In Western Maharashtra, India, one can find several shrines of Waghoba, a deity representing a big cat, both tiger and leopard. The Warlis, as well as several other indigenous communities in the region, worship Waghoba as an integral part of their belief system.
To learn more about this deity and its significance to human-leopard interactions, we—a group of researchers from Wildlife Conservation Society-India, Wildlife Conservation Trust and Norwegian Institute for Nature Research—conducted a study across Mumbai Suburban, Thane and Palghar districts of Maharashtra. From November 2018 to April 2019, we explored the landscape to document how extensively the Waghoba deities were found, and interviewed people within the Warli community (Nair et al. 2021). By the end of the fieldwork, we had located 150 shrines! We also learnt a lot about Waghoba, including origin stories, myths, beliefs, iconography, rituals, experiences, and festivals. Through these stories and practices, we got a glimpse of the ways in which the people of that landscape comprehend the challenges of living with leopards.
Below is one version of Waghoba’s origin story that was narrated by a Warli interviewee:
Pc: Nikit Surve
‘Human-wildlife conflict’ and ‘livestock depredation’ may be relatively recent concepts for people working in conservation, but narratives such as the above show us that these challenges are not at all novel to the people in this landscape. They are entwined in the stories that have been passed down orally for innumerable generations within the communities.
The origin story narrates how Waghoba, due to his nature, kills livestock and the ways in which his mother negotiates a deal between the people and Waghoba to maintain co-existence. The festival of Waghbaras is a manifestation of this negotiation. Waghbaras is celebrated every year across western Maharashtra, including in the middle of cosmopolitan Mumbai. People offer livestock as a sacrifice to Waghoba, in exchange for his benevolence and protection from danger and harm, especially from big cats.
By listening to their stories and learning about their rituals and practices, we learnt that the people in this landscape don’t see leopards as just a menacing beast. They see Waghoba, and thus the leopard, as someone who is bound by his nature of being a big cat, while also being bound by a promise he has made to his human kin. Such a complex and nuanced picture of the being creates a space for the leopards to survive not only in the landscape but also within the Warli society.
Original paper:
Nair, R., Dhee, O. Patil, N. Surve, A. Andheria, J. D. C. Linnell, V. Athreya. 2021. Sharing Spaces and Entanglements With Big Cats: The Warli and Their Waghoba in Maharashtra, India. Frontiers in Conservation Science 2: 683356. doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2021.683356
Around midday in the hot sun, my 85-year old grandma, Yashodamma, came across a spectacled cobra (Naja naja) in her backyard. She lives by herself in a village called Humcha, located in the heart of the Western Ghats, the Shimoga district of Karnataka, India. In her absence for a couple of months, the cobra had probably found an undisturbed space in her backyard and made itself at home. This snake is highly venomous and one of the big four in terms of snakebite and human deaths across India. However, grandma’s first reaction on noticing it was not fear, as one would expect. Rather, she thanked the snake for appearing before her and prayed that it would not harm anyone. In Hinduism, spectacled cobras are considered to be the deity Nagaraja.
She kept an eye on the snake’s movement to make sure that it did not enter the house. Around 4 PM. she saw it slither across the road and towards the neighbour’s house. It then hid inside a gutter with only the tail visible to grandma. Out of curiosity, she continued to watch its activity. After an hour, the cobra’s tail started to wiggle strangely. A few minutes passed before it climbed slowly out of the gutter, body enlarged. It seemed to be struggling after ingesting something big. After a few more minutes, the snake appeared to be writhing in agony. By now, it had moved back towards grandma’s portico. Suddenly, it regurgitated an undigested rat, but continued to writhe with the shape of something else still in its stomach.
By this time, grandma realised that the snake was in agony and had started to feel its pain. She did not want to call any snake rescuers because many with poor knowledge would just catch and release the poor creature far away, adding to its stress. She placed a bowl of water near the snake but it was of no help. Around 7 PM, the snake died with its mouth wide open in grandma’s portico. She wept like there was a death in the family, informed the neighbours, and called a poojari (Hindu priest) to perform the cobra’s last rites. Nobody knew the cause of death for sure, but grandma concluded that the cobra had swallowed a pair of rats that had been poisoned by people. Rat poison is commonly used to keep the rat and bandicoot populations around the village in check.
This is one of several stories that show how coexistence with and tolerance of wildlife—even when they can be dangerous to humans—is cultural in India. Deep-rooted cultural values and norms, particularly amongst rural communities, are the reason wildlife continues to thrive in a densely populated country. For example, most elements of nature are worshipped as deities by Hindus—the elephant as Ganesha, turtle as Vishnu, boar as Varaha, wind as Vaayudeva, river as Kaveri, and so on. There is an intrinsic understanding of ecology and natural laws in daily life, which people also celebrate through seasonal festivals. Grandma knew how to safely share space with a venomous cobra, realised that releasing it far away from its territory would add stress, and understood the importance of the food chain and how disastrous poisoning rats was to the snake—something that the younger generation have to be taught in schools and Universities. She mourned the death of the snake for three days and on the fourth day, she was emotional while narrating the tragic story to my mother. Her connection to the snake was a combination of science and emotion towards the creature.
People’s relationship with nature and wildlife varies across cultures and can depend on religious beliefs, traditional practices, and daily lifestyles. Unfortunately, with increasing urbanisation and commercialisation, people are losing touch with nature as well as their culture. And as cultural connections to wildlife disappear along with grandma and her generation alike, the few practices that remain continue without their original meaning and relevance. Worship (in Hinduism) is limited to idols confined within constructed temples, while living Nagarajas end up as roadkill, Ganesha and Varaha are electrocuted, Vishnu is illegally traded, Vayudeva and Kaveri are polluted, and their habitats destroyed. With much of India’s wildlife living outside protected areas, retaining our deep cultural connection with wildlife is all the more important for their continued survival. Although grandma’s story strengthened my conviction that conservation is not possible without emotions and cultural values, it left me with several questions. How can wildlife conservation be brought back as an important aspect of culture? Is it the responsibility of our educational systems alone or do our families and the larger society have a role to play too? Ultimately, humanity is built around and shaped by culture, and retaining the true essence of that culture is what conservation needs the most today.
In the inky darkness of a lush Brazilian rainforest, a hungry predator is on the hunt. A Brazilian pit viper (Bothrops jararaca) is coiled, ready to ambush any prey that crosses its path. A patient hunter, it waits for the perfect moment to strike. An unsuspecting rodent scurries past. In a flash, the viper strikes. Two hypodermic needle-like fangs sink into the rodent, injecting it with lethal venom. The viper’s venom wreaks havoc on the rodent’s circulatory system. Within seconds, the cocktail of toxins present in the venom causes a severe drop in the rodent’s blood pressure, rendering it unconscious. Soon, the rodent stops moving. The snake can now feast on its prey. The venom has done its job.
Thousands of miles away, an adult human male is on the prowl. He scans through the colourful racks of the pharmacy, looking for his prescription medication. Like millions of humans, he suffers from hypertension, a contributor to humanity’s biggest killer—heart disease. He finally finds his medication: Captopril, a tablet that keeps his blood pressure in check. Its origin? Elements from the lethal pit viper venom which just killed the rodent. Behold snake venom: an unlikely elixir for humans.
Why venom?
It isn’t easy being a snake in the wild. Food is scarce and hunting prey is a task. Having no limbs and being dependent on external factors to regulate body temperature don’t help either. What weapon could snakes possibly deploy to counter these disadvantages?
A weapon which rapidly debilitates prey would be ideal. Over millions of years, snakes have evolved proteins, peptides, and enzymes in highly specialised glands to produce just that kind of weapon: venom.
These proteins, peptides, and enzymes act as toxins and attack specific biological pathways. Toxins are generally classified into three types: neurotoxic (impacting the central and peripheral nervous system), cytotoxic (impacting cells), and haemotoxic (impacting the cardiovascular system). Evidently, snake venom has evolved to attack some of the most sensitive systems in any animal. With its circulatory or nervous system in jeopardy, an envenomated animal’s chances of escaping from a snake are greatly reduced. However, it’s not just snakes that evolved to produce venom. Through random genetic mutations, distinct taxa such as sea anemones, bees, scorpions, and even some primates independently evolved to produce venom in ‘repurposed’ salivary glands—a phenomenon called convergent evolution. When these mutations proved advantageous, those species thrived due to natural selection favouring them.
The toxins started out as proteins involved in everyday physiological processes. Through genetic mutations, these seemingly harmless proteins evolved to be highly effective toxins that could target specific biological pathways. Take, for example, phospholipase type A2 (PLA2), a protein that is present in the venom of virtually all snake species. An ancestral, non-toxic PLA2 probably helped cells maintain a steady state. But a series of random genetic mutations eventually led to the evolution of PLA2 with an arsenal of neurotoxic, myotoxic, and haemotoxic functions.
Venom is fast-acting, effective, and debilitating. But is that all there is to it?
Beyond a deadly cocktail
Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) is an enzyme that promotes the constriction of blood vessels, resulting in an increase in blood pressure. In the late 1960s, researchers discovered that Brazilian pit viper venom contained a peptide called Bradykinin potentiating factor (BPF) that could selectively inhibit ACE. This discovery aligned well with the fact that snake venom functioned by inducing a drastic drop in blood pressure, and was leveraged to develop a synthetic analogue of BPF, which could be used to treat hypertension by lowering blood pressure. Thus, Captopril (sold under the brand name Capoten) was the first ACE-inhibitor hypertension drug to be approved for human use.
Snake venom has proved to be a hit among drugs for cardiovascular ailments: Tirofiban (sold under the brand name Aggrastat) is used to treat unstable angina, a condition where insufficient blood flow to the heart—usually due to the formation of blood clots in the coronary artery—results in chest pain. Tirofiban is a synthetic version of a protein found in the venom of the saw-scaled viper (Echis carinatus), a snake responsible for a significant number of envenomations in India. Saw-scaled viper bites usually result in internal haemorrhaging. This is due to a protein in their venom known as echistatin, which binds to certain receptors on platelets, thereby preventing the timely formation of blood clots and leading to internal bleeding and shock.. While the viper uses this protein to ensure its prey is immobilised, humans benefit from a synthetic version of echistatin by using its clot-preventing property to treat unstable angina.
Another example is Integrilin, a drug used to prevent clot formation in heart attack patients, which uses a similar synthetic protein derived from the venom of the Southeastern pygmy rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius barbouri).
What does the future hold?
While these are but a few of the snake venom-derived drugs currently used to treat human ailments, there are several others undergoing testing. From the possibility of black mamba venom being used as a formidable painkiller to the prospect of desert black snake venom being used to treat infertility, snake venom is proving to be a treasure trove of potential treatments for various human conditions.
Snakes are generally looked upon with fear and disgust. The general attitude toward snakes, especially venomous snakes, is that they are repulsive and scary creatures. Evidently, there is a whole lot more to venomous snakes. Perhaps it’s time to stop looking at snakes as vermin, and instead, look at them as animals who, although dangerous at times, have the potential to do humanity much good.
Further reading:
Jenner, R. and E. Undheim. 2017. Venom: The secrets of nature’s deadliest weapon (Illustrated ed.). Smithsonian Books.
Mohamed Abd El-Aziz, T., A. Garcia Soares and J. D. Stockand. 2019. Snake venoms in drug discovery: Valuable therapeutic tools for life saving. Toxins11(10): 564.
The hazel dormouse is classified as ‘Vulnerable’ in the UK, due to a loss of suitable habitat. The species has been lost from much of its original range, particularly in the north of England, and remaining populations are declining by 3.8 percent per year. To restore dormice to areas where they are now extinct, a reintroduction programme was set up in 1993 by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and English Nature (now Natural England).
For a reintroduction to succeed, it is vital to select suitable sites based on the habitat requirements of the species. Dormice are habitat specialists, preferring diverse woodlands with a well-developed understorey. With a reduction in the size and distribution of this habitat, it’s difficult to find appropriate sites for future reintroductions. In this new study published in Conservation Science and Practice, we investigated how habitat suitability mapping could assist this process.
To create our dormouse habitat suitability map, we needed to identify which habitat characteristics are shared by sites where dormice are present. Firstly, we collected 51 maps which each contained details about a certain type of habitat, for example broadleaved woodland or distance to roads. We then combined this habitat information with a map showing where dormice are still present (using data from the PTES National Dormouse Monitoring Programme). This revealed that dormice prefer a high amount of broadleaved woodland, a steeper than average slope gradient, and less arable land nearby. Next, we used these results to calculate overall habitat suitability scores, which were then projected onto a map of England (see map below).
Map showing habitat suitability for the hazel dormouse, with lighter colours being more suitable than darker colours. The white dots represent where dormice are still found and are surveyed multiple times a year as part of the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme. The yellow stars represent the location of the existing 24 reintroduction sites used in this study. Taken from Cartledge et al.,2021.
We wanted to find out whether these habitat variables also influenced dormouse numbers at the 24 existing reintroduction sites. The same habitat factors identified from the habitat suitability mapping (broadleaved woodland, slope, and arable land) also affected the reintroduced dormice, showing just how important it is to select sites with suitable habitat for dormouse reintroductions. Interestingly, we found no effect of the site size on dormouse numbers, therefore finding suitable habitat should be prioritised when selecting future reintroduction sites. Note this doesn’t necessarily mean that site size isn’t important! However, it does mean that habitat variables were much more important for the dormice at the 24 reintroduction sites we investigated.
We then used all this information to take a closer look at the county of Cheshire, where the third ever UK dormouse reintroduction took place (in 1996). Unfortunately, there are no longer any signs of dormice using the nest boxes at the site. Why? It’s possible that the absence of habitat management has led to mature woodland which is no longer suitable for the dormice. This is further supported by our results, which also suggested that the original reintroduction site is no longer suitable. However, our habitat suitability maps can be used to identify potential sites for future reintroductions. We found that there are 45 other woodlands in Cheshire which are suitable. There are a few areas which contain clusters of suitable habitat, which we would recommend for future reintroductions, with the idea of setting up connected populations of dormice.
The habitat suitability score could have other uses for dormouse conservation. Dormice are a protected species, requiring mitigation if they live in an area of development. Our map could also be used to locate sites which are most likely to contain dormice. In the long-run, this could help to minimise the effort of surveyors and disturbance to the animals that live there.
Overall, this habitat suitability method could be used as a tool to identify potential sites for future reintroductions and to find priority areas for survey during mitigation and development. The same method could also easily be translated into suitability maps for other species, thus having the possibility of assisting reintroduction programmes for other species.
Further reading:
Cartledge, E. L., M. Baker, I. White, A. Powell, B. Gregory, M. Varley, J. L. Hurst et al. 2021. Applying remotely sensed habitat descriptors to assist reintroduction programs: A case study in the hazel dormouse. Conservation Science and Practice: e544. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.544
Wembridge, D., I. White, N. Al-Fulaij, E. Marnham and S. Langton. 2019. The State of Britain’s Dormice 2019. People’s Trust for Endangered Species. Retrieved from https://ptes.org/wp content/uploads/2019/11/SoBD-2019.pdf.
Semi-arid landscapes such as grasslands and savanna ecosystems support a high diversity of mammalian herbivores and carnivores across the globe. In India, these ecosystems cover ten percent of the land surface out of which less than five percent comes under its Protected Area network. Here, although these semi-arid landscapes are often termed as ‘wastelands’, they are important grazing grounds for millions of pastoralists who depend on livestock. Due to neglect, such landscapes are subjected to various threats, such as fragmentation, habitat degradation, conversion to agriculture, and urbanisation, which in turn threaten several important species, including the Indian grey wolf.
Indian grey wolves are the apex predators of these semi-arid landscapes and conserving wolves means not only conserving the habitat, but also the other species associated with it. Wolves in India are overshadowed by more charismatic species like the tiger and elephant, even though they are included under Schedule-1 of Wildlife Protection Act (1972)—the highest level of protection. For a large-ranging species like the wolf, it is important to understand not only the extent of the area in which it is present, but also the factors that help in the persistence of the species. Wolves generally reside outside protected areas, in the agricultural matrix, where due to high human densities, they often come into conflict with people. But well-managed protected areas can act as breeding centres for wolves. Therefore, identifying suitable patches and managing those patches efficiently inside protected areas could pave the path for wolf conservation in the larger landscape. Our recent study focused on identifying such important patches in the Kailadevi Wildlife Sanctuary (KWLS)—the last stronghold of wolves in Rajasthan.
