish to see protected in their area and how that should be achieved. The community should therefore get a say in what they feel the objectives of marine and coastal management practices should be and whether an MPA is the best tool to achieve that. Involving the community in setting local objectives means that the planning process begins with a common understanding of what it is trying to achieve. Once some level of consensus is reached on MPA objectives, they can provide a framework to guide the trade off decisions.
Embracing complexity
We can not rely on MPAs alone as a technical fix for the incredibly complex problem of marine conservation management. However, if carefully implemented and managed, they can be an important tool. It is folly, however, to believe that MPAs can be implemented using formulaic planning processes that follow a roadmap designed by scientists and policymakers alone. Targets for global MPA coverage of our oceans and formulas on how much of an MPA should be no-take may make the process of planning a little easier from a purely scientific point of view but, in reality, the complexity of the human environment suggests we are setting ourselves up for failure if we adhere to these numbers too tightly. Instead, we need to acknowledge there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to MPA planning and management and that, in some cases, an MPA may not even be the most appropriate response, at least in the short term. Instead, we can look to the complexity within the human environment to teach us lessons on how we can do things better, in a way that celebrates the diversity of the human condition just as we celebrate the diversity of marine life.
Introduction In 2006, US President George W Bush proclaimed the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument (renamed Papahānaumokuākea in 2007). Covering 362,073 km², this was the world’s largest marine protected area (MPA). In 2008, Kiribati legally designated the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a 408,250 km² marine park in the Pacific Ocean—again, the world’s largest. Most recently, in March 2015, the UK government declared its intention to create an 834,000 km² marine reserve around the Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific—which would make it the world’s largest MPA yet.
Over the past ten years, a series of very large marine protected areas (> 100,000 km²) have been declared around the world, many of them the ‘world’s largest’, at least for a brief period. There are currently 21 large MPAs, with several more under development. What motivates this ‘race’ to establish more, ever-larger MPAs? There are several conventional answers to this question. First, MPAs are widely agreed to be effective conservation tools. An MPA is any clearly defined marine space that is managed for conservation purposes. MPAs include marine reserves or ‘no-take’ areas, where no extractive resource use is permitted; zoned MPAs, where different types of use are permitted in different areas; and multiple-use MPAs, where extractive resource use is permitted but managed throughout the MPA. No-take areas, in particular, are known to have significant benefits for both biodiversity conservation and fisheries management, and many large MPAs are no-take (e.g. Papahānaumokuākea, where only non-commercial uses by native Hawaiians are permitted, and the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, which was closed to all commercial fishing at the end of 2014). Second, there is pressure to reach international marine conservation targets. As of 2014, 3.4% of the world’s oceans have been enclosed in MPAs. The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity have a goal of protecting 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020, while the IUCN declared a more ambitious target of 30% of the world’s oceans as no-take at the 6th World Parks Congress in 2014. Third, there is undoubtedly a need to ‘scale up’ conservation in response to the current oceans crisis – a crisis that includes declining fish stocks, marine biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and loss of habitats (e.g. coral reefs), among other challenges. However, there are many additional political, economic, and social factors that must be considered if this movement to ‘scale up’ marine conservation is to be understood.
For some observers, large MPAs are an obvious and appropriate tool for helping to address the oceans crisis. They are responsible for much of the recent increase in global MPA coverage, playing a critical role in moving toward conservation targets. They protect the open ocean and deep-sea habitats, migratory species, and can encompass entire ecosystems. Because they are often located in remote areas, far from human population centres, they are sometimes perceived as politically easier and less expensive to establish than coastal MPAs. In short, each new announcement of a large MPA is heralded as a conservation victory. Is this declaration of victory premature?
If these very large MPAs are to be successful in the long term, then we suggest there is a need to better understand their human dimensions. Experience with smaller, coastal MPAs has demonstrated that failing to account for human interests and impacts can undermine conservation goals. Coastal areas have diverse and easily recognised human uses (e.g. fisheries, tourism) and values (e.g. economic, cultural), which have been well documented. In contrast, there has been a tendency to conceptualise large MPAs as marine wilderness, where humans and their interests are absent. This is a false and dangerous idea—we must think of all oceans as peopled seascapes and all conservation projects as human projects. Human dimensions of large MPAs may be different and less visible but are no less important to consider than for coastal MPAs. For example, uninhabited islands in the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, a large MPA in the Pacific, have important cultural value for indigenous residents of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. Unfortunately, the human dimensions of large MPAs are poorly understood. If large MPAs are to deliver their intended conservation benefits, then there is a need for research on their human dimensions – governance, politics, and social and economic outcomes.
Governance
Governance is more than government, encompassing all stakeholders and processes that contribute to decision-making and outcomes for a given system. MPA governance is complex, incorporating inter-related social and ecological systems. Research on coastal and inshore MPAs has demonstrated that effective MPAs must have clear resource use rules, monitoring and enforcement systems, conflict resolution mechanisms, and decision-making arrangements. More generally, participatory decision-making arrangements are seen as critical. The question is whether and how existing insights about MPA governance can be ‘scaled up’ for LMPAs.
First, there is concern about how such large areas can be effectively monitored and their rules enforced. In coastal areas, resource users often play a key role in monitoring and enforcement. This is neither feasible nor relevant for offshore areas, where resources and their users are different (e.g. industrial tuna fisheries vs small-scale fisheries). ‘Technological fixes’ are being increasingly promoted for large MPAs, with many civil society groups cooperating in the development and promotion of technical tools of surveillance (e.g. using satellites for monitoring). Whether such tools can be effectively connected to enforcement mechanisms, and how they will be viewed (and supported or opposed) by resource users, remains to be seen.
Second, many large MPAs have been established through top-down political processes, in a manner that has been found to be ineffective and conflict inducing in coastal MPAs. With similar conflicts emerging in some large MPAs, the danger of ignoring human interests for large MPAs is apparent. However, participatory and consultative processes are difficult for very large, remote areas with widely dispersed stakeholders – who should be included and how?
Third, large MPAs have the potential to affect (and be affected by) other national and international policies and agreements in a way that coastal MPAs do not. These institutional interactions must be considered. For example, a proposed large MPA in Palau would ban fishing in 80% of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and prohibit purse seine fishing throughout the entire EEZ. Such policies would have impacts on industrial tuna fishing, with the potential to shift fishing effort elsewhere (to other countries) and to interact with regional fishing agreements. The manner in which governance of large MPAs intersects with international trade and resource agreements must be considered.
Politics
Large MPAs are declared by governments and are therefore a function of formal politics. However, they are also embroiled in informal politics – the power-laden interactions of all actors involved in the governance system. Coastal and inshore MPAs are often a source of conflict, as diverse actors seek to protect and advance their interests (e.g. maintain fishing access vs. limit extractive use). While political interests, motivations, and processes may differ for large MPAs, they will likely be just as significant for conservation outcomes.
While the increase in large MPAs can be partially understood as a response to global conservation targets, other geopolitical processes are also important to consider. For example, small island states that declare large MPAs make themselves more visible and relevant on a global stage, often attracting conservation funding and reinforcing their sovereignty. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and philanthropic foundations, which are promoting and supporting these large MPAs (including research, consultation processes, financing, and enforcement), are asserting their interests and visions through these projects. In some cases, indigenous communities are using large MPAs to assert their claims and challenge state sovereignty, while in other cases large MPAs serve to reinforce colonial relations. For example, the British Indian Ocean Territory Marine Protected Area, established around the Chagos Islands by the UK government in 2010, has been criticized for undermining the claims and rights of the already displaced Chagos people. A recent decision by the United Nations permanent court of arbitration ruled that the UK acted illegally in establishing the reserve. If large MPAs are established without attention to the rights and interests of all stakeholders, they risk exacerbating conflict and building resentment rather than support for conservation.
Outcomes
Outcomes include all impacts – social, economic, political, cultural, as well as ecological – of large MPAs. Coastal and inshore MPAs can have both positive impacts (benefits) and negative impacts (costs). Benefits for people include things like increased food security and revenue from tourism, while costs include lost income from reduced fishing, social conflict, and unequal distribution of costs and benefits among different social groups. Because large MPAs tend to be offshore, away from human communities, their costs and benefits will differ. However, it is still necessary to identify and understand these impacts (whether current or potential impacts), in order to make informed decisions about large MPAs.
Impacts of large MPAs may include the costs of administration and management, changes in revenue for actual or potential industries (e.g. fishing, seabed mining, tourism), financial arrangements with multilateral institutions or NGOs, and the protection or undermining of cultural values and traditional practices. Negative impacts should be mitigated or addressed while clarifying positive impacts can justify the establishment of the large MPA and help to build support for marine conservation. It is important that projected impacts are realistic, based on evidence and research, in order to set realistic expectations. In the long term, unfulfilled promises are likely to undermine support for large MPAs.
Moving Forward – Advancing Human Dimensions Research for Large MPAs
Decades of research on coastal and inshore MPAs has illustrated that human dimensions must be accounted for if MPAs are to be effective. Given the recent and ongoing development of large MPAs, there is a timely opportunity to conduct policy-relevant social science research to inform their advancement.
While social science research cannot prevent conflict or guarantee the fulfilment of promises, it can contribute to the clarification of expectations, processes, impacts, and possibilities. We must think of all ocean spaces as ‘peopled seas.’
Suggested reading:
This article is adapted from: Gruby, Rebecca L, Noella J Gray, Lisa M Campbell, and Leslie Acton. Toward a social science research agenda for large marine protected areas. Conservation Letters. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12194.
De Santo, Elizabeth M. 2013. Missing marine protected area (MPA) targets: How the push for quantity over quality undermines sustainability and social justice. Journal of Environmental Management 124:137-146.
Richmond Laurie and Dawn Kotowicz. 2015. Equity and access in marine protected areas: The history and future of ‘traditional indigenous fishing’ in the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument. Applied Geography 59: 117-124.
Conservation stories often encourage the imagination of conservation as a simple exercise in moral dualism – choosing good over bad. It is this facile type-casting and posturing that paves the path for contentious interventions. The central environmental formulations of the Indian state also rely on such dichotomies. These laws largely pertain to terrestrial landscapes and were shaped by colonial practices and western ideologies of wilderness. A characteristic theme underlying these ideas is the separation of ‘conservation’ and ‘development’ as two antagonistic ambitions, thereby creating a wedge between nature and humans. All this is orchestrated by bureaucratic machinery exclusively mandated to sort ‘right’ from ‘wrong’.
Our post-independence attempts at legislating on matters of the environment have significantly contributed to this conservation-development dichotomy. Although there are other laws governing natural resource use such as agriculture, fisheries and revenue laws, with equally significant environmental implications, the attention of conservationists has remained focused on the specialised legislations, namely the Wild Life Protection Act (WLPA), 1972, the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 and more recently the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.
The economic reforms process undertaken by the government since 1991 began waging a quiet war against any environmentalism that stymied industrial development. The march towards a full-blown neoliberal era saw a new response to rules on nature. In cases where laws like the Environment (Protection) Act and the Forest (Conservation) Act slowed down industrial expansion, these rules were branded as ‘anti-development’.
The result is that our environmental governance is now a fractured and often unjust enterprise. Conservationists focus mostly on wildlife laws, desperately protective of approximately 5% of India’s land designated as protected areas. Meanwhile, environmentalists complain that the remaining laws originally meant to regulate industries end up eventually leading the industry into biodiversity-rich areas under the pretext of ‘reformed’ clearance procedures.
This post-independence rule-making of the state in terrestrial areas left resource-dependent marginalized communities vulnerable. They now suffer the double jeopardy of losing on the one hand to powerful industrial lobbies in a regulatory mirage, and on the other to conservation schemes that isolate them from their environments. With more such conservation and (industrial) development attention trained on coastal and marine spaces where other environmentalists operate, the numbers alienated from such an approach can only swell further.
Small-scale fisheries in Odisha – collective based livelihoods
Spillover conservation
The most popular terrestrial wildlife conservation approach has been the declaration of Protected Areas (PA) and the listing of wild species on protected lists, both facilitated by the Wild Life (Protection) Act (WLPA), 1972. A new category – community reserves – was introduced in 2003, but few community reserves have been declared. Most PAs are either designated as National Parks or Wildlife Sanctuaries which aim at prohibiting to the extent possible, local human presence and use of resources within their boundaries.
The WLPA is drafted on the singular idea that physically separating humans from wildlife is the appropriate approach to all conservation challenges. The history of wildlife protection through bounded spaces and closed areas is found even in ancient India and was nested in a utilitarian perspective where the priority was to reserve areas for maintaining stocks of big game or draught animals for the future use and enjoyment of the royals, although there was also evidence of preserving nature for ‘its own sake’ during this period. A distinct elitist preservationist view of nature occurred in the post-independence period which persists in existing conservation ideology. This law, therefore, does not offer much of a conservation plan beyond penalties and punishments for human intrusion into PAs and illegal use of protected species. Human-wildlife interactions, socio-ecological institutions, organisations and phenomena and even simple dependence regimes are given short shrift in this law.
Meanwhile, international attention, investment and intervention on marine conservation goals is gaining in priority and India too is compelled to prove her track record in this direction. In practice, however, the terrestrial conservation totems appear to have spilt over to the marine realm, as national and international conservation organisations look towards fortress conservation models to provide solutions to marine challenges. The government’s weakness for resorting to the concept of marine protected areas (MPA) under the WLPA (virtually no-take zones) needs an honest audit as reports of conflict over these styles of marine conservation pour in.
The rigidity of the exclusionist approach in terrestrial area management, specifically through the narrow options offered by the terrestrially oriented WLPA, stands in stark contrast to the context-specific methods that could be applied such as certain local practices of small scale fisher communities. These include fishing gear modifications, craft regulations, spatial and temporal regulations like fishing zones and seasonal bans. The distinction between terrestrial and marine social-ecological systems requires context-specific treatments or environmentalisms.
Podampetta fishing hamlet by the Kantiagarh village
The failure of terrestrial totems
Far more densely inhabited than most forests, the coasts are used by numerous fishing communities concurrently. Traditional community-based systems of fisheries management include fishing gear restrictions, closed seasons in specific areas, or bans on particular forms of fishing such as night fishing or dynamite fishing. In the late 1970s, modern fishing methods threatened the livelihoods of these communities and coastal ecosystems, as mechanised craft and gear, principally bottom-trawlers, severely impacted fishing stocks.
By the early 1980s, many coastal states in India had responded by introducing fisheries legislation (Marine Fisheries (Regulation) Acts) to safeguard the interests of artisanal fishers through a framework of spatial-temporal fishing regulations. For example, the Orissa Marine Fisheries (Regulation) Act (OMFRA), 1982, prohibits mechanised fishing vessels like trawlers from fishing within five kilometres of the shore. In recent years the state has also regulated the use of certain fishing gears and fishing zones that permits only low impact fishing practices in areas where sea turtle congregate to breed.
These laws are not designed to exclude people from their marine environments. It appears that these conservation measures also recognise that humans have historically ‘used’ or consumed marine species. Thus, fisheries management, while prescribing conservation options that allow for the presence of humans and human activity, also call for modifications in the range, intensity and nature of the fishing activity. For example, in Gujarat, the fisheries regulations prescribe prohibitions on the catch of gravid lobsters. The Tamil Nadu fisheries laws prescribe rules on species of shanks that can be harvested and their size.
Despite this, the system of declaring MPAs and implementing these through state forest departments has dominated marine conservation in India. In reality, the environment ministry’s response to demands for marine management has been to create a conservation mechanism identical to the terrestrial PAs as seen in the five major MPAs in the country: the Gahirmatha Wildlife Sanctuary in Orissa, the Gulf of Kutch Marine National Park in Gujarat, Gulf of Mannar National Park in Tamil Nadu, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Park and Rani Jhansi National Park in the Andaman group of islands.
In response, fishing communities have objected to the complete ban on human presence in these formerly open access areas, the specific contours of the conflicts depending on the intensity with which these bans have been enforced. The example of Orissa is apt here. For the last two decades, conservationists have been trying in vain to reduce the large scale mortality (> 100,000 in the last ten years) of olive ridley turtles in trawl fishing nets. National and international efforts to introduce turtle excluder devices and keep trawlers out of the Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary have failed, in part due to the strong resistance from the trawling community. The 1997 declaration of the Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary generated considerable discontent among various fishing communities, as it denied them all fishing rights within a delineated core zone. Some conservationists revised their ideas to focus efforts on the protection of offshore reproductive congregations of mating turtles. They also recognise that within these areas, certain forms of fishing might be benign.
Beach landing at Gopalpur, southern Odisha
Despite the protests against the declaration of additional MPAs in Orissa, the Orissa Forest Department has been reluctant to abandon its plans to declare the other two known offshore congregation areas – the Devi and the Rushikulya rookeries (the only other known mass nesting sites in the country) – as marine wildlife sanctuaries. This would impinge on the rights of even the non-mechanised sector rather than simply restrict harmful fishing activities. Ironically, since most major turtle congregations occur within a few kilometres of the shore, merely enforcing the fishing regulations of the OMFRA, which bans all mechanised fishing within five km of the coast, would help in effectively conserving these turtle populations and also safeguard the interests of the artisanal sector. In contrast to laws governing protected areas, the OMFRA also has the flexibility to formulate creative rules that are area, activity and time-specific.
In addition to being unable to adequately protect marine species themselves, MPAs as envisaged and operated through the WLPA, fail on another count. Since the focus remains on protecting the habitats within boundaries, the law is simply unresponsive to development threats that originate outside the boundaries of the MPAs. All the MPAs of the country have some experience of this.
Take the example of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park (GoMNP). This MPA (measuring about 560 sq km, including 21 islands and their surrounding waters) lies in the core area of the ecologically sensitive Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve measuring 10,500 sq km. Yet all efforts of protection are concentrated only in the islands of the GoMNP. The Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar are considered as distinct water bodies with varied conditions, seasonal cycles and oceanic parameters, although they are linked to each other via Adams bridge and the Pamban Pass. The seagrass beds and coral reefs in the Palk Bay and other areas of the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve make this region as fragile and important as the GoMNP. However, since these remaining regions of the biosphere reserve or the Palk Bay (which is home to a number of protected scheduled species such as sea fans, sponges, sea cucumbers and corals) have no legal protection for the habitats, this loophole has been utilised by the proponents of the controversial Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project (SSCP).
The Sethusamudram project proposed to create a 167 km long shipping canal passing through the Gulf of Mannar, the Palk Strait and the Palk Bay between India and Sri Lanka. It involves dredging an 89 kilometre stretch for a width of 300 metres and a depth of 12 metres to accommodate ships less than 30,000 DWT having a draft of 10m. A large percentage of this cargo was projected to be petroleum oil and lubricants. Despite the detailed and informed criticisms levelled against it, this project has overcome the challenges, ridden roughshod over the environment impact assessment notification and obtained environmental clearance. Dredging activity commenced in 2006 without even obtaining the views of the Chief Wildlife Warden for environmental clearance. Park managers of the forest department remained mute spectators not just to the destruction of seagrass beds and coral reefs within the MPA caused by dredging activities but to the loss of flora and fauna all along the canal and outside the MPA as well.
The motorised fishing sector in Gopalpur in southern Odisha.
Similarly, the authorities in charge of the Gahirmatha Marine Wildlife Sanctuary in Orissa have been unable to halt the construction of the Dhamra port, just ten kilometres north of the MPA. Similarly, the Gulf of Kutch Marine National Park in Gujarat is located in the middle of an active shipping route and its fragile islands have been subjected to several oil spills and industrial activity in the Gulf. Our green and brown laws have only exacerbated marine conservation blues. It has been argued earlier that marine wildlife rules, planned through fisheries laws would have more traction with fishing communities, rather than the rigid WLPA, since they have essentially been resource-allocation laws. This view holds that marine conservation could meet with far more success if effected through means that promote social justice rather than those privileging a single endangered species.
Outlier environmentalism
While these arguments may help us steer conservation philosophies and modify policy, we must resist the temptation to replace one totem with another and instead engage with the dynamic perspectives that drive resource use and foster compliance. Although fishery laws approach conservation from resource use and management standpoint, thereby possessing the potential to integrate both conservation and development, the implementation of fisheries laws themselves leaves much to be desired. The record of non-compliance and non-implementation by empowered officials is almost as old as these laws themselves. Importantly, while the approach of inclusion is commendable in fisheries laws as far as resource extraction is concerned, few efforts have been made to make legal spaces for fishing communities to actively participate in their implementation. Nevertheless, however hard it is to distinguish the baby from the bathwater, conservationists (utilitarian or otherwise) must pay equal attention to reforming fisheries management laws as they do its terrestrial counterparts.
Gill net fishers near the Rushikulya rookery
The challenges of managing fisheries is not uncomplicated by any means. Traditional management systems based on restricting activities work well only where fishing communities are an integral part of the monitoring and enforcing mechanisms. The idea of intense resource use was not organic to traditional fisher communities. There is an active effort to promote such a perspective from the hinterland (significantly through technology up-gradation schemes of the state). These rapid technological advancements in fisheries and a noticeable systemic breakdown within the fishing communities make conformity to rules difficult. Only where fishing communities are better organised and the level of awareness and political representation greater have these communities been able to enforce some form of rules (traditional or official).
It is in the ordinary everyday life of fishers and in the political strategies of their leaders that one finds the outlines of a new kind of environmentalism that is fluid and defies water-tight categorisations. This ethic suggests that it is futile to remain wholly preservationist or utilitarian, or entirely biocentric or anthropocentric. This appears to be much more than the environmentalism of the poor. It is an ethic that has drawn in a range of actors, negotiating identity, caste, class and ideology. As new entrants to an old arena, lovers of turtles, dolphins, sharks and other marine creatures must give credence to these environmentalisms that these spaces nurture. Crossing over ideological, disciplinary and pedagogical boundaries is necessary if nature is not to become the outlier.
Further reading:
Gray NJ. 2010. Sea change: Exploring the international effort to promote marine protected areas. Conservation and Society Vol.8(4) pp 331-338.
Rajagopalan R. 2008. Marine Protected Areas in India. Samudra Monograph. International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, Chennai.
Sridhar A and K Shanker. 2007. Lessons from marine paradigms. Seminar No. 577 (2007) pp 63 – 68.
The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology Bernd Heinrich ISBN-978-0060742164 Harper Perennial, Reprint edition June 24, 2008
Even before I finished reading The Snoring Bird, I had another book of his lined up. Such is Bernd Heinrich’s mastery of words in a language he adopted while being adopted by a country that promised freedom in many ways. I have not read a memoir as beautifully evocative as this one, fast-paced yet detailed, one that seamlessly intertwines a family’s intrepid journey through the brutalities of war by escaping into the vast curiosities of nature.
The idea for the book grew out of Heinrich’s wish to tell the stories of his family to his children, but the resources for it lay out of sight, “covered in chicken shit”. You can see the author in the old Maine house’s dusty barn loft, rediscovering a letter he had sent to his father about making the cross-country team at college—an impossible dream at the time. In that same cobweb-covered pile, you can see Heinrich’s eyes brighten and soften as he reads the fond correspondence that his father regularly shared with his own mentor and lifelong friend, the late Professor Erwin Stresemann, filled with rich details of his latest expedition to distant Dobruja, or even one of his father’s ‘love letters’ to one of his wives.
