As food security moves to the forefront of national priorities in developing nations, governments are investing more in knowledge generation with the expectation that science and technology will help rescue imperiled stocks and boost agricultural yields.

Marine fisheries are particularly troubled as wild fish landings have continued to decline since the 1980s. Although a few marine fisheries are managed sustainability (notably sockeye salmon in Alaska), the majority of the world’s fish stocks are currently fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted. Further, although the broad development of aquaculture has led to a net increase in global fish production, aquaculture has done little to alleviate fishing pressure on wild stocks, and may exacerbate their vulnerability to collapse. National and regional initiatives, such as the visionary Coral Triangle Initiative, highlight the need for science based knowledge to aid in the development of more sustainable fishery regulations and practices, and conserve centres of marine biodiversity. Yet, how exploitative fishing and conservation can successfully cooperate remains uncertain. At face value, conservation and exploitation may seem like two sides of the same coin; one aiming to safeguard marine resources, the other tasked with harvesting them. However, both are necessary. Marine resources must be exploited to feed our global population and provide livelihood for millions of people; and marine resources must be conserved to ensure that future generations can also provide for themselves and that marine food webs endure.

This challenge has yet to be solved, but we are striding forward. Here, I describe how an investment in scientific research for the exploitation of a fishery produced valuable and unexpected data for the conservation of that fishery. Mandated by the Philippine administration to be the research arm of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute (NFRDI) has been the principle source of government-supported scientific data for the development and management of the country’s fisheries since 2001. Since its origin, the Institute has primarily utilised labor-intensive field measurements to obtain stock assessment metrics of growth, abundance and mortality rates of highly-valued commodity species. Although well-established and important in providing a snapshot of fish population parameters (such as Total Available Catch), these metrics are limited to quantifying phenotypic patterns (physical attributes or phenotypes). They provide little insight for delineating stock boundaries, quantifying migration rates and identifying corridors and barriers to gene flow. Rather, to effectively describe these metrics, researchers required tools that profiled the genotypic features (genetic attributes or genotypes) of the fish populations; they use population genetics.

A population is a group of organisms living in the same geographic area that can potentially interbreed. Population genetics, furthermore, is the study of the genetic variation in a population and how it changes in response to environmental and evolutionary forces. Whereas phenotypes can be quantified by examining the physical features of an organism, genotypes are obtained from an organism’s genetic features. One way to obtain this data is through DNA sequencing. Genotypic data has several advantages over phenotypic data; in particular that genetic data shows patterns and traits that may not be expressed in the phenotype, in other words, features that are not visible. For this reason, genotypic data is a powerful tool in species identification, especially in specimens that are difficult to distinguish by appearance. Further, this data can used to determine from which population an individual originated, the parentage and kinship of individuals in a population, and the relatedness among populations distributed over a geographic region. These uses are applicable to marine fisheries management, particularly for demarcating the geographic limits or boundaries of a fish population (delineating stock boundaries), and for locating pathways or corridors where genes are transferred among populations via migration (gene flow).

The emergence of a wide range and inexpensive suite of molecular genetics tools over the past two decades has since made genotypic studies commonplace, even on the modest budget of research laboratories in developing nations. The formation of NFRDI’s molecular genetics laboratory signified a stride forward for fisheries research in the Philippines. In recent years, NFRDI has become the leading government laboratory utilising molecular genetics explicitly for fisheries research, and overall, one of the nation’s most productive sources for scholarly, peer-reviewed molecular genetics publications.

Tuna, mackerel, scad and sardines are the primary targets of capture-fisheries of the Philippines and across much of South East Asia. Of these, sardines are the cheapest and most accessible source of animal protein in the Philippines and provide billions of pesos in domestic economic revenue. Molecular genetic research on this taxon was limited to just a handful of studies on a rare and endemic freshwater species prior to 2010. At that point, a new collaboration focusing on sardine research was forged between NFRDI and the Old Dominion University (United States). By design, NFRDI would host an Old Dominion University scientist for two years who would mentor the Institute’s junior scientists and together generate molecular data on sardines.The research aim was to delineate sardine stock boundaries, following which the data would be transferred to a policy-making body actively in the process of forming national sardine policy. In short, this objective was met and culminated in several data-supported recommendations made to policy makers. Subsequently, one recommendation was incorporated into an administrative order instituting a closed season for sardine fishing in southern Philippine waters. This involved a correction to the taxonomic nomenclature of the most abundant sardine species (Sardinella lemuru) that had persisted for nearly a century, an important amendment given regulations are species-specific. Although the incorporated recommendation was modest in scope, it signified a discrete example of molecular genetics data being applied to the development of marine fishery policy in a developing nation.

More exciting from a conservation perspective were, however, the unanticipated discoveries that shed new light on the biodiversity of this valued fishery. In addition to the previously mentioned taxonomic correction of the most common Philippine sardine, we identified the presence of a sardine previously unknown to the archipelago. Sardinella hualiensis, the Taiwanese sardinella, as its name indicates, is native to Taiwan and mainland China. This is a particularly fascinating discovery when considering the sea-surface temperature regimes of these areas; Philippine waters are tropical, Taiwanese waters are temperate to sub-tropical. In other words, the water where the sardine is “from” is cooler; yet repeated field and molecular assessments confirm its presence in the Philippines. Could the range extension of a northern-latitude, cool water species be in some way related to global climate change, or has the Taiwanese sardinella long been present in the Philippines and just has gone unnoticed? Given the difficulty in taxonomic identification of sardines, the latter is plausible. Since 1908, the number of Philippine sardinella species cited in scientific publications has ranged from three to eleven. Using a combination of robust morphological and genetic metrics on specimens from across the Philippines, we at the NFRDI lab have confirmed the presence of six Sardinella, including the Taiwanese sardinella.

Further, we have been able to quantify the genetic diversity of these sardines in relation to their geographic distribution across the archipelago—their phylogeographic pattern. Paralleling the region’s extraordinary level of marine biodiversity (the Philippines is at the apex of the Coral Triangle, the world’s epicenter of marine biodiversity), several of the sardine species show high degrees of genetic diversity, including exceedingly high diversity in one species that it is arguable a cryptic species complex. Cryptic species are morphologically identical (or at least highly similar) but genetically distinguishable sister species evolving from a common ancestor. Cryptic species are common in marine environments with a number of examples in corals, fish, and invertebrates. Their accurate distinction is often only revealed through molecular genetic studies and intuitively, can aid in improved delineation of interbreeding stocks.

Lastly, in a survey of sardine species sold in metropolitan Manila fish markets, we documented the frequent availability of the freshwater sardinella Sardinella tawilis. Endemic to a single freshwater lake in the Philippines and revered as a culinary delicacy, this sardine’s population is currently declining under increased pressure from fishing, invasive species and aquaculture development of the lake. Upon gathering molecular data, we were surprised to discover that none of the marketsold fish were actually the freshwater sardinella as advertised, but rather one of several marine sardinella species. Markets were advertising and selling marine sardines as the freshwater species (the latter fetches a higher price), and consumers were unaware of the switch until our discovery through the use of molecular methods. Note that distinguishing sardinella species is difficult by even a trained scientist and it is unclear where in the supply chain marine fish were being substituted for the freshwater species. This, however, presents an interesting conservation situation— because marine sardines were being sold as the freshwater sardines, the market demand for the actual freshwater sardine is lower and may relieve fishing pressure on an already declining stock. However, molecular evidence shows consumers are being misled.