We assessed the factors that govern the selection of sites by wolves, by dividing the whole of KWLS into grids and collecting data on the presence and absence of signs in those grids. Wolves generally occur in low densities, and methods such as radio-collaring are difficult to implement due to logistical constraints. But presence-absence can be inferred through indirect signs, such as pugmarks, scats (droppings), scratch marks, etc., which, combined with the use of sophisticated statistical techniques, can help in identifying important habitats for wolves.
Despite various threats that wolves face all across its distribution in India like loss of habitat, fragmentation, and persecution due to livestock loss, wolves have managed to survive in highly human-dominated landscapes, such as KWLS. In the absence of wild prey, such as chinkara (Indian gazelle), due to overgrazing by livestock, wolves have adapted by preying on livestock, which creates conflict with humans. Through our study we urge that immediate actions should be taken towards restoring the degraded habitat, and incentivized voluntary village relocation should be carried out to create space for the recovery of wild prey populations and to reduce the pressure of predation on livestock. Moreover, an efficient livestock compensation scheme should be put in place to reduce retaliatory actions against wolves. Our findings have the potential to aid wolf conservation not only in KWLS, but also in other wildlife reserves and sanctuaries across India and to help elevate the status of semi-arid landscapes in India from that of ‘wastelands’ to grasslands.
Further Reading
Mahajan, P., D. Khandal and K. Chandrawal. 2021. Factors influencing habitat-use of Indian Grey Wolf in the semiarid landscape of Western India. Mammal Study 47(1): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3106/ms2021-0029
Protected areas—be it national parks, nature reserves and the like—are usually thought of as the most important means of conserving nature as well as the biodiversity and ecosystem services associated with them. At a global level, the number of protected areas as well as the total area under protection have steadily increased over the last decades. Yet, their distribution is severely biased towards certain regions, countries and continents.
Given the extraordinary threat biodiversity faces under the current and future climatic changes, it is uncertain which regions of the world will serve as refuges for the world’s fauna and flora. Thus, it is important that the existing protected areas ideally cover the full spectrum of environmental conditions, so that as many animals and plants as possible can still inhabit the optimal environmental niche where they can thrive.
To ensure this, we need to know which environmental conditions are over- or underrepresented by the current global protected area network. For this, we calculated the percentage area under protection across different environmental conditions. For the marine realm, we looked at factors such as sea surface temperature, sea surface salinity, and bathymetry (depth to the seafloor), and for the terrestrial realm, we considered temperature, precipitation, and elevation, which are among the main determinants of species richness in both realms. Combining the information on environmental conditions with the distribution of currently protected areas, we were able to assess the coverage across different environmental conditions. We not only did this for each factor (e.g., temperature) individually, but also for the pairwise combinations of the respective factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation). This was because the environmental niche of a species is often not just described by a single variable, but a combination of them.
Considering only one variable at a time, we found that for the terrestrial realm, high temperature, low precipitation as well as medium and very high elevation conditions were underrepresented. While for the marine realm, low and medium sea surface temperature, medium and high sea surface salinity conditions, as well as the deep sea were underrepresented. Looking at the pairwise combination of variables, we found that both cold and very dry terrestrial environments, i.e. deserts, had mostly low protection. This was also the case for low sea surface temperature as well as low and medium sea surface salinity conditions across most depths for marine environments.
Our findings indicate which biophysical conditions currently lack protection and where areas with these conditions are located. Together with biodiversity measures this information can be used to guide current and future conservation efforts, which will hopefully help to establish a more comprehensive global protected area network that will be more resilient to current and future climatic changes.
Further Reading
Biber, M. F., A. Voskamp and C. Hof. 2021. Representation of the world’s biophysical conditions by the global protected area network. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13822.
Suppose you are taking shelter from a storm, and you find that your roof has not one but many, many leaks. The very thing that provides refuge from the downpour is now compromised, and unless you can patch every leak, you’re going to need to take refuge under another roof. For your shelter to protect you, it needs to keep out all the rain, not just some of it.
Apply this concept to conservation and you have what an interdisciplinary team of researchers are calling the domains of refugia, a new conceptual framework that can help us understand where natural communities can find shelter from multiple threats. The storm that is threatening the persistence of species or populations on the landscape, from which we need “shelter”, isn’t from a single threat. It’s a whole suite of threats, such as habitat loss, invasive species, shifting patterns of fire and water, and climate change.
In practice, conservation planning or management often focuses on a single threat—for example, climate change. The domains of refugia concept provides a new framework to recognize multiple threats and identify areas that can serve as refugia from them. In this framework, domains are social, ecological, or physical drivers, processes, or cycles that exert influence on landscape structure, function, or composition, such as changing climate or patterns of wildfire, that can act as a threat. The framework is structured around three questions: What threats do species and natural communities need protection from in the study area? How can refugial conditions be quantified and mapped? How can we use domains of refugia to inform conservation planning and management? These generalizable questions can be applied to different regions around the world, with adjustments made to accommodate different domain types and data sources, including land use maps, climate data, and fire history, among others.
We applied this framework to a Southern California landscape—a hotspot of biodiversity with a Mediterranean climate characterised by hot, dry summers and mild winters yielding annual precipitation levels typically less than 12 inches. While natural communities are adapted to persist in this already demanding landscape, they face many threats including changes in fire regime, unprecedented drought, human activities, and climate change. We found that sites with a high refugial capacity—aptly referred to as super-refugia—have on average 30 percent less frequent extremely warm summers, 20 percent less frequent fire events, 10 percent less exposure to altered channels and riparian areas, and 50 percent fewer trails than the surrounding landscape. The presence of these super-refugia sites are not insignificant—covering an area of nearly 8200 km2, roughly four times the size of Mauritius—yet are greatly under-represented in the existing protected area network. By characterising and identifying refugial conditions in this Southern California landscape, we have the ability to inform immediate efforts to expand protected areas.
Like our leaky roof, there are multiple threats to species and natural communities that we must consider when constructing our conservation plans and strategies. The highly adaptable domains of refugia framework maps these threats on a landscape scale, and provides us the ability to identify our shelters from the storm—super-refugia—and act now to safeguard them.
Figure 1. Refugia are sites with low exposure to multiple threats that can provide suitable conditions for species to retreat to, persist in and potentially expand from to other suitable sites. Domains are social, ecological or physical drivers, processes or cycles that exert influence on landscape structure, function or composition. Spatial variability of exposure to multiple threats across landscape domains (labeled 1-4) can create patterns of refugia (seen on right). Some sites may provide refugia from all threats, which we refer to as super-refugia (a), whereas other sites may provide refugia from only a few or some (b & c) or none (d) of the identified stressors of the landscape.
Further Reading
Isabel M. Rojas, Megan Jennings, Erin Conlisk, Alexandra D. Syphard, Jack Mikesell, Alicia M. Kinoshita, Krista West, Doug Stow, Emanuel Storey, Mark E. De Guzman, Diane Foote, Alexandria Warneke, Amber Pairis, Sherry Ryan, Lorraine E. Flint, Alan L. Flint, Rebecca Lewison. 2021. A landscape-scale framework to identify refugia from multiple stressors. Conservation Biology https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13834
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted lives everywhere, including my own. It has been almost a year since I left the office and began working remotely. This change has left me grappling with feelings of isolation that I have never felt before. However, isolation is a phenomenon that impacts species beyond humans. I have come to empathise with one that is native to my hometown in Whatcom County, Washington—the Oregon spotted frog (Rana pretiosa). Their decline has been exacerbated by population isolation, which occurs when small populations of a species can no longer reach each other.
The Oregon spotted frog and I
The Oregon spotted frog is my neighbour on the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States of America. They are typically found at lower elevations in still water ponds connected by streams or ditches. Named after the black spots found across their back, Oregon spotted frogs can be green, tan, or red, and they have bright yellow or gold eyes. These frogs were once found in wetlands from southwestern British Columbia to northern California. But they now occupy only 10–30 percent of that territory, concentrated in limited areas of western Washington, southwestern British Columbia, and Oregon. Before the pandemic, I regularly travelled a similar distance, visiting family and friends in British Columbia and Northern California. I now only travel within my small city. This restriction in range makes me claustrophobic at times. However, for the Oregon spotted frog, this habitat limitation has led to them being listed as ‘threatened’ in the U.S. Endangered Species Act and as ‘endangered’ in Canada. There are multiple factors influencing the decline of the species. However, the loss and alteration of their wetland habitat is listed as one of the main causes.
Isolation and its consequences
Oregon spotted frogs rarely stray from wetlands. They utilise shallow ponds in the spring during their breeding season, while deeper waters suit their active lifestyle in the summer. In the winter, they seek natural springs, beaver features (areas with water overflowing stream banks or pools created by a dam), and other wetlands with emergent vegetation. Feeding, basking, mating, and movement between seasonal habitats all occur in the water. However, connected landscapes with habitat requirements for all seasons have become increasingly rare. This restriction of movement now feels similar to how almost all my activities are limited to my apartment. Yet, my experience differs from that of the Oregon spotted frog in that I have the option of leaving.
This isolation due to lack of aquatic habitat connectivity occurs at both the population level as well as between seasonal habitats. Population isolation occurs as groups of Oregon spotted frogs that used to congregate during breeding can no longer reach each other. While I currently feel isolated from my family and friends, these frogs have been dealing with isolation from their extended family and friends for generations. This has led to sub-divided genetic groups with low genetic diversity, or genetic variation, due to inbreeding. Maintaining and improving connectivity between seasonal habitats is important for the survival of individual frogs, while reducing population isolation improves the chances of survival of the species overall.
Aquatic habitat connectivity can be disrupted in several ways, with human structures and processes playing a major role. Similar to how I’m restricted by the physical constraints of signs, tape, plastic shields, walls, and other barriers to enforce social isolation; impervious surfaces, such as roads, can create physical barriers between populations of Oregon spotted frogs. Further, unsuitable habitats can also act as a barrier to connectivity if water quality, hydrology, and plant species composition impede movement between habitat patches.
Since receiving my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccination, I’m able to foresee an end to my isolation. While vaccine creation and dissemination brings hope for the end of the worst impacts of the virus, the future of Oregon spotted frog habitat improvement is grim. They have evolved to rely on aquatic habitat for much of their life history. Factors such as precipitation and temperature can have an enormous impact on the connectivity between populations. If the streams and ditches they use to move are dry or too warm, they become further isolated. Climate change projections for the Pacific Northwest also indicate that there will likely be a reduction in the overall water availability, which would create a reduction of water connectivity for the Oregon spotted frog. This in turn leads to further isolation. However, the good news is that we can work towards conservation solutions, similar to how we have worked towards mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conservation solutions
Conservation solutions for the Oregon spotted frog are complex and require a multi-pronged approach, similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are utilising social distancing measures, vaccine development and deployment, and protective equipment to bring an end to the pandemic. Conservation solutions for the frog depend on decreasing their isolation through maintaining habitat connectivity, expanding and maintaining Oregon spotted frog habitat, and the founding of additional populations.
Captive breeding and head-starting
Some work is already ongoing to potentially reintroduce Oregon spotted frogs into areas that were likely part of their former range. Similarly, captive breeding, reintroduction, and head-starting programmes are underway in Canada and the United States. In head-starting programmes, young individuals are removed from wild populations and raised in captivity during vulnerable life stages, before being reintroduced into the population. This is comparable to how more vulnerable human populations, such as the elderly or those with autoimmune disorders, had special grocery store hours and other measures to protect them until the vaccine became available.
Captive breeding with reintroduction and head-starting programmes help conserve Oregon spotted frogs by introducing more genetic diversity into isolated populations. However, there are a few challenges. Some studies have shown that wild populations can be harmed by captive-reared reintroductions. This is because those animals do not survive as well, despite increasing genetic diversity. It also takes many captive frogs to have sufficient genetic diversity. This problem is currently being improved by a new method that involves freezing sperm from different individuals, minimizing the number of males needed to be kept in captivity. However, like social distancing measures, captive breeding and head-starting are only temporary measures. Predictive modeling suggests that these measures can likely reduce short-term extinction, but they will not save the species in the long term. It is common in reintroduction programmes for the original threats that cause a species’ decline to continue to impact the introduced animals and the population as a whole. Thus, it is imperative to also address the issue of habitat loss and alteration.
Habitat improvement
Habitat loss is considered the leading cause of decline of the Oregon spotted frog. Reversing the loss of habitat is important for improving genetic diversity in the frog populations. As with COVID-19, where achieving a high proportion of vaccinated individuals is the only way to end the pandemic; improving, maintaining, and creating suitable Oregon spotted frog habitat is essential to ensuring their long-term persistence.
Of special concern is the loss and alteration of shallow breeding wetlands. This, in part, is caused by invasive reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea). Controlling invasive aquatic plants is difficult because herbicides can cause damage to amphibians and many mechanical or manipulative approaches have limited effectiveness. Fortunately, recent work has shown that some herbicides can be used without harm to the Oregon spotted frog to control the reed canary grass. These herbicides are now being applied, but eradication takes several applications over a few years.
Cattle grazing was also shown to successfully reduce reed canary grass in these habitats in 2003. However, livestock cannot remove the plant permanently, and can also lead to adverse impacts by contributing to water quality issues. To be used effectively, it should be limited to open thick stands of reed canary grass. Studies are being conducted to understand the full impact of grazing on Oregon spotted frogs. Similarly, mowing reed canary grass is a short-term solution because it will not remove the grass permanently. These solutions are reminiscent of utilizing protective equipment, such as masks, against COVID-19. They are not completely effective. However, if implemented repeatedly and universally, protective equipment can help minimise the spread. In the case of the cattle grazing and mowing, it can help to rebuild populations until more permanent solutions are found.
Apart from invasive plant management, other habitat improvements can also be made. We have all sought ways to improve our lives at homes, in order to deal with overwhelming feelings of social isolation. I have personally bought new books and other sources of entertainment. I have also created an office for myself at home.
Introducing and protecting beavers (Castor canadensis) is one way to improve Oregon spotted frog habitat. Beavers help create suitable habitats and increase habitat connectivity. Improving water connectivity between habitats is just as essential. Even man-made ditches can help the frogs travel farther to overwintering habitats. Additionally, improvement or maintenance of water quality, hydrology, and vegetation are also important for creating suitable habitat and ensuring habitat connectivity. Habitat improvements must focus on the physical, spatial, and environmental requirements of the Oregon spotted frog to be effective.
Conclusion
Population isolation—due to lack of habitat and water connectivity—is leading to the decline of the Oregon spotted frog, and we are largely to blame. Some of the last remaining suitable frog habitat is in my hometown. Until recently, I wasn’t aware of their existence. If it were not for my own isolation during the COVID-19 lockdown, I would not have empathised as deeply with their plight. For the effective conservation of the Oregon spotted frog, habitat concerns should be addressed, populations should be augmented, and populations need to continue to be monitored. This requires both community and global involvement. Much of the Oregon spotted frog habitat in Whatcom County is on private land. Local residents, like myself, can help by spreading awareness of the frog’s struggles and the different methods that can be deployed to increase habitat and water connectivity. Awareness can then lead to further community action, such as improving water quality in local waterways and advocating for beaver protection.
Further Reading
Duarte, A., J. T. Peterson, C. A. Pearl, J. C. Rowe, B. McCreary, S. K. Galvan, and M. J. Adams. 2020. Estimation of metademographic rates and landscape connectivity for a conservation-reliant anuran. Landscape Ecology 35(6): 1459–1479.
Funk, W. C., C. A. Pearl, H. M. Draheim, M. J. Adams, T. D. Mullins, and S. M. Haig. 2008. Range-wide phylogeographic analysis of the spotted frog complex (Rana luteiventris and Rana pretiosa) in northwestern North America. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 49(1): 198–210.
Robertson, J. M., M. A. Murphy, C. A. Pearl, M. J. Adams, M. I. PáezVacas, S. M. Haig, D. S. Pilliod, et al. 2018. Regional variation in drivers of connectivity for two frog species (Rana pretiosa and R. luteiventris) from the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Molecular Ecology 27(16): 3242–3256.
You know how the saying (kind of) goes, ‘Always judge a book by its content page?’ That is at least what I was thinking when I started reading Janaki Lenin’s book, Every Creature Has a Story. Not only does it have a beautiful cover, it has a riveting Contents page. Here are a few examples–
Airborne Sleep Sticklebacks Hold Their Water Wasps Enslave Spiders to Weave for Them Pregnant Fathers Laziness Has Its Uses Did Moby Dick Sink the Pequod?