The Snoring Bird is a memoir not of one person, but an entire family. The author’s father, Gerd Heinrich’s skill as an ornithologist, and a bird and mammal collector was unparalleled, as was his love for Ichneumon wasps. He relied greatly on his wives, at least one of whom always accompanied him on his many strenuous expeditions, multitasking efficiently as a taxidermist, trapper, cook and assistant. The author does not mince words when he writes about his father’s need to control, his expectancy of obedience and strict adherence to ‘duty’. But he also portrays the honesty and simplicity that defined his father, his quick-thinking and instinctive actions, one of which miraculously saved the author and his mother from being drowned in the Baltic Sea with hordes of other refugees fleeing war-torn Poland. Even though the author and his father were “more apart than together”, this book is testimony to the unintentional influence and impact that a parent has on his child personally, professionally, for the rest of their lives.
The pages are filled with plenty of natural history tidbits, either in a backyard or in untraversed faraway lands, both equally exotic and riveting. Heinrich appreciates his good fortune, albeit belatedly, to be part of the “last classical zoological expedition” in Africa. The tedious work of hunting tiny birds in dense jungles, and skinning and preparing specimens that still exist today in museums across the world severely paled in comparison to the feeling of rejuvenation he experienced, his senses stimulated in new ways as if reborn in a new paradise waiting to be explored.
Placed right in the middle of the narrative is a short and quick telling of their family’s escape to America during the second world war. You almost miss the brevity of this portion because you are busy pursuing the trails of members of the family, temporarily broken up as they leave their cherished Borowke estate in Poland. It is this very human part of the book that had my hands glued to it. Each and every winding step of their journey seems nudged by a stroke of luck. An ominous ‘What if?’ almost every night could have, and probably tormented the author years later when he was old enough to comprehend the gravity of that particularly cruel reality.
Heinrich has managed so well to keep this track of the story just out of focus, as he weaves natural history through the entire book. Or, perhaps by keeping it crisp, he has in a masterstroke of brilliance, given the reader just enough information that they can choose to dwell in the astonishing turn of events for a moment, like I did, or continue to read with a mild sense of disbelief (which the author lightly warns against in the preface).
Heinrich has judiciously sprinkled the text with paragraphs that exude the beauty and thrill of nature, woven with his deeply personal emotions as he lies on his belly and crawls through the jungles of east Africa. Even while he tracks his own life from being his father’s boy overturning rocks to look for wasps, to being a graduate student in California and eventually a professor in Vermont, not to mention the author of several books, you can still see that young excited boy sitting in nature’s lap, filled with limitless curiosity. The story behind the intriguing title, one as exciting as the rest of the book, I leave for you to discover. Heinrich is a world-class story-teller, and anyone interested in history, war, nature or just a great read should wake up to The Snoring Bird.
Welcome to Subirdia – Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife by John M. Marzluff; With Illustrations by Jack DeLap ISBN-9780300197075 Yale University Press, September 30, 2014
Your enjoyment of John Marzluff’s new popular science book Welcome to Subirdia will likely be determined by your familiarity with the issues that he discusses within its ten chapters. The book, subtitled Sharing Our Neighborhoods With Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife, serves as a primer on the role that developed spaces—cities, suburbs, and the “exurbs” that often connect the two—can play in conserving wildlife and preserving or enhancing local ecosystem function. The word “subirdia” reflects the idea that these human-disturbed environments act as “a bridge that connects the more urbanized parts of the city to the wilder country beyond the metropolis”, thereby providing space for birds and oth]er wildlife.
Marzluff, Professor of Wildlife Science in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, draws heavily from his own research in and around Seattle over the past many years. He and his students have studied everything from the hefty pileated woodpecker down to the diminutive Pacific wren. In the process, they have developed a detailed understanding of which avian species are avoiders, adapters, and exploiters —or, in other words, those that flee from human disturbance, those that modify their behaviour so as to cope with it, and those that thrive in it, respectively.
Unfortunately, the first seven chapters of the book pass in a blur. The author mentions a range of interesting research, but doesn’t really describe it in a satisfying amount of detail; he provides tantalizing glimpses into his team’s methodologies, then leaps straight into simplified summaries of the findings that will feel shallow and insufficient to readers who have any previous knowledge of the intricacies of the relationships between wildlife and anthropogenic spaces. On the other hand, those who are seeking exposure to this information for the first time will find Welcome to Subirdia to be a useful review that will quickly bring them up to speed on the basics. The book improves greatly in the final four chapters. In chapter seven, Marzluff eloquently explains the processes of adaptation and evolution, emphasizing how humans can—often unknowingly—act as a selective pressure on the wildlife with which they share their habitats. In the next chapter, the author broadens his focus in order to explore the many other types of organisms that are threatened by or can make themselves at home in, human spaces. This important section emphasizes that the feathered subjects of the first several chapters are only a portion of the many species of wildlife that encounter humans; like their avian relatives, mammals, invertebrates, fish, and herps also either adapt, exploit or avoid. The final two chapters provide useful advice to readers who have been inspired by the preceding pages and would like to join citizen science efforts, landscape in a bird-friendly way, or lobby for more eco-friendly practices in their neighbourhoods.
Marzluff writes in an accessible, jargon-free way, making the findings of academic research easily comprehensible to the average reader. In fact, some portions of the book are unexpectedly poetic, as in the following passage from the last page:
Cutting our ties to the web is like cutting the belay line climbers rely upon as they stretch for a distant handhold. As we stretch to live within a rapidly changing world, are we ready to gamble on an unprotected, solo climb? My hope is that we forego a lone ascent and instead seek creative ways to coexist with a wide diversity of birds and other creatures.
However, Marzluff’s desire to write in a straightforward manner also sometimes means that he is overly simplistic, to the point that he is also sometimes inaccurate. For example, he writes about a fellow scientist who has “a passion for forests and their nemeses: fire, bugs, and climate change.” Any reader with a basic understanding of ecology will know that wildfires can actually be a boon for forests, providing the conditions necessary for the germination of seeds and the growth of new saplings; insects, likewise, may play an essential role in promoting decomposition and pollinating flowers. Although pedantry can get in the way of a good read, inaccuracies like these may actually defeat the purpose of a conservation-minded popular science book like this one.
The release of Welcome to Subirdia was accompanied by many lengthy, heated discussions on Internet chat boards, where wildlife-lovers expressed surprise at the author’s support of suburbs and built-up habitats—areas that ecologists have typically dismissed as wasted space. However, most modern conservationists agree that anthropogenic areas are a vital resource in conservation efforts, and Marzluff’s book helps explain why this is so. It’s a shame that the book doesn’t provide more details to back up this central thesis, but it still takes an excellent first step towards changing the way that the average reader views the urban jungle and the non-human creatures that can make their homes within it.
I will remember the smell of fishing harbours for a long time to come. It threatens to overwhelm at first. Then, it jostles for competition with other sensory assaults: shouts of fishermen auctioning their fish and people declaring their bids; loud colours of saris, lungis and fishing trawlers; the cries of fishermen on their boats passing crates of fish to each other and the ‘thud!’ as the crate lands on the floor of the harbour, hundreds of people busily doing things. My thoughts are interrupted, suddenly- a group of fishermen obscure my view and hastily tell me to move out of the way as they haul a large yellow-fin tuna away from their boats. The floor of the harbour is wet, parts of it speckled with fish scales that glimmer dimly. The wetness clings to my sandals.
I am with Bharti DK, a PhD student of the Indian Institute of Science and Sajan John, a researcher with nuggets of wisdom about everything under the sun and the sea. Bharti’s quest to find an elusive, unassuming marine animal has brought us to the fishing harbours of Kerala. She wants to find out how this animal disperses and how such dispersal might shape its populations.
Bharti holds a shell in her hand, a conical shell with spirals and a delicate minaret. It is the former home to a snail called Conus, one of the species that she is interested in. Conus is usually found ten metres into the sea and sometimes caught as by-catch by the fishermen. “Have you seen this shell?” we ask the fishermen.
Some of them peer curiously at us from their boats and ask us what we are there for.
They point us in the direction of heaps of fish and other marine life they are not interested in. There are people sorting these heaps. Fish that can be sold go in one pile, the rest go in another. A few of these people enthusiastically look for Conus, throwing us any shell that vaguely resembles it. For a short while, our quest becomes their quest. I am easily distracted. Above us, the sky is a blur. There are crows, brahminy kites and egrets circling the boats. Every now and again, one of them swoops and steals a fish from the boats. Sometimes a fight breaks out between the birds as they pilfer each other’s catch.
A morning at Shaktikulam harbour
We prod the heaps of marine refuse with a stick, looking for Conus. Some of the heaps still writhe with life. Hermit crabs stumble out in a daze. Sajan points out some beautiful creatures called sand dollars. They are flat and round and fit in the palm of my hand. I look closer and notice patterns of petals etched on them. I quickly pocket them to add to the growing hoard of nature’s treasures in my room, little knowing that the pretty creatures would gently fill my bag with a putrid odour and metamorphose into brown, unrecognisable slush.
In one of the harbours, a big, burly fisherman followed by an entourage of his colleagues, towers over us and asks us what we want. Sajan explains at length. The fisherman disappears into his cabin and comes out holding a shell. It is a species of Conus called Textile Cone which looks like porcelain etched with fine zigzag lines. However, like most other shells we found, its inhabitant is absent.
Back in her laboratory in Bangalore, Bharti will extract DNA from Conus snails from different locations. From its DNA, she will be able to understand the genetics of each population and find out how related populations are to each other. Some Conus species travel long distances as larva, while others are sedentary. Bharti wants to find out why this is so, what it is about each species that determines how far its young travel. She will use the genetic relatedness of populations to estimate how far a species’ larva travels. The logic is simple: the further the larvae travel, the more will be the genetic relatedness of separated populations.
The fishermen sometimes ask us to come aboard their boats where fish are still being sorted. Picking our way across boats, we see fishermen lolling on their sides, tired from their sojourn at sea. Some of these boats have spent many days at sea, going as far as Pakistan. Not bothering to get up or shift from their reclining positions, the fishermen ask us what we want, and pass around the Conus shell that we show them. Often they make us run in circles: fishermen of the smaller fishing boats tell us to go to trawlers; the men of the trawlers send us back to the small fishing boats.
This has been the general routine in the six fishing harbours we have gone to from Thiruvanathapuram to Kozhikode. Each time we near the harbour our driver announces, “The smell has come!” We don our hats, roll up our pants and let ourselves be enveloped by the bustling masses of people.
The harbours are intriguing with all their activity, but it is sad that my first introduction to many beautiful creatures of the sea is when they are lying lifeless on the harbour floor. Here are marlins with their enormous, jagged fins which look like they jumped straight out of someone’s imagination; here lie eagle rays with little heart-shaped depressions on their bellies; sharks that look sinister even in death; pearly-white, translucent squid oozing out their black ink; plump yellow-fin tunas—their tiny yellowfins contrasting sharply with the grey of their bodies.
An auction of rays in progress
Before the fishermen return in their technicolor boats when the sun’s rays are still only an hour old, the harbour is in a lull. Then, in a few hours, the activity in the harbour touches fever-pitch and then lapses again into a sleepy restfulness. People from big hotels, exporters and fishmongers arrive at the scene and wait for the arrival of the fishing boats. Some of them form little knots and watch the sea. A few fishermen sit by their boats and mend their fishing nets as the sun rises over the harbour. Once the boats dock, a flurry of activity ensues. Boats are cleaned; barnacles scraped off; smaller fish sorted out; bigger fish bodily dragged out of boats, pulled through a mass of humanity and then auctioned. As soon as a new load of fish is brought to the harbour, a crowd of people surround it and an auction starts without preamble. Once done, the crowd dissolves and forms at another site.
We stand out amidst the throng. The fishermen allow us to interrupt them to ask them about the shell.
“Have you seen this shell?” We ask over and over again. “Do you know where we can find it?”
After this frenzy of activity, the pulse of the harbour slows. Fishermen laze in their boats, tell each other about the day’s happenings and catch a few snatches of sleep. Some gather for a game of cards in the shade of the harbour.
As we come away from the harbour, I am reminded of the fishing markets in Asterix comics, always bustling with activity and incident. We learn towards the end of our quest, that there is a separate fishing season just for Conus and other ornamental shells, and we had come at the wrong time. That may be another chapter in Bharti’s quest. As for me, I am content with the opportunity this quest allowed me, to peek into the lives of fishermen, entwined as they are with those of the fish in the ocean.
A two-week-long educational trip to Kenya provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of ecotourism.
Those involved in conservation know that it is an interdisciplinary field combining sociology, politics, economics, culture, biology and ecology. It is not an easy thing to share the complexities of conservation dynamics with students who, when they make their first forays into the field, tend to see the issues in very black and white terms. Residential field courses, however, offer unique opportunities for budding conservationists to see and experience the issues first hand—to be impressed and moved by the majesty of wildlife, but also to view the inequalities and injustices that drive people to engage in poaching, deforestation and other activities that threaten not just certain species, but entire ecosystems. Having recently returned from such a field course, I am struck by how these sorts of trips allow students to fully appreciate how difficult it is to measure natural systems, and how “truth” is often concealed by propaganda, opinion, misinformation, disinformation and the occasional total lack of information.
Our destination was Kenya, which is home not only to a famous diversity of wildlife but also a number of other riches—geothermal energy, water, oil and food. Our trip spends 14 days in a small polygon of Kenya with vertices marked by Nairobi, Lake Naivasha, Lake Nakuru, Mount Kenya, and the western and eastern ends of the Maasai Mara. Here, it is particularly easy to see how Kenya’s prosperity waxes and wanes with changes in climate, national politics, global politics and the interests of global superpowers, multinational companies and international charities.
Kenya’s wildlife, and the tourism it attracts, is some of the keystones of the nation’s economy. But Kenya faces social and environmental problems that affect international tourism, and its government seeks economic prosperity and technological development in ways that usually conflict directly with the nation’s natural capital. Furthermore, it is not only Kenya’s wildlife that needs conserving; there is also the country’s vast melting pot of cultures to consider.
The field course begins: Land-use change around Nairobi
We began near Nairobi in the Kitengela triangles, barely-triangular tracts of land that traditionally formed dispersal corridors for the great megaherbivore migrations of the Serengeti ecosystem. The pressures of economic development in Nairobi have caused the land value to sky-rocket in this region. Without sensible regulation of land sale and subdivisions, the Kitengela plains have changed from a continuous stretch of savanna and scrub into a patchwork of small-holdings, farms, cement factories, and villages fenced and fragmented to such an extent that wildlife migrations are blocked. Nairobi National Park, a honeypot for safari tourism due to its proximity to Nairobi, is now fully encircled by urban sprawl and poorly regulated, anthropogenic, landscape fragmentation. Is it now any more than a big zoo?
We found hope on the fringes of the park, where members of the Olerai Conservancy aim to halt the subdivision of land into fenced, half-acre plots. The native Kenyan managers of the conservancy have worked with their local communities for several years now, fostering trust that their vision of posterity can also yield prosperity through a combination of low-impact agriculture and tourism. Grants from the Kenyan government and the World Bank have helped to support the installation of water pans, which provide precious permanent drinking for livestock and wildlife.
We met pastoralist landowners on the very edge of the park, where loss of livestock to lions and hyenas, and loss of crops to large herbivores, is not just a threat but a reality. This sometimes prompts illegal retaliatory killings, which can be discouraged via compensation schemes, assisted installation of fortified livestock enclosures, and new methods for deterring predators. Unfortunately, these schemes—run by government and international charities—are usually transient, dictated by pockets of large-scale funding.
Kenya’s lakes: Floriculture, catchment scale management, and ecotourism
We found a new set of environmental problems at Lake Naivasha, a freshwater lake fed by catchments that stretch back to the Aberdare mountain range. The lake has a long and ecologically devastating history of species introductions, the most obvious of which are the vast floating mats of water hyacinth and papyrus. In some years, boats fail to reach the central lake waters through this floating thicket. Introduced crayfish and tilapia fish have radically altered the natural aquatic community, but even these fish stocks have declined in the face of sedimentation from upstream agriculture and the burgeoning floriculture industries on the lake’s shore. Lake Naivasha is now a booming industry for international flower-growers, growing and sending roses to the supermarkets of Europe. The cynical view of this industry is that it exports Kenya’s scarcest commodity, water, to water-rich countries, in the form of flowers. This might sound like taking coals to Newcastle, but the tax breaks provided by the Kenyan government, coupled with the ideal growing conditions and cheapness of human labour in this region, make it highly profitable.
We visited two flower farms where drip irrigation is used to minimise water usage; where the use of pesticides and fertilisers is carefully regulated– sometimes using biological instead of chemical controls; where attempts are made to capture rainwater efficiently and recycle water wherever possible; and where there has been investment in riparian waste-water treatment systems to reduce the output of waste chemicals into the lake itself.
We discussed the provision of minimum wages and ethical working conditions for staff, the provision of housing and schooling for the families of workers, and the work of the Lake Naivasha Riparian Association whose members hope to reduce the impact of floriculture on wildlife and the lake ecosystem.
We also drove to Lake Nakuru National Park, a completely fenced, but still vast, wildlife sanctuary on the edge of Nakuru city.This is a hotspot for rhinoceros conservation, hosting healthy populations of both white and black rhinos alongside a host of other charismatic species. Despite enjoying the wildlife, we wonder whether we are visiting part of Kenya’s vast wildness—a bastion of conservation in the face of rising pressures from rhino poaching—or whether the fence simply creates a large safari park for tourists.
Middle Kenya: Conserving rhinos and water
After relocating to the western flank of Mount Kenya, we explored several sites in middle Kenya. The first was Solio, a cattle ranch forming a buffer around a wildlife reserve that supports very large densities of black and white rhinos. Solio’s income is derived from a mixture of cattle ranching and high-end tourism, alongside national and international trade in rhinos for restocking programmes.
The latter income source is currently threatened by increasing levels of poaching, but perhaps more directly by changes in government policy. Until recently, only the indigenous wildlife of Kenya was the property of the Kenyan people, and was managed by the Kenyan Wildlife Service. The recent Wildlife Act made even the non-indigenous wildlife of Kenya, including white rhinos, also the property of Kenya. This prevents ranches like Solio from earning money from trade in white rhino, and begs several questions: If the Kenyan government insists on ownership of all wildlife, how will private conservation entrepreneurs support conservation on private land? Could private ranches benefit from community engagement, so as to reduce the incidence of poaching? How can rhino horn be devalued internationally to reduce the profits in poaching—or should we consider legalising trade in rhino horn?
With this conservation conflict still ringing in our ears, we returned to the issue of water regulation and conservation. Water is more plentiful on the flanks of Mount Kenya, but the catchments extend all the way to the Indian Ocean, and with increasing levels of water extraction, mountainside rivers soon turn into seasonal streams needed by pastoralists and wildlife alike. In Ngushishi, a Water Resource Users Association (WRUA) is supported by the Department of Water to regulate the use of natural water sources by domestic users, flower farms, local farmers and larger farms growing crops for the international supermarket trade. Water users who join the WRUA are given a proportion of the water flow, but the WRUA ensures that a fixed amount of water is left to flow to the lower parts of the catchment. Here, regulation is essential because the wealth is at the top of the catchment and, left unchecked, there would be no incentives for upstream users to leave water for 30 current conservation 8.4 Students in the flower farm spotlight Dave Hodgson downstream use. Thanks to good management and an apparent lack of corruption, Ngushishi WRUA succeeds where others have failed; however, questions remain: What happens during drought years? What happens when water prices fluctuate? How does illegal water extraction get policed?
We also met an organic farmer who is supported by the WRUA and has created an exemplar of lowimpact, organic farming. On a small piece of land, he grows a diversity of crops for the local, national, and (sometimes) international market. He rears cattle in barns to supply milk for the local market. He composts his domestic and horticultural waste to return nutrients to the soil. He drip-irrigates to minimise water consumption. In fact, he uses every drop of water four times. He has built water pans to store rainwater, ensuring water availability for at least three months of drought conditions. This water is used domestically before entering a large fishpond, where the farmer rears fish for the local market. The water from the pond is used to irrigate crops and is then recycled to feed a composting system. On the fringes of the composting pits and water reservoirs, the farmer rears bees for honey and silk moths for fabric. We were suitably impressed by his organisation and productivity.
Land use and safari in the Maasai Mara
Students in the flower farm
For the final leg of our journey, we folded ourselves into our matatu vans and endured the long journey to the Mara North Conservancy at the western end of the Maasai Mara. At dusk, we entered a patch of scrub where we camped for the night. Maasai guards kept the leopards and hyenas away, and the students were awestruck by the stars unobscured by light pollution here.
A dawn walk by the river revealed hippos and buffalo, but the feeling of wilderness was dispelled when the students were shown the nearby lodge and glamping tents at Salt Springs, located only metres from our supposedly “wild” camp. The facility is run entirely by Maasai and helps bring income into the Mara North Conservancy. It is a preferable alternative to unsustainable agricultural activity, or the illegal development of permanent structures, on this critical habitat. Rising land value and a new sense of ownership have driven Maasai landowners to sell to the highest bidder, resulting in fences and international investment. The Serengeti ecosystem is vast, but development risks the natural movement of the wildlife that maintains this northern section.
Many conservation issues are raised by the following two days of safari. We drove too close to the animals, spent too long watching them, and found ourselves, voyeurs of traditional Maasai lifestyles, during a touristic visit to a local manyatta. It made us question our very presence in Kenya. The experiences were those of a lifetime, but how does tourism change local lifestyles, impact on the behaviour and persistence of the wildlife, and drive the market forces that exploit Kenya’s natural resources?
We debated our impacts on Kenya, concluding that a field course like ours can only be justified if it has a legacy; what the staff and students learn from the experience must be translated into efforts to help Kenya develop sustainably—and to conserve, but not in the sense of preserving the wildlife and ecosystem. Rather, we would wish for conservation that means adapting to maintain biodiversity, quality of life for local residents, and natural environment (which is also natural capital) in the face of national and international politics, market forces and climatic change.
Summing up
Having been involved with Kenya field trips for ten years now, I can sense changes—although I often can’t tell whether I am gradually forming opinions, finding out more truth, or detecting real change. This year, I came home feeling more positive than ever that the instinctive optimism of Kenya’s people will bear fruit, and will provide the impetus for the conservation and sustainable development of the country’s natural environment. Despite political instability, corruption, poaching and terrorism, the people of Kenya understand that their wildlife contributes both posterity and prosperity to them and to their nation, and are motivated to conserve it. I hope that Kenya’s political systems catch up with this optimism and learns to support, regulate, and align the interests of Kenya’s human and natural systems—and that the country can serve as a model to other nature-rich nations looking to balance economic and ecological goals.
Marrying traditional community knowledge-gathering with the latest in surveillance technology
Imagine a camera floating above a forest, regularly transmitting precise images to the community or the organisation monitoring it for conservation and management. Science fiction? Read on.
Tropical forests are presently under several large-scale threats making their monitoring critical. Community-based forest monitoring (CBFM) has been shown to be useful to maximise the collection of such information. Jaime and others discuss the practicalities of scaling this up further by using state-of-the-art technology. In their recent article, they reviewed the literature on the use of small drones and evaluate their feasibility for CBFM. The advantages among others include high spatial and temporal resolution, relatively low price and importantly, acquisition of the data by communities themselves, thereby empowering them. The disadvantages are mostly technology-limited which will improve in the future, except a few such as ethical issues, ambiguous national laws and social repercussions.
Decentralisation of data acquisition and management, they mention is also possible using drone assisted CBFM. They suggest that the prospect of having access to such fine-level information will attract communities to partake in CBFM and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation projects, to better manage their forests and to monitor illegal activities such as logging and mining. This information will also be useful for governments, non-governmental organisations and scientists.