In science, we are often intensely focused on the discrete objectives of a project, understandably so since they are what research funds have been allocated to. However, if we are rigorous in our investigation and allow the data to lead the discussion, the project not only yields the target information, but could also uncover unanticipated, yet welcome results. Results that are of particular value as we work to find an enduring balance between the exploitation and conservation of our marine resources.

 
Some 200 million around the world people depend on fisheries for some part of their livelihoods. An overwhelming proportion of these are in developing countries, where the capacity of national governments to effectively manage fisheries is low. As a result of this weak governance, overfishing is rampant and threatens marine ecosystems and the people that depend on them.

In 2006, I launched an ambitious research project that sought to better our understanding of whether and how communities can locally manage fisheries in ways that sustain marine ecosystems and local livelihoods. For several years, my research team and I travelled across the Indo-Pacific visiting 42 coastal communities throughout Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Our results showed that under the right conditions, local people can sustainably manage their resources in ways that improve human wellbeing. Since so much of the headlines about fisheries are doom-and-gloom, our success story is worth sharing.

Collaborative management on the rise

Many governments, conservation organisations, and donors are engaging natural resource users in collaborative arrangements to deliver better outcomes for both people and the ecosystems they depend on. This is frequently called “co-management” and is a process that provides local people with greater participation in decisions about natural resources.

An example is the Beach Management Units (BMUs) introduced in Kenya during the past six years, which have allowed stakeholders to develop and enforce local rules. These rules are expected to improve the management of a fishery that has historically suffered from weak management and enforcement. Such arrangements aim to make management more reflective of local conditions and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders, thereby increasing the incentives for people to comply with the rules of their own accord. In Kenya, the introduction of co-management was initially met with some skepticism, but results from our survey of resource users in eight of the 33 pilot sites reveal that less than 3% of respondents think that co-management is bad for them.

One of the most exciting and unexpected results from the Kenyan co-management legislation has been a proliferation of small community-based reserves. There has been considerable opposition to government controlled marine reserves in Kenya. Indeed, attempts by the government to establish a marine reserve in the southern coast of Kenya was met with protests and subsequently abandoned. A key difference is that proceeds from tourist fees to dive or snorkel in government marine parks used to go to government coffers, but with the new BMU legislation, communities can now design and implement their own fee system that they can collect and keep. Now that the decision-making power, and benefits, remain local, 18 communities have now established community-based reserves (locally referred to as tengefu, the Swahili word for “set aside”).

Similar movements toward fisheries co-management are afoot throughout the world. In the western Indian Ocean, Madagascar and Tanzania have developed similar initiatives. In places like Papua New Guinea, local customary laws are often used to manage local fisheries. Yet the forces of globalisation are breaking down these traditional institutions, so some communities are looking toward governments and civil society to develop new co-management partnerships. Communities and scientists are working together to develop conservation programmes based on local traditions that are meeting community needs. For example, contemporary science and mapping is being combined with local knowledge to determine where management areas should be placed. Results form these types of hybrid management initiatives are promising: we are seeing tangible conservation benefits of 2 times the biomass of fish inside periodically harvested areas. Scientists, managers and policy makers are looking at ways to better understand the human dimensions of coral reef ecosystems and learn how to scale-up these local successes.

Some good news

Sustaining fisheries
We found that 2/3 of co-managed fisheries were sustainably managed. Although not perfect, it was certainly better than the fisheries that lacked local management—only 1/3 of those were regarded as sustainable.

High compliance
Getting people to comply with restrictions on resource use is a continual challenge for many fisheries management and marine conservation initiatives. We found that 88% of co-managed fisheries were mostly or fully complied with.

Making co-management work for people’s livelihoods
Across the Indo-Pacific, the majority (54%) of people we surveyed felt that co-management was positive for their livelihoods, while only 9% felt that it was bad for them.

When does co-management work best? Setting the stage for success

Our study found that, overall, co-management was largely positive for people and marine ecosystems. Nevertheless, there were also cases when co-management facilitated overexploitation, resulted in poor compliance, and made people worse off. We found that successful co-management has socioeconomic, institutional, and contextual attributes.

Socioeconomic characteristics of resource users

People may avoid being involved in management if they do not have the time and resources and do not understand that human activities can impact the condition of marine ecosystems. The main socioeconomic considerations include:

• Poverty- People may have difficulty making the short-term sacrifices that are required to engage in co-management if they are struggling to meet their basic requirements.

• Knowledge about how humans impact marine ecosystems- People may be unwilling to restrain their use of resources because they do not see a connection between human activities (such as fishing) and the condition of the resource or ecosystems.

• Dependence on resources- People heavily dependent on fishing often find it difficult to find time to engage in other livelihood activities. On the other hand, when people are heavily dependent on fishing, they are more likely to have an incentive to cooperate and solve problems.

• Social capital and trust- People need to trust each other and their leaders if they are going to work cooperatively towards solving fisheries problems.

Getting the institutions ‘right’

Local institutions that are well organised and functioning are a critical ingredient of making co-management work. Specific institutional characteristics, known as design principles, help to promote cooperation among people. These design principles include:

• Clearly defined boundaries and membership, which helps people understand where and to whom the rules apply and who gets to make them.

• Active participation, which can be facilitated through forums that encourage users to actively participate in management, particularly in decision-making processes.

• Transparent monitoring and leadership, which provide the reassurances necessary for people to invest in co-management.

• Graduated sanctions, which are punishments that increase with the frequency and severity of infringements. For example, the first time a rule is broken, the person gets a warning, a fine is given the second time and lastly the person is jailed. These help to create a sense of learning and fairness about the rules.

The local context

Conditions that can either encourage or discourage people from participating in co-management include:

• Population size- Small groups of people are more likely to coordinate and build the trust necessary to work together to solve problems.

• Markets- Temptations for people to break comanagement rules are created by easy access to markets for their marine products. Co-management organisations can, however, harness markets and add value to products. This can create powerful incentives for people to participate in and comply with co-management, when done effectively.

The down side

Of course, people have raised a number of important critiques about co-management. In some cases, national governments simply put the costs of managing fisheries on local communities who can ill afford it and lack the capacity to implement it.

My study found that, although co-management helps to put decision-making power in local people’s hands, it does not always do so equitably. Indeed, co-management has the potential to decrease social equity by creating opportunities for local ‘elites’ who control resources to coopt the process and capture the majority of the benefits. For example, in Kenya, to ensure that BMU leaders understood the rules, regulations, and responsibilities, the BMU legislation required that chairmen have at least six years of education. Yet in some communities, there were no fishers with this basic level of qualification, meaning that people who were not involved in the fishery were in charge of fisheries co-management.