And it just gets better from there. Underscored by a tagline that tells readers, What Science Reveals About Animal Behaviour, author and filmmaker Lenin’s book is a collection of 50 essays, updated and selected from her column in The Wire. Lenin’s series offers a fascinating understanding of animal behaviour, while breaking down complex science and research for the reader.
For instance, in ‘Rodent Monogamy’ Lenin considers the question of what makes some prairie voles ‘stick to one mate and the others wander?’ Explaining research that otherwise would be gobbledygook for many of us, she explains the way vasopressin, a hormone produced by the hypothalamus influences social behaviours. It’s enthralling stuff, suffused with generous doses of humour and insight.
I was fascinated by ‘The Scent of a Fur Seal’, where Lenin writes about the curious case of Antarctic fur seal mothers being able to locate their offspring after having travelled as far as 240 km over five to ten days in search of food. Countless documentaries came to mind as I read this chapter slowly, taking it all in. As a children’s book author, I have always read in stories on how seahorses make for great dads, as males are the ones who get pregnant. Lenin talks to Camilla Whittington and her colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia, to understand this better. Including how on a full moon night, the father produces ‘isotocin, the fish equivalent of oxytocin’ to induce labour. Never looking at a full moon night in the same way again! And that a ‘big-belly seahorse dad’ can produce some 1,100 babies.
Another example of good paternal behaviour that Lenin cites is that of ‘young male moustached warblers’ who, if the fathers do a runner, step into incubate eggs, feed the female’s young chicks, and keep predators away. Surrogacy in the bird world, who’d have thought that there were so many examples, and such sound reasons for them.
There are lots of aha moments in the book, awe-and aww-inducing ones as well. Like when Lenin explores the question ‘Are Humpback Whales Altruistic?’ It turns out, they do go out of their way to rescue their own kind, and sometimes other creatures! Marine biologist Robert Pitman, who is with the National Marine Fisheries Service, US, offers insight into their Good Samaritan motivation—along with his colleagues, he has compiled some 115 cases of humpbacks confronting killer whales in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
From looking at bird song to parenting behaviour and literary history to prey-predator relationships, the author takes on complex subjects with panache and offers scientific reasoning and research in each essay, separating fact from anecdotes. What’s also fantastic is that Lenin delves into different species, but mostly she looks at oft-ignored ones—from ants to snails and shrews to wasps. It’s bizarre, it’s enthralling, and it’s witty. And she does all of this with clarity and a scientific curiosity which is really infectious.
In her Introduction, Lenin admits that it hasn’t always been easy. The basis of the essay was a column, which means short deadlines and so she appreciated the chance to ‘update and tinker’ with stories for the book. ‘As if the challenge of getting the science right and communicating it accurately weren’t enough,’ she writes, ‘I also aspired towards another goal—to entertain and connect with readers who knew nothing about the animals.’ That is a good goal to aspire to, and Lenin achieves it and how.
Also, I must admit, having this book in hardback, given that it’s so beautifully produced (not to mention extensively researched), makes it a joy to hold and read.
When it comes to animal behaviour, few Indian books approach the subject from the lens of science for mainstream narratives. Usually these strands are restricted to academia, which is why Every Creature Has a Story becomes something of a landmark publication. Especially at the time it has been published—we’re entering into what is now being called as the Sixth Extinction, we’re firmly in the Anthropocene, not to mention a pandemic, and it’s become imperative, as developmental biologist K Vijay Raghavan, in his foreword to the book writes, ‘to understand earth’s many remaining natural wonders better, even as we strive to restore it to stability.’ And Every Creature Has a Story does just that.
I’m not going to lie, I am bonkers for bats. I can point to three bat-related experiences that have piqued my curiosity and tugged at my wonderment. These experiences helped teach me that bats are fascinating, they benefit all of our lives, are an essential part of the ecosystem, and need our help now. Though some of my stories might have some saying “no, thank you”, I hope that by the end you share my appreciation for the coolest creatures ever.
Up Close and Personal
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, the kind of town where you have to drive a few miles to get to the nearest grocery store and walk ten minutes to get to the next house over. One day my family and I returned home to find a little brown creature in the stairway. It was fuzzy, had a small snout, little black eyes, and large ears. At first glance, I thought it was a mouse, but after closer inspection, I could see wings! This little bat got stuck in our house, and my mom donned some gloves to scoop it into a container. Feeling sorry for the little bat, I put a piece of banana in the container. Of course, since all bats in the Pacific Northwest—and almost all bats in North America—are insectivorous, the bat didn’t even touch the banana. When evening came we put the container outside, left the lid off, and within an hour, it flew away. This was the first time I had ever seen a bat up close, and to me, it didn’t seem so scary.
If you ever come across a bat somewhere it shouldn’t be, contact your local wildlife agency or rehabber. If you absolutely need to move it, make sure you wear gloves or find ways to collect the animal using a box to keep you both safe. There are a lot of mysteries about our bat populations so if you find a colony of bats, report it to your local wildlife agency. This could fill in gaps in knowledge about our local species.
In reading this you may be wondering, aren’t bats dangerous? What about rabies? Viruses? Even COVID-19? Bats are thought to be rabid, but it is very rare for a bat to have rabies, and even more rare for a bat to infect a person. Usually, when someone is bitten it is because they picked up the bat without precaution and the bat is trying to defend itself. In the U.S., if a bat bites a human the bat must be tested for rabies. Testing for rabies requires killing the bat, whether or not the bat is sick.
COVID-19 is believed to be a zoonotic disease that originated from an animal and has yet to be determined which animal or species it spread from. A few species of bats and other animals have been found to carry similar coronaviruses, which makes them suspected culprits. However, you cannot get COVID-19 from any North American bats. Blaming bats and eradicating or killing them will not solve issues of the current or any future pandemic. Humans are putting themselves in danger by destroying natural habitats and bringing wild animals in close contact with themselves and other animals. Bringing together different species in an unnatural and stressful environment, such as live and wet markets, give viruses new opportunities to spread.
Considering other viruses or diseases, bats should not be feared but learned from. They have incredible immune systems that work differently from humans’. When bats fly, their body temperature rises to what would be considered a fever for humans, then their temperature plummets when they torpor, or hibernate. This makes it very difficult for a virus to survive because it must endure such a wide range of temperatures within a 24-hour period. This is thought to be one of the reasons bats live unusually long for their size.
Currently, in North America, a disease called Whitenose Syndrome (WNS) is devastating whole colonies of bats. The disease is caused by a fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) that attacks bats while they are hibernating. This disturbance awakens infected bats during the winter when there are little or no insects available to eat. This depletes their fat stores, causing the bats to starve to death. Finding a bat during this season is especially important to report to your local wildlife agency. If WNS is the culprit, they will be able to gather more information about the disease. People do not have to worry about getting sick from WNS, but they should worry about accidentally spreading it. If you go into caves or near colonies it is important to clean and sanitize any clothes, equipment, or shoes between locations. It is thought that people are responsible for the spread of Pd from Europe to North America and across state lines. It seems that bats should fear people and not the other way around.
I Can Hear You but I Cannot See You
Bats are difficult to research. They are nocturnal, have the ability to fly very far, very fast, and many bats roost in inconspicuous spaces. Their unpredictable flight pattern while chasing insects makes it difficult to observe a single bat for longer than a few seconds. As night falls, it becomes difficult to see bat silhouettes zigzagging against the darkening sky. This poses the question, how do they see with no light? Bats are not blind nor do they have superb eyesight. So, what is their biological version of night vision goggles? They have something better: the ability to echolocate.
Historically, people would shoot bats with shotguns to study them. Nowadays a great way to learn about bats is through detecting their echolocation calls. Echolocation allows bats, and a few other animals, such as dolphins and shrews, to project sound that will bounce off objects like echoes. These echoes return and are translated by skillful ears into a sort of image. With this, a bat can determine how far away an object is, how big it is, and even what it is. Even though bats use sound to depict their surroundings, we cannot hear them because the series of chirps (or calls) most bats produce are at a higher frequency than humans can hear. Bat detectors are devices that translate the calls into a lower audible frequency. In some cases, knowing the frequency and waveform shape of the call is enough information to identify the species of bat.
To further my studies in the field, I went out with a bat detector to listen for bats. Recording calls cannot tell us how many bats are in the area, but it can tell us if bats are present. Bats are often associated with caves or forests, but did you know that some bats live in or frequent large cities? I recorded bat calls within the city of Seattle with an Echo Meter Touch, a bat detector that plugs into a smartphone. The accompanying app by Wildlife Acoustics identifies the species of bat in real-time. I recorded a silver-haired bat, big brown bat, and little brown bats all of which are known to live in the Seattle area. The neat thing about bat detectors is that when you are listening to the bats, you are not disturbing them and it allows you to ‘see’ them in the dark when you cannot watch them.
Grumpy Faces and Angry Squeaks
By far the most exciting experience I ever had was a class field trip to Dusty Lake. Before this I liked them, but this was the moment that I really fell in love with bats. In the evening we set up a mist net trap above a small stream. A mist net resembles a very thin volleyball net with pouches which allows scientists to safely get their hands on bats (or birds). In practice, a bat will fly into the net and become stuck in a pouch. The researcher will free the bat, take measurements and notes on each individual captured. Carefully handling the bat allows for detailed data gathering, species identification, and leaves them unharmed, if not a little upset.
I had seen a bat up close before, but nothing compared to watching the interaction between my professor and the bats. My professor did all of the work while the rest of us watched in awe. As the bat was being handled it made a little grumpy face, let out a series of small frustrated squeaks, and struggled like mad to escape. Once my professor was done, he would place the little bat either in the breast pocket of his shirt or on top of his shoulder. Lo and behold the bats would just hang out—no more anger, no more squeaking, they just sat on him until they were ready to go, and then they would just fly away.
Observing these small creatures at close quarters eliminated any and all fears I ever harboured. As I did more research, I learned bats are more similar to humans than most people would think. Bats are social animals and have a sense of community. They have been found to share food and in some cases will adopt pups who lost their mom. Bats are not the evil beings they are advertised to be in movies and horror stories but are magnificent hard workers, who just happened to get stuck with the graveyard shift.
The Takeaway
You may wonder where you can see bats. Well, bats are everywhere! Or, almost everywhere. Bats live all around the world, except for in very cold climates such as Antarctica. There are over 1,400 species of bats worldwide, which are split into two groups: the microbats and megabats. Microbats are echolocators, tend to be smaller and eat a variety of prey, depending on the bat species. This includes anything from insects, scorpions, fish, nectar, and even blood. All bats in North America are part of this group, with the vast majority being insectivores. Megabats, on the other hand, tend to be larger, have better eyesight, a better sense of smell, and smaller ears in comparison. These bats are also known as the Old World fruit bats and primarily consume fruit and nectar. Their fruit eating habits actually help reforest lands by planting new trees. By eating fruit and pooping out the seeds as they fly, species of megabats disperse the seeds of mangoes, figs, bananas, and avocados, making them vital to the production of many of our favorite commercial fruits.
If you would like to observe a wild bat, just pop out around sunset and look toward the sky. Bats are most active during warmer months, and if you want to increase your chances, head to a body of water such as a lake or stream. If you are really lucky, and you happen to be near a bat colony, you might be in for quite a sight. The largest known colony—and largest known mammalian congregation—resides in Bracken Cave, Texas. Here you can watch millions of Mexican free-tailed bats exiting the cave together. There are many areas with large colonies of bats, and with a little research you might find one close to you.
All bats are incredibly important to both the ecosystem and people. They pollinate plants, disperse seeds, and eat an unfathomable number of insects. Bats need to be a high priority in research so we can learn how best to conserve them. Further, bats do not only need support from scientists, but they need support from you and me. If you are a fan, share your enthusiasm, tell your friends and family. Physical actions can also be taken, like preserving snags (dead trees) for homes, restoring native vegetation and habitat, planting night-blooming flowers, keeping your cat indoors, or joining a citizen science project to study bats yourself. Some ongoing citizen science projects include the Long Island Bat Watch, the Spotted Bat Project hosted by Oregon State University, and Neighborhood Bat Watch throughout Canada. There are many ways to help bats no matter where you live, how old you are, and what you do. Stand up for those who hang upside down and give them the support they need.
Further Reading
Gorbunova, V., A. Seluanov, and B. K. Kennedy. 2020. The world goes bats: living longer and tolerating viruses. Cell Metabolism 32(1): 31–43.
Hoyt, J. R., A. M. Kilpatrick, and K. E. Langwig. 2021. Ecology and impacts of white-nose syndrome on bats. Nature Reviews Microbiology 19: 196–210.
Konda, M., B. Dodda, V. M. Konala, S. Naramala, and S. Adapa. 2020. Potential zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2 and insights for preventing future pandemics through one health approach. Cureaus 12(6): 1–9.
“As food, caterpillars are regulars in the village, but meat is a stranger.”
− A Yansi saying from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1)
The practice of using insects as a food source is older than you might think, and is intertwined with humanity’s food culture, both in the past and present, and with clues to the future.
The story begins far back in evolutionary time. To set the stage: it is around the same time as the extinction of the dinosaurs, and warming global temperatures are causing a radiation and diversification of flowering plants. Important pollinators like insects follow, as do insectivorous vertebrates (insectivorous: consuming insects as food, predominantly used for non-human animals). The first primates, the common ancestor of all apes, monkeys, and human beings today, likely evolved around this time too, 50 million years ago. This scrappy ancestor of ours was likely insectivorous as well. Like the aye aye, tamarins, and the marmoset, several smaller primate species living today remain predominantly insectivorous.
Our story flashes forward down the human evolutionary line to the genus Australopithecus, evolving shortly after our split from our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees six million years ago. These ‘upright walking apes’ have specialisations to furnish a relatively newer innovation—walking on two legs. Bipedalism requires major adaptations in the hip joints, back, knees and feet. Many Australopithecines also show another important specialisation—the use of tools.
Tool use and diet
The archaeological site of Swartkrans is a limestone cave in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, in which fossils have accumulated over time. It is the site of some of the oldest known bone tools used by the Australopithecine, A. robustus. Of particular interest here are highly polished bone tools around the size of a sausage. They have a wear pattern on the ends, consisting of fine striations parallel to their long axis. This pattern, combined with the fact that it was found on so many tools in one area, rules out the possibility of it being caused by non-human agents like weathering or gnawing by hungry carnivores. They were human tools!
These tools were generally thought to have been used to dig up tubers, which continue to be an energetically important food source today. In 2001, researchers Backwell and d’Errico took a second look. They created experimental tools, used them for various tasks, and then used microscopy to compare the resultant wear patterns with the archaeological specimens. The surface modifications on the artefacts matched those of tools used to dig into termite mounds. Termite mounds consist of uniformly sized soil that has been finely sorted, and so unlike digging into rocky uneven soil for tubers, fine parallel wear is produced. In case of digging for tubers, the tool needs to be manoeuvred in different directions—so the pattern showed scarring that was deeper and multi-directional. Further studies have suggested a multi-use hypothesis: early humans might have used the bone tools for termite foraging in addition to digging for tubers, processing hide and harvesting bark.
In the habitat of early hominids, social insects like termites would have been abundant and easy to locate, making them a viable, nutritious addition to the diet. Even as Homo sapiens has evolved, that has remained true. The fact that early humans likely had insects in their diet demonstrates what a perfectly natural dietary component they are. A diet incorporating insects, with the appropriate cultural and social knowledge of which to eat and when, is as natural as a diet eating shrimp and lobster, insects’ arthropod cousins.
Choosing what to eat
Today, more than 2000 species of edible insects are consumed by human beings. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that insects make up the traditional diets of around two billion people.
For both hominid ancestors and modern foragers and cultivators, several considerations are made about which edible insects are eaten. What species of insects are consumed depends generally on how big they are and how many are available. To make the effort to catch them worthwhile, they must be easy to locate, preferably in large quantities. Beetles (Order Coleoptera) are the most diverse insect group, so, unsurprisingly, they are also the most commonly consumed. Caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, and termites, along with grasshoppers and crickets, are among some of the other commonly eaten insects.
There is a rich history of edible insects in traditional and street food culture in tropical regions worldwide. Insects are consumed at various life stages and may be eaten raw, fried, boiled, roasted or ground. Edible insect consumption was widespread among pre-colonial populations in most of Asia, Africa, and large parts of South America.
Mopane worms (Gonimbrasia belina), the brightly coloured caterpillar of the Emperor moth, have been eaten for generations across Southern Africa. They are available seasonally and are generally handpicked, often by women and children. The caterpillars are gutted, boiled and sun-dried, which can preserve them for several months. Depending on how they are prepared, they can taste like everything from tea to burnt steak. Mopane worms are a profitable harvest, both nutritionally and economically, and they are increasingly beingcommercialised.