They also provide recommendations for deploying drone-assisted CBFM programs based on their practical experience. They suggest testing the feasibility of drones in existing CBFM programmes since while practicability, replicability and incorporation of local community knowledge are the advantages, the constraints are of program implementation, enthusiasm and decision-making of the communities as well as ethical issues. Once these nuances are addressed, the use of drones promises a landscape-level method for forest conservation, management and monitoring, which is the need of the hour.
References:
Galvez J et al. 2014. Small drones for community-based forest monitoring: An assessment of their feasibility and potential in tropical areas. Forests 5(6): 1481–1507.
Is a good cause helped by a well-known face rooting for it?
Charitable causes have increasingly begun to enlist celebrities as brand ambassadors these days, with mixed effects. For every Emma Watson giving impassioned speeches about gender equality, there are dozens of other public figures who live with their feet in their mouths. More importantly, the association of a famous name is no guarantee that a charitable cause will make lasting change in the face of complex global problems. How did we get to the point where entertainers from Bono to Angelina Jolie became the face of social and environmental justice?
Daniel Brockington, professor at the University of Manchester, believes that the increasing prominence of celebrities in charitable initiatives is a symptom of a larger pattern: the rising dependence of NGOs on corporate interests. In a February 2014 paper in Third World Quarterly, Brockington analysed interviews and data collected from both sides of the charity-celebrity divide, from NGO employees to journalists, agents and public relations officials in the UK and the USA. In addition, Brockington presented a history of charity-celebrity partnerships, beginning with the first Live Aid concert held in 1985. What Brockington found was that such partnerships have become increasingly systematised, as NGOs comb databases for suitable celebrity sponsors. One impetus behind that search is competition for corporate funding, which NGOs can draw if they promise added glamour to corporates: a glimpse of the rich and famous.
Brockington emphasises that celebrity involvement is a marginal factor when it comes to the effects that NGOs actually have on the ground. “The value of this account is that it delineates the limits of interest in the topic for development scholars,” he says. However, he acknowledges that the clouding of NGO functioning with corporate and celebrity agendas is becoming an issue of increasing importance, and pushes for similar research within the global South.
References:
Dan Brockington. 2014. The production and construction of celebrity advocacy in international development, Third World Quarterly, 35:1, 88-108, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2014.868987.
“…the mosaic and diversity of life is the living story of our planet.” — Dr LL Gaddy, naturalist & author
We live in a world of extraordinary diversity and richness. From the tangled labyrinth of the tropical rainforest to the seemingly endless ice shelves of the arctic north, and the stormy seas which surround them, lifeforms have evolved to exploit every opportunity and to fill every niche. So great is this variety that it can be overwhelming, and as a result, it can be easy for some species to be forgotten, passed over and left to drift into obscurity. Especially if they are very small. But it is the species that are least physically imposing that form the silent majority, the greatest portion of life on our planet, and in many ways, it is from them that we have the most to learn. As Harvard professor EO Wilson has said, “the little things… compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things…run the world”. So this is the story of the little things. The forgotten species that in the seething tide of life get lost and ignored, but which despite their anonymity have a fascinating tale to tell.
If we are all sitting comfortably, I’ll ask you to take up your microscope, and we can begin. Nematode worms are the most abundant of all animals on the planet. Four out of five animals are nematodes. It has been said that if all solid material on Earth’s surface was removed, the outline of the physical structures would still be visible, from the nematodes. This alone highlights the profusion and fecundity of life on earth, but what is perhaps even more astounding is that we have only begun to peel the outer layer of the diversity onion. Until the early 2000s, scientists had formally described ~6000 species of bacteria worldwide. A great number. However, new techniques for sequencing DNA now suggest that in a single gram of agricultural soil, that’s less than a tea spoon’s worth, there may in fact be over 26,000 bacteria species, while in forests the figure may be as high as 53,000. All these species are engaged in complex ecological interactions, and the DNA they carry, ‘chosen’ as it were by natural selection, suits each to a discrete niche and mode of life. So 53,000 niches, in a teaspoon of soil. Already the mind begins to struggle.
The diversity in the world’s oceans is no less astounding. Marine bacteria of the genus Prochlorococcus may in fact be the most abundant organisms on Earth, playing a significant, if not pre-eminent role in oceanic (and global) photosynthesis. Their importance to the health of our planet is therefore hard to overestimate, and yet these single-celled organisms were not discovered until 1988.
Swapping the microscope for a lower resolution magnifying lens, a foray into the astonishing diversity of the insects represents a similarly overwhelming prospect. Take for example the beetles. More than a quarter of all species described so far are beetles. Their numbers do not simply exceed those of most other taxonomic groups; it has been estimated that there are more beetle species than there are amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal species combined, 11 times over. That’s 350,000 species, many of whom, together with the other forms of tiny life which form the foundations of our planet’s ecosystems, make a living decomposing and re-constituting ‘spent’ biological matter, and so act as the powerhouse for the diversity pyramid which rests upon their narrow shoulders. And what of those other tiny lifeforms? No story of our planet’s little things would be complete without mention of the Hymenoptera, the sawflies, bees, wasps and ants. To take just the latter, the ants are perhaps most astonishing for the way, when it comes to both time and scale, they combine the inconceivably large with the minutely small. A queen black ant (Lasius niger), for example, is 1cm in length but can live to 28 years of age. Super-colonies of the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) can contain literally billions of workers and are spread over hundreds of kilometres, but each individual worker is less than 3mm long. Dubbed the ‘dinosaur’ or ‘proto-ant’, Nothomyrmeciamacrops is found in the arid region of South Australia, and has hardly changed from ancestors which were already extant 60 million years ago: that’s just 5 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, and 59.98 million years before the first modern humans evolved.
Meanwhile, if we turn to other insect groups, certain species of termite can boast feats of architectural accomplishment which not only rival those of human engineers but actively inform and inspire them. In the savannahs of Namibia, the spired mounds of Macrotermes michaelseni can be 12 metres in circumference and almost 4 metres high. Elaborate examples of functional design, inside the mound’s imposing walls is an intricate network of variously sized tunnels. Smaller tunnels near the surface help to reduce the effects of turbulent air currents outside. By impeding stronger gusts, air moving more gently can permeate the walls, moving in and out in wave-like currents, and refreshing the air inside. What is more, in addition to maintaining air quality, by carrying wet soil in and out of the mound the workers actively regulate the moisture levels inside the mound, keeping the humidity close to a constant 80% year-round. This is not just for comfort, however. It is vital for a complex mutualism which greatly increases the efficiency with which the termites can process their food. Strict vegetarians, the termites gather vegetation from the surrounding area and bring it back to the nest. This plant material is then eaten and partially digested as it passes through the termite’s gut. However, the termites’ favour woody vegetation that is high in cellulose, and the enzymes in the termite’s guts are not formidable enough to fully break down. To solve this, the termites take the excreted material and build comb-like structures, on which a specific fungus then grows. This fungus further breaks down the coarse cellulose in the plants and makes it easier for the termites to digest on the 2nd ingestion. If the humidity drops too low, the fungi however cannot grow, so maintaining moisture levels is vital to the termites’ food supply. And all this in a species with a head no wider than 4mm.
So life is bountiful. Life is opulent. Life is quite frankly showing off. Earth’s ecosystems contain literally billions of species, a great many different modes of existence, and the ecological networks within them can be astonishingly complex. But perhaps the most wonderful thing of all? In many cases, all this diversity exists precisely because the rest of it is there. Biodiversity in and of itself may give strength. While still a controversial idea, many scientists believe that an ecosystem with more species may be more resilient to environmental changes, and its available resources used more efficiently so that it is more productive in terms of absolute biomass. What is more, these complex communities are vital to our own species. There is strong evidence that biodiversity helps to regulate the three things which we arguably rely on most: our air, water and food supplies. Research has even shown that contact with nature is directly beneficial to both our physical and mental health. So it seems we need biodiversity.
Scientists are revealing new wonders of the natural world, every day. In 2014, a single research institute, the California Academy of Sciences, described 221 new species of plants and animals alone. This number does not even consider the other kingdoms: the fungi, bacteria and protista, which are known to be far more numerous, and to which other researchers are devoting their lives to studying. The 50,000 bacterial species in a tea spoon’s worth of soil, the bees and beetles, wasps and worms. Together, these organisms form the bedrock of the diversity of life, and if we allow them the space to simply exist, they will continue to flourish, to thrive, and to enrich our lives.
We have an ancient relationship with wolves. This relationship has taken many forms over the centuries, and the myths and tales that we tell about wolves reflect this. In some stories, the wolf is a devourer, a demon or a destructor. In others, the wolf is a guardian, a nurturer or a guide. Many stories teach us to fear and loathe wolves, but there are also stories that teach us to respect and revere them.
Whether the stories of your childhood rendered the wolf friend or foe, one thing is for sure: the wolf is making a comeback. Today communities in the United States and Western Europe are facing rising wolf populations and struggling to decide whether or not they are willing to welcome these wild, ferocious-looking neighbours.
Historically, humans and wolves have had a turbulent relationship that has cost us both lives and livelihoods. Since 1878, for example, the Indian wolf (Canis lupus pallipes), a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), has been responsible for over 1,000 documented human casualties, including hundreds of children. For villagers who live in regions where the Indian wolf roams, the threat of losing a child to a wolf is a very real one. Human lives are not the only ones at risk; domesticated livestock and the human livelihoods attached to them are also threatened by wolves. The predation of livestock by gray wolves is an international issue that impacts the economic survival of ranchers and herders from Russia to the United States. For wolves, the cost of our relationship has been both life and land. The territory wolves inhabited once covered most of the Northern Hemisphere, and this species is now confined to scattered areas that humans have not yet overtaken.
Though a portion of the historical range of wolves is still accessible to them, they have been intensely hunted by humans for centuries. By the early 1900s, hunting had led to the extirpation, or local extinction, of wolves from most regions of the United States and Western Europe, including the entire United Kingdom.
Destructive outcomes have made our relationship with wolves problematic for both species. Despite widespread persecution, wolves have proved themselves both resourceful and adaptive, and their return to parts of the US and Western Europe demonstrates an ability and willingness to coexist with humans. The question we now have to answer is whether we can coexist with them.
The biggest challenge to wolf conservation is low cultural acceptance amongst politically powerful communities, particularly herdsmen and hunters. The communities most resistant to wolf reintroduction are typically found in areas that wolves have only recently returned to or might inhabit in the near future. These communities lack livestock practices that prevent wolf predation and lack a clear understanding of how wolves affect other animal populations and the ecosystem overall. These communities have not yet adapted to wolves but they could, especially if provided with economical and educational resources to support the transition.
The ecological role of the wolf
As members of the global food web, both humans and wolves find themselves irrevocably intertwined in an entanglement of connections that we are still only beginning to understand. This food web represents a larger context for the conflict between humans and wolves and both of our roles in the global ecosystem are worth examining if we are to best determine how to guide present and future wolf conservation.
Unlike humans, wolves alter their diets in response to changes in the populations of other species in the food web. Since wolves and other large predators have no natural predators themselves feature Anna Busse (humans are typically not considered a “natural” predator for these species), they are classified as apex predators, which hold a top-level, regulatory role in food webs. By interacting with both herbivores (also known as primary consumers) and smaller predators, apex predators promote a balance of genetic health, competition, and biodiversity throughout the ecosystem.
In Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming, USA), for example, tree saplings of willow and aspen act as producers that are eaten by primary consumers such as elk (Cervus canadensis). These are then hunted by coyotes (Canis latrans), which are mid-level predators (or mesopredators). Wolves are the apex predators residing at the top of this food chain, regulating the populations of both primary consumers (which they hunt) and mesopredators (with which they compete). The dynamic of this food web is influenced by additional species, including plants, rodents, foxes, bears, eagles and countless others.
As apex predators wolves act as vital regulators for the surrounding ecosystem
Apex predators impact prey species not only by eating them but also by altering their consumptive and migratory behaviours by influencing their perception of predation risk—the likelihood of predator-induced mortality. This can lead to reduced foraging behaviour and increased energy usage, which regulates the rate of survival and reproduction among prey species. Predation risk also increases migratory behaviour, thus mitigating the impact of herbivorous species on plant populations by preventing the continued exploitation of a particular plant species or area. In the absence of apex predators, primary consumers create ecosystem imbalances by over-consuming key plant species. In the United Kingdom, where red deer (Cervus elaphus) have proliferated in the absence of wolves and other large predators, overconsumption of saplings has hampered reforestation efforts, leading to reductions in bird density.
The red deer also compete with livestock for food, creating unforeseen costs for those who rely economically on livestock. Apex predators regulate mesopredator populations primarily through competition rather than direct consumption; not only do they consume key prey species that mesopredators also consume, but they may also prompt mesopredators to avoid entire habitats altogether. In the absence of apex predators, an increase in mesopredator populations (known as mesopredator release) leads to a decline in the populations of the species they consume. This has been demonstrated in Minnesota where coyote populations have risen in the absence of wolves, causing a decline in rabbit and hare populations. Because mesopredators target a wide variety of prey species, this unregulated consumption can create an ecosystem imbalance.
The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) is another apex predator that plays an important role.
This type of ecosystem influence can extend beyond the wilderness and into human interests. The absence of wolves as apex regulators in the US has led to increased livestock predation by mesopredators such as coyotes which, when compared to wolves, may be responsible for over 26 times the number of sheep fatalities, and 14 times the number of nationally recorded cattle fatalities. The potential for grey wolves to control coyote populations—and, thus, coyote predation on livestock—is a compelling reason on its own to preserve wolf populations, even for herdsmen.
Controversy over conservation law
Despite wolf conservation policies upheld by the US and EU, the rise of wolf populations in select regions has been met by strong political resistance which has managed to slow reintroduction efforts, and in some territories (such as the UK) has prevented them entirely.
For example, in the US, wolves have been protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1973, but the return of sizable populations to the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes region from Canada generated enough political resistance that protection was removed from these two areas in 2011 and 2012, enabling legal hunting of wolves to take place. Conservationists continually fought both rulings and in 2014 the decision to delist wolves in the Great Lakes region was overturned, providing federal protection for that population once again. The absence of wolves as apex regulators in the US has led to increased livestock predation by mesopredators such as coyotes which, when compared to wolves, may be responsible for over 26 times the number of sheep fatalities, and 14 times the number of nationally recorded cattle fatalities.
Wolves are protected under EU policies as well, prohibiting destruction and damage to populations, though there are many exceptions that allow killings similar to those occurring in the US to take place. Norway and Sweden have been conducting highly controversial wolf cullings since 2005 and 2009 (respectively) despite public resistance, frequent suspensions and questionably low wolf populations in both countries.
Resolving our differences
The competitive relationship between wolves and humans will always have the potential for conflict and overcoming the human instinct to hunt wolves will not be easy. Because of this, the conservation of wolves faces many obstacles, but also provides numerous opportunities. As we work to conserve the wolf and its habitat, we can also work to mitigate the relationship between wolves and the humans they come into direct conflict with. Herdsmen can be supported through the employment of range riders who patrol around herds and discourage wolf attacks. Additional means of livestock protection can be implemented such as predator-proof fencing, herding and livestock protection dogs, and the removal of livestock carcasses which provide an invitation and an easy meal for predators. Hunters can be engaged with and educated about the importance of conserving wolf populations. In all of these communities, individuals who believe in the conservation of wolves can be empowered to transform the perspectives around them.
Wolves regulate the population size of prey species such as caribou (Rangifer tarandus)
Wolves and other apex predators, despite their competitive relationship with humans, act as vital regulators for our global ecosystem. They help maintain healthy population sizes of various species, encourage the continual movement, genetic and overall fitness of prey populations, and self-regulate their own population in response to environmental conditions. As the impacts of human development have placed our global ecosystems in a precarious position, it would be wise for us to conserve these regulators rather than eliminate them and put further strain on ecosystems already under stress. By utilizing more mindful human practices and educating ourselves on the value of wolf conservation, we can overcome the limitations of our relationship with wolves and can begin to write a new chapter in the mythology of the wolf.
Further reading:
Álvares F, J Domingues, P Sierra, & P Primavera. 2011. Cultural dimension of wolves in the Iberian Peninsula: implications of ethnozoology in conservation biology. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 24(3), 313-331.
Chapron G, P Kaczensky, JD Linnell, M Von Arx, D Huber, H Andrén & S Nowak. 2014. Recovery of large carnivores in Europe’s modern human-dominated landscapes. Science, 346(6216), 1517-1519.
Monbiot G. 2014. Feral: Rewilding the land, the sea, and human life. University of Chicago Press.
Ripple WJ, EJ Larsen, RA Renkin & DW Smith. 2001. Trophic cascades among wolves, elk and aspen on Yellowstone National Park’s northern range. Biological conservation, 102(3), 227-234.
Stephens WR. 2011. Gray Wolf Rising: Why the Clash over Wolf Management in the Northern Rockies Calls for Congressional Action to Define Recovery under the Endangered Species Act. Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev., 36, 917.
The majority of the world’s flamingos are of conservation concern; can they be protected?
Flamingos have been described as both the most charismatic of all bird species and one of the most recognisable. While some might argue with the former claim, few would challenge the latter. Thanks to their bright, cheerful plumage, hefty, crooked bill and spindly legs—one often held aloft in that iconic balanced position—flamingos can easily be identified by people around the world.
Though the birds are often referred to generically as ‘pink flamingos’, there are actually six different species: American (also called Caribbean, Cuban, or rosy; Phoenicopterus ruber); greater (Phoenicopterus roseus); Chilean (previously also known as red-kneed; Phoenicopterus chilensus); lesser (Phoeniconaias minor); Andean (Phoenicoparrus andinus); and puna (also called James; (Phoenicoparrus jamesi). Evidence of ancient flamingo ancestors has been unearthed in both Australia and Antarctica. Today, however, free-living flamingos are only found in North America (American), South America (Andean, Chilean, and puna), Europe (greater), Africa (lesser and greater) and Asia (lesser and greater).
All extant flamingos require habitats characterised by a single common feature: shallow saline pools. These can be fed by underwater springs, ocean waves, rivers, and—perhaps most importantly— rain. Water in flamingo habitats is often saltier than the sea and may contain compounds that are toxic to many species if consumed in large doses. This seemingly inhospitable habitat is perfect for brine shrimp, small molluscs, diatoms and cyanobacteria—all potential prey items for flamingos. Because so few animals can tolerate extremely salty environments or figure out how to collect the tiny particles of food available there, flamingos have been able to exploit this niche virtually uncontested.
It can be difficult to census flamingos because they tend to live in such remote, impenetrable wetlands. To make matters worse, the birds have a habit of relocating frequently and unexpectedly, which means that researchers may show up to known flamingo haunts only to discover they have just been vacated in favour of grounds that are tens or even hundreds of kilometres away. Available data indicate that global population sizes vary widely from one species to the next; the least abundant species is the Andean, with only 34,000 individuals, while the most common is the lesser, with as many as 3.2 million birds.
These numbers, however, belie the complexity of flamingos’ conservation situations. All three South American species are threatened by anthropogenic disturbance and habitat destruction; while Andeans are considered ‘vulnerable’, punas (100,000 individuals) and Chileans (200,000 individuals) are listed as ‘near threatened. This is also the status of lesser flamingos, 90% of which breed at a single site that is threatened by industrial developers. Only the American (330,000) and greater (680,000) flamingos are listed as being of ‘least conservation concern’.
It’s not entirely surprising that so many flamingo species should be under threat; the pink birds have a long history of unpleasant interactions with humans. Phoenician traders are reported to have transported flamingos to Cornwall, UK, where the birds were passed off as phoenixes and traded for tin. Flamingos were kept in captivity by the Egyptians and some groups of Native Americans, and flamingo meat was enjoyed by people of several cultures—though perhaps most of all by the Romans, who have recorded for posterity recipes for properly preparing flamingo tongues for delectation. Even today, the birds are sport-hunted or poached across their range. The illegal slaughter of dozens of adult birds caused an uproar in India in early 2012 because it occurred when hundreds of preeminent ornithologists and birdwatchers were visiting Gujarat for the Global Bird Watcher’s Conference.
Flamingos are also known to be negatively impacted by nearly all forms of human traffic, including planes, boats, and all-terrain vehicles. Both the noise and visual disturbance caused by these vehicles disrupts feeding and breeding efforts and may even lead to habitat abandonment. Ironically, much of this traffic is associated with ecotourism activities that are supposed to generate funds for protecting the birds over the long term.
Even more worrying is the fact that flamingo habitat is under nearly constant threat from human activities such as mining, farming and urban expansion. These activities can reduce the quality of feeding and breeding sites by altering water pH, introducing invasive species that out-compete flamingos for food, removing water (for use in irrigation or to facilitate easier access to minerals), and introducing dangerous structures such as power lines, with which flamingos can become entangled while flying. In the Mediterranean, where native greater flamingos often come into contact with escaped lesser, Chilean, and American flamingos, researchers worry about the potential detrimental genetic and behavioural effects of mixed-species breeding attempts.
One of the most contentious issues is the proposed construction of roads through the irreplaceable flamingo habitats. This has been one of the biggest threats to lesser flamingos at Tanzania’s Lake Natron—the single most important breeding ground in the world for lesser flamingos. As detrimental as the road itself could be, even worse is the accompanying plan to open a soda extraction plant that could alter water levels at the lake, thereby potentially reducing the quality and quantity of food available to the birds. Over the years, several proposed developments have also threatened to degrade habitat near the ‘flamingo city’ in India’s Rann of Kutch. Biologists fear that construction in this area will alter water flow and reduce the accessibility of vital flamingo food resources.
Another worry is climate change, which could render favourite habitats unsuitable for feeding or breeding by either drying them up or flooding them to the point that they no longer have the pH required to sustain flamingos’ primary prey. Changing water conditions might also encourage blooms of toxic algal species or the spread of harmful bacteria—issues that have already been implicated in the deaths of large numbers of waterbirds in Africa. Flamingos are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in their microhabitat and may decide to forego breeding if they perceive that environmental conditions are not optimal for nesting. While some flamingo populations have readily adapted to anthropogenic environments, this is not generally true. This suggests that the birds would not be likely to utilize man-made alternatives introduced as replacements for degraded natural areas.
Worldwide, conservationists have already initiated several efforts to get the threatened birds out of harm’s way. Important habitats for the South American species have been given official protected status, and activists are hard at work to achieve a similar goal at Lake Natron and other African lesser flamingo haunts. Anti-poaching laws have been introduced in some regions and guards have been hired to protect flamingo colonies throughout the breeding season. Perhaps most importantly, researchers have been working on surveying more flamingo habitats—particularly in South America. These intensive efforts are vital for finding out how many birds remain, whether populations are stable or fluctuating, and which flamingo habitats most need to be protected.
However, flamingo conservation efforts do not just involve wild birds and field researchers, but also captive birds and aviculturists. Over the years, observations of flamingos at zoos and parks have provided a wealth of information on the birds’ natural histories—particularly for the three South American species, which are difficult to locate and study in the wild. Another benefit of captive flamingo populations is that they are a huge draw to visitors whose admission fees are often funnelled directly into conservation efforts. Outside of zoos, the majority of visitors are unlikely to have an opportunity to see flamingos in the wild. As a result, captive facilities are a vital tool in the campaign to raise awareness of, and support for these threatened birds.