Conclusions

There is no silver bullet for the problems facing the world’s fisheries, but co-management arrangements that reflect local conditions can help to sustain fisheries and the people that depend on them, even where poverty is pervasive and national governance weak. The likelihood of co-management becoming successful is, however, higher when specific institutional, socioeconomic, and contextual conditions are in place. Communities, donors, and managers can facilitate desirable co-management outcomes by implementing locally-appropriate strategies to address these critical conditions.

National parks and wilderness areas originated in the United States and have since spread around the world. Given the history of the United States, it should then come as no surprise that national parks and wilderness are inherently racist. From the early 1600s, when Europeans first landed on the eastern shore of what was to become the United States, until the late 1880s, people of European descent waged constant war against the continent’s aboriginal inhabitants. These were wars of annihilation and extermination. Indigenous peoples were portrayed as uncivilised savages and subhuman vermin marked by God for destruction by the superior White race. Indigenous women and children were routinely slaughtered. Even Native Americans who had converted to Christianity were butchered and their lands stolen.

George Washington, the first President of the United States, orchestrated a genocidal campaign against America’s original owners, as did virtually every president down to and including Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves.

Native people who survived were forced onto apartheid-like reservations, but even there the genocide continued. Corrupt Indian agents stole monies appropriated to feed their wards and thousands of Native Americans starved to death. Reservation peoples were prohibited from practicing ancestral religions and other aboriginal customs. Children were torn from their mothers’ arms and shipped to boarding schools where they were beaten if they dared speak their native language. Then there was Wounded Knee.

The US military had confined the Sioux to reservations in South Dakota. After years of suffering, a new native religion swept the West, including the Sioux reservations. Wovoka, a Paiute shaman, had a vision that there was to be a second coming of Christ, except this time Christ was going to be an Indian, who would rid the world of Whites. All native people had to do was dress and dance in certain, entirely peaceful ways. As might be expected, this set off a new wave of Indian-hating hysteria. The military was summoned and attempted to disarm a group of Sioux, who had gathered to practice this new religion. A shot was fired and the military opened up with everything they had including rapid-fire cannons. The soldiers fired so enthusiastically that over half the U.S. casualties were from friendly fire. That is, the soldiers shot each other in their eagerness to gun down fleeing savages. Two thirds of the Sioux dead were women and children, some killed as far as two miles from where the initial shot had been fired. Twenty members of the 7th cavalry were deemed “national heroes” and awarded the Medal of Honour, the US’s highest decoration, for their part in the “battle”. The Sioux call it murder. Such is the history of the United States. Even this, though, was not the worst of it.

What is now California was once populated by hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. Yet there are no large Indian reservations in California nor did the US ever mount large-scale military campaigns in that state, unlike other areas of the American West. Why the difference?—because California passed a law which said that any White could kill any Indian at any time without cause. Local Whites formed sporting parties to hunt down savages. That law was eventually rescinded but a second law was passed, which made it illegal for Indians to testify against Whites in courts of law, so the killing continued until there were few aboriginal people left. There may have been closed seasons on deer (Odocoileus sp) or elk (Cervus elaphus), but there was no closed season on Native Americans.

Today, Native Americans make up less than two percent of the US population and are the most disadvantaged segment of society with the highest unemployment and death rates. Except for a few large tribes like the Navajo, Native Americans are also in the process of being bred out of existence. On many reservations, as little as one-sixteenth aboriginal blood is needed to be counted as a tribal member.

Yellowstone was declared the world’s first National Park in 1872. That legislation stipulated that the park was not to receive any funding from the US government. Instead, park management was to be financed solely by entrance and concession fees. In 1873, financial panic gripped the nation, what we today would call an economic recession or depression. Grant, the general who won the US Civil War, was president and he decided to start a new war to divert the country’s attention from his failed domestic policies and corrupt administration. He did this by sending General George Armstrong Custer and 1800 men into the Black Hills on the Sioux Reservation. This was in direct violation of existing treaties with the Sioux and was illegal. Nonetheless, as Grant had hoped, gold was discovered and Whites poured into the Black Hills, setting off war with the Sioux.

General Custer once boasted that given but a single troop of cavalry, he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. Well, in 1876, Custer put that hypothesis to the test on the Greasy Grass (aka Little Bighorn) and rode into history when his command was killed to the last man by the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies. A national hysteria ensued. In 1877, the US military was looking to kill Indians, any Indians. The Nez Perce were a peaceful people, who occupied a large, highly productive area where the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho meet today. After years of having their best lands stolen by Whites and their culture denigrated by missionaries, a handful of Nez Perce rebelled and killed a few Whites, intensifying national Indian-hating hysteria. The Nez Perce quickly realised that if they were cornered by the US military their people would be annihilated as payback for the Custer massacre, so the entire tribe decided to flee to Canada, a country with a more enlightened aboriginal policy.

The way directly north, however, was blocked by the US military, so the Nez Perce fled east, which eventually took them through the newly established Yellowstone National Park. While in the park, a small number of White tourists were killed or wounded by the Nez Perce, which only heightened national hysteria. The park’s indigenous Shoshone inhabitants avoided both the Whites and the Nez Perce and had absolutely nothing to do with this incident. Nevertheless, tourists fled the park and tourism declined to zero, as no sane White person wanted to visit a park filled with bloodthirsty savages. No tourists meant no entrance fees, no concession fees, and no national park.

To solve this problem, Norris, Yellowstone’s second superintendent, invented the myth that Native Americans never used the park because those simple-minded people feared Yellowstone’s geysers and thermal areas. Norris also had the park’s original Shoshone owners forcefully removed to distant reservations in Idaho and Wyoming. Thus, fortress conservation was born. That is, throw out the rightful, indigenous owners without compensation and then lie about it. It should also be remembered that the US Military ran Yellowstone National Park from 1886 to 1916 when the National Park Service was created. Moreover, as several authors have noted, the US Park Service’s treatment of indigenous peoples has been less than honourable. I would call it despicable.

Wilderness, though, is even worse because it absolves Whites of all their misdeeds. If everything was a wilderness untouched by the hand of man, then Whites could not have stolen indigenous lands nor committed genocide. If I could ban one word from the English language, it would be, “wilderness” as wilderness is a thousand times worse than slavery. Slaves, after all, were bred and kept alive. No such kindness was shown to Native Americans. In addition, freed slaves became citizens of the United States 70 years before the federal government “granted” US citizenship to indigenous people. Moreover, freed slaves joined the Union Army to hunt down and kill aboriginal peoples.

Some contend that indigenous peoples were conservationists. While calling aboriginal people conservationists may appear to be the only kind things Whites have ever said about Native Americans, in reality it is an act of “immense condescension” because it implies that native people lacked agency—defined as the ability to manage their affairs or to purposefully modify their environments. If indigenous people lacked agency then they were no more than animals. Instead, as I and others have documented, by keeping ungulate numbers low through hunting and by purposefully modifying plant communities with fire, aboriginal people created ecosystems across the globe. What Europeans saw when they first stepped off the boat had not been created by God or Nature, but by indigenous peoples.