In Australia, witchetty (witjuti) grubs refer to the large, white larvae of several moths and beetles. It is most commonly used to refer to the larvae of the cossid moth Endoxyla. They are eaten raw or lightly cooked and are an important ‘bush food’ to Aboriginal Australians.
Fried spiders, while not technically insects, are a Cambodian delicacy. The practice started out as a ‘hunger food’ in response to crippling food scarcity during the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge. The spider is the Thai zebra tarantula, which are safe to eat, cook quickly and have high amounts of protein and zinc. Today, the spiders are a popular deep-fried street food and tourist attraction. Worryingly, increased deforestation has threatened the spiders’ natural habitat, leading to concerns over the sustainability of this food source.
Several edible insects are also ‘pests’ on crops. In Burkina Faso, the shea caterpillar (Cirina butyrospermi), known colloquially as ‘chitoumou’, feeds off trees grown to produce shea butter. The seasonal collection and sale of these edible caterpillars represent a valuable income source for women in the region. The caterpillars are an important source of animal protein. If you wish to eat them immediately, the larvae may be boiled in water, and fried in butter, but the caterpillars may also be boiled and sun-dried to preserve them for sale in markets.
While wild-harvested edible insects are important supplements to traditional diets, they are often seasonal.
In central Japan, the edible wasp Vespula flaviceps is a delicacy. The wasps are traditionally gathered in late autumn when the nests are the largest. The process of collecting the wasps involves first creating a bait of meat to attract the carnivorous worker wasps. When a wasp is attracted, it is offered a wasp-sized piece of meat attached with a marker, made of cotton wool or plastic. If this process is successful, the wasp is followed through the forest to locate the nest. Smoke is used to sedate the wasps, and the nest is dug out for harvesting.
The harvesting is time-consuming, energy-intensive, and following the wasps across the forested mountain landscape is dangerous. Today, there has been a push for domestication, with wasp collectors relocating nests to human-made hive boxes.
Domestication is often expensive and unsuccessful, but, in this case, economics is not the primary motivator for keeping the wasps. The species remains deeply significant to the food culture, with annual festivals organising competitions for the biggest wasp nest, either harvested or cultivated. Celebrations of the wasp harvest involve various delicacies, and an opportunity to exchange knowledge about collection and cultivation.
Nutritional benefits
Edible insects present an important nutritional opportunity in a changing world. World hunger is on the rise, affecting 690 million people worldwide (2).
The world’s population is estimated to be well over nine billion by 2050. Increasing our livestock production to meet these demands would increase the pressure for land and freshwater and release increased amounts of the greenhouse gases associated with conventional meat sources.
Meeting the challenges of feeding humanity, today and in the future, will require a restructuring of our global food production systems. Edible insects are rich in protein and have an energy content similar to other sources of meat like chicken and beef. Excluding domesticated sources, fat is hard to come by in the natural world, and edible insects are an important source of the nutrient. The specific nutrient profile varies across insect species and can depend on what the insects are fed on, their stage of development, sex, and environmental factors. A higher fat content is found in insect larvae and soft-bodied species like termites, while crickets and grasshoppers, having a hard exoskeleton have lower fat levels. Although data on the exact quantities is limited, edible insects are also sources of micronutrients like zinc, calcium and vitamin A. Iron levels in insects also tend to be higher than most plant-based alternatives to meat protein.
Insects in a changing world
While humanity’s ancestors might have subsisted by wild-foraging on insects for their diets, we may not be so lucky. Worldwide, insects are facing an apocalypse. Recent studies have predicted that insects could vanish within a century at their current rate of decline. The main cause of this decline? The intensification of agriculture and pesticide use. Traditional indigenous knowledge of the management of these insects and their habitat is also fast disappearing.
To avoid the unsustainable overexploitation of already-imperilled wild edible insect populations, the FAO proposes a solution—the rearing of insects for food and animal feed. Better knowledge of insect ecology, life cycles, and ecosystem dynamics could help increase efficiency while maintaining nutritional quality.
Small-scale rearing of insects has a lighter environmental impact than typically Western forms of animal protein. Demand for animal protein increases the demand for grain and protein as fodder for livestock. Around six kilograms of plant protein are needed to feed livestock to produce one kilogram of high quality animal protein. Being cold-blooded, insects can convert feed into increased body mass more efficiently—crickets can convert feed to meat with an efficiency two, four and twelve times that of chicken, pigs and cattle, respectively.
Edible insects produce fewer levels of greenhouse gases than most livestock and require considerably less water. As it can be done in vertically stacked boxes, insect-rearing does not need extensive land-clearing to expand production. (A necessary addendum: further research is needed into potential allergens associated with edible insects and to ensure that environmental benefits of insect rearing are retained when scaled up.)
Insects also provide household level livelihood opportunities, as this ‘mini livestock’ already forms a part of street food culture in many parts of the world. In urban and rural areas, involvement in cultivation, processing and sale of insects can provide a source of nutrition and extra income to marginalised groups like women and the landless.
What’s stopping us?
At this point, it would be worthwhile to consider why we don’t already have insects as a part of our collective diet. Developing countries are seeing an increasing ‘westernisation’ of their diets. Western countries historically tend to look upon the practice as taboo (see: any season of the reality show Fear Factor). The reasons are probably twofold—the climate in northern latitudes is colder and necessitates eating meat. By comparison, in the tropics, several edible species might be found all year round, and harvests can be more predictable.
Climate might explain the lack of eating insects, but not the associated disgust. The origin of human disgust is all too often dependent on culture, on history, mobility, and, in this case, colonialism. The consumption of insects by indigenous peoples was often looked upon as further evidence of their differences from the colonialist’s ideal, and was used as a justification for the dehumanisation and atrocities that followed. Disgust is often used to maintain hierarchies. Similar problems arise out of dominant perceptions of class, caste and tribe, where associated insecteating is looked down upon, leading to the loss of these food practices.
Food and power
While considering how we can use the opportunity (both nutritional and environmental) that insects provide us, it is equally important to recognise that overhauling our food production systems provides us with the opportunity to not simply reinforce the power imbalances that brought this present crisis upon us. Resource extraction must benefit the people most threatened by food insecurity.
Since 2010, insect products are increasingly being sold online as the edible insect movement has gained traction in predominantly white countries. They are priced far higher than meat products, limiting their access from most of the world. Further, their increasing popularity among those with resources drives prices up, meaning that traditional consumers eventually may no longer have access.
Edible insect products in the market reveal little information on the social and ecological contexts of their production. A more democratic approach would involve consideration of who produces, controls and benefits from this resource. Visualising a more democratic food production system that truly benefits the underprivileged will depend on how the profits are distributed within the trade chain.
Food challenges are not due to a lack of food but due to structural inequalities. What structures will we be reinforcing through our food choices, both old and new?
Footnotes
(1) Muyay, T. 1981. Les insectes comme aliments de l’homme: Serie II, Vol. 69. Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ceeba Publications.
(2) FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets. Rome, FAO.
Further reading
Dobermann, D., J. A. Swift and L. M. Field. 2017. Opportunities and hurdles of edible insects for food and feed. Nutrition Bulletin 42(4): 293–308.
Payne, C. L. R., A. Badolo, S. Cox, B. Sagnon, D. Dobermann, C. Milbank, P. Scarborough et al. 2020. The contribution of ‘chitoumou’, the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi, to the food security of smallholder farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Food Security 12(1): 221–234.
Müller, A., J. Evans, C.L.R. Payne and R. Roberts. 2016. Entomophagy and power. Journal of Insects as Food and Feed 2(2): 121–136.
Folklore depicts the rich cultural heritage of a society’s past and plays a significant role in shaping its beliefs and customs. They help inculcate values, transfer knowledge, and promote wisdom in individuals of that society. According to the study published in the journal Frontiers of Environmental Science in February 2021, folktales are also influential in paving the way for human-wildlife coexistence in the high altitudes of the Himalayas in Ladakh, India.
The study, authored by Dr. Saloni Bhatia and collaborators, presses us to consider folklore as a tool to understand people-wildlife interactions in the “Land of High Passes”.
“We, who are interested in conservation, tend to look at everything in a sort of utilitarian perspective, but the cultural things transcend the realm of conservation. It’s more of a way of life,” says Bhatia, who is currently associated with IIT-Bombay for her postdoctoral studies. People’s perception of wildlife is often driven by their traditional and cultural values, norms and practices. Scientists have recently started to identify the importance of multidisciplinary research that takes these parameters into account to understand the complex mechanisms of human-wildlife coexistence.
This study tried to dissect the cultural values behind the human-wildlife relationships in the Indian Trans Himalayan region. Archived documents and semi-structured interviews with the locals were used to collect narratives about ibex, wolves, and snow leopards, as well as a mythical carnivore called seng ge or snow lion, often mentioned in the local Tibetan Buddhist folklore. They found that ibex were mainly associated with utilitarian and optimistic views. “The cultural connections that people have with ibex are far more nuanced and deep. If one were to think about a cultural flagship, then ibex would be more appropriate than a snow leopard,” states Bhatia.
The study also revealed that wolves and snow leopards are likened with protective deities, incorporating a positive symbolism in these carnivores. More recently, such values have been overwhelmed by the animals’ negative impact on human life in terms of livestock loss and human injuries. Consequently, they are chiefly being associated with negative symbolism. The mythical snow lion outvalues all the other carnivores in positive symbolism.
The study presses us to pay more attention to understanding the cultural dimensions of human-wildlife coexistence. According to Bhatia, practitioners should engage in “customised conservation messaging” to get locals on board in conservation endeavours, with a focus on issues that the locals care about. The positive perspectives can be a factor to promote grassroots conservation, whereas the negative ones can be used to initiate conversations with the locals to promote coexistence. For example, the apparent parity between a snow lion and a snow leopard could be utilised to preserve the latter.
Apart from the conservation aspect, the value of this study lies in the repository of Ladakhi folklore. Similar methods can be applied across the country to produce a national repository of indigenous knowledge. This will help understand the complex cultural aspect of how wildlife is sharing space with humans in a densely populated country like India. Furthermore, elderly people with vast knowledge of the ecology of the landscape can act as catalysts to initiate conservation dialogues at the grassroots. They can mentor young practitioners who can imbibe the knowledge and utilise it to ensure the persistence of wildlife in these ever-changing landscapes.
Every place might have different stories and perspectives on similar or other animals, and the approach to nature conservation should be designed accordingly. “When you do conservation messaging and don’t understand these nuances as a practitioner, then it is difficult to draw up a message that people can relate to,” adds Bhatia.
To promote the long-term coexistence of humans and wildlife, socio-economic and cultural aspects of the locals and the ecological facets should be given equal importance in current day wildlife research. “We tend to approach conservation from a very narrow perspective defined by our own set of values,” says Bhatia, “but if you just open up to the world and keep yourself open and empathetic and compassionate, there are multiple perspectives, and there’s so much out there to learn from.”
Folklore has the potential to influence people’s perceptions of wildlife. This can be used as a framework to acknowledge the value of this cultural practice to understand the intricate details of the human-wildlife coexistence and ensure the persistence of wildlife in the country.
Further Reading
Bhatia S, K. Suryawanshi, S. M. Redpath, S. Namgail, C. Mishra. 2021. Understanding People’s Relationship With Wildlife in Trans-Himalayan Folklore. Frontiers of Environmental Science 9: 595169.
After working as an ecologist for over 30 years, Stephen Redpath decided to retire early from his professorship at the University of Aberdeen and take up landscape painting full time. In a conversation conducted over email, Hari Sridhar and Manini Bansal asked Steve Redpath about this decision, where his art draws ideas and inspiration from, and how being a scientist has influenced how he paints the natural world.
Hari Sridhar: In 2019, after spending over 30 years working as an ecologist, you decided to take up landscape painting. Tell us about the origins of this interest, and what motivated you to make this switch at this point in your career?
Steve Redpath: I have always had a deep love of the natural world. My earliest memories are of birds and landscapes and associated feelings of joy and connection. I grew up in a creative household—my parents were weavers in west Wales—so there were always books on art and colour and design lying around. I always enjoyed drawing and painting. The woollen mill was in a beautiful part of the world, and I spent much of my childhood outside, birdwatching, looking for nests, tickling fish and just messing about. I met a friend of my parents when I was 10 years old and he said I could get a job as an ecologist, which I thought was amazing. A job watching birds all day! So, I set course for a degree in Ecology, which I did at Leeds University in the north of England. I followed that up with a PhD and a job at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. I spent 13 glorious years collecting data and, yes, watching birds. But slowly I got sucked into management and committees and grant writing etc., which I didn’t enjoy so much, although it did have its rewards. However, I did particularly enjoy teaching and interacting with lively, young, ecologists full of passion for doing something positive in the world.
About 15 years ago, I started struggling with my mental health, and in 2009 I had a breakdown. A couple of things really helped me out of this horrible time: my lovely family and art. I drew and painted and filled up books with, what were, to be honest, mostly pretty dreadful paintings, but the process of painting was so exciting and mesmerizing. It also shut out the endless noise that was in my head. From that moment I made two decisions. One was to focus my academic life on human-wildlife conflict, which I found fascinating, and, secondly, to retire from my job at Aberdeen University at 60 years old and pursue a life as an artist.
After 10 years, I had manoeuvered my University job into something that was very stimulating. The teaching was great, I was working on some fascinating research and field projects with some wonderful people around the world. I especially loved working with the Snow Leopard Trust, Nature Conservation Foundation, and with academics from a wide diversity of disciplines. I also had two amazing years spending time with brilliant ecologists, political scientists and psychologists in Sweden. Everything was going to plan. Then in 2019, I became ill and was eventually diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). This is such a debilitating illness, which sucked the energy out of me and left me with reduced cognitive function (the doctors called it ‘brain fog’). I had to stop work and I was eventually forced to retire at the age of 57.
This was not what I planned, but suddenly I had time to focus on painting. It was odd. I had no energy; I could not read and on some days I even struggled to speak. But I could paint. It clearly used a different part of my brain. Since then, I have painted virtually every day. In my head, I have this huge store of images and feelings of a life in the natural world, after a career as an ecologist, and a feeling that I could let go and explore who I am through my painting. What a treat!
HS: Walk us through your process, i.e. how you decide what to paint and how to represent it? How much of what you draw is based on memory versus painting “live”?
SR: There is no single process, and, if I’m honest, I sometimes find it hard to understand what is going on. Some days, especially when my CFS is bad, I will sit and paint whatever comes out. In a way, I just observe myself. At these moments, I’m not trying to represent a place. I’m just lost in the joy of watching pigment, water and paper interact. It is wonderfully meditative. Once I’ve started painting, I may make a decision to add some contrast or introduce a new colour. So, I suppose, I observe and respond and observe and respond. (Picture 1)
On other days, I will have a place in mind, for example, a bit of coastline or an upland landscape. Again, I won’t try and reproduce an exact representation—it is the feel I’m after. To me, painting is all about emotion—my response to the natural world and my attempts to capture that feeling on paper. I paint for me and I try not to think about how others will respond. So, in these situations, I chose a palette and I add a little more “editorial” control over the process, although, in reality, a lot of it is still simply observing myself (Picture 2)
Sometimes, I will try to express a specific emotion, rather than a place. For example, it may be the frustration of living with CFS (Picture 3). In these cases, I start with that feeling and then let go.
I also sketch outdoors a lot (Picture 4) and, increasingly, paint in other media such as acrylics or oils (Picture 5). In addition, I bring my sketches back to my studio and use them as an aid. Direct painting is very exciting, but a challenge when you live with CFS. It is only something I can do on “good” days. But even when I sketch outdoors, I find that I am more interested in the feel of a place and less interested in, for example, whether specific trees are in the right place or I have the line of the mountain exactly right. There is a wonderful magic that can happen when you paint and observe for hours in situ. I find I start to see the landscape differently and this affects how I portray it. I see new colours and contrasts and the whole thing becomes emotional and alive. A connection forms between the landscape, the painting and myself. It is glorious and fleeting, and it is a state I’m constantly striving for. I find I have a dialogue with the painting—it “talks” to me and I talk to it and a relationship forms.
This all may seem a bit odd for a man of science, but it is how I perceive the process. I try not to think about it too much. I’m simply having too much fun.