Although it has taken many years, aviculturists have finally worked out how to keep flamingos happy and healthy enough to breed in captivity. This has been a boon to conservation efforts for two main reasons. First, sustainable captive populations reduce or even remove, the need to import wild-caught birds—a process that is always associated with the risk of injury and death to the birds, during both trapping and shipping. Second, the maintenance of a large and healthy global population of captive birds acts as an insurance policy against any catastrophes that happen in the wild. Captive flamingos may someday be an important source of genetic diversity required for re-invigorating wild stocks, or, if captive breeding programs reach their full potential, they could even be used to produce birds that can be released into natural flamingo habitats.
Recently, there has been increasing interest in keeping captive flamingos happy as well as healthy. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the fact that where there is one flamingo, there is usually another, an integral part of happiness is a satisfactory social life. Observations of ‘friendships’ and ‘coalitions’ within flocks can help managers decide, among other things, what the optimal flock size is, how much space birds need before they start getting on each other’s nerves, and which sex ratios are optimal for promoting breeding behaviour. By being aware of which birds prefer to flock together, aviculturists can also avoid separating ‘friends’ when moving birds between enclosures or giving animals away to other facilities. Studies of sociality in flamingos could also provide insights into group dynamics of other species—including humans.
Regardless of whether we’re watching flamingos in order to learn something about ourselves or just to admire their beauty, it is hard not to be impressed. Although they may look delicate and slight, these deceptively hearty birds manage to survive in some of the harshest habitats on earth and have been doing so for millions of years. We can only hope that efforts to protect flamingos and their habitats will keep these living fossils around to brighten many more days over the generations to come.
African lions have been wiped out from 80% of their historic range and continue to decline at an alarming rate due to retaliatory killings, loss of habitat and prey species, exploitation by recreational trophy hunters and commercial trade and disease. This special issue of Current Conservation focuses on conservation issues and the effective management of lions
across some important lion habitats. Philipp Henschel and Luke Hunter of Panthera Foundation present the case of critically endangered lions of West and Central Africa. Through their article, they emphasise the need for assessing population trends, threat status and safeguarding these genetically distinct African lion populations. The remarkable efforts of Ewaso lions speaks of a very positive approach to human-lion coexistence by empowering local communities. Shivani Bhalla and Heather Gurd describe their efforts and success in making the indigenous Samburu people the ambassadors and guardians of their own natural heritage.
Whereas conservation programmes are mostly run by the State or conservation NGOs, ALERT encourages volunteers to be a part of lion conservation, research and community development programmes. Simon OChen a “nomadic adventurer” writes about his experience as a volunteer and the delight of working with lion cubs as part of a project to strengthen wild populations through release of captive raised lions in Zambia. This approach represents a new direction and a much debated conservation model. Scientists Matt Hayward and Michael Somers have long time experience in carnivore reintroductions in South Africa and have written extensively about the reintroduction of top-order predators. They describe how South Africa leads the world in large-scale biodiversity restoration with lions at the forefront and how translocations may serve as an effective and powerful conservation strategy. Set against the context of these conservation and management approaches, I present my perspective on the future of Asiatic lions.
Issue Editor: Meena Venkataraman
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Mosi Oa Tunya National Park, Zambezi River, Zambia
Walking the cubs along the Zambezi River in the Mosi Oa Tunya National Park, Zambia. It gets the cubs used to being in the wild encountering wildlife such as elephants, giraffes, gazelle and buffalo.
On the outskirts of Livingstone, Zambia, lies Damba Forest where impalas and kudus share a 700-acre enclosure with a pride of lions with radio collars. This is known as Stage 2, where the first generation of lions to be walked by ALERT’s conservation program have had a litter. These lions were walked as cubs through their habitat to familiarise them with the wildlife they would encounter upon release. In two years’ time, their litter will be the first lions released into the African wild without having any human interaction except for tranquilised medical checks. These cubs are raised solely by the pride that lives in the 707-acre enclosure that is regularly stocked with the live game for the lions to hone their natural hunting instincts in order to survive.
“As of 2013, there are only 32,000 lions in the African wild,” says Daryl Black, the General Manager of ALERT – African Lion Environment Research Team – in Livingstone. “That’s an 80% drop from the 200,000 that roamed Africa during the 60s and 70s.” The drop is due to the Asian black market and people’s belief that parts of exotic animals have medicinal benefits.
Daryl is based at the Thorntree River Lodge about 10 km outside of Livingstone, in the Mosi Oa Tunya National Park, where the program hosts its volunteers. He has extensive knowledge of African wildlife, having worked as a guide for over ten years in Kenya’s Maasai Mara Park. He is in charge of overseeing ALERT’s project, making sure it runs smoothly so that the release of the programme’s lions is a successful accomplishment.
“What about the lions that have been walked and hand-raised?” I ask Cara Watts, lion manager of the project, as we sit in the Land Rover with two volunteers and an intern, watching the pride in Stage 2, Zulu, the dominant male, shrugging our presence off.
“Lions possess the natural instinct to hunt and kill” she whispers. “Our lions are walked through the Mosi Oa Tunya National Park,” Daryl explains the benefits of walking the cubs until they are 18 months old. “Here they come in contact with wildlife such as buffalo, elephants, giraffes and impalas. When the lions are about 15 months old they’ll even hunt while we walk them. To them, we are simply part of the pride that raises them.”
The current cubs that are being walked will be the last. Within a year they will be retired and moved to Stage 2 where the focus of the project will be to raise the necessary funds to build an electrified 9-kilometre double-fence Stage 3.
ALERT’s project is not just about the lions. It also focuses on giving back to the community by providing gainful employment which gives a sense of ownership and community and teaching in the local schools.
“Education is a very important part of this programme,” says Dr Jackie Abell, ALERT’s research manager. “The volunteers are given an education pack which they learn and then teach the local kids in the school. Some of the kids have no idea what kind of animals they have here. And even though it’s currently school holidays, these kids come in on their own time and of their own free will because they are keen to learn. We’re changing their attitude about conservation.”
“It’s grown a lot,” says Jeremy Tiger, a Canadian who had volunteered with the program when it was a year old after it began in 2008. He was walking Zulu when Zulu was just 14 months old. This time, he’s returned with his partner, Alanna Swarup.
“He didn’t have to convince me,” she says. “He was always talking about it and we had some holiday time coming up so we decided we’d come here and help with the lions. I love that it’s hands-on, Simon OChen”, she says, adding, “Even chopping up the donkey meat.”
The four stages to release lions into the wild are: Stage 1 Lions as young as six weeks are taken on walks to build their confidence and allow their natural hunting instincts to develop. Stage 2 Set in a 700-acre enclosure with plenty of game to hunt, the lions learn to develop a natural pride social system. Stage 3 The lions are released into a larger eco-system (80 km2) in the Damba National Forest where they will learn to compete with other predators such as hyenas. The lions will give birth to cubs raised in a completely wild environment with no human contact – effectively making them wild lions. Stage 4 After maturing at the age of five, the cubs born in Stage 3 will be released into the African wilderness of Damba National Forest with all the skills and human avoidance behaviours of any wild-born cub.
The African lion is a powerful flagship species synonymous with African rangelands; yet across the continent, lions and other great carnivores are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Kenya is no exception to this grave trend, with the national population estimated at fewer than 2,000 individuals.
Here, like elsewhere in Africa, habitat loss and conflict with people rank amongst the most significant threats to lions. Rapid human population growth and encroachment into wildlife habitats have increased the incidence of human-lion interaction and conflict over recent decades. Conflicts, which can culminate in retaliatory persecution of lions, are often most pronounced amongst pastoralist communities for whom livestock depredation presents a significant actual—as well as perceived—risk to people’s livelihoods. With anthropogenic threats central to the decline of the African lion, and with over 65% of lion range outside of formal protection (www.panthera.org), many believe that the success of carnivore conservation hinges on the involvement of local people. This is reflective of a broader shift in the conservation paradigm, where historical, largely top-down approaches that once disenfranchised local communities have been replaced by more integrated solutions that recognise local needs and empower communities to manage their natural resources and become more effective stewards of their environment. In the Greater Ewaso Nyiro ecosystem of northern Kenya, the conservation organisation Ewaso Lions is working with Samburu communities, a semi-nomadic pastoralist ethnic group, to develop creative solutions to conserve lions and mitigate human-carnivore conflict. In this article, we present examples from Ewaso Lions’ portfolio of outreach activities, which are purposefully rooted in traditional cultural practices and are designed to build capacity and harness local expertise. Warrior Watch
Nashipai in Samburu
Morans, the warrior age-class of the Samburu tribe, traditionally play a central role in protecting their communities and livestock from external threats, including predation by lions and other large carnivores. Yet, these young men represent one of the most neglected groups in conservation management and decision-making in northern Kenya. Recognising this gap, Ewaso Lions Field and Community Manager and Samburu moran, Jeneria Lekilelei, came up with the idea for the Warrior Watch programme. Being a moran himself, he realised that his age class could potentially be the best ambassadors for conservation as they spend most of their time in wilderness areas. Jeneria described how “Warriors are the eyes and ears in the bush and involving them is key to the conservation and security of region’s wildlife and people”. Launched in 2010, Warrior Watch, therefore, encourages morans to become active wildlife ambassadors and to improve community awareness and tolerance for lions and other carnivores.
The programme intentionally builds on morans’ traditional protection role by increasing their capacity to mitigate human-carnivore conflict. Morans reinforce livestock enclosures, teach herders good husbandry and communicate the message about the value of lions to their peers. Equally, through the incorporation of a participatory monitoring scheme, Warrior Watch leverages morans’ wide-ranging presence in wildlife areas to monitor threatened species and record conflict incidents, ensuring the collection of information that is critical to successful conservation monitoring and research over a far greater geographical scale than could be achieved by Ewaso Lions’ staff alone. To fulfil their role, Warrior Watch participants receive ongoing training in wildlife ecology and conservation, conflict mitigation techniques and basic data collection (including the use of GPS devices). Although provided with small food stipends, it is education which forms the principal incentive for participation, with many of these formerly non-literate morans now able to read and write and, vitally, to complete their own wildlife monitoring and conflict reports. Despite the programme targeting only a small sub-section of the population (15 morans across 3 conservancies) and offering negligible financial rewards, an evaluation conducted in 2012 revealed how Warrior Watch had already gained widespread community support and significantly influenced local attitudes towards, and tolerance of, predators within the two year period following its launch. As so few morans are directly engaged in the programme, effective dissemination has been critical to this success, with participants sharing their knowledge and skills widely amongst other morans and members of their community.
The evaluation further revealed how Warrior Watch has been instrumental in empowering the moran demographic both politically (by increasing participation in conservation and associated decision-making) and socially (by enhancing respect for morans and building social capital). This empowerment, coupled with an increased understanding of the importance of carnivores and knowledge of wildlife-friendly conflict reduction strategies, is believed to have galvanised community support in the absence of significant monetary incentives. Although a formal evaluation of the ecological impacts of Warrior Watch has not been undertaken, in 2013 alone, Warrior Watch morans prevented lions from being killed on eight separate occasions, emphasising the conservation potential of this programme.
Wazee Watch Samburu wazee (elders) are respected leaders who, in contrast to the moran demographic, are traditionally recognised as central decision-makers with a great capacity to influence change within their communities. Accordingly, the practices and decisions made by the wazee have a greater likelihood of being adopted than those enacted by other groups. Despite the Warrior Watch programme’s success in mitigating incidents of human-carnivore conflict, limited communication across the wazee and moran demographics has hindered effective collaboration between the two groups. Jeneria, recognising this shortfall, felt that engaging the elders would be critical to continued conservation success within the area. Wazee Watch was, therefore, launched in July 2013 to capitalise on elders’ influence within communities and to provide a platform for intergenerational discussions about wildlife. Ewaso Lions meets with the eight wazee every two months to discuss challenges in conservation and often to seek assistance from the elders in various forums, related to security or conservation. The wazee also strive to reinforce the conservation message, representing Ewaso Lions at community meetings and supporting Warrior Watch morans in their efforts to diffuse potential conflict situations and to educate the community on the importance of carnivores. Consequently, the programme has the potential to further increase social capital, as warriors and elders unite to achieve this shared conservation goal. Mama Simba
Mama Simba ladies during conservation training
As is common amongst pastoralist communities, gender roles within Samburu society are strongly marked, with women typically assuming responsibility for the household and not participating in decision-making at the community level. By virtue of their role fetching firewood and water, building and maintaining the homestead (manyatta) and tending to livestock (especially goats), they are central users and managers of natural resources and also frequently come into contact with wildlife.
Moreover, whilst elders and warriors are away with cattle, especially during the dry season, women often remain within the village. Consequently, they must deal with human-carnivore conflict first-hand should a predator attack livestock inside their village at night. Yet, Samburu women—like morans—have rarely been actively included in conservation activities in northern Kenya.
The Mama Simba (‘mother of lions’) programme was launched in September 2013 within Westgate Community Conservancy to harness women’s enthusiasm to participate in conservation and to fulfill their requests for education. Mama Simba equips women, who have limited exposure to conservation issues, with the knowledge and skills needed to reduce their environmental impact, effectively conserve wildlife and ultimately improve livelihoods.
Firstly, the programme delivers workshops informing women of the importance of conservation and sustainable practices and offers hands-on training in the identification of wildlife (including identification of carnivore tracks). Secondly, as part of a wider initiative entitled Boma Watch, it works with women to enhance livestock protection within the manyatta, encouraging reinforcement of livestock enclosure (bomas) with thornbush to restrict entry by carnivores, and enlisting their support to test and monitor experimental deterrents, such as ‘Lion lights’. Thirdly, the programme offers an alternative source of income, by commissioning the women—renowned for their exceptional beadwork skills—to make authentic beaded lion figurines. Ewaso Lions purchases these handicrafts directly from the women who make them, before selling them at international forums. Finally, through Mama Simba’s educational arm, the programme teaches women to read and write. Acquiring literacy not only facilitates their participation in conservation-based activities but also empowers women in other aspects of their life, including their beadwork, food and livestock trade businesses. Anecdotal evidence further suggests that the women feel a strong sense of ownership and pride in the work they do as part of the Mama Simba programme and are now afforded a greater say within their communities. It is anticipated that the Mama Simba programme will be evaluated in the future using an evaluation toolkit created for the project.
Lion Kids Camp
Children during the Lion Kids Camp in Samburu see their first-ever lion.
Despite living in close proximity to world-famous National Parks and Reserves, children in rural Kenya are rarely afforded the opportunity to observe wildlife at close range and to experience what attracts numerous tourists to their country each year. Instead, children’s perceptions of wildlife are shaped by largely negative interactions: for example, an elephant chasing a woman as she fetches firewood, a donkey mauled by hyenas, or the remains of a camel following an attack by lions. Since attitudes formed early in life tend to persist, environmental education aimed at children has great potential for fostering values and behaviours that support long-term conservation objectives and the development of a new generation of wildlife ambassadors.
The Lion Kids Camp is a four-day residential camp hosted by Ewaso Lions in collaboration with The Safari Collection tourist company. After securing their place in the camp through a creative arts competition, children from local primary schools are taken on game drives and bird walks, shown how to use binoculars and cameras; they listen to lectures from local conservation groups and perform in a wildlife conservation-themed drama competition. An independent evaluation found that the inaugural Lion Kids Camp had not only provided children with a positive and enjoyable experience of wildlife but had significantly improved children’s knowledge of wildlife and conservation issues, the greatest change observed in those children with a lower baseline level of environmental education. Encouragingly, in the questionnaire surveys that followed the camp, all the children agreed that they would be sad if there were no lions in Samburu. Using the results of the evaluation, subsequent camps will continue to nurture our future rangers, wardens, tour guides and field officers. Lion Watch
Jeneria Lekilelei – Samburu warrior, Ewaso Lions Field Manager and Founder of the Warrior Watch programme
Lions and other large carnivores are a major lure to tourists, with thousands of visitors heading to the National Reserves and Community Conservancies which comprises Ewaso Lions study area each year. In order to better engage the tourism industry in lion conservation and effectively exploit the knowledge and presence of safari guides and their clients, Ewaso Lions launched its citizen science project, Lion Watch, in April 2013.
Through Lion Watch, 20 professional guides and rangers, the majority of whom hail from local communities, have received advanced training in the identification and ecology of the region’s lion population and learnt how to monitor the species using identification cards, aging books and a specially designed smartphone app. The programme thus serves a dual function: firstly, it greatly increases the spatial scale of lion monitoring as guides record lion sightings during game drives and secondly, it promotes a richer tourism experience for visitors, who are also encouraged to upload their own photos to an online database. To date, more than 500 lion sightings have been recorded by guides within Samburu and Isiolo Counties, with this vital data contributing to evidence-based conservation decision-making.
Conclusion Ultimately, Ewaso Lions believes that by integrating decisions and information from the local people who share the landscape with lions into conservation, we are better equipped to understand and conserve the lion population. As our programmes illustrate, current knowledge of lion conflict and movement on the ground can lead to effective community-owned solutions to human-carnivore conflict. In addition, our programmes support the idea that local incentives for conservation are multi-dimensional and the success of community-based conservation need not necessarily rely upon financial instruments. Instead, our approach recognises the importance of political and social benefits in the form of increased equity and empowerment and encourages local ownership of wildlife conservation practices. We firmly believe that this approach has helped galvanise community support for conservation and, in turn, ensured that the lion population within our study area is now stable and has increased to its highest number in a dozen years.
Further reading: Chardonnet P. et al. 2010. Managing conflicts between people and lion: review and insights from literature and field experience. Wildlife Management Working Paper, No. 13. Gurd H. 2012. Evaluating the success of Warrior Watch: a community-based conservation initiative in Samburu, northern Kenya. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Imperial College London, UK <https://www.iccs.org.uk/wp-content/thesis/consci/2012/Gurd.pdf> Kenya Wildlife Service. 2009. National Strategy for the Conservation and Management of Lions and Spotted Hyenas in Kenya 2009–2014. Nairobi, Kenya.
Pollard C. 2013. Assessment of critical evaluation systems for community-based conservation programmes in Samburu, northern Kenya. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Imperial College London, UK https://www.iccs.org.uk/wp-content/thesis/consci/2013/Pollard.pdf Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the Kenya Wildlife Service, Samburu and Isiolo County Councils and Westgate, Kalama and Mpus Kutuk Conservancies for providing us with permits and support to carry out our community based conservation work. We would also like to acknowledge Jeneria Lekilelei, Ewaso Lions Field and Community Manager, for his extensive contribution towards the design and management of these community programmes.
The Asiatic lions represent a carefree existence to many. Having historically benefitted from royal patronage, they continue to enjoy painstaking protection in the Gir Protected Area. The lions can rest assured that their food security, water availability, habitat suitability and safety are meticulously managed and vitriolically debated in conservation forums. Dispersing through increasingly urbanised settings, establishing home ranges in new habitats outside the protected area, nothing seems to deter the lions except for the danger posed by an occasional open well, electrified fence or poisoned carcass. Pride and love of lions of local people, media and political pressure ensure that concerted and constant efforts are kept up to save it from extinction.
Recently, when 6 lions died due to rail accidents outside the PA in the Rajula area in Amreli district, there was much public and media outcry as a result of which Rs. 10 crore was immediately allotted to investigate, mitigate and solve the problem. Speed regulation, fencing along railway tracks, and construction of 23 underpasses were proposed to ensure the safe passage of wild animals thereafter. When results of a recent “study” conducted in the Lathi Liliya area hinted at fluorosis in lions due to high levels of fluoride in the groundwater, there was a scramble to act and a study was initiated to investigate the problem in greater detail. Throughout the Gir landscape, alert forest department staff are on the lookout for injured or ailing lions so as to provide prompt on-field medical attention or move them to the animal shelter at Sasan Gir for better care. The involvement is so high that it is sometimes misplaced. Some overenthusiastic staff often take it upon themselves, even as they endanger their own lives, to interfere in cub rearing, territorial strife and movement paths of lions. The immense political and media pressure sometimes makes such measures obligatory. So, what then really ails the Asiatic lion? Is conservation about increasing the numbers alone?
Corridors and habitat expansion In the past, the Asiatic lion population has been revived and saved from the brink of extinction through conservation interventions at critical periods. Fortunately, in the past 3 decades, there has been consistent growth in the population. The lion numbers were around 240 in 1990 and have increased to over 400 in 2010. The population growth has also resulted in increased movement, dispersal and establishment of lions in natural habitat patches outside the PA with the result that about 25% of the lion population is now found in Girnar WLS, coastal areas and in distinct patches of natural habitats along Shetrunji River northeast of Gir PA. In a decade, livestock depredation and incidences of lion attacks on people have increased. It is evident that the continued survival of lions depends on people’s tolerance and at the same time, protection of lions from poaching, accidents, retaliatory killing, and diseases. Dispersing lions face the risk of transmission of epidemic diseases due to contact with people and domestic animals. Studies have identified domestic dogs as a major source of rabies and canine distemper outbreaks. Hard lessons have already been learnt from the canine distemper virus epidemic in Serengeti National Park. Although kept under check through stringent protection and laws, poaching is a looming threat especially when endangered species like lions are outside protected areas in human landscapes where it is difficult to monitor their safety. To keep up with these new demands, the focus of management has shifted and is now oriented towards effective conflict mitigation, secure passage and creation of dispersal corridors and resource-rich natural habitats outside the PA for the spillover population.
This situation is not unique to the Gir-lion ecosystem. Worldwide, forest and wildlife conservation has stepped out of the forest into the “outside” world to confront a range of new challenges. Landscape-level planning and management is something to wish for but not easily achieved, especially for large carnivores. Expansion of habitat preferably along the natural dispersal range of lions in the Gir landscape seems to be the logical way forward but, is limited by a matrix of agropastoral landscapes, industrial townships and highly populated villages.
This situation justifies the increasing focus on human-dominated landscapes and reconciliation of human needs and environmental conservation. Incentive-based conservation, monetary compensation for losses incurred due to livestock depredation, relocation, community participation and empowerment are conservation approaches that are gaining favour in recent times with the lion as focal species.
Which model for Gir?
Dry deciduous forest habitat of the Gir Sanctuary
A majority of people living in the peripheral villages (97 villages and one lakh humans) of Gir PA belong to families that have been resident in this area for several generations and are predominantly landowners with medium-sized land-holdings (5-15 ha) practising agriculture. Crop raiding and livestock loss (partially compensated by the forest department) are the penalties they pay due to proximity to the forest while deriving few benefits by way of livelihood or resource collection. In spite of this, our study revealed a positive sentiment towards the forests as people recognised the benefits derived by way of ecosystem services such as soil fertility and water availability favouring high crop yields. Their attitude towards lions is even more remarkable.
To say that the local people are ‘tolerant’ would be an understatement; in fact, they have a great sense of pride and love for lions. This attitude has favoured lion survival through several generations but as lions move further beyond this zone of historical coexistence, an uneasy relationship and apprehension among local people endangers their survival. Thus, there is a subtle change in the cultural acceptance and tolerance of the presence of lions amidst human habitations. Therefore, future conservation success will depend on achieving goodwill towards lions across a wider swathe of the landscape.