For nearly 100 years, large numbers of food limited elk have severely overgrazed Yellowstone Park’s northern range destroying aspen (Populus tremuloides) and willow (Salix sp) communities— vegetation types that normally have exceedingly high biodiversity. Wolves (Canis lupus) were introduced in 1995 and since that time the elk count on the northern range has fallen from 19,000 to just under 4,000. This has spawned a plethora of publications, both popular and academic, on the importance of keystone carnivore predation and trophic cascades. Although purported to be science, this outpouring is simply more White racist theology.

First, as Stiner and I have documented, even early hominids, let alone indigenous peoples were more efficient predators than carnivores. Second, while wolves have lowered elk numbers, wolf predation has not reduced Yellowstone’s bison (Bison bison) population, which is still overgrazing the park. Third, what wolves? Between 1835 and 1876, 20 different expeditions spent 765 days on foot or horseback in the Yellowstone Ecosystem, yet no one reported seeing or killing a single wolf. Fourth, wolves are not known to carry drip torches or to start fires. According to fire-scar data reported by the Park Service, Yellowstone’s northern range historically had a fire frequency of once every 25 years. This means that an area equal in size to the northern range historically burned once every 25 years—not by one large fire, but by many small fires.

Well, Yellowstone has had a let-burn policy now for nearly 50 years, yet none of the northern range has been burned. The Park Service has said this is because “lightning has chosen not to strike”, but the government’s own data shows that lightning strikes the northern range an average of four times per square kilometre per year. Those lightning strikes, however, occur during June, July, and August when the park’s grasslands are too green to burn. Thus, the only plausible explanation for the documented burn interval that historically occurred on the park’s northern range is that all those fires were purposefully set by indigenous people to manage their environment. Elsewhere, I have compared known lightning-ignition rates in the United States with potential aboriginal-ignition rates and found that aboriginal-set fires were 270 to 35,000 times more frequent than fires started by lightning. It must also be remembered that hunting by native peoples has been a natural process in the Americas for at least the last 12,000 years and longer on other continents.

If, as I and others have documented, namely that indigenous peoples the world over acted as both keystone predators and keystone fire-starters, why then does the scientific community continue to ignore those data? Anthropologist Omer Stewart addressed this very issue 50 years ago.

Views of peasants and country folk belonging to the same race and culture as the investigators are placed below consideration, but ancient practices and explanations of red Indians and black Negroes warrant no serious thought, even if known. Usually the White scientists refuse to learn the ways of the coloured aborigines, whether New World or Old World because it is assumed such children of nature could contribute nothing to modern scientific inquiry.

(Stewart OC. 1956. Fire as the first great force employed by man. Pages 115-133. In: Man’s role in changing the face of the earth (Ed WL Thomas) University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA)

Unfortunately what passes for scientific discourse today is the same racism that Stewart described. Recently, Dr Bruce Smith, who spent his career as a wildlife biologist employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, published a book on elk management in Jackson Hole, which includes southern Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge and several federal wilderness areas.

The valley’s over-abundant elk problem has a long and storied history that need not be repeated here except to note that biologists, environmentalists and sport hunters all assume that 15,000 to 20,000 elk have always occupied Jackson Hole. Dr Smith’s book has been favourably reviewed in academic journals by prominent wildlife ecologists and the environmental community has given Dr Smith an award for his work in Jackson Hole. In short, wildlifers and environmentalists all praise the book. In reality, though, the book is simply another discourse in White racist theology. Not only are Native Americans not even mentioned, but Dr Smith also ignored all the existing archaeological data.

Dr Gary Wright spent years excavating archaeological sites in Jackson Hole and published a 1984 book on his findings. Now if thousands of elk have always inhabited Jackson Hole, as assumed by Dr Smith and others, then elk bones should be common in the valley’s many archaeological sites. Instead, elk bones are rare to non-existent in archaeological sites and according to the evidence unearthed by Wright, aboriginal people, who inhabited Jackson Hole for at least the last 10,000 years, subsisted primarily on plant resources.

Moreover, as archaeologist Wright noted,

Keep in mind that I have battling wildlife biologists from Grand Teton and Yellowstone Parks for some years. One told me, after a seminar I gave at the Jackson Hole Biological Research Station on the faunal resources of the regions.
“Even if you demonstrate that no elk were here, we would still continue to argue for them because our management policies require a herd of at least 10,000 elk by the end of the last … deglaciation.”

(Wright GA. 1984. People of the high country: Jackson Hole before the settlers. Peter Lang, New York, USA).

Similarly, I was once told by a Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist,

“We are not going to consider your data because if you are even close to being correct, then everything we are doing is wrong, and we are not ever going to consider that possibility.”

Is this science? Or is it theology? After the results of Dr Wright’s research became known, federal and state agencies terminated Dr Wright’s funding. Scientific fraud, after all, begins with who gets funded, or hired, and who does not.

It really should come as no surprise that the wildlife profession is fundamentally racist once you understand how that discipline developed. Aldo Leopold was the father of wildlife management in the United States. He held the first university position in the field and wrote the first wildlife management text. He also was a founding member of the Wilderness Society, as well as a prominent member of the Ecological Society of America and the Wildlife Society. As a Forest Supervisor, Leopold established the first wilderness area in the US. Aldo Leopold was an extremely prolific writer and he has been lionised by the environmental movement.

Unfortunately, Aldo Leopold was also a racist of the worst kind for he totally ignored Native Americans. Dr Leopold began his career as a Forest Ranger in New Mexico. New Mexico is a very dry state and indigenous peoples built with stone. There are thousands upon thousands of highly visible archaeological sites in New Mexico including Chaco Canyon, which is now a World Heritage Site. In addition, there are Pueblo, Zuni, Navajo, Ute, and Apache reservations in the state. Furthermore, there is a written historical record dating to the mid 1500s when the Spanish first explored and then occupied the area. How anyone could work in New Mexico as Aldo Leopold did and not even mention native people speaks volumes of how deeply Indian-hating and racism is buried in American culture and the scientific community. Similar situations exist in African national parks and other protected areas throughout the world.

For instance, uncontrolled elephant (Loxodonta africana) populations are having serious negative impacts in many southern African national parks. Most biologists claim this destruction is “natural” and deny that aboriginal hunters had any significant effect on elephant numbers. They conveniently overlook the fact that indigenous peoples, such as the Wata, were skilled elephant hunters. The most proficient Wata hunters killed 50, or more, elephants per year using “primitive technology.” One arrow-one dead elephant, in minutes.

To stop the growth of an elephant population only slightly more than three percent of the animals need to be killed per year, while a four percent off-take rate will drive elephant numbers to extinction.

Thus, a handful of indigenous hunters could easily have controlled elephant numbers. One Wata hunter alone could have controlled a population of 1000 elephants by killing no more than 35 animals per year. Without indigenous elephant population control, large numbers of very old baobab (Adansonia digitata) trees would not exist on the African landscape, because baobabs are one of the first species elephants eliminate. Nothing is more unnatural than an African ecosystem without hominid hunters and firestarters, unless, of course, one does not believe in evolution.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of biologists and ecologists have no interest in human evolution. Anyone who thinks that huge quantities of animal biomass can be tied up in elephants and other mega-herbivores and not be subjected to intense human hunting, knows absolutely nothing about human evolutionary ecology or why men hunt.