HS: That you sketch outdoors a lot suggests that you live and work in a place where you have easy access to natural landscapes. Could you describe the place where you live and also tell us a little bit about what sketching outdoors involves?
SR: I am very fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world—Aberdeenshire in the north east of Scotland. It is a place filled with beautiful habitats, from the coastal estuaries and large sea-bird colonies up the famous rivers of the Dee and the Don to the mountains of the Cairngorm National Park. An endless supply of glorious places to visit and sketch. We also have that delightful northern light that is very special. I live in a small village on the edge of the national park, with mountains, forests, lakes and farmland within easy access (Picture 6)
When I go for walks, I tend to take a sketchbook, pencil, charcoal and maybe some pastels or watercolours. I’m always looking—it may be a simple line I’m trying to capture in my book, or the fall of light and shade over a field, or the colour of a distant hill. I fill up books with simple sketches and often use these for later inspiration in the studio (Picture 7). Often, I will sketch with my non-dominant hand, or I sketch “blind”—without looking at the paper at all. I find these approaches produce more interesting and satisfying reflections of what I am observing.
HS: I’m intrigued by your method of drawing with your non-dominant hand or without looking at the canvas. Could you tell us a little more about how this works foryou?
SR: Just like being an ecologist, being a painter involves careful observation. To me, this doesn’t mean trying to reproduce an exact representation, like a photograph, but being honest about the feel of a place, of capturing the interplay of light and tone and contrast, to represent the energy of a landscape at that time. To sit and really see, and then try to let that seeing flow onto the paper. Sometimes, I find that using my dominant hand hinders that flow, maybe because the hand has memories of movements and tends to move in specific ways. Using the non-dominant hand gives more freedom of expression and allows for uncertain movements, which add greatly to the picture. However, I think what I enjoy the most is drawing “blind” (Picture 8), through which I can spend all my time seeing and trust my hand to reproduce. It is amazing. Maybe the tree is in totally the wrong place (for example, in the sky), but the feel of the whole piece is there. I find it fascinating that you can capture the essence of something or somewhere even if spatial configuration is scrambled.
HS: In a couple of your earlier responses, you’ve alluded to how being a scientist has influenced your art. Can you reflect on this a little more, in particular, about ways in which the scientist/ecologist view of the world both helps and hinders your art?
SR: Much has been written about the divide between Art and Science cultures. I tend to ignore all of that. They both seem innately interwoven in my life and I have always loved both. Consequently, I don’t feel that my life as a scientist hinders my painting. On the contrary, science has taught me the value of careful observation and patience, which are fundamental to life as an artist. My life as a field ecologist, working in amazing places, and observing birds and nature, has helped my painting enormously.
Of course there are big differences in the practice of Science and Art, but I think both are trying to find truths about the world or about our individual experiences of living in the world. The main difference for me is that my time is no longer spent with a notebook and binoculars, but with a sketchbook (the binoculars are still there). I still love the excitement of natural history and the joy of finding a nest or walking in the uplands listening to calling curlews or exploring the coast and the large breeding colonies of guillemots and razorbills that occur near Aberdeen. So, on some days, I will watch and not sketch, and on other days, I will be painting and be unaware of the nest nearby. It seems a perfect life—living in a glorious place, exploring the natural world and trying to capture my experience of it on paper.
HS: What has changed about the way you, literally, see the natural world, i.e. the thought processes running through your head when you’re in nature, after you took to painting? Do you find yourself paying attention to different aspects now, compared to when you were a field ecologist?
SR: Interesting question. As an ecologist I used to be more attuned to species I was studying, but as I have focused on painting, I think I have become more attuned to the feel of being in a place, and I am certainly more aware of the light. Sometimes, I can get very moved by watching light and shadows play out over a hillside. It is a more holistic experience—the light, the contrasts, the colours, the tones, the sounds, the smells, the wind, the movement – all these things I feel more. Isn’t that wonderful!
HS: Earlier, you said that sometimes you draw upon a memory of a specific place when painting. Are there any instances where you have tried to capture, in your painting, a particular field experience, or even tried to portray a theme related to your scientific work?
SR: I had to think about this one. I have never tried to recreate a specific field experience or a theme related to my work. But why not? I think the general experiences I have been through—the landscapes I have lived in and walked in and got wet in and observed are there for sure. I also think the tension that is inherent to my work on conflict and those conversations with people with divergent views is there for sure, but I am less interested in trying to represent a specific event. It is more about absorbing all that work and then allowing it to come out as it comes out. My paintings are, in part, a reflection of my lived experiences as well as the reflection of direct observation. I know some people use art as propaganda—for example, to express a pro-conservation position, or highlight a particular problem, and that is fine of course, but that is not why I paint. I am searching for some sort of honesty and truth about the way I see and feel landscape and the way my experiences affect that representation.
HS: What are your thoughts on how drawing and painting can play a role in the communication of science and conservation? Are you aware of any examples where you think this has been done well?
SR: As I have said, I paint for myself. I paint because I have this compulsion to put pigment on a surface and watch how it interacts with water and other pigments. I paint because I want to capture how I see and feel the world around me. I know there are many brilliant artists who paint to highlight the plight of a species or the loss of habitat or to raise awareness of a particular issue. In that case, there is a direct and specific line of communication. Obviously, I still feel passionately about conservation and the plight of the natural world, and this will inevitably feed into my painting, but not in such a direct way. I am happy with a painting when it moves me and captures how I feel about a place. If that moves other people and makes them think about hope and the beauty of our world, then great. But it isn’t, specifically, the driver for me
HS: After your retirement, have you continued to stay in touch with your earlier research interests in any way? If you don’t mind my asking, are there aspects of your university job and being an ecologist that you miss?
SR: My first love was natural history and I will always maintain that passion. As to my research, my chronic fatigue has made it almost impossible to stay in touch. I often struggle to read papers and follow argumentation. There is much that I do miss. I miss the amazing people I worked with all over the world and I miss the joy of teaching keen students. I do also miss the challenge of working on human-wildlife conflicts, but it was a stressful job at times. As an ecologist, I absolutely adored the fieldwork, and trying to understand the species I was studying; for example, I spent a long time trying to get into the head of a hen harrier! I miss that intensity. But now, I am content to observe and to try to portray a fleeting glimpse of the world I experience, on paper.
HS: Before we end, is there anything you would like to add, that hasn’t been covered by the questions I’ve asked, but is relevant to the theme(s) of this conversation?
SR: My whole life, I have felt passionate about the beauty of the natural world, and I had 30 years as a working ecologist / conservation scientist. I wanted to make a difference and help find positive solutions to some of the thorny problems we face. In many ways, this is a traumatic discipline, and I’m sure that contributed to my breakdown and ongoing feelings of anxiety. Working in this field, it is easy to become overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness. Art helps me deal with the effects of this trauma, and for that I will always be grateful. One of the joys of art is that it can give hope, connect people and touch something inside them to help them celebrate our world. Ecologists are not always good at speaking about hope and beauty and love. Art can open these doors and help start conversations about how we can find positive, effective ways forward. I would encourage anyone to pick up a pencil or brush and make some marks on something. Who knows where it will take you.
In the last 20 odd years, conservation has suddenly become a universal idea, whether it is about tigers, global warming or jam. Global in the sense that the internet is: accessible to a few, comprehensible to fewer, and useful to a particular stratum of the global village. Certainly less ubiquitous than coke, but perhaps more so than fast cars. Most people tend to think of conservation either as a noble cause that one ought to be committed to, or at least something good and proper to have in the right modest quantities.
Conservationists thus tend to think of themselves as noble missionaries, in quest of the Holy Grail of pristine wilderness or environmental sustainability, depending on which camp you belong to. Some, like the animal rights gang, act with religious zeal on their convictions. Others, like the biologists, tend to be cocooned in their discipline (with perhaps a slightly exaggerated view of its importance). And yet others, like the large international organisations, tend to be forces of neo-colonisation, not unlike the multinationals they purport to detest. Of course, without a doubt, there are noble individuals in these organisations (and who is to say there are none in Coke and Pepsi). It should come as no surprise then that conservationists have the entire range of human frailties at their disposal.
In our never-ending quest to create more confusion and further muddy the waters, we argue here that we should recognise the afflictions which affect the normal functioning of the body ecologic, just as any disease would. We have already critiqued various half-baked ideas such as Half-Earth (1) and compassionate conservation (2) and discussed megademophobia, an obsessive fear of population increase (1). However, as usual, we missed a trick. In fact, we missed the entire gamut of conservation diseases that affect this demographic. We attempt to make amends here with the Official Shockington Guide to Conservation Ailments And Diseases (OSGCAAD).
Vertabratitis in conservation is the expression of the broader problem of taxonomic chauvinism, or taxoplasmosis which makes certain taxa irresistible to biologists. The most common forms of this disease are mammaloma, an inordinate obsession with conserving mammals but preferably large ones.
Mammaloma
A casual survey of the conservation load of lions and tigers (catatonia), elephants (pachydermatitis), apes (apendicitis), pandas (Long fo mi syndrome), and whales (orcaitis) demonstrates the widespread nature of this disease. But there are other forms as well, such as ornithalgia, which can be diagnosed by twitching in patients. And then there is herpes, which results in a compulsion to collect every frog (amphibiosis) or lizard (schincophrenia) or grab every snake (serpentitis). And then, of course, some harbour an unhealthy relationship with sharks, which is known as elasmobronchitis.
Catatonia
Ornithalgia
Herpes
Elasmobronchitis
The obsession with sea turtles (chelora) is truly global and can be found in almost every coastal province in the world. This leads to claims that sea turtles are endangered, even if they are found in every ocean, sea and bay; a mania for moving eggs to hatcheries; and alarming levels of affection for the ridiculously cute hatchlings. Sea turtle people have long been at loggerheads about whether the symptoms include flat or leather backs, or turning green (or black in the east Pacific). It remains a ridley.
Though somewhat rarer, many cases of invertebratitis have been recorded too. Some suffer from lepidospirosis, and are seen hopping around with butterfly nets, while others have an inordinate fondness for beetles, and can only be cured by a coleonoscopy. The latter is not to be confused with an inordinate love of The Beatles, which we do not believe needs curing. And yet others can’t stop chirping about What Katy Did. A few harbour an unhealthy obsession with shellfish, resulting in Crustacea, which can lead to atrophy in their mussels causing them to clam up. And those who learn to dive get immediately infected with coralory disease.
Though several of the above diseases have been widespread and can be quite infectious, some individuals developed immunity, while others received a vaccine against taxoplasmosis in general. However, these individuals were then found to be susceptible to diversititis, which is the belief that greater diversity is always better. So tropical rainforests trump the tundra. And consequently, global conservation priorities typically focus on the tropical countries of the south that have the misfortune to be both poor and the confluence of some complex relationship between species richness and the environment. A common symptom of this disease is frequent use of the word ‘biodiversity’ and may manifest as hot spots. A rare reverse form of this disease, where victims actually prefer lifeless landscapes, does occur and is known as bipolar disorder.
The above traits tend to be mutually exclusive. It is rare to find someone presenting with catatonia and orcaitis at the same time. Although they may both twitch. But a common chronic condition that can co-occur with all the above is discoveritis, which is the relentless drive to find new species. Almost 20,000 new species are described each year, so this is quite a common condition, and advances in molecular taxonomy are making the progression of this disease quite relentless. Small close family groups of marmosets, chimpanzees, and gibbons are now discovering that they are, in fact, barely related at all.
Aunts are a different species from their nephews and nieces, and a whole genus distant from their great grandparents. This has the obvious advantage of creating instant rarity. Once abundant populations can be rendered critically endangered with the swipe of a swab. The late Georgina Mace even complained that it was impossible to work out extinction trends in primates because of the plethora of new species.
One of the most crippling diseases is animalia. This goes far beyond vertebratitis and diversititis in conferring rights upon individuals. In its extreme form, this can extend to granting person-hood to every plant and animal that ever lived, and vice versa. (3) The symptoms can include blurry vision, confused behaviour, excessive emotionality, and a poor diet.
And then there are disorders whose exact cause is not known. Prejaculation (a self-explanatory term) is a knee jerk response to just about anything, which occurs well beyond the conservation community. In this demographic, frequently proclaiming the imminent extinction of a species (usually in the press) is an obvious symptom. Many species, particularly large iconic vertebrates, have had to draw on Mark Twain to state that the ‘reports of death grossly exaggerated’. Other, tinier, unknown ones have slipped quietly away into that good night, but who cares.
And finally, there is Pristianity, the predominant affliction of 20th century conservation, the desire to set aside exclusionary protected areas, exclusively for fellow Pristians. Some might argue that this is more a religion than a disease, but honestly, we can’t tell the difference. Believed to have originated in the Wyoming province of the People’s Republic of America, this has spread to all countries of the world. While some believe it may be in remission, there are particularly virulent forms that still surface from time to time. This, if anything, is a pandaemic.
Unfortunately, many people do not take these diseases seriously, or refuse to get vaccinated or just refuse to stay home when they should. Many of these diseases have had super spreaders, and several have seen community transmission. Some are in remission, others are not. We call here for a formal recognition of these conditions (preferably by the use of the phrase ‘well then son, you’ve got a condition’), so that one can institute a programme of treatment and rehabilitation. This will inevitably cost bazillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. But if it helps build resilience to more diseases that might jump from the wild into human society, then we would have done a good thing. We think.
Epilogue We attempted to publish this in several conservation journals without any success. We conclude that conservationists do not possess a humerus.
Footnotes
(1) Shockington, K. 2018. Half-Earth is half-hearted: Make way for Thanos and the half-universe. Current Conservation 12(4): 32–34.
(2) Shockington, K. 2019. Compassionate halfism. Current Conservation 13(3): 32–34.
(3) Shockington, K. 2019. The Planthood of Persons. Current Conservation 14(2): 34–36.
Futher Reading
Buscher, B., R. Fletcher, D. Brockington, C. Sandbrook, W. M. Adams, L. Campbell, C. Corson et al. 2017. Half Earth or Whole Earth: Radical ideas for conservation and their implications. Oryx 51(3): 407–410.
Oommen, M. A., R. Cooney, M. Ramesh, M. Archer, D. Brockington, B. Buscher, R. Fletcher et al. 2019. The fatal flaws of compassionate conservation. Conservation Biology 33: 784–787.
Mace, G. M. 2004. The role of taxonomy in species conservation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 359: 711–719.
Pawar, S. 2003. Taxonomic chauvinism and the methodologically challenged. Bioscience 53(9): 861–864.
Shanker, K. and M. A. Oommen. 2021. The authoritarian biologist reloaded and deep ecology redux: Conservation imperialism and the battle over knowledge, money and space. In: A Functioning Anarchy (eds. Sundar, N. and S. Raghavan). New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
As a kid, I’d spend hours observing ant trails, curious to find out what would happen if I broke the trail. It turns out I wasn’t the only one curious! Scientists have been studying these creatures for over centuries and myrmecologists (ant biologists) spend their entire lives studying ant communication.
Ants are able to communicate in several ways—with chemical and physical signals, sounds, and body language. How? Mostly with their antennae. They use these forms of communication to recognize members of their colony, give warning signals to approaching predators, inform other members of the colony of new food, and grow the colony during mating season (during ‘nuptial’ flights, named after a word describing human weddings).
With these superpowers, they communicate not only with ants, but also other living things! Sometimes these tiny superheroes play the role of bodyguards for thorny plants like Acacia. The ant colony nests inside the trees’ hollow thorns, but repays this favour by protecting the plant from hungry herbivores that are on their way to nibble the leaves . This is a ‘give and take relationship’, where two different species have significant impacts on each other.
Another example is the relationship some ants have with seeds called elaiosomes. These ants are vegetarian and love to feed on nectar and fleshy structures attached to these seeds. In return, they help the plants by pollinating their flowers and dispersing seeds.
Some ants are farmers. They loosen up the soil, allowing water and oxygen to reach plant roots. Ants also help to keep the environment clean by feeding on organic waste and dead organisms. For example, carpenter ants make use of dead or diseased wood to build nests, subsequently speeding up the process of decomposition.
But remember, some ants can be pretty dangerous too! Among all ants, army ants are the most evolved predators. They are known to attack as a group and can hunt organisms ranging from insects to reptiles. Army ants can expertly search for food, and have sharp tooth-like structures called mandibles to attack their prey. The trap-jaw ant, a type of army ant, has sensory hairs projecting from its labrum (a lip-like structure) and when they touch prey, the mandibles involuntarily open and grab the prey before it can escape.