Gir Sanctuary has emerged as a very popular tourist destination particularly in recent years with close to 3 lakh tourists contributing to annual revenue of about 2.5 crores. An additional 250,000 people visit the Tulsishayam temple located at the edge of the sanctuary, and Banej and Kankai temples located within the core area of the sanctuary. In spite of the enormous tourist influx and high revenue, local people are not directly benefitting nor are they dependent on this income for their livelihood. In such a thriving agro-pastoral environment, models of conservation where revenue from tourism is used to boost the local economy and create partnerships with local people are not strictly necessary. In spite of this, the revenue generated from tourism has been made available for the conservation and management of Gir PA by the State government of Gujarat. How effectively this fund is utilised and how well the people residing in the Gir landscape are allowed to appreciate and participate in conservation and management of the Asiatic lion and its habitat will determine the future of the species. Unless well planned, tourism and developmental activities would have irreversible repercussions where neither the local people nor the wildlife will benefit. A case in the point is a proposal to construct a ring road around the Gir Protected Area System (Gir National Park and Gir, Pania, Mitiyala and Girnar Sanctuary) at a cost of Rs. 260 crores. A project of this nature would cause land-use changes, promote rapid development and urbanisation and, most importantly, delink corridors for animal movement and hence pose a threat to the safe movement of animals.
Safeguards from extinction
Lion with its cub at Gir.
The only free-ranging population of Asiatic lions is presently limited to a single habitat and conservationists the world over are convinced of the need for additional sites. For this purpose, Barda Wildlife Sanctuary in Porbander district, at a distance of about 100 km from Gir PA, has been identified as an ideal habitat for the translocation of lions. Experts are of the opinion that the choice of Barda WLS may yet be inadequate to save lions from the ill effects of disease outbreaks and natural calamities as it is too close to the source population. On the other hand, a persistent conservation campaign since 1993 has argued the need for an alternate home to secure this endangered population and has identified Kuno WLS in Madhya Pradesh State as the most suitable habitat for this purpose. A recent Supreme Court ruling has given the much needed impetus to this long pending proposal and hopefully a well-meaning and critical conservation initiative will be realized very soon.
Lions are social animals and, being territorial, need adequate space to survive. Lack of adequate habitat would have a bearing on their ecology and behaviour by impacting on the population structure, home range sizes, activity and behaviour. The survival of lions in human landscapes may be a test of their resilience and not necessarily the ideal environment for comfortable existence. Lions are social animals and, being territorial, need adequate space to survive. Lack of adequate habitat would have a bearing on their ecology and behaviour by impacting their population structure, home range sizes, activity and behaviour. The survival of lions in human landscapes may be a test of their resilience and not necessarily the ideal environment for comfortable existence. Political will, surplus conservation budgets, local community support and dedicated management are all in favour of conservation of the Asiatic lion. Fortunately, lions have responded to the last few decades of conservation with increasing population numbers and habitat expansion. The risks of disease, poaching, accidents, escalation of human-lion conflict, changes in people’s attitude and deleterious effects of inbreeding are imminent threats but cannot be carelessly overlooked. The continued survival of this endangered species will depend on setting sight on these issues, clearly visualising and preempting future problems. In JF Kennedy’s words—“those who look only to the past and present are likely to miss the future”. This is something to keep in mind for the remarkable Asiatic lion.
Further reading: Elliot NB, SA Cushman, DW Macdonald & AJ Loveridge. 2014. The devil is in the dispersers: predictions of landscape connectivity change with demography. Journal of Applied Ecology, 51: 1169–1178. Meena V, DW Macdonald & RA Montgomery. 2014. Managing success: Asiatic lion conservation, interface problems and peoples’ perceptions in the Gir Protected Area. Biological Conservation 174: 120-126. Packer C, A Loveridge, S Canney, T Caro, ST Garnett, M Pfeifer, KK Zander et al. 2013. Conserving large carnivores: dollars and fence. Ecology letters 16: 635-641. Photographs: Meena Venkataraman, Bhushan Pandya
Besides elephants, lions are the quintessential symbol of wild Africa, used as icons of strength and power in national flags, coats of arms, historical and contemporary art, and logos of sports teams and private enterprises around the globe. The species’ popularity translates to the high economic potential for countries that still harbour populations; lions are at the centre of the tourism industry in sub-Saharan Africa, which generated US$ 36 billion of foreign revenues in 2012 alone. The portrayed king of the animal kingdom is losing ground, however.
While lion populations are stable or increasing in a few Southern African nations such as Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, steep declines have occurred in West, Central and East Africa. These declines are driven by habitat loss, indiscriminate killing of lions in response to perceived or real conflict with livestock, poorly regulated sport hunting, and the depletion of lion prey through unsustainable bushmeat hunting. While the extent to which each of these threats limits lion populations varies by country, the impact of bushmeat hunting on lions and other savannah carnivores has been largely ignored until recently. However, it is now clear that the problem is pervasive and occurs in virtually all protected areas in the savannah habitat.
As the largest land predator of the African continent, lions rely on a stable supply of prey—predominantly large ungulates weighing 200-550 kilograms. Lion population density is correlated with the available biomass of wild herbivores within this weight range. Large ungulates, however, are targeted by an unsustainable and increasingly commercialised bushmeat trade, leading to collapses in prey populations across large parts of savannah Africa. The drivers for this trade include human encroachment of wildlife areas, poverty, and food insecurity, while conservation efforts are hampered by inadequate wildlife laws and enforcement. An analysis of population data from 1970 to 2005 on 78 species of herbivores revealed that while population sizes increased by 24% in Southern Africa, they declined by 52% in Eastern Africa and by 85% in West Africa.
For lions and prey alike, the situation is most alarming in West Africa. In response, we helped to initiate and coordinate a massive effort to survey lion populations across the region. Between 2006 and 2012, 21 protected areas were surveyed, encompassing all of the largest protected areas within the historical lion range in West Africa, and the best remaining lion habitat in this region. All of the sites were reported to harbour lions in 2005 when we brought together wildlife authorities from West and Central Africa who provided their best assessment of where lions could still be found. However, after the survey was complete, of the 21 protected areas surveyed, only 4 still harboured lions. Lions now occupy only 1.1% of their historical range in West Africa. The total West African lion population is estimated to number 406 (273–605) individuals, likely representing <250 mature lions. Above 90% of the remaining lions likely persist in one population, in the transboundary W-Arly-Pendjari protected area complex, straddling the border region of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. Relict populations of <50 individuals each survive in Senegal’s NiokoloKoba National Park as well as in Nigeria’s Kainji Lake National Park and Yankari Game Reserve. These recently published results warrant listing of the lion as Critically Endangered in West Africa on the IUCN Red List. The current IUCN Red List already supports a separate regional listing of the lion in West Africa and is likely to respond to this critical situation by assigning lions the highest threat category in this region in the new version of the Red List, scheduled to be published in 2015.
While this listing may draw some much-needed attention to the plight of the lion in West Africa, concrete measures are desperately needed on the ground to safeguard the remaining populations. A comparison of protected area management characteristics between those West African sites that lost lions recently and those where lions still occurred revealed that two factors were mainly responsible for lion persistence: protected area size and management budget. In West Africa, where the carrying capacity for large ungulates is comparatively low, and where intense bushmeat hunting pressure inside and around protected areas is generally high, very large protected areas of 4,000 km² and above are required to ensure lion persistence.
To effectively protect those areas, figures from East and Southern Africa suggest that US$2,000/km² is required to maintain lions at carrying capacity in unfenced protected areas. In comparison, the West African sites we surveyed operated on an average budget of US$28/ km², with sites still harboring lions possessing significantly higher budgets than those that lost their lions (US$61/km²vs. US$4/km²). By far the highest management budget, US$197/km2, was applied at the site that harbours>90% of West Africa’s lions; W-Arly-Pendjari. The lessons learned from this comparison are as simple as they are challenging. Lion conservation efforts in West Africa should focus on the largest protected areas that still harbor lions. At these sites, management budgets need to be increased significantly; even the best-funded site in West Africa, W-Arly-Pendjari, will require a tenfold increase in management budget to meet science-based recommendations on budgets needed for effective lion conservation.
Considering that all eleven former or current lion range countries in West Africa are among the 50 poorest countries in the world, lion range states in West Africa will be unable to mobilise the resources required to secure their remaining lions. In the short term, that will require massive financial and technical assistance to range states from outside, principally by the international donor community in the developed world. For any such investments, it will be imperative that conservation initiatives assure sound governance of the funds, and that adequate funding levels are sustained in the long term. Considering the unique potential of the lion as a magnet for nature-based tourism, investment should also be directed toward developing and enhancing photographic tourism in politically stable countries such as Benin and Senegal. This will help to create and maintain economic incentives for lion conservation, and develop enduring revenue streams for PA management not wholly reliant on donor funding.
Philipp Henschel training rangers in Tankari GR, Nigeria
In Central Africa, almost no data exist on lion population sizes and trends, with the exception of Cameroon, where monitoring has revealed steady decreases in population size over the past decade. The largest continuous area thought to harbour lions is in the Central African Republic (CAR) and adjacent northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However, no lion field surveys have ever been carried out in either country, and available information on lion range and numbers in this region is highly speculative. Field survey efforts are urgently required but are hindered by the tenuous political situation in those two countries. Aerial ungulate counts recently conducted across northern CAR, covering 95,000 km2 of the best remaining wildlife habitat, established that large mammal numbers in the area declined by 94% in the past three decades. As elsewhere, the massive collapse in wildlife numbers is driven by uncontrolled bushmeat hunting and trade. Considering the close link between ungulate biomass and lion densities, it can be expected that lion populations in northern CAR suffered concomitant declines. The remaining wildlife habitat in eastern CAR and northern DRC has not yet been aerially surveyed.
However, conservationists familiar with these areas expect wildlife collapses similar to those in northern CAR. The first step towards securing remaining lion populations in CAR and DRC will be to confirm where populations remain and assess which populations hold the best promise for the long-term survival of the lion in Central Africa. The lions of West and Central Africa are irreplaceable. Recent molecular work has separated modern lions into a northern group, comprising the last remaining Asiatic lions in India, the extinct Barbary lions of North Africa, and lions from West and Central Africa; and a southern group, comprising lions in East and Southern Africa. Lion geneticists accordingly argue for a taxonomic revision of the lion, and recognition of a southern and a northern subspecies, contrary to the current division into an African and an Asian subspecies. Of the ca 30,000 lions surviving today, an estimated 90% belong to the southern group. We argue that the imperilled northern group, comprising the unique lions of West and Central Africa, warrants urgent and coordinated intervention before it is too late.
Further reading: Dubach, JM et al. 2013. Genetic perspectives on “Lion Conservation Units” in Eastern and Southern Africa. Conservation Genetics, 1-15. Henschel P et al. 2014. The Lion in West Africa Is Critically Endangered. PLoS ONE, 9, e83500. Lindsey PA et al. 2013. The bushmeat trade in African savannas: Impacts, drivers, and possible solutions. Biological Conservation, 160, 80-96. Riggio J et al. 2013. The size of savannah Africa: a lion’s (Panthera leo) view. Biodiversity and Conservation, 22, 17-35.
Biodiversity conservation seems to progress along a trajectory over time and economic development from gazetting isolated protected areas (often paper parks), to intensively managing those areas, linking them via corridors, and finally restoring those areas to some preconceived benchmark. Here, we describe this transition in South Africa and show how it now leads the world in largescale, biodiversity restoration, with lions (Panthera leo) at the forefront.
Although southern Africa is considered the cradle of humankind by many, it was not until a few thousand years ago that large scale transformation, through the use of fire and hunting, of the landscape begun. This was expedited a few hundred years ago when Europeans came to South Africa. They quickly changed the whole landscape with fenced farms and created towns. With this they eradicated many of the large mammals; some such as the bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus) were hunted to extinction. South Africa used to have huge migrations of springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), creating some of the largest herds of mammals ever. The fences and hunting stopped this too, with the last recorded migration in 1896.
With the obvious dangers of large carnivores to humans and livestock, they were severely affected by this widespread increase in development. Along with the arrival of these farms over almost the entire landscape, many people, but particularly those in South Africa, lost the culture of living with dangerous animals, as is done in some other parts of Africa and India. Lion numbers were severely reduced to the point of extinction in South Africa, as they were in most parts of the world, with populations invariably restricted to a few small pockets. Some areas survived without too much development, perhaps only because of the high prevalence of diseases, such as malaria or sleeping sickness.
Around 1900, there was the proclamation of some of the oldest reserves in the world, such as the Kruger National Park and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (HiP). HiP was originally a royal hunting ground for the Zulu kingdom but was established as a park in 1895. The Kruger Park area was first proclaimed in 1898 as the Sabie Game Reserve by the then president of the Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger. In 1926, the National Parks Act was proclaimed and with it the merging of the Sabie and Shingwedzi Game Reserves into the Kruger National Park which, without the linked surrounding areas, is 2 million ha in size (20,000 sq. km). Since then, but especially after WWII, the number of protected areas in South Africa has grown considerably. These were mostly small (< 100,000 ha) but they began to restock them with the original wildlife, some including a few extralimital species or even exotics. Some extralimital species still remain but many of the exotics have been removed.
Some of these reintroduction exercises were massive in scale. Madikwe Game Reserve for instance reintroduced more than 8000 animals of 28 species between 1991 and 1997, one of the largest game translocation exercises in the world. This included lions.
The persecution of large carnivores, however, continued, even in conservation areas such as the Kruger National Park. Conservation staff would shoot African wild dogs Lycaon pictus on sight and even help farmers kill them outside protected areas. The aim was to protect the “game” or the ungulates, and the carnivores were simply seen as a threat to the game.
In the 1960s, one of the most famous reintroduction conservation success stories in the world began—the resurrection through translocation and reintroductions of the almost extinct white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum). Only a few remained, most of them in KwaZulu-Natal province. Driven by local conservationists such as the legendary Ian Player, rhinos were transported all over the country, including to the Kruger National Park and even to Zimbabwe and overseas. This turned the tide on their decline and until recently they seemed secure with numbers increasing to around 19,000. However, the last three years has seen a new onslaught of poaching and a new rhino war is been fought by rangers, especially in Kruger National Park. There are now again fears for their future and a renewed effort to transfer them to new places, again even outside South Africa, has begun. Black rhino (Diceros bicornis) similarly had their numbers decrease to about 2300 in 1993 but then they were similarly managed through the Black Rhino Expansion Programme which took their numbers up to about 5000. They are now also victims of the new wave of poaching and are potentially in trouble again.
For some of the large carnivores, a similar expansion exercise has been carried out. Much of the movement has not been purely for conservation purposes but rather to increase the tourism potential of smaller reserves. Many tourists like to see the “Big Five” (lions, leopard (Panthera pardus), buffalo (Syncerus caffer), elephants (Loxodonta africana), and rhino). Similarly, hunters in Africa like to say they have hunted in a Big Five area or even hunted the Big Five. For this buffalo, elephant, lion, white rhino (black rhino if just for tourism) and leopard are often introduced. Many of these translocations were done with little planning as to the potential future effects of these species in small fenced reserves.
For instance, in many areas, the large carnivores quickly ate more than was sustainable and ungulate numbers needed to be supplemented at high costs. Similarly, elephant numbers are approaching levels in some areas that will necessitate management so as to preserve another biodiversity in these reserves. Reserves have begun to move the elephants out or put them on contraceptives. The situation in many areas is not sustainable as moving elephants that have already been moved once sometimes causes behavioural problems. Also, there are not enough areas left needing elephants and moving them is very expensive. There are also obvious ethical considerations to the option of culling, which at some point may need to be considered.
In a more formal approach, similar in some ways to the coordinated rhino reintroductions and translocations, a plan to manage wild dogs was set up in 1997. An African Wild Dog PHVA (Population and Habitat Viability Analysis) was done which resulted in a plan for wild dogs to be reintroduced to a number of small reserves. These wild dogs were to be monitored intensively and management implemented to simulate a natural metapopulation. While the original aim of this exercise was to have 9 packs in the metapopulation, there are at present around 14 packs and 237 individuals. Each sub-population is managed by translocating individuals or groups to simulate natural pack dynamics and dispersals between subpopulations. Some individuals have left the subpopulations and now roam outside reserves, while some are in transit in this managed metapopulation. The only other population of wild dogs in South Africa is in Kruger National Park which is not managed and is currently estimated at 280 individuals including pups and those in the western boundary reserves.
Similarly, cheetahs have been managed between these small reserves to try and simulate natural processes. This is done by the National Cheetah Conservation Forum (NCCF). They aim to implement a co-ordinated relocation strategy that will: 1) ensure the long-term viability of cheetahs in small fenced reserves, 2) ensure the long term genetic and demographic integrity of the metapopulation, 3) increase the resident range of cheetahs in South Africa and 4) maximise the conservation benefits of cheetahs in small fenced reserves.
Lions were historically distributed across most of South Africa but were reduced to a few isolated areas by the early 1900s. Although presently under review, they are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. In KwaZulu-Natal province, for instance, they became extinct in around 1938. Then, without human assistance, a male possibly migrating from Kruger turned up in iMfolozi in 1958. More were then reintroduced in March 1965. The population grew to about 140 animals in 1987 but then started declining and showed possible signs of inbreeding depression during the 1990s. To reverse this, 16 lions from Madikwe Game Reserve and Pilanesberg National Park, were introduced from 1999 to 2002. At the same time as this, lions were introduced into many other reserves around South Africa. With the political changes in the early 1990s came a new wave of increased tourism to South Africa. This resulted in the increase in the number of reserves wanting lions on their property. Lions have now been reintroduced into over 40 small reserves in South Africa. The dilemma is that in small fenced reserves, the natural mechanisms of lion population limitations and predator-prey dynamics are absent. In open systems, ecological and behavioural processes limit population growth. Like elephants, many lion populations are now on contraceptives. Many reserves have removal programs to limit their numbers to maintain as natural a system as possible given the size of the reserves. In South Africa, lions are hunted for sport or lion bones. There is controversy around this as some situations are called canned-lion hunting where lions are specifically bred to be hunted, and are hunted in small areas. When considering lion conservation, we do not include these lions.
Lions when moved are kept in bomas at the site of release—a soft release, which improves survival. Post-release monitoring with the aid of radio or satellite collars is essential, especially in reserves with a high human density nearby. Often human activity is the cause of post-release mortality via direct persecution following the human-wildlife conflict. In the end, however, what will affect the long-term persistence of lions in South Africa is a stable economy and governance. Factors affecting translocation success are removing the factors driving the initial population extinction and supportive social contexts. Lions were largely driven extinct in South Africa by direct persecution and loss of prey base. Direct persecution is understandable given the threat lions pose to human life and livelihood, and so conservation practices aim to ameliorate this by separating people from dangerous wildlife in South Africa through the legislated use of conservation fencing. The restoration of wildlife numbers has improved the status of the prey base for lions. The economic value of large wildlife ensures it is the general public/private sector largely driving the increase in lion numbers in South Africa today, particularly because wildlife is privately owned and individual entities can make money from owning them via regular game sales. There is wide-spread support for these actions.
South Africa has led the way in faunal restoration and this has led to the situation where the country’s protected areas cover 6% of the land, while an additional 13% is largely protected via the private sector as game ranches or ecotourism ventures. This is a boon for conservation. Most southern African countries have similar levels of private conservation land ownership. Key drivers for the success of conservation activities in this region is the willingness of conservationists to undertake drastic interventions, the support of the government in these actions, and the economic benefits that have been seen from returning land to conservation from pastoralism. South Africa illustrates to the rest of the world the value of adequately costing wildlife into national economics and performing active and intensive conservation management.
Counter arguments to the South African conservation management philosophy are that intensive management is costly, may alter ecological interactions, may convey a sense of unnaturalness through heavily managed (manicured) wildlife areas, and benefit sharing. Intensive management is costly, but South Africans realise it is a price worth paying to conserve their natural heritage. Furthermore, the private sector is driving much of the expansion of conservation lands because it is a profitable land use, and often more profitable than the pastoralism that was historically practiced. The current philosophy of South African governmental conservation managers is to restore ecological interactions to those before humans vastly altered ecosystems and drove species extinct; however some private game ranches (particularly hunting reserves) stock extralimital species and unusual colour morphs of species because they garner higher prices from hunters. This has raised substantial concerns from the conservation community.
Notwithstanding the challenges of defining ‘natural’ on a continent that has been impacted by humans for as long as the species has existed, the management of South African reserves promotes wildness in a way that it is invariably part of the attraction of the sites. In fact, most reserves have humans fenced in to allow wildlife to roam freely beyond human habitation (tourist camps). Finally, sharing the benefits of protected areas to local communities is somewhat belatedly receiving the importance it deserves and local communities jointly run some reserves, but often benefit through employment, schools, education, and healthcare. The costs of living alongside protected areas in South Africa are largely mitigated by the use of fencing; however, it is increasingly being recognised that humans derive enormous physical and health benefits from living alongside protected areas and so this is an unmeasured benefit to local communities. Ultimately, the value of South Africa’s conservation management approach is illustrated by the constant or increasing population densities within their conservation areas and the increase in the number of conservation areas. This stands in stark contrast to many other lion range states.
References: Hunter LTB, Pretorius K, Carlisle LC, Rickelton M, Walker C, Slotow R & JD Skinner. 2007. Restoring lions Panthera leo to northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: short-term biological and technical success but equivocal long-term conservation. Oryx, 41(2), 196–204. doi:10.1017/ S003060530700172X. Miller SM, Bissett C, Burger A, Courtenay B, Dickerson T, Druce DJ, Ferreira S, Funston PJ, Hofmeyr D, Kilian PJ, Matthews W, Naylor S, Parker DM, Slotow R, Toft M & D Zimmermann. 2013. Management of reintroduced lions in small, fenced reserves in South Africa : an assessment and guidelines. South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 43, 138–154. Slotow R & LTB Hunter. 2009. Reintroduction decisions taken at the incorrect social scale devalue their conservation contribution: African lion in South Africa. In: MW Hayward & MJ Somers. (eds). The Reintroduction of Top-order Predators. Wiley- Blackwell, Oxford. Trinkel M, Ferguson N, Reid A, Reid C, Somers M, Turelli L, Graf J, Szykman M, Cooper D, Haverman P, Kastberger G, Packer C & R Slotow. 2008. Translocating lions into an inbred lion population in the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, South Africa. Animal Conservation, 11(2), 138–143. doi:10.1111/ j.1469-1795.2008.00163.x
Banning fishing in the beel has not only affected the sustenance of the Keot fishing community in Guwahati but it is also threatening the beel’s very existence.
“Posua botah”, he said, “the wind is blowing from the west now so we cannot take you to the beel to show you how we catch fish. This wind cleans the water and we won’t get fish. ‘Bhatial botah’, when the wind blows from the east, the water turns muddy and the fish come up to the surface to breathe. That’s the best time to fish”, he explained. They know the beel like they know their body. They are the ‘Kewat’ (Keot in Assamese), a fishing community of more than 820 families from Keotpara in Azara. They are completely dependent on the Deepor beel for their sustenance. The beel gives them food and they look after her with sincere devotion.
With a perennial spread of about 10 km2, which extends up to 40 km2 during floods, Deepor Beel is Assam’s lone Ramsar site, one of the largest wetlands of the Brahmaputra valley and the only major storage water basin for Guwahati’s drainage. Till 2009, the beel was maintained by the State Fisheries Department. Then the state government declared the beel a bird sanctuary for the numerous migratory birds that visit annually and banned fishing. And just like that, the fishermen’s lives went for a toss. Sadly, while fishing is banned to protect the wetland, oil refinery, domestic and hospital waste is still being dumped, choking the wetland, killing fish and spoiling the very beel that the government is trying to protect.
Guwahati generates about 450 tonnes of waste every day that finds its way to the periphery of the beel. Strangely, this garbage dump is home to one of the largest concentrations of the globally endangered greater adjutant stork (Leptoptilos dubius)
The Guwahati oil refinery waste is directed through the Bharalu and Kalmoni rivers to the beel. The channels also carry other industrial and hospital waste. Official sources say that the release of sewage into the water might have caused the fall in oxygen levels resulting in the death of fish.