Instead evolutionary considerations are ignored because they do not support romantic, religious, and racist views of nature. Contrary to what one might think, conservation and sustainability are not the end products of evolution. Instead, conservation will develop only when a resource is economical to defend. Think of economics as calories. If it takes 1,000 calories to defend a resource but less than 1,000 calories are obtained when that resource is consumed, evolution by natural selection will quickly eliminate the inefficient, be they humans or animals. Regarding types of land ownership with open-access on one end of the spectrum and private property on the other, private property is the most conducive to conservation. Furthermore, within any one society, conservation benefits elites more than it does the common man or woman. In short, conservation favours the rich and well fed, while preservation favours the super-rich and the super well fed. National parks and wilderness areas are preservation, not conservation. Opinion polls in the US show that the public supports conservation, but not preservation, which is why the term conservation is now applied to most everything, while preservation is seldom mentioned.

As study after study has shown, and as predicted by human evolutionary ecology, indigenous peoples whose lands and resources have been usurped to create protected areas become, “the enemies of conservation,” something education alone will never change. If local people are to support conservation or preservation, then their lands must be returned along with ownership of wildlife and all other resources, plus they need to be paid. Why is the world filled with cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, and the like? Simple, they are private property and anyone, who wants to use or consume those resources, must financially compensate their owners.

Similarly, why are there national ballets, symphony orchestras, sport teams, and other high-priced, ticket items favoured by elites?—because the performers are paid. How long do you think a symphony orchestra would last if its members were not paid for their services? Right, so why then should poor, indigenous people provide free conservation services for Whites and other elites? How long do you think movies would be made if everyone could view them for free?

In general, community-based conservation programs have had a poor track record because conservation-generated income has habitually been siphoned off by various levels of government or through elite capture, including graft and corruption. To be successful all the money from community-based conservation programs must reach the individual people, who actually bear the associated costs. It is really quite simple—pay local people to provide conservation services or repeal the laws of evolution. The United States and other developed countries can afford to practice preservation because they are rich and their people are very well fed. In addition, they are expertly managed police states. You do not think the US is a police state? Then obviously you are not a Sioux, or Nez Perce, or Blackfoot, or… .

Suggested reading

Anderson MK. 2005. Tending the wild: Native American knowledge and the management of California’s natural resources. University of California Press, Berkeley, USA.

Brown D. 1970. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, USA.

Churchill W. 1997. A little matter of genocide. City Lights Books, San Francisco, USA.

Gammage B. 2011. The biggest estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia.

Nabokov P & L Loendorf. 2004. Restoring a presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, USA.

For the full, referenced version of Prof Kay’s article, readers are encouraged to visit https://www.libertysource.org/wp-content/uploads/ipePublications/Aboriginal-Influences-and-the-Original-State-of-Nature.pdf

Illustrations: Pencil Sauce, Alan Ainslie (www.alanainslie.com)

In ecology and conservation practice we often face surprises. Surprise can come from many directions, very frequently from hidden connections that we may not think about. We want to understand how a prey reacts to its predator, but another species may turn out to play a major role in regulating the prey. We want to see how healthy is a population in a habitat patch, but its fate may seem to depend on another population in another, distant but connected habitat patch. We want to act local, in general, but often we have to think global. All these issues call for thinking about networks, developing a network perspective, maybe collecting network data and performing network analysis.

Network analysis, supported by its rich mathematical background, offers more and more solutions for thinking different about a bunch of conservation issues. If one is not sure about the potential inter-relationships among several elements of the ecosystem (species, habitats, individuals, populations etc), a network perspective may help at least to sketch and overview the potential sources of surprise. Indirect effects can be mapped and even their strength can be quantified, which is surely a way to better explain surprising findings. I do not mean that network analysis always provides exact predictions, but it may help to integrate information, design new experiments and increase efficiency of efforts. In brief, it helps to get closer to a more informed, more intelligent and more efficient conservation practice. All this is more abstract (this sounds bad) but also more holistic (this sounds good) than traditional efforts.

The earliest interest in ecological networks was probably raised by marine ecologists. The “no fish is an island” paradigm is becoming stronger and more supported as various network analytical software appear. Multispecies models were developed and experimental studies were done as a response to recognising the importance of indirect effects like trophic cascades. A trophic cascade means that a consumer indirectly helps the prey of its prey (by eating what eats it). The most famous example is the chain of interactions (and the resulting indirect chain effect) from intensified fisheries in Alaska to the emergence of urchin deserts in California. Fisheries reduced fish stocks causing seals to move south from Alaska. The seals were followed by killer whales, which also fed on sea otters. The reduced sea otter population meant that sea urchins, their preferred prey, benefited. Urchins expanded and massively consumed kelp forests causing the disappearance of not only small fish hiding in the kelp forest , but also the kelp forest itself. Eventually, without food, the urchins also died leaving a desert of dead urchins rolling on the pure sandy bottom. All in all, a well-documented chain of interactions happened, ranging over a wide geographical area. Without a large-scale network thinking, connecting overfishing in Alaska to disappearing kelp forests in California would not have been possible.

Two other major conservation (but also economical) issues in marine systems are harmful algal blooms and overfishing predatory fish stocks. We tend to think that the two may be interrelated: overfishing can reduce the strength of important trophic cascade mechanisms and finally lead to the bloom of algae under weaker control. Networks help to understand, quantify, and hopefully in time also predict blooms.

A good example of how to use network thinking to convince stakeholders, is the case of seal cull in South Africa. Seals consumed roughly as much commercially important fish as caught by fisheries. The issue emerged whether a massive cull of seals could improve the performance of fisheries. Following a long political discussion, with important inputs from ecologists, the plan was eventually rejected. Network analysis by the ecologists showed that even if there is a clearly competitive situation between seals and fisherman, longer indirect pathways in the same food web may actually cause contrasting effects. If some of these long indirect effects are stronger than the shorter ones (which is quite possible), seal cull may be even worse for fishermen. Let alone moral and ethical issues, this is a sound scientific argument, supported by numbers.

Sustainability is a major interest in fisheries (just like in agricultural management). There is an emerging interest in shifting focus from singlespecies evaluation of the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) towards a multispecies assessment. Though MSY sounds like a measure calculated for a particular species, it could be better computed only if the stocks of several other species are much better known. If we recall the “no fish is an island” paradigm, we can be sure that the maximal sustainable yield is a function of the whole community and for each species it should be evaluated and quantified in the context of the whole ecosystem. Fishing on several species in parallel causes multiple changes in the system and the combined effects will be faced by the community.

Community effects and landscape effects are often combined, and this raises a “network of networks” issue. Here, network analysis is not only a modeling tool, but also a conceptually important help.

A famous example is the one of the extinctions in the avifauna following habitat fragmentation in California. It was not clear why certain birds were so sensitive to habitat fragmentation, especially since they were not found to be restricted only to large habitat fragments. The solution was found by the “network of networks” thinking.Habitat fragmentation and the loss of connectivity between patches led to the disappearance of coyotes, the top predator in this ecosystem, from the smaller fragments.  Consequently, in these small fragments, smaller predators, having escaped top-down control earlier exerted by the coyote (mesopredator release) started to benefit. These small predators increased in population size and consumed some bird species to local extinction in the small fragments.