While such foolproof mechanisms prove to be deadly for several organisms, not all are fearful of the ants. Many animals, such as spiders, pangolins, and bears, feed on ants as their primary source of nutrients. In fact, because of ants’ nutritional value, some tribes in India are known to consume them as a part of their regular diet. The Mavilan tribal community of Kerala prepares ant chutney by mixing ants with turmeric, grated coconut, chillies and salt. The chutney is believed to cure asthma.
These brilliant organisms have not just fascinated biologists, but also people across a range of professions. For example, software developers have studied ant behaviour to help them design problem-solving operations, or algorithms, for computers. Some algorithms have also been inspired by the structure of ant colonies—for example, the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm. The first algorithm was created by studying a trail of ants as they navigated a path between their colony and a food source.
As the human population continues to grow and crowd into busy cities, architects are taking inspiration from the intricate structures of anthills to make best use of space. Several species of ants use their own bodies to build ‘living bridges’ to traverse small crevices. Inspired by this, many architects are figuring out how to use materials with high elasticity to make utilitarian structures.
For as long as anyone can remember, kids have grown up listening to the popular story of the ant and the grasshopper from Aesop’s Fables. The tale narrates how the hardworking ant stores food for the upcoming harsh winter as against the ignorant grasshopper who wakes up at the last minute and is left with no food for the cold season. Ants have also been mentioned in religious books, where several myths and beliefs revolve around these tiny creatures. In fact, ants have even made it to the realm of science fiction—Antman is a favourite superhero amongst fans of the Marvel universe!
Next time you see an ant, follow in its tracks and observe what it’s doing—you may discover another phenomenal aspect of its life, because there are so many questions about them left unanswered even today.
Dr. Dani Rabaiotti is a researcher based at the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology. She has previously studied bats and foxes, but is now involved with the ‘Hot Dogs’ project, which looks at how climate change might affect the behaviour of African wild dogs.
Dani has also written Does it Fart?, True or Poo?, and Believe it or Snot, which provide serious answers to silly (but important!) animal behaviour questions.
Read on to find out more about Dani and her conservation work.
WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BECOME A CONSERVATIONIST? I grew up watching a lot of natural history shows, and I’d say that was probably the main driver. It wasn’t necessarily spending time outside; it was more spending time watching TV and then going to zoos and aquariums as a child. It just really made me passionate about animals—so although I wasn’t too much of a scientist, I knew that I wanted to work with animals and that I had to do science in order to do that.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE ANIMAL OR HABITAT? When I was really small, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I loved the marine environment. I learned to scuba dive when I was 15, and I just have a real soft spot for marine animals. I could watch fish forever and I love all marine invertebrates—crabs, sea cucumbers, nudibranchs . I still love going to the National SEA LIFE Centre Birmingham Aquarium and seeing all the marine animals.
HOW DID YOU END UP WORKING ON WILD DOGS WHEN YOU ORIGINALLY LOVED SEA CREATURES? I think for me it was about what I enjoyed doing and studying. You get one impression of marine biology from watching television—going scuba diving all the time in nice warm water —but in real life, there is a lot of chemistry involved and studying things under a microscope, which isn’t really what I wanted to do. Scuba diving ended up being more of a hobby, which is great—too much of anything can make it less enjoyable. I still go scuba diving when I get the chance, and I do go to zoos and aquariums, but I also enjoy hiking.
WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE? There are different ways to be a conservation biologist, so for me, it looks like working with the data collected by people in the field—a whole team of people based out in Africa. What I do is manage the data collection and analyse the data when it comes in. I sit at a computer and build a lot of mathematical models in a coding programme.
I also do a lot of work with captive dogs at the zoo, where we can trial some of the technology that we use in the wild. On a day where I go to the zoo, I might go in and film the dogs getting fed or walking around while they are wearing a collar that collects data about their movements. This helps us improve how we collect and understand the data collected from Africa.
That is quite different from what a day would look like for our field team, and this is why it is so important that you have many different people who do different things. Our field team would get up in the morning, check on the wild dogs, collect data on one group of dogs, enter the data, go check on a different group of wild dogs, come back and enter those data, and so on. On the other end is me, receiving the data and using it to build mathematical models.
WHEN YOU BECAME A CONSERVATIONIST, DID YOU EXPECT TO HAVE TO USE MATHS? I hated maths but I enjoyed the problem-solving element of it. I think part of the reason I hated it was the way it was taught—there was a problem that we had to solve and it was really boring, without any interesting examples. But once I got my own dataset, it all just clicked into place. It is just a problem-solving process and it doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the ‘proper’ ways of doing things or all the technical language around it. At the end of the day, if you know you’ve got a wild dog and you want to find out how far it’s moving every day, then you’ve got to do a bit of maths—and that’s interesting and can give you some really interesting insights into animal behaviour. I think the really key thing is, even if you don’t enjoy something , you can link it with something else that you are interested in. And often it turns out that you don’t actually dislike it—you just didn’t enjoy the way that thing was taught.
WHAT OTHER SKILLS DO CONSERVATIONISTS NEED? A key element for working in conservation is being able to read across quite a lot of different subjects—maths, ecology, biology, social science. You don’t have to specialize in one area, but just be reasonably good at a few things. Also, conservation is all about people; being able to talk with people is really important, and being able to tell them about something in a way that is clear and helpful to them.
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO YOUNG PEOPLE INTERESTED IN GETTING INVOLVED WITH CONSERVATION WORK? I think the important thing is to find what works for you and your schedule. If you’re at school during the week, then you can’t go and volunteer every day, but maybe you could do one day a week. Or maybe you could get involved in a club or a hobby . Go to places (online or in-person) where you will meet people who are already working in the field. Try to learn about the job beyond what you see on television. I think the best piece of advice that people gave me was that you don’t have to do fieldwork abroad. There are lots of local opportunities that are really helpful and easier to get involved in. Also, don’t be put off if you don’t see people like you in the conservation community. If you love it, forge your own path that will work with your life and your circumstances.
I am exhausted. Drained. So hungry. My wings feel jittery, like they still want to be flying. My legs feel wobbly, like they might give way at any moment. Ten days straight I’ve been in the air! You get used to it.
But now I’m here, finally here… Alaska! I’ve flown here from New Zealand, my second home over in the Southern Hemisphere. It was starting to get pretty cold there, and the food was running low, so I decided it was time to head north. I do this every year, moving back and forth across the globe with the seasons, chasing an eternal summer. A bit crazy? Maybe. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I’m a bar-tailed godwit, a large migratory shorebird from the Scolopacidae family. Sometimes, if I’m feeling a bit fancy, I go by the name Limosa lapponica. I have brown, white and grey plumage, long, gangly legs, and a suuuuper long bill which scoops up at the end—perfect for catching bristleworms! I make the huge journey across the globe twice a year. That’s right—12,000 kilometres twice a year. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ll fly the distance from the earth to the moon. You could call me an elite athlete.
And let me tell you, I eat like an elite athlete. Right now, I’m skinny as anything (flying uses up a loooot of energy), but you should have seen me ten days ago! I ate so much I thought I might explode! And with all that extra weight on me, it’s fair to say that my take-off wasn’t the most graceful thing in the world…
I’m always tired at the end of my flight, but I’m particularly exhausted this time round. Why? Well, to tell you the truth, something odd happened on my flight over. Odd and…and scary. You see, I always stop over half-way on my northward migrations for a quick rest and refuel. The Yellow Sea is my go-to. It’s a big inlet that sits in between China and Korea, and it’s full of mudflats that are full of delicious critters. Prime shorebird territory! There’s one particular mudflat I stop at every single time I make the journey from New Zealand to Alaska. It’s a favourite amongst shorebirds—during peak migration time, you’ll see tens of thousands of us wading through the flats, pecking at the water in a hungry frenzy.
But this time when I turned up, it was just… gone. All I could see were pipelines and ships and concrete everywhere. Had I got the location wrong? Was my navigation off? Surely not — it was always perfect, guided precisely by the earth’s magnetic field. Then what was going on? I flew around the area for a while, scanning for any sign of the mudflat I knew and loved.
Nothing. I started panicking. If I couldn’t find food, then I wouldn’t survive the next leg of my journey. I kept flying and flying, directionless, losing stamina with every wingbeat. Eventually I spotted a small flock of birds heading east. Did they know of another mudflat nearby? I frantically caught up to them and followed behind for a while, hoping, hoping. And then I saw it—a glint of water down below, a flutter of life. I flew down with the other birds to check out what I’d spotted.
Rich, gooey brown mud as far as the eye could see. Streams of water flowing in every direction, leaving trickly tracks where they travelled. And birds! So many birds, all foraging away to their hearts’ content. I was going to be OK.
I guess that mudflat is my new pitstop now. It’s nice enough. But it’s not my old mudflat— nothing can compare! And who’s to say this new one won’t vanish by next year? Frankly, I’m worried.
But I must focus on the present. Right now, I’m safe and happy. Right now, it’s time to sleep, to eat, to be still for a while.
Ahh… it’s good to be home. The Alaskan mud feels delicious under my feet, cool and oozy. The water is pink in the evening light, sparkling like an upside-down chandelier. Wading through the shallows, I can see all sorts of little critters zipping about in the water and hidden in the mud—shellfish, bristleworms, sea snails, clams…
I could guzzle down a tonne right now!
Each year, millions of birds migrate back and forth along an international ‘superhighway’ called the East Asian-Australasian flyway, which stretches from the Arctic tundra all the way down to Australia and New Zealand.
Land development all along the flyway — but particularly in the Yellow Sea—poses a serious threat to migratory shorebirds like the bar-tailed godwit. Many shorebird species have suffered significant declines over the last few decades, as more and more critical habitat is developed over.
As our understanding of the negative impacts of land development on these birds grows, so too does the pressure on governments to take action. Governments around the world are beginning to implement policies that reduce land reclamation and improve habitat quality along the flyway, but there’s still a long way to go.
We need to keep spreading the word about these incredible birds, and keep pushing for effective conservation action.
It is safe to say that for a dung beetle, poop is life and not vice versa. These unique little crawlies not only feed on dung but make a living out of it—literally. Can you imagine living in a house made of poop? Before you jump to say “Eww”, hear these beetles out. Some dung beetles live inside a dung pat and are called “dwellers”, some are “tunnellers” and tunnel underneath the ground, whereas some simply roll away a dung ball and are called “rollers”. These beetles have played an important role in nature, by quietly recycling dung on the earth’s surface, since millions of years.
These dung–loving beetles can be found in every continent except Antarctica, in habitats ranging from forests, grasslands, agricultural fields to deserts even. Any geography where dung or decaying organic matter is present, the beetles will be there. For a dung beetle, where there is dung, there is a way.
In ancient Egypt, dung beetles were considered sacred. One particular species—Scarabaeus sacer—was linked to the sun god, Khepri. The ancient Egyptians believed that Khepri was responsible for the sun’s rising and setting each day just like the dung beetle would turn pieces of dung into a ball and roll it away.
There are thousands and thousands of species of dung beetles, belonging to various families under the superfamily of Scarabaeoidea of class Insecta. Some of the beetles do not depend only on dung, but also feed on detritus (bodies or segments of dead animals, like dead millipedes for example) and other decaying organic matter. This means that these beetles and their dung-feeding habits are not exclusive to any one particular species or genus.
With the constant removal of dung, these beetles prevent the breeding of parasitic flies and other pests that are found in dung. Often seeds can be found in animal poop, so while moving or burying dung balls, dung beetles contribute to the dispersal of seeds, which is important for the survival of several plant species. While tunneling and maneuvering dung across or into the soil, dung beetles create passageways for air, water, and nutrients from the dung to move into the soil.
Dung beetles might seem small and insignificant, but they play a vital role in the day-to-day functioning of nature. So, the next time you see one, be sure to give it as much attention as a tiger in a forest.
Eight-year-old Gajju dropped the stick he held, making the other boys shout in irritation as their game of gilli danda, a rowdy game similar to cricket, came to an abrupt halt. He rushed off towards the sound of his grandmother’s voice. The village was peaceful in the early evening. The women were sitting beneath the shady trees, while the men napped inside the houses. When the oppressive heat of the desert afternoon faded to a pleasant warmth, they would return to their agricultural land. Gajju’s dadima was one of the oldest women in their village. It did not take Gajju long to spot her sitting beneath a dhak tree, known as the flame of the forest, holding a bundle in her arms.
“How slow you have become,” she scolded light-heartedly, but she smiled and shifted her foot to make room for the panting boy. “I have a task for you, Gajju.”
Gajju was intrigued. What could it possibly be? She unwrapped the bundle in her lap and gently pulled the shawl away to reveal a tiny, trembling baby gazelle.
Gajju was enchanted by the little gazelle. Dadima stroked its soft head gently with her thumb, and the gazelle gave a small bleat in response. “This is a chinkara, Gajju,” she said. “Your uncle found this little one lying beside her mother, who was dead—shot, perhaps, or maybe killed by one of the village dogs. He brought this fawn back and gave her to me to care for. I think it is time you helped raise a young gazelle, just like your father did when he was your age.” Grandmother smiled reminiscently. “Your father used to go everywhere with the little chinkara that he looked after. Even after becoming a full-grown adult, the chinkara used to visit him out in the fields and come to the village to eat in the summer months.”
“You mean I can keep this chinkara as a pet?” Gajju asked eagerly.
His grandmother shook her head. “Not as a pet, as a friend. Until she is old enough to go back to the wild.” She handed the trembling fawn to Gajju, who petted her gently until she stopped shaking and looked up at him with big, trusting eyes.
“This is the tradition of our Bishnoi clan,” said Grandmother, smiling. “We are the protectors of wild animals, especially the little ones who are helpless and cannot survive without protection.” She patted Gajju on the head. “You are finally being initiated into this ancient tradition, my child. Look after your little friend well.”
Days passed, and Gajju fell head over heels in love with the little chinkara, whom he had named Chutki. Chutki, too, adored the boy, trotting after him on shaky legs and curling up to sleep beside him every night. Gajju was sure to keep her inside the house after dark, for fear that a leopard, wolf, or jackal might try to snatch Chutki if she was left outside. The little chinkara soon started responding to the love and care and became Gajju’s faithful shadow.
One day, Gajju woke up to find Chutki missing. Panicked, he rushed out of the small house shouting for her. But Chutki was nowhere to be found! Gajju knew in his heart that something must have happened to his little friend. He turned and fled towards the agricultural fields, where his father and uncle would be working. If anyone could help him find Chutki, it was his father.
“Babuji, babuji, come quickly!” Gajju cried upon seeing his father. His father was squatting on the ground, prodding at the soil. He looked over his shoulder and then sprang to his feet at the sight of Gajju’s terrified expression.
“What happened, son?” he asked, gripping the boy by the shoulders and looking into his eyes. “Are you well? Is everything ok with mai and dadima?”
“Something’s wrong with Chutki!” Gajju said tearfully. “She’s gone missing!”
His father scratched his chin. “Well, she couldn’t have wandered very far. She’s too young to travel long distances. We’ll find her. Don’t worry, Gajju.” He strode towards the edge of the field with his son trailing behind. “Let’s get one of the dogs to sniff her out.”
As his father went to find one of the village dogs, Gajju waited by the fence. He chewed on his fingernail, hoping that Chutki was all right. Suddenly, he heard a strange sneezing sound. Wait! Wasn’t that the call of a chinkara? The sneezing sound came again, faint but recognizable, and all at once Gajju knew it was Chutki calling to him. He took off in the direction of the sound, running as fast as his legs could carry him. “I’m coming, Chutki!” he panted aloud as he ran.
He skidded to a stop near a small clearing amidst clumps of mesquite or baavlia (Prosopis juliflora) trees. The thorns cut his arms as he pushed his way to the clearing, but Gajju hardly noticed, because in front of him was Chutki, her legs trembling and ears flopping, facing two hungry jackals.
The jackals glanced at Gajju and then focused on the chinkara once again, clearly dismissing the boy’s presence. Chutki huffed in fear, her eyes rolling. She looked exhausted, and Gajju felt anger welling up inside him.
“Go away!” he shouted, flapping his arms and taking a step towards the jackals. His father had always told him to appear big and confident when confronting a predator. “You can’t have her! She’s my friend, not your next meal!” The jackals retreated a step but one of them—the female—darted around Chutki, making the chinkara turn back to glance at her. The male snapped at Chutki from the front, and then leapt backwards as Gajju rushed towards him. Gajju was terrified of the jackals, but all he could think of was poor, frightened Chutki. He couldn’t stand by and watch the jackals attack her!