Earlier, fishing was enough to sustain the Kewat fisherfolk. Now, the situation is changing. Many have taken to other means to support themselves, including pig-rearing. The state government now plans to form a Deepor Beel Management and Development Authority to tackle issues related to the livelihoods of the Kewat community and the conservation of biodiversity. This is a welcome step. Everyone dependent on the beel – be it fish, bird or man – is important and shouldn’t be ignored. Finding the right balance is the key.
India Water Portal (IWP), an initiative supported by Arghyam, is a national knowledge portal for water set up by the National Knowledge Commission in 2006. It deals with issues that influence water or that are related to it such as climate change, sanitation and food security. IWP engages with local individuals and organisations all over India to highlight and provide critical analyses on water-related issues. Photographs: India Water Portal
Every year in the month of May, scientists, students, fisherfolk and the public get together to count fish in one of India’s largest lakes. Hari Sridhar spoke to Priyadarsanan Dharma Rajan, a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and Ashish Mathew George, Programme officer of the Vembanad Wetland Conservation Programme, to find out more about the annual Vembanad fish count.
HS: What is the idea behind this annual fish count? PDR: This is an activity planned mainly to bring the fisher community closer to fisheries experts, students, and the general public. ATREE went to Vembanad at a time when the local people were worried about the burgeoning backwater tourism and the lake pollution caused by it. The fisherfolk were more concerned because it was affecting the fishery and alienating their traditional fishing grounds. To make any conservation intervention a success, one has to first gain the confidence of the traditional stakeholders, in this case the fisherfolk. Our first challenge was to win their trust. They are a traditional community, who were always skeptical about outside people. They were not antagonistic, but they were not willing to take any outsider into trust. They denounced research: ‘Many people come, do research and go, but how are we benefited?’. It is true what the local people were telling. There are several scientists and institutions working and several large research studies implemented, but not even basic water quality data was available to the people. So rather than getting into any active research at the start, we decided that what Vembanad required was some action to empower people to regain their rights to the lake. The fish count is only one among many activities that ATREE initiated in Vembanad. Our main intention behind the fish count was to create awareness about the state of fishery. We also wanted to convince them about the importance of this kind of scientific data collection for their own benefit. The first count was conducted in 2008. This year, on 23rd and 24th May, we conducted the seventh successive edition of the count. A number of agencies and individuals participate in this event – Kerala University for Fisheries and Oceanic Sciences, Saint Albert’s college in Ernakulam, Environmental Science Department of M G University, Kerala State Biodiversity Board, the Casino Group of Hotels, Vembanad Nature Club, volunteers and most importantly, the fisherfolk themselves.
HS: Let’s step back a bit from the fish count and talk about Vembanad; why was ATREE interested in Vembanad in the first place? PDR: I would put it differently: it was really the interest or passion of individuals for the conservation of these backwaters which ATREE encouraged and facilitated. SD Shibulal, who was then the Chief Operating Officer (later CEO) of Infosys, hails from the village of Muhamma in Alapuzzha district, on the banks of Vembanad. He made an offer to ATREE: if ATREE is ready to do something for the conservation of Vembanad backwaters he will provide the funding. I was born and brought up near the backwaters and my neighbourhood—the Ashtamudi backwaters—had a major influence in shaping me as an ecologist and conservationist. My early conservation years, when I was in UG and PG, were all linked to these backwaters. When an opportunity to do something for the conservation of the backwaters came up, I was not in a position to back out. My colleagues Seema Purushothaman and MC Kiran, who also hail from Kerala and shared my interest, also joined the team. We did a reconnaissance survey in 2006 and started the programme in 2007.
HS: Tell us a little more about Vembanad. Why was there a need for a conservation intervention in Vembanad? PDR: I think that Vembanad is more important than even the Himalayan glaciers. It is so unique. It may be the only place on earth where cultivation happens below mean sea level and thousands of people live a semi-submerged existence for part of the year. It supports a highly productive agricultural system – Kuttanad, the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’— spread over 1,100km2 in a reclaimed portion of the lake. If you consider the livelihood support provided by Vembanad, it is next only to that provided by the Arabian Sea. Most of these livelihoods, be it fishing, farming, coir industry, clams, duck farming or more recently tourism, all depend on the water and the quality of water in the lake.
Vembanad is also important for its biodiversity. It is a Ramsar site and an Important Bird Area. A lot of migratory birds come to the eastern side of the lake. There are a few small islands that have very good vegetation diversity. The fishery resources are also quite high here. In fact, ours is not the first fish survey. In 1979 and 1984 Dr BM Kurup conducted surveys and documented more than 150 fish species. But in our surveys, we documented only 71 species. We believe that the reduction in diversity has to do with the building of the Thanneermukkom barrage in the early 70s. The barrage was built to reduce salinity entering the southern side of the lake, to aid rice cultivation. Before the barrage came up the lake used to include both freshwater and marine species, but now very few marine migrants reach the lake.
The barrage has changed the ecology of the lake. Many freshwater species require some salinity for breeding – the best example is the giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii); there are also some local eels. Similarly, there are some marine species, like shrimps, that require fresh water for breeding. The barrage poses problems for such animals. The barrage has also caused another problem: saline water helps flush the lake, keep it clean and prevent excess nutrients from accumulating in it. After the barrage came up, this flushing happens less frequently. This problem is compounded by agricultural runoff. Once the monsoon floods recede, water is pumped out of the fields, to do rice cultivation, rather than into the fields as is done elsewhere. This causes a heavy influx of fertilizers which results in the proliferation of water hyacinth and other weeds. So the major issue we wanted to address was the declining water quality and the associated loss in diversity and fish resources. But the first challenge to overcome was the lack of baseline data.
HS: Getting back to the fish count, can you tell us what actually happens during the count? PDR: The fish count serves two purposes: first, it is an awareness campaign about the state of fishery resources and lake conservation issues. But at the same time, we follow a strict scientific protocol; so at least over one day every year we get some data. The fish count operates in three cruises, each covering different parts of the lake in such a way that the entire lake gets covered. 30-60 people are assigned to each cruise team. Each team has a captain and includes fisheries experts, fisheries students – for whom this is probably the only chance for direct experience with fisherfolk and the lake – and, most importantly, the fisherfolk themselves. We also invite the general public from across the country to volunteer in the fish count; this year we had volunteers from Bangalore, Coimbatore, Chennai and other places in the south. Different tasks are assigned to members of the team – helping the fisherfolk cast nets, identifying species, counting the fish, maintaining a checklist, documentation etc.
Along each cruise route, we count fish at five pre-decided points using three different methods—cast net, gill nets and hand nets. This way all the strata of the lake get covered. There is enough work for everyone to do because by the time the teams reach Alappuzha they have to be ready with the date to present. In fact, even before we reach Alappuzha the press people start calling us—” What are the results?” Give us the count. You know how the press is! We have to do some analysis and refine it later, but the first-hand data is presented immediately at the valedictory meeting. And the next day it is in the local newspapers. From this year India Biodiversity Portal is also partnering with the fish count. An informatics person from IBP was present in each cruise and the observations were immediately uploaded to the portal. So now there is quicker dissemination of the data. To our knowledge, ours is the only information available about fishery resources of Vembanad in last 2-3 decades.
A public display board with information on water quality
HS: Apart from counting fish, what other information do you collect on these cruises? AMG: Water quality sampling, other environmental conditions, sightings of birds and mammals like otters. PDR: We also collect data from the fish landing centres. There are two landing centres in the area where the fisherfolk come very early in the morning with their catch. We station the volunteers there the previous night itself to collect data straight from the fisherfolk’s baskets.
HS: What have been some of the important findings of the counts done so far? PDR: Like I already mentioned, our counts have shown that fish diversity has reduced dramatically, from 150 species during the 70s-80s to 70 species now. There is a decline in the carnivorous fishes and there has been an increase in omnivores. We have been noticing a gradual reduction in freshwater pufferfish since our first count in 2008. There has been a recent proliferation of the freshwater sponge Spongilla lacustris, a climate indicator, which is a cause of worry for the fisherfolk. On the positive side, our surveys have also documented some interesting, rare species in the lakes. I will send you the report with all the details. You know that by profession I am an entomologist, not a fish expert. The Vembanad project is my interest or passion, although it is a passion that has taken up almost 50% of my time in the last six years.
HS: You earlier said that one motivation for this activity was that the data and information collected does not reach the people. What are you doing differently in this regard? AMG: Let me give you an example. In 2012 we started Jaladarpanam, a community water quality monitoring programme. Once every month the fisherfolk measure water quality at various locations and the data are displayed on public display boards put up in eight locations. In April 2012 —this programme began in January—the people started noticing that the salinity wasn’t coming through to the lake and the level of pollution was increasing because the barrage was still closed. KM Poovu, the secretary of the Federation of Lake Protection Forums, took this data to the Alappuzha District Collector and demanded that the barrage be opened immediately. PDR: There is a committee to decide on the operation of the barrage, which even has representatives from the fisherfolk. But the farmers are a more powerful lobby, and they manage to keep the barrage closed for longer than the agreed period. Every year the barrage is supposed to be closed only till March, but often it remains closed in April as well to suit the farmers’ convenience. But once the fisherfolk had the data on the water quality in their hands, they felt empowered to go and protest before the collector and demand that the barrage is operated in a timely manner. We were surprised because we never thought that the local community will use the data to fight for their cause.
HS: Tell us more about the involvement of the fisherfolk in this whole project. What is their role in decision-making?
Ophiosternon begalensis (Bengal eel), species recorded for the first time in the area.
PDR: The fisherfolk are directly involved from the beginning. In fact, they are the co-organisers of the fish count, through the Kayal Samrakshana Samithys, the Lake Protection Fora (LPF). These fora are independent grassroot, democratic institutions that have come up for the conservation of the lake. We are trying to build an alternate model for conservation through these LPF. Conservation, usually, even under the guise of participatory management, is heavily top-down, where local communities don’t have a voice in decision-making. Here we are trying a bottom-up approach: we organised the fisherfolk to use their traditional wisdom and observations, in partnership with scientists, to identify problems and even solutions. And the fisherfolk themselves implement these solutions. A good example is the fish sanctuaries established in Vembanad. We engaged the fisherfolk in a dialogue about the dwindling fish resources in the lake and asked them why it was happening. They said it is due to the reduction in mangroves around the lake. We then asked what we could do now. There was an idea from the community – earlier they were using a method called padal fishing, which was now banned. Padal refers to bundles of fresh foliage of plants like mango and cashew, which are placed in the lake. These padals create a plankton bloom which in turn attract a lot of fish, especially brooders. The fisherfolk suggested the use of these padals to create artificial sanctuaries for the fishery, instead of using them for harvesting. An elderly fisherman came up with a design to prevent harvesting from these padals: a fence of bamboo poles around each “padal” such that nets cannot be cast on them. We first tried it with one sanctuary and asked fisheries scientists from St. Albert’s college to evaluate it. But, even before their evaluation, we knew the fish sanctuary was a success because of the large presence of cormorants and otters around it. Today we have 13 such sanctuaries in Vembanad.
Eleotris fusca (Dusky sleeper), species recorded for the first time in the area.
AMG: But this would not have been possible without the knowledge of the fisherfolk, about the breeding biology of the fishes, the best spots to place these padals with regard to depth and water flow, etc.
HS: Why did this not happen earlier? Why did it require your presence for it to happen? PDR: We just facilitated dialogue and collective thinking, which changed the scenario. In this programme, we sometimes bring in some technical know-how, some scientific know-how, but the decisions, the identification of the problem and the solutions largely come from the community. We only facilitate this process. The reason I am so keen on this alternate model for conservation, what we call ‘deliberative democratic conservation’, is this: most conservation efforts are initiated by outside agencies – an NGO or the forest department – and most of the time they also act as the decision-makers. In such a model, when the external agency is withdrawn the whole programme collapses. With what we are trying to do in Vembanad, even if ATREE withdraws, we hope that the momentum we have created will carry the programme forward in the future, that the people will continue with that effort on their own. Right now we do not claim that the whole community is aware of conservation, but at least some people have started discussing and thinking collectively about it. Some of them, like KM Poovu or Kailasan, who are fisherfolk from the area, are becoming champions of conservation. Poovu has even published a booklet on ethical fishing.
Participants of the Vembanad fish count
We believe that such an approach creates better ownership among people over the commons and is a better approach for governance of landscapes, especially heavily-used ones. HS: Do you see the programme being on track to allow ATREE to withdraw soon? PDR: I have already initiated a dialogue with my organisation! In our project proposal itself, we had mentioned that the CERC (Community Environment Resource Centre) set up to implement these activities should eventually be handed over to the community and ATREE should withdraw. It is seven years now, and I think it is time ATREE begins the process of gradual handover. Before that happens some more capacity building is required: the community should be able to raise its own resources, properly manage the funds, make appropriate decisions, etc. These are the challenges we are trying to tackle now.
Monsoon takes on a whole new meaning when you find yourself in the highest rainfall zone in the Western Ghats – the second-highest rainfall zone in India. Agumbe, a wonderfully forested region in western Karnataka, “the king cobra capital of the world”, receives an average of 7640 millimetres of rainfall a year and a record of 4500 millimetres in a single month. With the coming of the monsoon and the first showers, one witnesses a miraculous transformation of the landscape —a change that occurs in more ways than can be perceived by a casual observer.
At first, the thirsty laterite soil seems to absorb every drop of water. But the rain is incessant, and soon every little ditch, depression and trench is converted into a water body. Dry streams, reduced to a series of interspersed pools and rocks in the summer months, begin to trickle and then flow. Rivulets course through plantations and forests, rapidly feeding streams and rivers. As the rivers begin to flow, cascading over weathered rock, fallen trees and dry banks, it sets in motion countless processes of revival, birth, growth, life and death.
Water and moisture have profound effects on germination, breeding, nesting, spawning, metamorphosis, feeding, and movement of organisms. From bacteria to birds, snails to reptiles, frogs to fish, arthropods to otters and everything in between, there is an evident burst of activity. The scene seems straight out of a Hollywood action flick.Large numbers of toads cluster together in an event of explosive breeding, often forming mating balls. The result of this mass mating is evidenced the next morning with long strings of eggs entangled in vegetation, carpeting the edges of puddles and muddy pools.Up in the trees, the Malabar gliding frog (Rhacophorus malabaricus) also joins in the mating frenzy. These incredibly well-camouflaged amphibians don’t venture down to the pools of water on the ground. They are tree-dwellers, and prefer to conduct their business up in the canopy. Their carefully designed foam nests are built strategically above puddles and ditches, within which a number of small off-white eggs are laid. The newly-hatched tadpoles will fall into the waters below to live out the first stage of their lives as entirely aquatic animals before making their way back to the trees as adults.When the rivulets from the forest empty into the low-lying meadows a dramatic change can be witnessed, sometimes over a period of just a few hours. Who would have imagined that these flat tracts of agricultural land and grassy meadows could be transformed overnight into thriving aquatic systems? With the first flooding of these grasslands, creatures, that one wouldn’t usually expect in such areas – like the catfish – suddenly appear.Over 280 species of fish have been documented from the streams and rivers of the Western Ghats. The health of these freshwater systems is vital to the health of all these fish species and a multitude of mammals, crustaceans, birds, insects and plants.All these creatures, witnessed over a few days of magical rain-driven transformation, are linked to the water and the coming of the monsoons. Their lives beat to the rhythm of the rain.Pundits the world over are already predicting our future water woes. It is a common opinion that the wars of the not-so-distant future will be waged over water. But that is just the human perspective. What about the millions of other species that inhabit this planet alongside us? The creatures shown here are just a fraction of dependent on the fresh water that the monsoons bring. We have a responsibility to use water wisely, and understand that it is an invaluable and limited resource, for us and the creatures that share our planet.
Tasneem Khan is the Assistant Director of the Andaman and Nicobar islands Environmental Team, India, tasneem@anetindia.org. Umeed Mistry is a diver and photographer, umeedmistry@gmail.com. Current Conservation is grateful to YES BANK & SAEVUS / NATURAL CAPITAL AWARDS for permission to use these images.
The life of a fisher-boatman on the Ganga River is hard. Seven years ago, an old fisherman had touched his sun-singed forehead and told me, “There are many wrinkles, but no future. Depending on river fishing in the Ganga and her tributaries for eking out our livelihood has become a curse today. We used to be the masters of the river, now we are scavengers. How would you feel if you got robbed almost every day when you returned from work?” The physical hardship apart, he explained, they had to feed whole families from the poor fishing returns while facing threat to life and risk of robbery. They begged for an answer to the question: “How did we, the fishers to whom tradition bequeathed the fruit of the Ganga waters, reach this state?”
It would help to put this serious issue in context right at the outset. Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar are the two Indian states with the largest populations of traditional fisher communities, including the Mallah, Nisad, Majhi, Keut, Bind and allied castes in the Gangetic plains. Most members of these communities are landless and dependent almost entirely on river fishing through the year(1) . River fisheries across India are considered an underperforming economic sector on account of continuously falling production and the Gangetic basin that supports nearly 10 million people is no exception(2). Despite both the historical and contemporary importance of the Ganges for fisher livelihoods, policy neglect of Gangetic fisheries has compounded in recent times. As a result, many fishers have left fishing due to poor incomes and from fear of conflicts.
Resource scarcity is thought to lie at the heart of conflicts on the Ganga. Dams, altered flows and pollution have resulted in a collapse of fish population stocks. But over and above scarcity, the complex political history of access and rights needs to be understood to identify causes of continuing conflict in the fisheries of UP and Bihar. Whatever little fish resources remain have been rendered worthless by ambiguous property rights, undefined tenure and the politics of access. This is linked to the inherent problem of water tenure in the dynamic alluvial rivers of the Gangetic plain: rivers keep changing their courses with every flood season, remapping land and water through erosion and deposition. Hence, it becomes nearly impossible to know, for fishers, over how much water and how much time their stakes truly lie. This uncertainty forms the substrate for the politically powerful to reinforce their authority. In the highly feudal and stratified societies of these states, fisheries conflicts are often coloured by violence and bloodshed.
Despite broad similarities in the geography, hydrology and anthropology of fishing, political history has yielded disparate resource access regimes in the states of UP and Bihar. UP has a system of private contracts over river segments of variable lengths, which are leased to contractors through periodic auctions, who in turn employ traditional fishers as fishing labour. In contrast, all flowing water in Bihar can be fished open access, i.e. fishery is ‘free-for-all’ by state decree. These private and open-access systems have now existed in parallel for the last 20-25 years (c.1990- present), having diverged from a shared colonial past. The rest of this article will discuss how these seemingly divergent systems of resource access have in fact produced the same effects on the lives of fisherfolk.
Jalkar or Panidari system in Bihar, the riverine counterpart of feudal Zamindari (landlording), was fortified by land tenancy acts passed by the British colonial administration in the late 18th century. Though the British were aware that such ‘permanent’ settlement was a paradox given the dynamic floodplain, they nevertheless did so to consolidate long-term revenue earnings. Zamindari establishments could sublet water areas for fishing to smaller entrepreneurs who would hire traditional fishers to work the fishery. This came about through the exercise of English riparian law, which allowed ownership of any water body adjoining a landowner’s estate. The ‘right to fishery’ was thus aligned with private land-based property rights, leaving landless fisher folk without any stakes. Writings by British officials serving in eastern Bihar (erstwhile Bengal) resonate the worry that fishers would overharvest and destroy the rich fishery of the Ganges if not for privately owned and regulated river stretches. Although the colonial administration grappled constantly with the problem of river channel changes on the one hand, and poverty and equity on the other, this did not result in actual dilution of powers vested in the Jalkar owners and lessees.
The Panidari control became brutal and coercive over the years. Though Zamindari abolition happened in independent India (in 1952), Panidari continued in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar till 1991. Only after a fisher-supported movement, the Ganga Mukti Andolan, which got political mobilisation at a fisher settlement called Kagzi Tola in the Kahalgaon block, was the fishery freed from the Panidari’s clutches. The new ruling socialist party seized the opportunity provided by the movement to reach out to lower caste vote bases and made fishing ‘free for all’. This symbolic breaking of ‘private’ boundary was portrayed as a victory of the ‘oppressed over the oppressors’ but in reality, it did little to secure livelihoods.
Instead, due to open-access fishing, the absence of any settlement of fishing rights, and the resulting weak institutions, a fishery mafia gained influence. Even today, criminals use highly destructive fishing practices causing serious declines in fish recruitment, and powerful people enforce these practices through violence and threat to local fishers. The last three decades have seen several brutal massacres of fishers and fish grabbing by criminals is common. As fishers in Bihar admit today, with shame, they did not see the writing on the wall in 1991. Given the current situation where ‘non-traditional, opportunistic, destructive fishers’ and criminals rule the roost without any sanctions, even the oppression of Panidari is described as though it were a blessing.
“We worked under the Panidar (waterlord) for a long time. It was bonded labour. Often we would get meager payment for our work, whereas our fish would be taken away since it belonged to the Panidar. Even the river stretch we fished between Sultanganj and Pirpainti, belonged to them. Asworkers we faced years of oppression. Our community united in the late 1980s and overthrew this oppressive regime. Phir Gangajee mein machhli marna Lalu ne firi kar diya (Then Lalu Yadav, the erstwhile Chief Minister of Bihar, made fishing in the Ganga river free for all). This change we ushered in was also our biggest mistake. The Panidar was our oppressor but also our protector within his domain. Now any Rangbaaz (criminal or thug) comes with a gun and loots away the fish. We fish in fear. We hope that the good days of the Panidari will return. (sic)” – Fisherman in Bhagalpur, Bihar (2012)
Millions of fisher folk depend entirely on the Ganga River and her tributaries for their livelihoods
The fisheries in UP shared a common history with Bihar with the Zamindari having a major influence on the control of fisheries. In the late 1980s, the contract system was introduced and the Thekedar (contractor) obtained lease rights to fish through government auction schemes. Today, fishers complain that contractors exploit them by paying poor wages and make them work in fixed areas as labourers. This exploitation easily moves on to fish grabbing, as the ‘contractor’s friends’ can descend on the fishing stretch and order fishers to give them fish for free. These friends are often government officials (police, irrigation departments, fishery departments etc.), who help the contractors win auctions in the first place. Leases are typically short-term and may be sold for huge amounts. What is more, investment recovery is ensured through highly destructive and overfishing practices.
“Thekedar haraami hain (the contractor is a cheat). He will make us work for 12 hours every day and pay only 100 Rupees each, and will also take all the fish. When the contract system came, we entered it stupidly. But now we are repenting, as we are poor and don’t have any other means than fishing. And fish are disappearing from the Ganga anyway. All we can do is hope that somebody gets rid of these wretched Thekedars and free the river for fishing. (sic)” -Fisherman in Banda, Uttar Pradesh (2012).
As the above narratives from the two states suggest, fishers are suffering, no matter what the resource access system. The UP fishers demand a river free of contracts, and the Bihar fishers desire to go back to private ownership of the river fishery(3).
These narratives are hopeless: they swing between the sinister ends of bondage and release, enclosure and the false promise of liberty. Underlying this hopelessness is an institutional failure, reflected by the failed property rights arrangements, that have aggravated the collapse of Gangetic fisheries. This has become a ‘cycle of doom’ with endless transitioning between private and open-access fisheries in UP and Bihar over time. It calls for an empirical investigation of the effects of these two regimes, on fishery productivity, livelihood security, incomes and perceptions. The urgent concern is: which one is better? Market economics tells us that private ownership is more efficient than open access under any circumstances; the latter is expected to bring about a tragedy of the river commons. But is this true? How do property rights regimes affect incomes and other benefits to traditional fishers? What are the implications for fisher membership of the regimes? What could be alternative regimes of resource use? Is there ground between these two states?