The change in the landscape network (connectivity of patches) generated changes in the community network (the food web) within the small fragments. Now the question emerges how to protect networks, of any of the kinds presented above. How do we focus conservation efforts on networks? Network theory says that network conservation is not the conservation of all elements of the network. Instead, network analysis may help to identify key network elements (key species and key interactions in food webs, key habitat patches and key corridors in landscape networks) and focusing on these elements seems to be an optimal way to try to efficiently protect also the rest of the network. If the same amount of resources are needed for a keystone species or for a “redundant” species, it is more efficient and economical to focus conservation efforts on the former instead of the latter. The same is also true for prioritising patches in a habitat network for conservation, because otherwise identical landscape elements may differ in conservation value due to their relative network position.

In this special issue, we feature three examples of the applications of network analysis in conservation. These range from multispecies bird groups to food webs of large marine ecosystems and to forest landscapes.

In the first paper, Hari Sridhar presents how network thinking helps identify important bird species in a tropical bird community. Here, the network is composed of bird species, and their connections are based on who groups with whom in mixed-species bird flocks. The conservation of the key players in this network, the species that are sought out for grouping by other species, can efficiently and automatically help the other species in the community too. Instead, protecting the notso-popular species in the network can only provide a species-specific solution and transitory success.
In the second paper, Andrés Felipe Navia, Enric Cortés and Víctor Hugo Cruz-Escalona show the power of network analysis in assessing the vulnerability and sustainability of marine ecosystems. Network tools help to identify keystone species, key interactions and characterise the general “architecture” of whole ecosystems.

In the third paper, Santiago Saura and Begoña de la Fuente use network analysis for landscape ecology. The extinction probability of many species depends on their spatial movements. In fragmented natural habitats, survival in disconnected patches is hard for several reasons, including genetics, demography and chance. For many species, it is thus essential to evaluate the possibilities of how to migrate, move and disperse among habitat patches. Network analysis helps to identify the patches and ecological corridors that are in key positions to maintain the connectivity of the habitat network.

After reading these papers, our hope is the reader will agree with us that there is much to do in systems-based conservation (focusing on several ecosystem components in parallel), and the integrative and holistic perspective of network ecology is a vital alternative to the traditional efforts. Alternative does not mean a competing view. Rather, the winning strategy is some mix of the more precise but limited analyses of local effects and the more integrative but less accurate approach focusing on the entire ecosystem.

Human pressure on marine and terrestrial ecosystems has increased in the past few decades leading to significant, often irreversible, changes. Some of the strongest sources of pressure include habitat destruction or degradation, contamination, fishing and hunting, all of which have caused changes in the abundance and distribution of species, the productivity of ecosystems, and even in the organisation required for the adequate functioning of these ecosystems. Although the organisation of ecosystems is resilient to natural stressors over long time scales, human action has induced strong pressures over time periods too short for these ecosystems to adapt.

This state of affairs has given rise to multiple approaches to try to understand how human activities have modified, and continue to modify, different ecosystems. On the way to gaining this understanding, numerous differences and controversies have emerged among researchers, not so much as to whether humans cause deleterious effects, but rather about the magnitude and extent of such effects. One of the most common approaches is the study of food webs and the effects of human activity on them. For example, some studies suggest that intense fishing pressure in the past 50 years has drastically modified the composition of marine food webs. In contrast, other researchers propose that the changes observed in the composition of marine food webs reflect effects on the species targeted by fisheries rather than network degradation. Some studies further suggest that human activity has substantially altered existing feeding relationships among species within the networks, leading to network reorganization only a few years after being impacted by humans.

The study of food webs has generated a lot of interest in the past few decades, especially recently, when the focus on ecosystems has become a central theme in fisheries management and conservation of ecosystem services around the world. A number of theoretical approaches have been developed to study food webs and associated tools to build, analyse, and interpret the network of interactions in food webs. Studies on the structure and function of these networks have generated the most attention. Research on network structure focuses on describing and interpreting the species composition of the food web and identifying guilds or functional groups of species that play similar roles in the web.

By contrast, studies on network function attempt to quantify energy flow among network components and the strength of interactions among species. The tools we described above allow us to model how food webs will respond to different kinds of management interventions, such as reducing fishing pressure, setting fish catch quotas, or selectively removing particular species from the web. These tools also help anticipate the consequences, on food webs, of natural changes such as decreases in abundance of top predators, structural simplification of food webs, and decreases in productivity. Using these approaches, studies have indicated that many ecosystems are transitioning to new organisational states that are more sensitive to natural changes.

These tools have also been used to compare highly impacted ecosystems to others that were relatively unchanged, showing that the latter are more stable and thus less susceptible to environmental modifications (this is called “resilience”). It is important to note that, for those interested in using this approach, the models we describe are highly dependent on information available, how the model itself is specified, and previous knowledge of the system modeled. Thus these models must be developed and applied with extreme caution and all assumptions and implications carefully examined. The structural analysis of trophic networks is a more recent approach that has borrowed very useful tools for ecology from the social sciences.

Based on information on the presence of interactions among predators and prey in food webs, structural analysis allows us to explore different properties of food webs such as which species have the highest connectivity, those that are the most central and important for maintaining network organisation, as well as the key species in terms of interactions or network cohesion. Recent findings suggest that not only species of high commercial value are the most important for organising or protecting ecosystems, but that, to the contrary, even species or groups of species without any apparent value may be those that contribute the most to maintaining the organisation of a trophic network, which means that management measures aimed at those species are needed to conserve the food web and its functions.
This approach allows studying direct and indirect trophic relationships between predators and their prey, considered important forces in network organisation, by analysing real or modeled scenarios of removing, or adding, species from the network under study. Regardless of the approach used, a good food web study hinges on the availability of basic information that allows one to build solid models from the outset. Knowledge of the diet and feeding ecology of species to the finest level of detail is desirable, since it enables nuanced modeling of important ecological effects such as temporal, spatial, and sex-specific diet shifts.

Depending on the approach used, it is also necessary to have population-level information on the species included in the model, such as production (i.e. biomass), productivity (i.e. mortality rates), and data on catches and discards among others. Tools for network analysis are particularly useful in large, difficult-to-delineate ecosystems, such as the oceans, or when populations under study cannot be manipulated, such as large cats in the African savannah, where experiments aimed at studying relationships between the loss of species and community stability cannot be conducted. It is in these situations that having a toolbox to partially reproduce the complexity of the ecosystem under study and conduct “experiments by computer” is especially useful: it allows researchers and decision-makers to have access to information that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain (such as the effects on predatory function, predator-prey relationships, and trophic interactions among species).

All in all, it is very important to consider the context of the assumptions and limitations of each mathematical model to avoid indiscriminate errors of extrapolation or overreaching conclusions. Although the different pressures on food web networks may at first appear to be disconnected from each other, in reality they are all interrelated and may even become magnified as pressures increase. For example, a “simple” imbalance in the proportion between predator and prey could spread a new indirect effect, which in turn could enhance a previously non-significant interaction in the web. If the species involved are not adapted to adjust to this new dynamic, it may lead to reductions in abundance of some of them, which in turn could spread another sequence of indirect effects that could even modify some ecosystem functions.