All at once, the cacophony of barking rent the air and two large village guard dogs burst into the clearing. Behind them came Gajju’s father, carrying a stout stick. At the sight of the dogs, the jackals fled into the thick brush. Gajju rushed to Chutki and dropped to his knees beside her, flinging his arms around her neck. “Oh, my poor Chutki, did they attack you?”
“Let me check her,” said his father kindly. He quickly examined the little chinkara, running his hands over her trembling body. “She’s fine, just terrified and probably in need of a good nap. Here, let me carry her back home.” He scooped up Chutki and beckoned to Gajju. The dogs joined them as they started back to the village.
“That was very brave of you, son,” said Gajju’s father as they walked along the dust path, the Prosopis trees forming a thorny barrier beside them. “Facing two jackals all by yourself is not an easy task for a little boy like you.”
Gajju shrugged. “I had to, Babuji. It was for Chutki. I couldn’t have left her alone to defend herself.” He shuddered. “I hate jackals. Those two would have killed her.”
His father half-smiled. “They’re carnivores, son. That’s what they do. Just as we are vegetarian, they eat flesh to survive. We cannot blame them for doing what nature intended them to do.”
“But they could have killed Chutki!”
“And now, we know that we need to keep a closer watch on her until she is fast enough to escape,” Babuji said calmly. “Don’t blame the jackals, son. Blame yourself for losing track of her. She is your responsibility.”
“I’ll never let her out of my sight again,” Gajju vowed fervently. “I’m sorry, Chutki. I let you down.”
Chutki opened one eye sleepily and huffed. Babuji smiled.
“I think she has forgiven you,” he said, as they arrived at the Bishnoi village. Gajju heaved a sigh of relief.
“I’m going to build Chutki a small pen when we get home, so that she will always be safe and not wander off,” said the little boy.
“And one day, when she is big and strong, we will let her return to the wild, as she was meant to be,” replied his father.
Thanks to their bright, cheerful plumage, hefty, crooked bill, and spindly legs—one often held aloft in that iconic balanced position—flamingos are instantly recognisable to people around the world.
Although we often refer to them as ‘pink flamingos’, there are actually six different species of flamingos, all in varying hues of light red. These include: the American (also called Caribbean, Cuban, or rosy), greater, Chilean, lesser, Andean, and puna (or James) flamingo. The greater flamingo is the largest, while, unsurprisingly, the lesser is the smallest—and because the two live together in many parts of Africa, we are able to observe this startling size difference in the wild.
Around the world, in different cultures spanning thousands of years, flamingos have been famous for their dazzling feathers. The Mesopotamian people named them issur nuri or ‘the bird of light’, while ancient Arabic speakers referred to them as nuham or ‘the flaming one’. There are even some theories that the flamingos’ fiery plumage and their habit of mysteriously disappearing and then unexpectedly reappearing days, or even weeks, later, may have inspired the myth of the phoenix.
Fossils of the early ancestors of flamingos have been collected from five continents. Some of the specimens date back to the Cretaceous era—approximately 120 million years ago. Samples from two million years ago—not nearly as long ago but still fairly old—reveal flamingos that look surprisingly similar to those we see today, meaning they must have lived in similar environments and behaved in similar ways all this time.
While we often picture them standing still by the water’s edge or striding through the shallows, flamingos are actually good swimmers. In fact, they are more closely related to swimming birds like grebes than they are to wading birds like herons. It has taken scientists decades to figure this out because flamingos are notoriously challenging to study. They live in remote places that often have no direct access by road. The sites have very saline water, and the salt crystals can coat the terrain, making it jagged and hard to walk across. Many flamingo researchers from the 19th and early 20th centuries reported wearing holes in their boots trying to get close enough to the birds to study them properly.
Living in such inhospitable places has been beneficial to flamingos because it has kept them safe for millions of years. Few other creatures can survive in such extremes. For flamingos living in Africa, it is often the case that the only fresh water available to drink is as hot as a cup of coffee. Their cousins in the South American plateaus, however, may need to break free from ice each morning, after the water has frozen around their legs while they sleep.
Flamingos can get chilly even at warmer sites, and researchers think that their notable one-legged stance is a method of ‘thermoregulation’; adjusting their body temperature—by tucking one leg up close, they can retain body heat in the same way we do when crossing our arms.
In lakes, whether warm or cool, flamingos feed on tiny creatures like brine shrimp and blue-green bacteria (cyanobacteria), which they filter from the water with the help of little combshaped structures in their bills called ‘lamellae’. It takes a lot of effort to find enough of these microscopic animals to keep their bellies full, so the majority of their time is spent feeding. It is worth the effort, though—not only does it keep them from feeling hungry, but these little organisms contain the pigments that give flamingos their bright, beautiful colours. (Humans can experience a similar effect from eating too many carrots!).
Another benefit of living in remote wetlands is that these sites offer a great place for flamingos to nest. The birds make cone-shaped mounds of mud by scooping it up with their bills, until the nests are high enough for them to sit on comfortably. This requires a decent amount of mud, which means that breeding typically only happens after a good bout of rain.
When the conditions seem right, flamingos signal their readiness by engaging in elaborate marching and dancing manoeuvres. At sites like Lake Natron in Tanzania, millions of flamingos gather to nest, and dances may involve many hundreds of birds at a time.
These large population numbers sound promising, but flamingos are fairly vulnerable overall. For instance, there are thought to be only 34,000 Andean flamingos, and of the three million or so lesser flamingos—the most abundant species—90 percent nest at a single site – which leaves them very exposed should anything happen to the environment. Wetland habitats are threatened around the world because of human activity, and wild flamingos are known to be quite sensitive to disturbances, such as car and air traffic. This may prevent them from breeding, which is especially problematic since they typically don’t attempt their first nest until they are at least ten years old; although, fortunately, they can live several decades more, if ‘Mr James’, a 60-year-old resident at the Slimbridge facility in the United Kingdom, is any indication.
In the past, humans have used flamingos for some pretty strange purposes. In South America, for example, flamingo products were used to treat lung disorders, while ancient Mediterranean sailors were thought to have traded flamingo feathers for Cornish tin. Today, however, the main ‘use’ of flamingos is as a study species in zoos and conservation facilities, where scientists are working hard to learn how best to keep animals safe, healthy, and happy in captivity, and how to maintain captive populations that can be used to repopulate wild habitats should there ever be a need.
This is beneficial both to the birds and to humans, since flamingos thrive in zoos and are also one of the most popular attractions worldwide, drawing visitors whose entry fees can be used to support conservation efforts for flamingos and other wildlife. Of course, it is also possible to see flamingos in the wild, especially in tourist destinations like The Bahamas, Kenya, and India.
If you can’t make it to one of these locations, though, don’t worry. You can add some pink flamingo cheer to your garden with one of Don Featherstone’s famous plastic flamingos (invented in 1957 and still on sale today), check out one of the fabulous books on flamingos recommended below, or spend some time on one of the flamingo activities included in this issue!
QUIZ : How much do you know about the flamingo?
What is the flamingo’s closest relative?
How many species of flamingos are there in the world?
Which mythical creature has been associated with flamingos?
What did the Phoenicians (ancient sailors) get from the Cornish in exchange for flamingo feathers?
What shape is a flamingo nest?
Why do flamingos march around in big groups?
Which species of flamingo is the tallest?
Who invented the pink plastic garden flamingo?
Where is the home of the oldest known flamingo, ‘Mr James’?
What sort of habitat does a flamingo typically live in?
Humans have used flamingo products to treat illnesses of what body part?
What food items make flamingos pink?
What is the name of the structure in flamingos’ mouths that lets them filter out their tiny prey from the water?
Why do flamingos stand on one leg?
Answers:
the grebe 2. six 3. the phoenix 4. tin 5. a cone with a flat/sunken top 6. they are preparing for mating season and looking for a mate 7. Greater Flamingo 8. Don Featherstone 9. Slimbridge, UK; he is approximately 60 years old saline, alkaline lakes, or more generally, a wetland 11. Lungs 12. brine shrimp, cyanobacteria 13. lamellae 14. probably to thermoregulate—to stay warm.
Whether you live in a city or in the countryside, along the coast or in the middle of the forest, you can have a great relationship with nature. And no matter how good your relationship with nature already is, you can make it even better!
Below is a list of questions that will help you do this by encouraging you to think about organisms, places, and activities that you might be taking for granted—things that might seem ordinary because you have gotten used to them, when actually they are incredible!
Although you could answer the questions out loud, we hope you will create visual responses—for example, by drawing a picture or constructing your answer out of LEGO ® or other building blocks. No matter what form your answer takes, we hope you come up with lots of fun and interesting ideas, which you share with people around you so that they can build a better relationship with nature, too*.
What is your favourite species? (For this and the next question, you can’t select humans or any animal that you have as a pet, no matter how much you might love them! Think about animals, plants, fungi—even microbes!—that you might encounter in nature.) Why is this your favourite—is there an interesting fact that you can share about this organism? If not, see if you can learn something new about this species and then share it with a friend or family member.
What is a species that has had a big impact on your life? If you are having a hard time answering, it might help to think about how organisms have influenced one of the following aspects of your daily routine: food, medicine, getting work done, making crafts, or keeping your environment healthy. How would your life change if this species weren’t in it?
What is a species that humans have had a big impact on? You might think of a relationship that you yourself have had with wildlife, or you might think of an example that involves human activities more generally. Can you think of any situations where humans have affected many different species at the same time or in the same place? Do you think that humans tend to have a positive or negative impact on other organisms?
What is your favourite place to encounter nature? No place is off-limits—it can be as near or as far, as big or as small, as you like. If you don’t have a favourite place, maybe you could think of some spots to explore. For example, you could visit each room in your apartment or house to see which window looks out on the largest number of birds flying past in a 5-minute period, or you could step outside your front door and see which side of the road has the largest number of fungi, mosses, or plants growing in the cracks. No matter which place you choose, think about what makes it so special— what sorts of species do you find there, and what interesting things are they doing?
How can you ensure that any place is a good place to enjoy nature? This might involve noticing, enjoying, and having a positive impact on other species wherever you go. What could you do to achieve those goals?
From frantic wildebeests crossing the Mara River in East Africa, to the lofty flight of bar-headed geese over the Himalayas and the frenetic upstream run of sockeye salmon in the Cascade Range of North America, migration defines the life of many animals around the world in the skies, oceans, rivers, mountains, as well as plains. This life strategy entails cyclical, predictable, and seasonal patterns of movement through which individual animals complete their life cycle at separate places that can range from short to extremely long distances. For instance, while the Christmas Island red crab migrates just over 4 km between terrestrial and marine environments in the Indian Ocean, the Arctic tern completely shifts hemispheres by flying from the Arctic to Antarctica and back in a 17,000-km journey each way.
Migration has evolved independently across a wide range of animals, including crustaceans (e.g., lobsters), insects (e.g., butterflies), fish (e.g., tunas), reptiles (e.g., sea turtles), birds (e.g., raptors), and mammals (e.g., whales). This suggests that migration is advantageous—animals are able to maximise their survival by exploiting ephemeral yet superabundant resources, as well as avoid unfavorable environmental conditions, including harsh weather and predation, at critical stages of their life cycle, such as breeding. This seasonal tracking of favourable conditions thus usually leads to movement in large aggregations, creating one of nature’s greatest spectacles.
Migratory species have been important to humans across multiple dimensions—tangible and intangible. Many migratory species are exploited as food, as in the case of commercially harvested tuna species, and caribou, which are harvested for subsistence purposes. On the other hand, a well-known case of non-consumptive use of migratory species is ecotourism. For example, the migration of humpback whales along the coasts of virtually all continents creates many job opportunities through whale watching tourism. Additionally, migratory species provide important ecosystem services through transport of nutrients and interactions with other species across different environments. For example, Pacific salmon, which spend most of their lives in the ocean, are important fertilizers of carbon-rich and climate-regulating temperate rainforests, as their mass migrations to spawn in inland waterways results in tons of nutrient-rich carcasses that are shuffled on the forest floor by hungry animals, such as bears. Some of the close connections between humans and migratory species have unsurprisingly become embedded in cultural expressions, such as festivals. For instance, Colombia’s upstream migration festival or ‘Festival de la Subienda’, is held in a small city on the shores of the Magdalena river to celebrate the bounty brought by the migration of multiple fish species of commercial and subsistence importance.
Despite their apparent abundance in many cases, migratory species cannot be taken for granted. North American skies that were once darkened by large roving flocks of passenger pigeons are now just part of a cautionary tale. This species used to migrate between nesting areas in the Northeastern United States, moving as far south as Florida during winter. However, overhunting and habitat loss drove them to extinction by the early 1900s. The story of the passenger pigeon looms over us once again, with many migratory species currently at risk of extinction. Examples include the saiga antelope, the orange-bellied parrot, and the American eel, amongst others. Similar mechanisms seem to be at play in the decline of these species. Depending upon their migratory patterns, habitat loss can have disproportionate effects on populations as they congregate in large numbers at specific sites during their life cycle. Likewise, managing harvest can be very challenging as individual animals often straddle multiple political jurisdictions with different regulatory contexts, potentially leading to overuse.
Recognising these impacts, efforts have been underway to conserve and restore populations of migratory species. These strategies require cooperation and coordination between people, organisations, and governments along their migratory routes. Within this context, multiple international agreements have been developed with a focus on various groups of migratory animals. Examples include the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS), the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles, the Polar Bear Agreement, the Agreement on the Conservation of Populations of European Bats, and the China-Russia Migratory Bird Agreement. Some of these mechanisms have been supplemented by local governments and non-governmental organisations, such as the Network of Urban Nature Reserves of Patagonia, which works on migratory shorebird conservation to support hemispheric conservation efforts in the Americas. Arrangements of cooperation and coordination have enabled the deployment of specific on- ground actions for conserving migratory species, such as the construction of overpasses across highways to allow the safe passage of pronghorn during migration south of Yellowstone National Park in western North America. Additionally, trans-frontier systems of protected areas have been established to secure the habitat of migratory wildebeest and zebra in East and Southern Africa.
Conserving migratory species remains a challenge; however, there are reasons for hope. As researchers continue to unveil long-unknown migrations through the use of ever improving tracking technology, policy makers are better informed to decide where conservation efforts are best rolled out. Likewise, this very information is being adopted by environmental educators and advocates to build narratives that mobilise public and political support based on the amazing journeys of these animals. In line with these ideas, Current Conservation decided to throw the spotlight on migratory species with this special issue, as they are incredibly important, are in peril, and require specific conservation approaches.
This special issue includes a wide breadth of contributions from various perspectives, regions of the world, ecosystems, and groups of animals. We open with an article by Sahas Barve on the ecology and physiology of birds that migrate between places at extremely different elevations, demonstrating their marvelous adaptations. We are then transported to Mexico, where Kirsten Lear explains how migratory bats play a key role in culturally and economically important landscapes. Beyond their biology and roles in ecosystems, migratory species also bear important cultural significance in their own right, as shown with cranes in South Asia in a captivating piece by David Hecht. The role of technology in studying animal migration is absolutely critical, and its development and use is reviewed by Jared Stabach. Along these lines, Rob Harcourt takes us on a personal tour of exciting field work to study the movements of seals in Antarctica. Finally, we end with some delightful storytelling by Kate Mansfield and Liliana Colman, who help us experience migration through the eyes of a sea turtle. We hope this collection of articles sparks further interest in, and support for, these marvelous travelers.
As a kid growing up in Mumbai, I often played on the beach. Our football would sometimes disperse a flock of white birds with grey wings sitting by the water. Those birds were brown-headed gulls, winter migrants that are commonly seen around water bodies throughout peninsular India. But they are part of an elite class of only 92 species worldwide (less than one percent of over 10,000 bird species) that show what scientists— Jessie L. Williamson and Christopher C. Witt—call Elevational Niche-Shift Migration (ENSM). ENSM is a special kind of migration where birds not only move seasonally between locations, but also these locations have over 2000 metres (6600 feet) of difference in elevation. Those brown-headed gulls eating chips and gathiya (Indian snacks) that you drop on the beach are doing something incredible every year, flying over the Himalayas to breed on the Tibetan plateau.