These questions kept coming back at me all the time when I travelled in 2012 across the Gangetic basin for a study on fisher livelihoods. I wanted to understand the factors underlying declining fisheries-based livelihoods and biodiversity in the Gangetic plains. I spent over 6 months interviewing over 200 fishers in several settlements along the Ganga River and also 12 of its tributaries flowing through UP and Bihar. These interviews allowed me to understand what the fishers perceived as problems and possible ways out. What I report here is similar to the results of a poll.
The major finding was that both resource regimes –private contracts and open-access – have performed rather poorly in terms of effective management of fish resources. This was counterintuitive – diametrically opposite property rights regimes were causing the same problems. But indeed, there were almost no differences in fishing practices in UP and Bihar: 60-90% of fishers across UP and Bihar lamented the use of highly indiscriminate methods which caught fish of all sizes and types. These destructive methods (involving mosquito nets, seines and poisoning of river channels) cause mass killing of fish fry, eggs and spawn. As per the fishing acts of both Bihar and UP, such destructive fishing is illegal, but no ground action is being taken to improve this condition. Due to the ‘managed’ fisheries of UP, fungicides for fish are used rampantly, leading to the death of aquatic plants and insects, and invasive food fish species (e.g. Chinese Carp, Tilapia) are increasing in numbers and spreading, affecting native fish diversity. Fish selling prices have increased nearly fivefold in UP and fourfold in Bihar in the last decade.
Fisher-boatman in Bihar. (this is the picture with the bridge).
The socio-economic benefits and costs to fishers were also very similar in both regimes. The monthly incomes of fish workers in UP and Bihar averaged around INR 2500 (± 1500 SD) per month, with the fishers managing to save only one-fourth of this. In addition to this poverty, were constant threats to social security (fish grabbing, criminal extortion, contractor oppression and caste-based violence), which nearly 75% of fishers in Bihar and 60% in UP reported as their gravest concerns(4). Fishers also stressed the hard physical labour they had to put in every day to get enough fish for the day’s meal. Overall, fishers wanted to move away from current regimes because of the rampant destructive fishing practices, risk, oppression and injustice.
Given these failures on several counts, are there suitable alternatives? With the failure of state-led cooperatives, answers seem difficult to come by. The governments of both states formed fisher cooperatives in the 1960s and 1970s. However, these have run into elite capture, generating serious conflicts with local fishers, and are largely dysfunctional today. Fishers from Bihar and UP stressed that cooperatives need to be revived for channelling benefits to local fishers (currently 10-15% of the cooperatives are functional in these states). Recent new schemes in Bihar have been aimed at reviving the cooperative structures to meet their original concerns. The failure of both private and open-access resource regimes suggest that alternatives in community-based management deserve their due, through processes of bottom-up political organisation. It is assumed that the political organisation of mobile resource users (e.g. herders, fishers) is inherently weak because of the transient nature of their livelihood-earning practices. There is a need for the emergence of a local fisher political identity that gives the community control overfishing areas to sustain what is leftover of the fisheries today.
My personal opinion is that river fisheries management that marries customary tenure with community ownership will be worth experimenting with. Defining tenure, even tentatively, will inevitably lead to parceling of the river among local fisher groups, but there does not appear another way to balance the articulation of diverse interests within fisheries (Dey, S. pers. comm.). For example, Mallah fishers allege that ‘nontraditional’ fishers of ‘other castes’, unaware of the fine-nuances of traditional low-impact fishing, use destructive fishing methods. This represents the making of a new conflict that might lead to the demand for exclusive rights to traditional fishers, a legitimate demand in its own right, albeit a caste-based political assertion. Effective adaptive management of water tenure through continuous dialogue remains necessary for cooperation among fishers. Today, the two “states” of Gangetic river fisheries highlights the need for strengthening community identity and locally situated institutions. If community-based fishing rights and access are created, their long-term sustainability will require restoration of fish stocks and improvement in the ecological condition of rivers. Inland fisheries policy in India needs to address these complex issues urgently to safeguard the livelihoods of millions of fishers. Endnote:
Many fishers also work as farm labourers, rickshaw-pullers, divers, construction workers in urban areas and as boatmen at pilgrimage centers to augment their incomes.
Most commercially valuable fish species (large carps, large catfish, Hilsa etc.) have shown declines in the range of 70-100% over the past 40 years. Trash fish (gobies, minor catfish and minor barbs), which nobody touched before, are now bought at over INR 100 for a kilogram.
Along the Ganga River in UP, a few river stretches can still be fished in an open-access manner while some are privately controlled. Similarly, a few stretches in Bihar are still perceived to be under private control (although this is ambiguously defined), whereas almost all other flowing water bodies are open-access. I asked fishers from both regimes in both states about what they would prefer as an alternative. Up to 70% of fishers (n=117) working in private contracts in UP said that this was a problem and they would like to have fishing made ‘free-for-all’. On the contrary, 63% of fishers (n=110) in Bihar clearly preferred the privately owned fishery of the past as a solution to problems facing their fishing livelihoods.
Costs to secure fishing was calculated based on frequencies of cited instances of fish grabbing and threat to life from contractors (UP) or criminals (Bihar). These costs can be understood as opportunity costs in terms of ‘money lost from loss of fishing opportunity’ in Bihar, or ‘cuts in wages given by contractor’ in UP. Thus, a 65% loss of fishing opportunity is treated equivalent to INR 65 being lost per INR 100 to which the fisher was entitled. 50-75% of the interviewed fishers in UP and Bihar perceived ‘high risk while fishing’ from contractor oppression or criminal grabbing.
Acknowledgements: Long-drawn discussions with Subhasis Dey over several years have helped structure this article. I thank Jagdish Krishnaswamy, Rohan Arthur, Sunil Choudhary, Siddhartha Krishnan, Sharad Lele and Rohan D’Souza for academic inputs on multiple arguments put forth here. Many fishers of UP and Bihar outlined the ideas that I have attempted to put in words. The Ravi Sankaran Inlaks Small Grants Program, Mumbai, funded this work.
References: Payne AI and SA Temple. 1996. River and Floodplain Fisheries in the Ganges Basin. Final report R.5485. Marine Resources Assessment Group Limited, Overseas Development Administration, London. Vass KK, SK Mondal, S Samanta, VR Suresh and PK Katiha. 2010. The environment and fishery status of River Ganges. Aquatic Ecosystem Health & Management, 13, 385–394. Kelkar N. 2012. Fishing for Scrap: Sustaining River Fisheries in the Face of Ecosystem Degradation, Socio-political Dynamics and Poverty in the Gangetic Basin. A Brief Report on the Status of River Fisheries: Causes of Decline, Conflicts and Potential Alternatives. Report submitted to the Parliamentary Committee on Fisheries, Department of Agriculture (branch), Government of India. 38 p. Reeves P. 1995. Inland waters and freshwater fisheries: Issues of control, access and conservation in colonial India. In: Nature, Culture and Imperialism. (Eds D Arnold and R Guha) OUP, New Delhi. P. 260-292. Sharma M. 2006. Landscapes and Lives. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. p.12-41.
Ambystoma mexicanum is a species with many names. In addition to its Latin binomial, it goes by “Mexican salamander,” “Mexican walking fish,” and “axolotl”—the last of which is a Nahuatl word that translates, dramatically, as “water monster”. Whatever you choose to call it, A mexicanum is a fascinating animal with an unusual life history that may one day help medical researchers develop improved techniques for treating traumatic injuries, and potentially even increase human lifespan. Yet, ironically, although abundant in laboratories and collections around the world, the axolotl is critically endangered and may soon be declared extinct in the wild.
Although axolotls have a long history of being used as food and medicine in the New World, they were not known in Europe until the mid-19th century, when specimens were sent from Mexico City to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. There, the zoologist Auguste Dumeril began studying the unusual characteristic that makes the axolotl so interesting to modern scientists: paedomorphism, or the maintenance of juvenile physical features into adulthood.
Like the majority of its fellow amphibians, the axolotl begins its life as an aquatic larva. Feathery gills, splayed around the animal’s face like a lacy Elizabethan ruff, allow it to extract oxygen from water. The axolotl also sports unlidded eyes, small limbs, and a pronounced fin running along its spine and onto its thick tail—traits that are common in all larval amphibians. These characteristics, along with the animal’s large size (axolotl larvae can be up to 46 cm long), give it the appearance of a giant tadpole from an alien world.
Unlike tadpoles, however, the axolotl does not usually undergo a full metamorphosis, the process through which typical amphibians prepare themselves for emerging from the water and transitioning into terrestrial life. The axolotl does not lose its gills, tail, or grow larger limbs to help it move onto land and navigate through the undergrowth. Instead, it experiences what is called neoteny, or delayed development: it keeps its larval traits and simply continues to expand until it reaches full size and sexual maturity at approximately 18-24 months of age. After this, the axolotl looks and behaves the same for the remaining decade or so of its life.
Thanks to the work of Dumeril and his successors, we now know that axolotl neoteny is at least partly caused by a deficit of thyroid-stimulating hormone. This chemical tells the thyroid gland when it is time to produce thyroxine—a different chemical that regulates the metabolic activity and, therefore, the body’s transition into adulthood. Thyroxine production is dependent on the axolotls’ ability to consume adequate levels of iodine, a commodity that is generally scarce in their habitat—(sometimes, especially when these animals breed at high densities, larvae obtain their dietary iodine requirement by consuming other larvae). An additional hindrance to metamorphosis may be the coldness of the water in which axolotls live since low temperatures reduce the efficacy of thyroxine. While these conditions cumulatively favour the lifelong retention of juvenile traits, it is biologically possible for axolotls to undergo metamorphosis and seek a terrestrial existence—as has been observed in their geographical neighbour and close relative, the Plateau tiger salamander (A. velasci). This is uncommon in the wild but, can be stimulated easily in captivity by an injection of iodine or thyroxine. Although this might seem like an extravagant parlour trick, it has been integral to studies of what is, perhaps, the defining feature of axolotls: their healing ability.
Wild-type axolotl
If an axolotl is cut, its wound will heal over without producing a scar. If it suffers trauma to part of a limb, it can repair the damage and eventually regain normal function. However, what is truly amazing about the axolotl is that, given enough time, it can completely regrow entire structures, including tails, legs, and even parts of its brain. Further, if organs are transplanted from one axolotl to another, the recipient will readily integrate the foreign components and eventually use them as if they were it’s own. Because these “talents” are most pronounced before an axolotl undergoes metamorphosis, researchers are particularly keen to understand how, why and when exactly the shift to adulthood makes healing more difficult. This information has obvious implications for both human and veterinary medicine, especially for a range of injuries that previously meant lifelong disability, paralysis, or certain death.
Although axolotls are special for their remarkable ability to recover from trauma, the neoteny that facilitates this trait has been observed in a number of other species. A survey of the natural histories of neotenic organisms suggests that the characteristic may be at least partly linked to habitat: Neoteny is particularly common in environments where it is difficult or dangerous for aquatic juveniles to make the transition to terrestrial habitats—especially those where the animals need to locate scarce resources while navigating rough terrain and avoiding desiccation.
This is an apt description of axolotl habitat—the high-altitude Laguna Alchichiga region located to the southeast of Mexico City. The area once boasted five lakes, or lagunas (Chalco, Texcoco, Zumpango, Xaltocan, Xochimilco), that sustained generations of Mesoamerican cultures. The two freshwater lakes, Chalco and Xochimilco, were a useful source of water for both humans and their crops; the Aztecs used these bodies of water to create a system of chinampas, or “floating gardens”, in which a series of drainage channels were interspersed with small plots of arable land that could be used to grow food crops.
Even before the appearance of humans, the Alchichiga region was a challenging place for the axolotl to live. Water temperatures fluctuate greatly, dropping as low as 6°C and soaring to as high as 20°C; the lakes experience intermittent periods of flooding and drought, and there are a number of terrestrial and aerial predators ready to snatch up any axolotls that venture onto land. Life only became more difficult once the Aztecs and their successors settled the area. Because axolotls were considered a delicacy—reportedly tasting like eel— they were regularly hunted for food; their fat was also processed into a syrup that could be used as a nutritional supplement. Perhaps most catastrophic to the axolotl was the drainage of Lake Chalco to prevent flooding and facilitate the expansion of Mexico City and its suburbs. Lake Xochimilco was similarly reduced, leaving the dwindling axolotl population to eke out an existence in the few freshwater ditches and pools that remain in the Alchichiga area.
Recent surveys suggest that wild axolotls occupy no more than 10 sq. km of fragmented and degraded habitat. The water in these areas is often polluted by chemicals, sediments, and microorganisms. Even where it is clean enough to foster the growth of vegetation on which axolotls can secure their eggs, the water may still be home to other dangers such as invasive fish (including carp and tilapia), that eat young axolotls and their prey. As a result of these challenges, axolotl numbers have decreased markedly in recent years—in 1998, surveyors located nearly 6,000 individuals per sq. km; over the next decade, the number dropped to 1,000 and then to 100; in January 2014, researchers could find no axolotls at all.
Despite these trends, axolotl conservationists are not ready to give up on this unique salamander. In addition to its bizarre appearance and regenerative powers, the axolotl also boasts a connection to the Aztec god of deformations and death. Thus, while it may not be the cutest or cuddliest of organisms, it is undeniably striking, memorable, culturally relevant, and strangely charismatic—a combination of traits that may allow it to function as a flagship species for conservation throughout the Alchichiga region.
Perhaps most promising is the fact that Lake Xochimilco, a popular tourist destination, has received international recognition through both the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites (1987) and the Ramsar Convention (2004). The axolotl was recently chosen as the figurehead for a Darwin Initiative project aiming to educate Xochimilco visitors about the lake’s ecosystem and its economic and ecological benefits. Among other initiatives, the project included wildlife surveys, guide training workshops for the boatmen who punt thousands of visitors around the canals on large flat-bottomed boats (trachineras), and efforts to help artisans establish souvenir-selling businesses. A field station situated along the shore of Lake Xochimilco provides space for both education about, and scientific study of, axolotls and other wildlife that share their wetland habitat. Visitors may not be able to see free-ranging axolotls, but they can view some of the many live specimens that are kept there in aquaria for research and breeding purposes.
Axolotl in the laboratory
In the future, some of those captive animals may be used to re-establish axolotl populations in the wild—but only if two conditions are met. First, the habitat needs not only to be restored but also protected; if it is not, the axolotls are unlikely to survive and successfully reproduce because they will have no environment in which to do so. Second, conservationists must work to ensure that only healthy individuals are released. The latter goal may sound easier to achieve than the former, but “health” is a complex issue that encompasses not only disease but also genetics and behaviour. Captive breeding can inadvertently select for particular traits that may not be favourable—or may even be actively harmful—in the wild. Preliminary genetic work has suggested that captive-bred axolotls have lower levels of genetic diversity, which means that they may be less able to respond to environmental pressures such as those associated with human disturbance and climate change. Additionally, variations in size, survival, reproductive output, and even colour can prevent successful mating between individuals from different populations of captive axolotls, and between captives and their free-living brethren. The urgency of establishing wild populations of axolotls cannot be overstated. Already, some captive axolotls have shown signs of losing some of their regenerative capacities over many generations, suggesting that robust wild populations are needed to keep this species viable over the long term.
Right now, the future is very uncertain, but there are glimmers of hope. In February 2014, in an unexpected and happy turn of events, biologists from Mexico’s National Autonomous University spotted two wild axolotls in Xochimilco. The animals could not be caught for use in captive breeding programs, but perhaps they will reproduce in their native waters. To facilitate this and other conservation interventions in the Alchichiga region, an international team of researchers met recently in Mexico to write an updated axolotl action plan. Their management recommendations, due to be released by the end of 2014, will usher in the next phase of axolotl conservation efforts—that, hopefully, will allow us to one day add “survivor” to the long list of names used to describe this remarkable species.
References: Bride IG, RA Griffiths, A Melendez-Herrada and JE McKay. 2008. Flying an amphibian flagship: conservation of the axolotl Ambystoma mexicanum through nature tourism at Lake Xochimilco, Mexico. International Zoology Yb 42:116-124. Contreras V, E Martinez-Meyer, E Valiente and L Zambrano. 2009. Recent decline and potential distribution in the last remnant area of the microendemic Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum). Biological Conservation 142:2881-2885. Griffiths RA, V Graue, IG Bride, and JE McKay. 2004. Conservation of the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) at Lake Xochimilco, Mexico. Herpetological Bulletin 89:4-11. Parra-Olea G, KR Zamudio, E Recuero, X AguilarMiguel, D Huacuz and L Zambrano. 2011. Conservation genetics of threatened Mexican axolotls (Ambystoma). Animal Conservation 15:61-72. Recuero E, J Cruzado-Cortes, G Parra-Olea and KR Zamudio. 2010. Urban aquatic habitats and conservation of highly endangered species: the case of Ambystoma mexicanum (Caudata, Ambystomatidae). Annual Zoology Fennici 47:223-238.
Australian rivers are in crisis, with reduced flows from massive irrigation pumping and extinction of native species accelerating at a frightening pace. The crisis is particularly severe on the many reaches of the Darling and Murray Rivers, which drain the east and north of the continent, joining and emptying into the sea on the southern coast. This is Australia’s longest and most productive freshwater system and its importance cannot be overstated. Conservationists have been outspoken in their demands that these rivers be restored to health through a range of measures including major reductions in the extractions allowed for agricultural irrigation. This call has been encapsulated in the phrase ‘environmental flows’ which signals the ecologists’ demand that restoration of flows and overall health of the rivers is essential for their biodiversity—and indeed for our survival.
Adapted from NSW Surveyor A.W. Mullens’ 1906 careful survey drawings of Ngunnhu by Peter Dargin, who added the key to the river rock names in his leaflet: Aboriginal Fisheries of the Darling-Barwon Rivers, Brewarrina Historical Society, Dubbo, 1976. Note the damage already done to the ‘Rocks’ area to create a vehicle roadway across the river bend.
This debate over river health has also been where aboriginal voices have been heard most strongly. Aboriginal people have been demanding not only ‘environmental’ but ‘cultural flows’, which they argue must be recognised as essential to this threatened river system. The Murray and Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations collective (MILDRIN), for example, on the rivers’ lower reaches, has called for the recognition of cultural flows in the national context of both the Native Title cases on river rights, (which partially recognised aboriginal people’s pre-invasion property rights in the common law) and the legalisation of tradable private property in water. This call for the recognition of an aboriginal interest in the river is not new. It draws on the centrality of water to traditional philosophies and social life as well as economies, but it also reflects responses and interactions to the changes caused by two centuries of settler land management.
It might be expected that ecologists and aboriginal defenders of rivers would be in complete agreement. After all, the need to recognise ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ or TEK is now a standard requirement of all, natural resource management guidelines. Yet relations between ecologists and aboriginal people in Australia have often been less than smooth—in fact, they have often been in open conflict. This paper will consider a local case study on the upper Darling system: the Brewarrina Native Fisheries, known in local aboriginal languages as Ngunnhu and in colloquial aboriginal English as ‘The Rocks’ or ‘The Fisheries’.
This site, like all river stretches of the Darling, has rich aboriginal traditions of embedded stories told about, and through, the landforms and flows of the river. Ngunnhu is unusual, however, because of the fish traps. The Brewarrina fish traps were a complex network of rounded pens, extending 500 metres around the bend of the Barwon River where Brewarrina now stands. There are many other stone fish traps in the long Darling River system but none are so long or so well-placed as Ngunnhu. These Brewarrina traps are an extraordinary feat of engineering, reflecting deep knowledge of the river’s behaviour in drought and flood as well as showing painstaking, stone-on-stone construction methods. The stone pens were laid out in a matrix along the length of the river in which the bed falls steeply at the same time as it bends. This ensured that no matter how low or high, fast or slow, the river was running, at least some of the pens would be underwater and so able to entice the fish in and then trap them, leaving them swimming safely but unable to find the small downstream opening through which they had entered. The high productivity of the traps meant they could feed many people, so they were the subject of elaborate protocols ensuring neighbouring peoples had rights to the river in times of drought. The traps were the focal point of large ceremonial gatherings, which brought together not only people from the three language groups adjacent to the river but often people from a country that was far more distant from the river. No matter how long the ceremonies took, the traps ensured that many hundreds of people could be fed well for weeks at a time.
One of the major sustained concerns of the aboriginal people has been about the physical damage to the structures and living ecologies of the rivers. The remaining section of this paper will focus on the pressures which were brought to bear by the aboriginal people on aquatic ecologists when they tried to build a new fishway across the weir. Brewarrina aboriginal communities have continuously stressed their concerns about damage to the river. This is a concern arising partly from settler disregard for the sacred story and partly from concerns about the settler’s weir – built in the early 20th Century to store water for the town in an area of unpredictable rainfall. The weir site was chosen to enhance an already deep part in the river, but its effect was both to obscure the deep area and to submerge more stone traps of the Ngunnhu itself. Furthermore, its concrete wall completely obstructed the natural movement of fish upstream to spawn. Each season after the weir was built, native fish would be found in massive numbers trapped below the weir, floundering and gasping as they crowded and died in attempts to move upstream. To address this glaring problem, government authorities had built a ‘fishway’ or ‘fish ramp’, a geometric set of rising concrete steps which protruded downstream from the wall on the northern, shallow, side of the river. Fish had never used this path to swim upstream—they had always chosen the southern—deeper—side of the river. So the fishway was poorly positioned, but in any case, its construction blasted even more of Ngunnhu’s pens apart, causing more physical and symbolic damage. Aboriginal fears were heightened even further after the expansive 1974 flood which had allowed European carp (Cyprinus carpio), initially introduced in southern ponds of the river as an ornamental fish, to escape into the main river system. The species spread rapidly all the way up the length of the system, at least into its major streams. The carp, although widely eaten throughout Asia, are viewed with disgust by Aborigines and settlers alike, deemed inedible because of their taste, their distinctive odour and their many fine bones.
The general aboriginal distress about the impact of the weir has been continuous. Aboriginal people mounted a campaign for a greater say in the management of the river as a heritage resource. Les Darcy, a Ngiyampa man who grew up on the river, was an early director of the Cultural and History centre located at the Fisheries. He led the campaign for the Centre to have a role in managing the fabric of the Fisheries themselves, both as a heritage structure and as a productive resource. In this 1996 interview, he reflected on his concerns about the river at Brewarrina, demonstrating that, for him, the weir was just one aspect of the severe impact which European settlement and western irrigated agriculture had made on the river: …It’s a shame we can’t live the same way . But there’s no more reeds, there’s trees all over the river falling in. The European carp have got it beat. I don’t think the irrigation has helped one little bit. Neither have the weirs… I often comment about building the weir at Brewarrina Rocks. They put a weir where it’s been 60 miles of water running in any man’s time. It’d never been known to get dry, it’s the deepest part of the Darling River, so why put a weir where the deepest part of the Darling River is? Why put a weir at all? It’s a terrible way of ruining a river. Les was scathing about the building of that first fish ramp which was not only ‘on the wrong side’ of the river but then… …they had to dynamite rocks for at least 50 yards to make a waterway for the fish to come up, and the fish want their natural course. … It shows you the thought and intelligence that went into the building of the weir at Brewarrina.
Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps c. 1900. https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/pages/ba18eab5-1a30- 4f5d-af0d-d3f555f56b83/files/national-heritage-brewarrina.pdf Original is by Henry King (1870 to 1923), commercial photographer, Sydney. The King collection is held in State Library of NSW: 1 album (54 p.) : 105 ill., sepia ; 26 x 41 cm. DSM/F572.9901/ K
Now, Les said, the failure of the first fish ramp meant ‘they’re thinking they’ve got to put it on the other side.’ But for him, the weir and the first fish ramp had already demonstrated that ‘expert’ government authorities did not understand the ecology of the river and therefore should not be trusted with any more decisions at all.
The grim concrete channel leading up to the weir on the far side of the river was ugly, but that was the least of its problems: as Les had pointed out, its failure to allow fish to swim upstream was sadly visible. Concerns about both weir and fishway gained even more momentum when, after big floods in 1974 and 1976, a long drought began, which continued from 1997 until at least 2009. This has made the dominance of carp in the river a common grievance among fishermen, graziers and irrigators, who were otherwise seldom on the same side of any argument.
Aboriginal demands for restoration of fishing resources and a reversal of the damage done by the weir have struck a responsive chord in the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Primary Industry (DPI) which manages freshwater rivers. At Brewarrina, there has been an intense debate about whether and how a new fish way might be constructed. The government has finally recognized the damage done by weirs, as DPI spokesman David Cordina explained: Native fish need to migrate short and large distances upstream to spawn, find food sources and redistribute. Barriers to fish passage, such as the Brewarrina weir, prevent this migration and as such, weirs are listed as one of the main factors that have contributed to the decline in native fish numbers in the Murray-Darling Basin. Native fish numbers are now estimated to be at just 10% of the pre-European settlement.
The most contentious discussions have been had around the impact that a new fish-way might have on Ngunnhu, the Fisheries. DPI announced in October 2009 that a final agreement had been reached after what its spokesperson, ecologist David Cordina, said was extensive consultation, to build a ‘reverse rock-ramp fishway’ which would be on the southern side of the river and would lie entirely within the existing pool of the weir, that is upstream of the remaining, exposed pens. Cordina continued:
River Turtles in the Barwon River’ By Brad Steadman, Niyampaa educator, land rights and river advocate, lives at Brewarrina. c. 2006, pen, texta colour, on paper. Niyampaa (alternative spelling Ngemba) language group extends along southern bank of Barwon and upper Darling Rivers, including Brewarrina
This represents a big win for the native fish of the Barwon River and the integrity of the Ngunnhu, or aboriginal Fishtraps, adjacent to the weir. The Ngunnhu, located immediately downstream of the weir is regarded as one of the most important cultural heritage sites in NSW, and as such every effort was taken to ensure the proposed fishway would only enhance their value.
Yet aboriginal concerns persisted. In letters sent to the Federal and the NSW Ministers for the Environment early in 2010, members of long-standing families in the Brewarrina aboriginal community expressed reservations about the agreement. They did so in terms that aligned with concerns of the past, but in ways that also reflected emerging technologies and new practical expressions for these old problems.
Firstly, these letters broached the question of effective recognition of aboriginal people as owners. They expressed frustration at the claim by DPI to have consulted widely, when the Government department had made extensive use of computer generated digital media tools like GPS mapping and animated projections in the consultative process. The view of the letter writers was that this had, in effect, removed the real decision-making power from an aboriginal community which remained educationally and technologically disadvantaged. This consultation, they wrote, had not used a form of communication which would have allowed meaningful participation in decision making by the broadest number of the local community.
Secondly, the letters expressed concern that the sacred nature of the Fisheries and its precinct had not been adequately recognised in the Government plan, which focused on the fish traps themselves rather than the wider area around the Fisheries. The letter writers argued that, apart from the general disturbance of construction, the government proposal would require the importation of many tonnes of rock from other locations, introducing an alien substance into a sacred landscape, which would again undermine the integrity of the site.
Finally, the letters expressed deep skepticism that NSW DPI could in fact prevent its new fishway from contributing yet more damage to the Fisheries, to the river banks and to the fish themselves. The letters stressed the many damaging outcomes which have already resulted from the settlers’ long interference with the stones of the fishtrap pens for a causeway, in the building of the weir itself and the original fishway – yet none of these damaging impacts had been predicted at the time by the engineers who built them. Why should aboriginal people believe now, the letters asked, just because of a sheaf of computer projections, that the engineers were in any better position to predict the outcome of what appeared to be yet another major intervention in the river’s flow? The letter writers held grave concerns, based soundly, it would seem, on past evidence, that interventions in the river would do more harm than good.
New fishway on southern side of river, rising in steps to the level of the weir pond. NSW Public Works Department: https://www.publicworks.nsw.gov.au/riverina-western/Brewarrina-fishway
Ngunnhu is, in many ways, an exceptional site: a waterscape of high productivity and complex human design and engineering, demanding recognition of aboriginal people’s knowledge of and successful harvesting of natural resources. Yet, at the same time as it demonstrates human ingenuity, it is embedded within a creation narrative of ancestral power over water, land and living species. The varying flows across its rocks are productive both in food species—for humans and birds—and in the complex stories of creation and continuing interaction between people and the more-than-human world. Aboriginal expressions of concern about Ngunnhu—the place, the river and its flow—show this interaction of both pre-invasion ‘tradition’ and post-invasion historical change. This interaction is typical of disputes about river health along with this long river system, feeding into the sensitivity with which aboriginal people respond to conservation initiatives.
The new Fishway at Brewarrina has at last been completed. It is on the southern side—the Brewarrina side—of the river, and it looks extremely beautiful. Rather than the brutalist concrete geometries of the old fishway, the new one is a rising arrangement of stones, echoing the design of Ngunnhu itself. But does it do the job everyone wants it to do? Does it allow native fish to swim upriver to spawn? Fish can no longer be seen gasping as they crowd together in frustration below the weir in the way they used to. The ecologists are cautiously optimistic, monitoring the fishway carefully, waiting to see if there are signs of regeneration among native species. Aboriginal community members have mixed views—many remain skeptical, reserving their judgement to see how the fishway works in drought as well as in rainy seasons. The long undertaking of the planning and then New fishway on the southern side of the river, rising in steps to the level of the weir pond. NSW Public Works Department: https://www.publicworks.nsw.gov.au/riverina-western/Brewarrina-fishway the construction of this fishway is a testament to the changes which have taken place—not only in the river but in the relations between aboriginal owners and settlers. Ecologists have had to recognise aboriginal people as owners of the river in ways that have never occurred before. The beneficiaries in this still fragile negotiation, it is to be hoped, will also be the riverine species who may finally find their way upstream.
Further reading: Jessica Weir and Steven Ross. 2007. ‘Beyond native title: the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations’. In The Social Effects of Native Title, (Eds B Smith and F Morphy), ANU Press, Australia. Donna Craig. 2005. ‘Indigenous Property Rights to Water: environmental flows, cultural values and tradeable property rights’, CSIRO paper. Paul Sinclair. 2001. The Murray: a river and its people, University of Melbourne Press, Australia. Heather Goodall. 2011. ‘Reclaiming Cultural Flows: Aboriginal People, Settlers and the Darling River’. In Outside Country: A History of Inland Australia, (Ed Alan Mayne) Wakefield Press, Adelaide, pp 95-126. Heather Goodall. 2008. ‘Riding the Tide: Indigenous knowledge, history and water in a changing Australia’. Environment and History. 14: 355-84. doi: 10.3197/096734008X333563
Photographs: www.environment.gov.au, Peter Dargin, www.publicworks.nsw.gov.au
The grass is greener where the sea-cow feeds! The dugong (Dugong dugon), fondly called the sea cow, is a marine mammal that occupies Indian waters around the Gulf of Kutch, Gulf of Mannar, and the Andaman and Nicobar (A&N) islands, where it is the anointed state animal. Apart from its voracious feeding on seagrass meadows very little is known about the dugong, making its conservation a challenge. A team of researchers from the Nature Conservation Foundation undertook a study to understand how the dugong is faring in the waters around the Andaman & Nicobar islands and how its status has changed over the last 50 years. Elrika D’Souza, the lead author of the paper resulting from this work, spoke to Diya Das about this study.
DD: Give us a Just-a-Minute version of your paper. ED: This paper talks about changes in dugong occurrences in the Andaman & Nicobar islands over five decades. Although there has been an almost 50% reduction in the area used by dugongs over this period because of threats such as hunting, there is still a remarkable persistence of the animal in some areas. Dugongs are creatures of seagrass meadows and our study found that they like to feed mainly on two kinds of seagrass. They prefer meadows with large, continuous stretches of these kinds. This aspect of dugong ecology is very handy because it makes the job of mapping suitable dugong habitats much easier. DD: Why dugongs? What makes them important? ED: Through their selective feeding, dugongs act as gardeners and maintain meadows with certain species of seagrasses. These meadows are then used by a number of fish, turtles and other invertebrate herbivores. It has been observed that meadows that are no longer used by dugongs change in character. The original seagrass species get replaced by species with lower nutritional value, which could, in turn, affect the other animals that are dependent on seagrass meadows. Without dugong grazing, the meadow may also reach a stage of ‘die-off’ where the shoots become old and the meadow is totally wiped out. DD: How much do we know about dugongs? ED: In the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, we know the animal only from sporadic sightings, or stranded or dead individuals. There have been no detailed studies looking at its distribution or ecology. So, basically, there is no information. Sighting the dugong is difficult here because they are usually solitary, or in pairs. Besides, they often use remote areas or places where the waters are murky. This makes the dugong a rarely-seen animal around these islands. In contrast, in places like Australia, they occur in herds of 300-400. DD: Given the rarity of the animal, what was your strategy? How did you go about looking for it? ED: To find out where dugongs occur currently, we used direct sightings and feeding signs. Dugongs have an interesting feeding habit: they spend a considerable time grazing on seagrasses and leave tell-tale trails on the meadow. Our earlier work has shown that these feeding trails take an average of eight days to disappear. So if we found signs of feeding, it meant a dugong had been there within the last week or so. This is a sure shot sign of the presence of the animal in that area.
A dugong around Ritchie’s archipelago
We surveyed 57 seagrass meadows around the Andaman and Nicobar islands between 2010 and 2012. During our surveys, we looked for these feeding signs and also recorded other information about the meadow, such as the composition of seagrass species, the density of shoots, patchiness, etc. This helped us to figure out what exactly causes them to use a particular meadow over others. Though we sighted only seven animals during our study, we were able to get a lot of information from the feeding signs.
We also wanted to see how dugong distribution has changed over the last 50 years. To find out about dugong distribution in the past, we relied on records maintained by various government departments such as the fisheries and forest department, and research institutes, as well as some published information available in journals. The records were very scanty, so we grouped the information into five-year periods to get a better overall picture of how dugong occurrences have changed over the last 50 years. DD: So what new information has emerged from your study? ED: We now know where dugongs are most likely to be found around the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, and what kinds of meadows they are most likely to use. From the long-term data, we learned about persistence – that these animals have been using the same meadows over a long period of time. If certain meadows have ceased to be feeding grounds it is probably because the animal was removed due to hunting or entanglement in fishing nets, or the quality of the meadow had changed. From a management point of view, our study helps prioritise meadows for conservation. It is now possible to identify meadows that contain features that dugongs like, and see whether they are presently used by dugongs or are likely to be feeding grounds in the future.
Feeding trails of dugongs
DD: How do you plan to take this forward? ED: By working with the government. We are trying to prioritise certain sites for dugong conservation and monitoring, based on its use by the animal and based on how dynamic the particular site is, i.e. how likely it is to change character in the near future. We also want to study direct threats to dugongs in these sites and come up with a priority map for conservation, categorising them as those that require immediate action, only monitoring, or no action as of now. We’ve already approached the government, and they are keen to work with us. They take pride in the presence of such a rare animal in their islands, and its conservation is something they are definitely keen on.
Reference: D’Souza E, V Patankar, R Arthur, T Alcoverro and N Kelkar. 2013. Long-Term Occupancy Trends in a Data-Poor Dugong Population in the Andaman and Nicobar Archipelago. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76181.
The Areng Valley, one of Cambodia’s most socially and ecologically sensitive areas can be found in the depths of the country’s southwestern forests. Home to rare and globally endangered wildlife—and to communities that depend on the valley’s abundant natural resources—the entire habitat may be flooded if officials proceed with the controversial Chaey Areng hydropower project. In addition to the likely impacts on the environment and communities of the valley, the project is politically sensitive, as it raises questions about how the habitat should managed, and who should have access to the resources of the Areng Valley. The following images provide an introduction to both the Areng Valley and the people who are trying to protect its riches and influence its future.
Located in southwestern Cambodia, the Areng Valley is a roughly 20,000-hectare expanse of evergreen forests, wetlands, farms, and villages that overlap with one of Southeast Asia’s most important conservation areas: the Central Cardamom Protected Forest. Designated as a protected area in 2002, the valley and the surrounding mountains are widely recognised as being a part of a broader bioregion that houses significant amounts of biodiversity. The region is host to some of the world’s rarest wildlife. Asian elephants, pleated gibbons, clouded leopards, Asiatic black bears and great hornbills are just some of the 31 globally endangered species that have been recorded in the Areng Valley alone. Of notable importance is the presence of the critically endangered Siamese crocodile in the Areng River, a species now extinct across 99% of its historical habitat range. This biological wealth is made possible by the large habitat range provided by the expansive evergreen montane forests of the Cardamom Mountains.
Some 400,000 hectares of relatively undisturbed ecosystems offer a wide range of species the room to flourish. The abundance of wildlife is also supported by the physical connections between the many ecosystems. Highland forests, for example, remain connected to lowland marshes through hydrological processes, which in turn allow biophysical processes like nutrient flows and migration to proceed unimpeded. Within the broader Cardamom Mountains bioregion, the Areng Valley is only one part of this mosaic of environments, but its river system plays an important role in connecting the diverse ecologies found in the Cardamoms.
At the heart of the valley is the Areng River, which fuels both the valley’s ecology and its residents. The river’s watershed receives an average of 150-200 inches of rainfall per year, with most of the precipitation occurring during the monsoon season (May-October). Seasonal pulses of floodwaters during this time are extremely important in allowing nutrients from the watershed’s forests to be distributed throughout the Areng Valley. Not only do these pulses contribute to the river’s aquatic biomass, but they also help nourish the valley’s agricultural fields. Connected to the river are also networks of seasonal streams, wetlands and ponds that allow many freshwater fish species to perform migrations between the river and the valley’s floodplain wetlands. Combined with the river’s internal aggregation of interconnected habitats—including deep pools, fast-flowing rapids, woody debris and riparian vegetation—the Areng River maintains a level of habitat quality that is becoming increasingly harder to find in the rest of Southeast Asia. Healthy populations of extremely rare Siamese crocodiles, Asian arowana (dragonfish) and “blackfish” attest to the river’s ability to support considerable amounts of biological wealth.
Embedded in the Areng Valley and River’s ecologies are native residents who rely heavily on the area’s environmental resources. While many people living in the valley moved to the area from other parts of Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, a large portion of the 1500 or so residents is Khmer Daeum, a group of Cambodian natives that include the Chong and Sui indigenous groups. Regardless of ethnic origin, all families in the Areng Valley make their livelihoods through subsistence practices. Rice cultivation, in particular, is an integral part of many people’s lives. All the rice, and virtually all other produce grown in the valley, is consumed locally. Cultural interactions also reinforce the locals’ connection to, and conception of, Areng’s landscape. Communal agricultural practices, along with communal use of forests and the Areng River, emphasise the shared use of the valley’s resources. In addition, animist beliefs in spirit forests and animals such as the Siamese crocodile help sustain a level of conservation by discouraging trespassing and unnecessary encounters.
One place where the intimate knowledge of the environment among valley residents frequently manifests itself is on the surface of the Areng River. Areng Valley fishers, in particular, possess a wealth of place-based knowledge honed by years of experience and are capable of catching many of the 43 fish species that have been recorded in the river’s watershed. The hidden contours and life under the Areng River are as familiar to them as the dirt paths that connect the houses of their village. With such knowledge comes a detailed understanding of the behaviour of aquatic species, including their migration patterns, preferred habitats, and life cycle characteristics. The connections people have with their surrounding environments make them experts on the Areng Valley’s ecological systems.
Despite the highly knowledgeable way in which the residents of the Areng Valley engage with their environment, some government officials feel that such knowledge and associated lifestyles are inappropriate for a country that is attempting to rapidly modernise. Both the economic poverty of people living in the Areng Valley and the country’s shortage of electricity are noted as being primary reasons necessitating the construction of the Cheay Areng hydropower dam on the Areng River. Since 2006, several foreign companies have offered to lift the valley out of poverty by promising residents generous compensation packages and by sustainably using the valley’s water resources through hydropower.
The Cambodian government has embraced these plans as a part of its overall development goals to increase electricity production and to help bring the benefits of development to rural populations. However, a number of prominent environmental organisations, as well as a Japanese aid agency, have countered such claims of prosperity and sustainability with data suggesting that the project offers minimal economic benefits—and will take a considerable toll on local communities and biodiversity. Increasingly, Areng Valley residents are also voicing their opposition to the project. In an attempt to counter what they see as a one-sided project that will strip them of important environmental resources, residents have resorted to forms of protest that allow them to project their voices past the confines of the valley. Their efforts include motorcade marches to provincial government offices, submission of petitions to the national government, and forms of civil disobedience that are physically preventing the hydropower project from moving forward.
The future management of the Areng Valley’s environment remains uncertain despite continued efforts by valley residents to stop the dam. Past experience has demonstrated that force is often used against groups that have vehemently opposed large-scale development projects in Cambodia. As a result, it is unclear how the situation will develop from here and how the Cambodian government and the company responsible for the project will respond to the demands of valley residents. For now, with no other functioning mechanism to have their voices heard, Areng Valley villagers will continue their protests.
The Areng Valley communities are not alone in their fight. Starting from a single dedicated local NGO, an expanding network of individuals and groups are rallying to support the efforts of valley residents. Among the supporters are a group of politically active monks who have embarked on an awareness-raising campaign for the plight of the Areng Valley, which involves the symbolic blessing of the oldest trees in the valley as well as praying for the protection of its people and environment. Other supporters include lawyers, film directors and scientists, each of whom contributes to a campaign seeking to empower valley residents in a way that will allow them to continue to maintain and benefit from the valley’s environment.
Ultimately, what the valley residents seek is a way to participate in discussions about how their environmental resources are used for either conservation or development. Much of the dialogue to date has been directed at them rather than with them. Thus, the Chaey Areng hydropower issue offers an opportunity to break new ground in Cambodia, to redefine how stakeholder participation actually influences the planning and implementation of resource use projects. If all sides involved in the resource dispute can listen to the people who will be most affected by a final decision—dam or no dam—then perhaps a path towards a more sustainable and equitable future can be made for the people and environment of the Areng Valley.
In India, dugongs inhabit waters around the Gulf of Kutch, Gulf of Mannar, Palk Bay and the Andaman & Nicobar archipelago. Our research has gathered new clues about a crucial part of the dugong’s life that occupies much of their time; their feeding habits in seagrass meadows. The search for answers started seven years ago when we sighted two dugongs while snorkelling around an island in Ritchie’s archipelago. We observed these two individuals closely for months and found them feeding in the same seagrass meadows throughout the year. They fed specifically on two species of seagrasses that were relatively small-sized and low in density. This led us to wonder how these animals managed to feed constantly in an area without depleting their resources completely.
A dugong feeding on seagrass around Ritchie’s archipelago
Dugongs are known to feed on high-nutrition and low-fibre species of seagrasses, typically pioneer species. Where animals exist in large numbers, such as in Australian waters, they are known to graze down meadows, reducing biomass by almost 80 to 90%. By uprooting entire shoots and then abandoning the meadow to allow them to recover for a period before they return, the dugongs tend the meadows and are therefore considered as ‘seagrass gardeners’. The time interval between two visits to a patch is long enough to ensure the recovery of the same species but short enough to prevent the next level of succession which would comprise low-nutrition, high-fibre species that are not optimal for the dugongs’ diet. In the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, populations of dugongs have dwindled considerably in the last five decades and we were observing persistence in habitat use, in contrast to abandoning of overgrazed sites. Hence, we tried to understand this difference in a more systematic manner. We had observed eight seagrass meadows (of the 44 surveyed) that were used by dugongs over a period of four years. We monitored these meadows and found signs of the animals feeding throughout the year at these sites. We also observed that each of these meadows was used either by individuals or pairs of dugongs. To increase our sightings of animals in and around seagrass meadows, we also set up a network of informants comprising fishermen, tourist boat operators and dive operators, who used the waters frequently.
A dugong around Ritchie’s archipelago
From this network’s and our personal observations, we estimated a total of fifteen individuals over a period of seven years around Reef, Havelock, Inglis, Neil, Sir Hugh, South Andaman, Nancowry, Trinket and Teressa Islands. In order to better understand why animals repeatedly used certain seagrass meadows, we measured the magnitude of dugong herbivory in the eight meadows where feeding signs were observed. All these meadows had distinct characteristics—they were all relatively large, unfragmented, continuous in seagrass cover and dominated by the pioneer species Halophila ovalis, Halodule uninervis and Halodule pinifolia. About 15% of the total production of seagrass was consumed by dugongs across these meadows. The recovery of meadows after a feeding event was also quick, taking little longer than a week to return to original shoot densities. Through experimental manipulations, we tried to understand the short term impacts of dugong herbivory on seagrasses. We created cages of fixed sizes in replicates at several meadows where dugongs fed. These cages were such that they allowed seagrasses to grow without altering the natural conditions but prevented them from being consumed by dugongs. We found that when herbivory was excluded for six months and longer, the shoot densities were almost 50% higher within the exclosures than in the surrounding meadow that was actively foraged upon.
Another dugong around Ritchie’s archipelago
The data obtained from herbivory exclosures when combined with direct observations of animal presence revealed that dugong feeding in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago is not limited by the availability of suitable resource habitat. The proportion of primary production consumed by dugongs does lead to a reduction in seagrass shoot densities but not to levels that trigger meadow abandonment. The ability of seagrasses to cope with such levels of herbivory perhaps explains the long-term site fidelity shown by individual dugongs in these seagrass meadows.
Our long term research from the islands has several important implications. Firstly, the low number of dugong sightings implies that conservation of the remnant populations is of utmost significance. Secondly, the dugongs in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago exhibit feeding behaviour that is probably typical of small populations and was not documented earlier. Taking advantage of the site fidelity of the species, the management can focus on monitoring and protecting these sites and ensuring no further decline in the population. However, the short term movement of dugongs can be governed by other factors too such as male and female mating strategies, escape from predation, calf protection, anthropogenic noise, and oceanography, among others. Therefore, in the future, these factors should be studied and considered while developing long term management plans for species conservation. At present, the dugong populations around the islands are dwindling and any further decline could lead to a level below which species recovery may be unlikely. Therefore, it is critical to safeguard the sites where dugongs occur to allow these wonderful gardeners of the sea to persist.
A typical meadow with mixed seagrass species
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Dr Teresa Alcoverro, Dr Núria Marbà and Dr Rohan Arthur for helping The proportion of primary production consumed by dugongs does lead to a reduction in seagrass shoot densities but not to levels that trigger meadow abandonment. The ability of seagrasses to cope with such levels of herbivory perhaps explains the long-term site fidelity shown by individual dugongs in these seagrass meadows. design this study, the Department of Environment and Forests, Port Blair for research permits and all at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’ Environmental Team (ANET) for their help and support.