Thus, considering the complexity of food webs, tools such as those we described are needed because they allow researchers to gain an understanding of networks, their properties, complexity, and possible responses to human-induced effects. Up to now, different approaches to studying networks have typically been applied independently of one another, with few attempts at comparing and contrasting results. In the future, it is important that the best features of each of these tools are integrated with the aim of optimising results and increasing the efficiency of network studies. This will, in turn, give us a higher degree of confidence in the models we develop to plan the conservation and management of food webs in the future.

Suggested reading:
Christensen V & C Walters. 2004. Ecopath with Ecosim: methods, capabilities and limitations. Ecological Modelling 172:109-139.
Dunne JA. 2006. The Network Structure of Food Webs. pp 27.86. In Ecological Networks: Linking Structure to Dynamics in Food Webs. (Eds M Pascual and JA Dunne). Oxford University Press, USA.
Gaichas SK & RC Francis. 2008. Network models for ecosystem-based fishery analysis: a review of concepts and application to the Gulf of Alaska marine food web. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 65(9): 1965-1982.
Navia AF, E Cortés, F Jordán, VH Cruz-Escalona & PA Mejía-Falla. 2012. Changes to marine trophic networks caused by fishing. pp 417-452, In: Diversity of Ecosystems (Ed A Mahamane). Intech, Croatia.

If you were given a pot of conservation money to spend on species of your choosing, who would you choose? Hari Sridhar would pick six common, unremarkable birds of the forests of Anshi in the Western Ghats. In this article he tells you why.

I am happy now. In fact, I am in one of those rare moments when I would not rather be somewhere else, or doing something else. I am sitting in the dining area of the forest department-run tourist camp in Anshi National park. After two plates of poha and three cups of tea, I am ready and looking forward to the fieldwork that lies ahead of me. It is a bright day and the birds are talking; a definite relief from yesterday’s gloomy silence. The sounds I hear hold the promise of drama and excitement. This is more than abstract anticipation, for, from where I sit, I can hear the very birds that I will see shortly, on the trail that runs behind our camp. First a fulvetta calls, then fulvetta and drongo, then a monarch joins in… a flock is forming. Nagesh and I set off immediately.

Five minutes later, we are at the point on the trail nearest to the flock. I hear the birds clearly from here – fulvetta, drongo, monarch, as well as warbler and minivet – to the right of the trail, across the stream, about 100 metres away. I step off the trail and start making my way through the forest – dense and wet forest, what you might call ‘jungle’, but not difficult to walk through. Nagesh stays behind, as he usually does. Not for him this mindless bird-chasing. He settles down, on a concrete-made-to-look-like-wood park bench, and pulls his phone out of his shirt pocket. I reach the stream and pause, deciding how to cross. The water is only ankle-deep but I do not want to get my shoes wet. I try jumping from rock to rock but, as always, I miss a step and my left shoe is filled with water. As I climb out of the stream and up the other bank, I hear the birds just ahead of me. Fulvetta, drongo, monarch, warbler, minivet, nuthatch. I am at the edge of the flock, peering in. Binoculars uncapped, dictaphone switched on, I am ready to report on the action, like a commentator at the start of a cricket match. At first I see nothing. Then slowly, bit-by-bit, the flock reveals itself.

A drongo—the one with long tail streamers—sitting still, on a branch at eye level, and looking upwards. At the end of the drongo’s gaze, on the same tree, is a flameback woodpecker. Clinging precariously to the trunk, he scans his surroundings with a slow sweep of his head. I know he is a ‘he’ because of his red crown. Now, he flies to another tree, and a second later, the drongo follows him. Higher up, on the same tree, a nuthatch zigzags all over the trunk—up and down, left and right, front and back—probing the bark for tiny in sects. I do not know why, but from where I stand, the scurrying nuthatch looks more beetle than bird. My thoughts are distracted by a small green bird flying across my field of vision, from left to right, between me and the nuthatch. Through my binoculars, I recognise it as a warbler. As I lower the binoculars from my eyes, I notice many more flying in and settling on the trees around… ten… fifteen… at least fifteen warblers. As soon as they land they get busy, checking every leaf, above and below, for insects. Among the pale green warblers, is a bright blue bird—a monarch—watching the warblers with keen interest, following their every move, occasionally flying out to snap up an insect, in mid-air. It seems like the frenetic activity of the warbler army, is, somehow, making flying insects available to the monarch. A pair of bulbuls flies into the flock, from across the stream. They sit, on a low-hanging liana, shoulders touching, and clean themselves. They are wet, and in their wetness they look more green than yellow. One of them calls intermittently, a loud and harsh call, with no discernible rhythm, a bunch of notes randomly thrown together. In comparison, the calls of the minivets that I hear from the upper reaches, sound pleasant and happy, like the laughter of children on a playground. I see the minivets now, orange males and yellow females, flying between trees, like confetti in the sky. A sharp monosyllabic “kraak” pulls my gaze down. The maker of the sound, the drongo, is now clinging to a tree trunk, and watching the woodpecker, a few centimetres below, extricate a grub from under the bark. When the woodpecker finally pulls the grub out, the drongo tries to snatch it, but is unsuccessful. Just then, a flash of white draws my attention. A paradise flycatcher has joined the flock. Like the monarch, he too is hanging around the warblers and chasing insects in the air. His handsomeness when perched is only matched by the clumsiness of his flight. A description that applies equally to another bird I just notice: a trogon. He is sitting motionless on a branch about four metres high. The calls of the minivets make me look up again. A different drongo – the slender one with a deeply forked tail – is flying behind the minivets, doing to the minivets what the other drongo was doing to the woodpecker.

I have been watching this flock for ten minutes now. But there is still one bird, which I know is in the flock, but that I have not seen yet. I know this because I have been hearing it all along. The fulvettas’ loud, rhythmic calls have been a constant presence, like a background score to the flock’s visual theatre. But, try as I may, I am unable to spot the fulvettas. Even now, I can hear their sounds, one directly above me, one to my left, one roughly 30 metres ahead. In fact, it seems like the whole flock is contained and moving within imaginary lines that connect the calling fulvettas. I wonder if the fulvettas’ calls serve as the flock’s rallying point. Are the fulvettas inadvertent pied pipers, leading all the other birds?

I will have my answer soon. The flock is at the edge of the stream, about to cross. I stand in the middle of the stream and wait, no longer caring about my shoes becoming wet. My hunch seems right. The first to cross are three fulvettas. Then the drongo with the long streamers, then two more fulvettas, four warblers, monarch, seven more warblers, bulbuls, trogon, more warblers, paradise flycatcher, minivets, the other drongo, nuthatch, and finally the woodpecker. Eleven species, more than 30 individuals. The flock makes its way into the forest on the other side of the stream, moving too fast for me to follow. Binoculars capped, dictaphone switched off, I too head to the other side, to find Nagesh and continue along the trail.

A mixed-species flock is extraordinary in two different ways. The first is aesthetic. My attempt at description does little justice to the visual and acoustic spectacle that a flock provides. Watching a flock is like watching a movie trailer: snatches of action coming at you at a pace too quick to process. Visuals, sounds and movement flooding your senses, demanding your attention all at once. And just when you are getting used to the sensory overload, the trailer ends; the flock has passed. It is as if all the drama of the forest is encapsulated in a brief moment of time.

A flock is also remarkable in an ecological sense. We, ecologists, tend to view interactions in the animal kingdom through a lens of nastiness. We expect animals of different kinds – of different species—to chase, to fight, to kill or to eat each other; at best, to ignore each other. Niceties have no place in our construct of the animal world. A mixed-species flock flies in the face of this conventional view because friendship and cooperation lie at the flock’s heart, of a kind that we only expect among kith and kin. Do not get me wrong. I am not talking about sacrifice—about one species losing out for the benefit of another. A flock is a win-win situation, one in which all parties involved stand to gain. In the flock I saw that morning on the trail behind the camp, it was clear that some birds were getting food from the other birds—drongos stealing from the woodpecker and the minivets; monarch and paradise flycatcher snapping up flying insects that the warblers made available. But what about the other birds—nuthatch, fulvetta, warbler, bulbul, minivet, trogon, woodpecker—what were they gaining? The answer is not clear but it probably has to do with safety and protection. In the flock, in the company of other species, these birds are safer than if they were on their own—maybe because there are more eyes to spot an approaching danger; maybe because they are each less likely to be singled out by a predator; maybe they can all gang up and chase the predator away. It is also known—and I have seen it myself – that birds like the fulvetta and drongos are especially quick to spot approaching danger and cry out warnings.

That is probably why the other birds followed the fulvetta; probably why the woodpecker and the minivet tolerated the sustained harassment by the drongos—a small payment for the safety they get in return.

So far, I have focused on a single example. One flock, one moment in time, one point in space. A collection of 30-odd individuals of 11 species whose fates were closely intertwined. But even as I was watching that one flock that day, if, somehow, I had been able to zoom out, and see the entire forest like a soaring raptor would, I would have seen and heard hundreds of flocks all over Anshi. Flocks that differed in composition—different sizes, different individuals, different species—yet, identical in purpose—a way to food and safety for the actors involved. In fact, if I had looked really carefully from my vantage point high above, I would have noticed that almost every insect-eating bird of the forest was in one flock or the other.

If you are wondering where I am going with this, or what this has to do with conservation, here is my answer. To protect a species, any species, to ensure that it stays with us in the future, there are a few steps that we must take. We must ensure that the place it lives in is safe, that this place has enough food, that its enemies—both those that might eat it and those that might fight it—are not too many. There are other steps too, but these are the important ones. But, if the species that we want to protect is an insect-eating bird, there is an additional precaution required: we must protect its friends too. From what I just described, it is clear that insect-eating birds are not islands in the forest. They are dependent on each other for food and safety, linked to each other through invisible bonds of cooperation. These bonds form the building blocks of a network—a friendship network— that connect all the insect-eating bird species in the forest. But not all bonds in the network are equal. Just like us humans, each insect-eating bird too, picks and chooses its friends carefully, driven by more than one consideration: is the potential friend’s behaviour compatible with mine? What kind of help will the friend provide? Will the friend be available and willing to flock with me when I need to? To protect an insect-eating bird species therefore, we need to identify and protect its chosen friends.

We can look at this issue in a different way. Instead of asking who a particular species’ chosen friends are, we can ask how often a particular species is the chosen friend of others. Think of it like a popularity chart. We can rank each species according to its popularity in the friendship network, according to how often and how many other species want to flock with it. How does this help? If ever we have the unfortunate situation where we had to prioritise species to protect, then we could work our way down from the most popular to the least popular in our list. Because, by protecting the popular ones, ‘keystones’ in ecological parlance, we also help the many others that depend upon them for food or protection.

That day, after the flock crossed the stream, Nagesh and I continued along the trail behind the camp and encountered two more flocks.

The first one, on a hilltop, had only two species—a lone white-bellied blue flycatcher and 5 dark-fronted babblers—all keeping close to the ground, flycatcher following the babblers. In contrast, the next flock was the biggest I had ever seen, including as many as 55 individuals of 23 species. Over the next four months, I walked all over the forests of Anshi, trying to observe as many flocks as possible, to observe from the ground what I might have seen that day if I had been able to soar like a raptor. During this time, I encountered 250 flocks and recorded all that each of them contained. Back in Bangalore, we used this information to construct the network of “friendships” among the insect-eating birds of Anshi. I will not go into the details of how we did this. If you would like to know more, you can find it in the paper mentioned under ‘Further reading’. What I want to tell you is who the popular ones, the superstars of the network, were.

The answer could not be clearer. If you arrange the 36 species in the Anshi friendship network from most popular to least popular—and indicate each species’ level of popularity by the height of a vertical bar, you will see six tall skyscrapers followed by 30 little stumps that hardly get off the ground. In other words, six species were much much more popular than all the others.

Who are these superstars? In no particular order, since they were all equally popular, the six species were: brown-cheeked fulvetta, scarlet minivet, yellow-browed bulbul, black-naped monarch, western crowned warbler and greater racket-tailed drongo. To confirm our findings, we went back to Anshi the next year and repeated the entire exercise. Walked all the trails again, recorded all the flocks, built the network, and found out who the popular ones were. The answer was identical. Therefore, there is no doubt about who the key players are—the go-to birds for food and safety in the Anshi friendship network. That part was easy. What is puzzling is why these six species, and not any others? The puzzle deepens when you consider these six are an odd assortment with little in common. Is it because their behaviours are compatible with those of many other birds? Is it because they are particularly good at helping and at providing benefits to other birds? Or is it because they are easily available and willing to flock? We do not know, and as with most such questions with multiple possibilities, the answer is probably a little of everything. What we do know is that that these six species are important and play crucial roles in determining the fates of numerous other species.
The good news is that all six species are doing well. They are abundant in the forest and show no signs of imminent decline. There is little risk of any of them going extinct in the near future. The bad news is, also, that all six species are doing well, because it means that they will attract no conservation attention. The enterprise of conservation is interested in the rare and the threatened, not in the safe and the common. While this might be a good strategy generally, it requires a rethink in this case, because the fates of many an uncommon species rests on the future of these common birds. Therefore, if I was given a pot of money to spend on the species of my choosing, I would choose these six birds. I would use the money to find out what makes these birds tick. And once I found that out, I would also make sure that what keeps them going, keeps going too. Because, if these six species, which hold the reins of the friendship network in Anshi, go down, they will take everyone else down with them. A loss, both ecological and aesthetic.

Further reading:
Sridhar H, F Jordán & K Shanker. 2013. Species importance in a heterospecific foraging association network. Oikos 122:1325-1334

Acknowledgements
I thank Ferenc Jordán, Pavithra Sankaran, Joyshree Chanam and TR Shankar Raman for their comments and suggestions on this article.