Thousands of species of birds spend their summers in their breeding habitats and migrate significant distances to their non-breeding or winter habitats every year. Some species, like the bar-tailed godwit, make epic 12000 km non-stop flights, and even the tiny 4-gram ruby-throated hummingbird flies from Canada to Central America and back every year. But almost all migratory species’ breeding and non-breeding habitats are at low elevations (for example, the Indian pitta). ENSM species, on the other hand, migrate between summer and winter habitats that are very different in elevation and, thus, over 20 percent different in their oxygen availability. Moreover, most spend their summers breeding in the more hypoxic (low oxygen) high elevation habitats where all activities—flying, maintaining body temperature, feeding, avoiding predators— are much more energy intensive than at lower elevations. Talk about high achievers!
After collating information on the migration ecology of thousands of birds, Williamson and Witt discovered that ENSM species are spread out across the avian tree of life. Songbirds (such as finches, warblers, and flycatchers) comprised the biggest single group, but sandpipers, gulls, cranes, pigeons, and hummingbirds are also some species with ENSM movement. Each clade has independently evolved this extreme lifestyle, which is especially concentrated in birds of the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau.
For any oxygen-breathing animal, enduring such a 20 percent change in oxygen availability is quite significant. High elevation organisms (including humans in the Ethiopian highlands, Tibet, and the Andes) have several modifications to their physiology that increase their ability to extract oxygen from the air. These include changes in the breathing pattern, blood circulation, blood chemistry (increased hemoglobin concentration, increased size and number of red blood cells), etc. However, high elevation adaptations come with a cost if you don’t live in a high elevation environment, such as highly viscous blood due to the increased red blood cell counts, making the blood more difficult to circulate. So, having high elevation adaptations in a low elevation environment for many months of the year creates a dangerous animal-environment mismatch.
The scientists suggest two models to explain how ENSM evolved: 1) High elevation habitats may match the winter ranges of these birds in temperature and habitat, or 2) Himalayan birds may also have evolved ENSM as their summer breeding habitats slowly rose up in elevation over millions of years, giving them the time to adapt.
Williamson and Witt argue that ENSM species may achieve these feats of physiology by not having a specialized high elevation or low elevation system, but rather a highly flexible physiology. This would give them the ability to quickly change their body to survive in a new environment, thus helping them cope with these extreme changes twice a year. Given the handful of ENSM species worldwide, it appears though that this physiological flexibility is difficult to evolve and a lot remains to be studied.
So the next time you see a brown-headed gull, grey wagtail, greenish warbler or common sandpiper, know that they may be common birds, but under the hood they are incredible animals!
Further reading: Williamson, J. L. and C. C. Witt. 2021. Elevational niche-shift migration: Why the degree of elevational change matters for the ecology, evolution, and physiology of migratory birds. Ornithology 138(2): ukaa087.
The moon rises above the jagged mountains, casting a soft, pale light on clusters of towering agave stalks and their branches full of flowers. A gentle breeze sways the flowers and the pungent odour of the sweet nectar wafts towards us as we sit, silent and waiting, by the agave. We hear a soft whoosh by our heads. Suddenly our infrared camera screen comes alive with frantic activity as a group of seven small, brown bats flit up to the flowers in rapid-fire succession. A split second is all each bat needs to lap up the sugary nectar that fuels their nightly foraging bouts. They continue their aerial feeding dance for several minutes, until they decide it’s time to move on to the next agave patch. They will continue this pattern throughout the night, taking periodic rests among rock outcrops or their roosting caves, where they groom, socialize, and rest.
These hungry bats are endangered Mexican long-nosed bats (Leptonycteris nivalis). Undertaking a spectacular 1200-km annual migration, pregnant females leave the mating cave in central Mexico to seek out a handful of maternity caves in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, to give birth to their single pup. Males stay behind in bachelor colonies.
Mexican long-nosed bats, along with their close relative the Lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae), feed on the energy-rich nectar from agave plants in the desert and mountain ecosystems they call home. Not quite as graceful or able to hover as hummingbirds, they get covered in yellow pollen during their rhythmic feeding bouts. They move among agave patches throughout the night, spreading this pollen near and far. Able to carry and disperse pollen over 50 km in a night—much farther than most birds or insects—these bats are critical to connecting agave populations, helping maintain their genetic diversity and ultimately increasing resilience to threats, such as pest and disease outbreaks. However, these nectar-feeding bats aren’t the only players that have a close relationship with agaves. Another key player? People.
Agaves and people
The next afternoon as the bats are tucked away in their cave, I take a walk with Armando, a Mexican farmer whose family lives in a communal ejido in the mountains of Nuevo León. We stroll through his parcela, the agricultural plot where he and his family grow corn, beans, and other crops. He stops along the fence line at a two-metre-tall agave with a large hole carved from the centre. Bending over, he scoops a cupful of cloudy liquid from the hole: agua miel, or “honey water”, the sap of the plant. I taste the liquid: it’s sweet but with a very plant-like taste. “Agaves are the sustenance of the ranch,” he says.
Like Armando, many rural ejidatarios (farmers) across Mexico harvest and use agave plants to obtain traditional beverages like agua miel and pulque (fermented agua miel); to distil liquors like tequila and mezcal for sale in local, regional, or even international markets; to feed to livestock, especially in times of drought; to serve as “living fences” that keep livestock out of crops or to delineate property boundaries; to retain soil and prevent erosion on hillslopes and along roadsides. Agaves sustain their livelihoods, allowing them to retain their homes and ties to the land even when other livelihood sources, such as livestock and farming, let them down. With increasing periods and severity of droughts and increasing desertification in Mexico, drought-tolerant agaves offer a lifeline for many families.
Armando points down to the base of the agave at several small baby agaves, called hijos, growing from the mother plant. These hijos are clones, underground offshoots that are genetically identical to the mother plant. Like their mother, they too will eventually shoot up a massive flowering stalk and offer nectar to bats and other animals. Clonal reproduction offers a safeguard to the mother plant in the event that seed production through pollination is not successful. For many agave species, sexual reproduction through seeds helps maintain genetic diversity, while clonal reproduction can help maintain population numbers.
In fact, Armando explains that for many agave species, proper “castration” of the mother plant—hollowing out the centre of the plant to create the hole where the agua miel collects—stimulates production of clonal hijos. This provides the harvester with new baby plants that they can then transplant as living fences or for future harvest. Thus, harvest of agaves, combined with sustainable ranching practices, can be an important way to safeguard agave populations for future use by people.
The importance of agaves for bat migration
When agaves are left to flower, they provide an important food source to nectar bats and are pollinated in turn, thus completing the cycle that benefits bats, agaves, and people. Rural communities throughout Mexico, as well as private and government lands in the U.S., are important stepping stones along the bats’ migratory route, connecting critical roosting caves with a path of foraging resources.
Back at the agave we had monitored the night before, the vibrant yellow flowers are beginning to shrivel in the sun and heat. As agave flowers shrivel across the landscape, the bats move along on their migration. Flower death does not, however, signal the end of the agave’s life cycle. The pollinated flowers soon become ovular fruits, with hundreds of tiny black seeds nestled inside. These fertilized seeds give the plant an opportunity to pass on its legacy in the form of new seedlings, if they successfully germinate.
Native to deserts and semi-arid habitats and with over 250 species worldwide, agaves have been part of cultural landscapes for over 10,000 years. However, agave populations and the habitats where they occur are being lost to various threats, such as expansion of agriculture, unsustainable ranching, urban development, and climate change. Loss of agaves affects both the migratory bats and the people that rely on them. Efforts to restore agave habitat are being undertaken by organizations like Bat Conservation International. Through diverse partnerships with NGOs, state and federal agencies, industry partners, and local communities across the southwestern United States and Mexico, Bat Conservation International is promoting agave planting, sustainable agave use, and other land use practices that support both threatened bat populations and human livelihoods.
Naturally dispersed by wind and water, tiny agave seeds get a helping hand from Bat Conservation International’s partners. By propagating and nurturing the seeds into little seedlings for planting back in the wild, these agaves get a new chance to grow tall on the landscape and once again feed the bats and provide sustenance and livelihoods to people. Exclusion of restored areas from herbivores helps ensure the plants’ survival. Community training in sustainable agriculture and ranching practices helps ensure that communities can make a living from their land long into the future. Long-term community conservation agreements ensure that the agaves are protected until they flower and that restoration efforts are co-designed in ways that benefit the communities. Market-based initiatives like the Bat Friendly™ Tequila and Mezcal project, launched by Dr. Rodrigo Medellín of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and David Suro of the Tequila Interchange Project, work with liquor producers to certify agave farms that let five percent of their crop flower for pollinating bats.
These efforts to restore and protect a “nectar corridor” for migratory bats and communities require bi- national collaboration between Mexico and the U.S., bringing together people and linking ideas across a vast landscape. I think back to my walk earlier with Armando and recall a statement he made that couldn’t be truer or more motivational: “For us the agave is so noble that it gives us life.” Agaves do indeed give us life. But it’s not just us—agaves support a wealth of healthy ecosystems and wildlife species, some of them migratory. It is our responsibility to protect and restore agave habitats before it is too late and species like the Mexican long-nosed bat are lost forever.
Further Reading
Bat Conservation International. 2021. Agave restoration. https://www.batcon.org/our-work/protect-restore-landscapes/agave-restoration/. Accessed on October 5, 2021.
Bat Conservation International. 2020. Boosting bats by restoring Mexico’s agaves. https://www.batcon.org/article/boosting-bats-by-restoring-mexicos-agaves/. Accessed on October 5, 2021.
Bat Friendly Project. https://www.batfriendly.org/. Accessed on October 5, 2021
We wait as the sun disappears behind the darkening mountains, the chill of winter settling into our bones without the warm beams of daylight enshrining the high-altitude wetland valley. The only sounds are our gentle breathing—making clouds of vapour illuminated by a rising moon—and the distant trumpet of black-necked cranes flying towards their roosting ponds. Deep in the winter of the new year, we listen as they move invisibly through the cover of night: gentle rustles of dark grey and black feathers and a quiet ripple of icy water as they land together. Gangtey-Phobjikha valley has long been blessed with the presence of the revered Thrung Thrung Karmo, as black-necked cranes are known in Dzongkha and Monpa languages. These birds are winter migrants from the Tibetan Plateau where they breed, finding refuge in the warmer, wetland valleys of the Kingdom of Bhutan, Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh in India, and parts of southern China.
Our team of scientists have been brought together by a single goal—to successfully capture and attach satellite transmitters to several black-necked cranes for a long-term study on their migratory patterns and movement ecology. The odds of success would feel immensely stacked against us, were it not for the collective wisdom and expertise of this team of crane scientists from Bhutan’s first and oldest non-governmental environmental organization, The Royal Society for the Protection of Nature (RSPN), and Crane Conservation Germany (Kranichschutz Deutschland).
As we sit quietly in the dark, listening, waiting for any sign that the capture set-up has been successful, the distant histories and memories of this place envelop me. For how many centuries has this protected valley sheltered Thrung Thrung Karmo and other migratory waterbirds from the harsh winter months of Tibet—the roof of the world? Here, where they are warmed by lower elevations and the welcome hospitality of the Bhutanese people that have called this valley home for generations. Many residents of Gangtey- Phobjikha consider the black-necked crane to be heavenly birds, divine messengers, and reincarnations of Bodhisattvas1. For many farmers, it is considered a blessing of good harvest for the year should migrating cranes land and dance in their fields of potatoes, turnips, barley, and buckwheat. Still others claim migrating cranes circumambulate the central monastery three times before descending into the valley in the winter, and again while ascending out of the valley on their way to their spring breeding grounds on the Tibetan Plateau.
Rubbing my hands together for warmth, waiting in the darkened silence, I dwell on the many connections that have formed through the centuries between cranes and mountain communities, manifest in paintings of cranes on the walls of traditional farmhouses; cranes ornately carved into the eaves of the wooden gateway of Gangtey Goenpa, the central monastery of the valley; stories of cranes threaded into traditional dances and woven into songs that mimic their characteristic call: Thrung Thrung, Thrung Thrung. I am reminded of one such traditional Bhutanese song, shared with me many years ago by my friend and colleague, Jigme—the guiding voice of this field excursion, who is in turn a leader in crane conservation and research in the country. I sit next to him as we wait some more through the night, a gentle wind blowing around us, sweeping through the expansive valley, covered in frost, when this song loops in my mind:
This song of antiquity, amongst many others of its kind, marks a long history between the people of this Kingdom and the cranes, which migrate from areas such as Lithang in Kham Province, Tibet. This region, which is intricately tied to Tibetan Buddhist histories and living traditions, was the birthplace of the Seventh and Tenth Dalai Lama. As I sing the song silently like a mantra in my head, I recognize its reminiscence to a verse, attributed to the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, frequently taken as a reference to his commencing rebirth: “Oh white crane, lend me your wings, I’m not going far and away, I’ll return through the land of Lithang, and thence, return again.” Inscribed in both this poetic verse and traditional song are geographical and historical linkages to Eastern Tibet. Each is animated by the migration of the world’s only alpine crane species, the black-necked crane, traversing across the Eastern Himalayas through centuries of song, dance, and recorded tradition.
The moon is high in the sky now, casting a silvery glow across the valley floor. Still, no sign of movement from the roosting cranes. Jigme keeps a watchful eye through the darkness, as I stay lost in thought. Another story enters my mind, shared with me by Sonam, a Bhutanese cultural scholar and friend. He tells me of a 17th century religious teacher who lived in this very valley we wait in now: Tendzin Lekrpai Dondrup, the Second Gangteng Trulku3 (born in 1645). Unable to return to Tibet to see his precious teacher, reportedly the Third reincarnation of Pema Lingpa4, Tendzin wished to send a message. In his melancholic reverence, he sings a song to the black-necked cranes of the valley, asking them to carry his message of respect to his master as they fly back to Tibet, high over the green mountain passes, when the winter frost thaws.
A distant splash breaks my concentration. Our group jumps to attention as we realize that a roosting crane may be caught. We rush off into the night, wading through the ice-laced waters and frosted wetland grasses, to spot an adult crane perfectly held by a leg hold—a time-honored trapping practice, perfected over many years by crane researchers around the world. The hold is released as Jigme cradles the crane gently under his arm. He walks slowly back across the wetland to the field truck, where he kneels in front of the team, a crane tucked safely at his side. The crane is fitted with a solar-powered transmitter—a small device as big as a bundle of incense sticks—that connects to the global cellular network and communicates geographic positions at regular intervals. This device, a humble, microchipped messenger, will tell us precisely where this crane goes, by sending regular signals along the path of their upcoming spring migration to Tibet. As we release the crane to rejoin the others, into the peaceful embrace of night, I am filled with gratitude for the many ways in which we tell our collective stories, and for our world’s many messengers—the songs and signals that are sent upon the wings of the crane—in the present century, those that have passed, and those still to come.
Whether through old songs, narrative verse, or solar-powered transmitter, the black-necked cranes are indeed our precious predecessors, hosts of the skies and the valleys, well-deserving of our reverence. As we drive home to warm beds and peaceful dreams, I am transported to an interview conversation held six years ago with the current Gangtey Khenpo—head of the central monastery of the Gangtey-Phobjikha valley. I had asked him about the significance of cranes in this place, and he replied: “Actually, the land is sacred, and the cranes are noble creatures… The cranes are enlightened, they are also found in heaven. They are very noble, show kindness, help each other, and are very compassionate. They are different from the other birds. They can fly high up, like an airplane… one of foreign disciples did research on this. He wrote a letter on the neck of the crane, and that crane was seen again .”
Perhaps it is the majesty of these magnificent, migratory birds that has fostered such goodwill and inspiration through the generations, and why many dedicated individuals have worked tirelessly to protect critical habitats within their migratory flyway—a route regularly used by large numbers of migrating birds. We see ourselves in them, in their strength, ability, grace, fidelity to place and partner. If we learn to hold their many stories and embrace diverse ways of telling them—across culture, language, discipline, and time—perhaps we can better serve them, as they serve us.
As a conservation social scientist, these memories paint for me a living tapestry—by song and by satellite—of cranes as messengers. Messengers that speak to the richness that can be illuminated when science embraces multiple ways of transmitting knowledge to inform conservation decision-making. It’s an achievable goal that can be equitably and inclusively accomplished in partnership with indigenous peoples and local communities. If we choose to listen, these types of historical connections and animating stories can be found threaded through just about everything. And if we do more than listen, we will realize they can add depth, dimension, and meaning to our growing scientific knowledge base through collective environmental and political action. Stories, precious messages from our predecessors, improve our capacity to understand the world’s many challenges and complexities. If we work together in partnership with communities who hold generations of storied expertise, then we will be better positioned to know, conserve, and protect migratory species, like the Thrung Thrung Karmo.
Footnotes
¹Bodhisattva, wylie (byang chub sems dpa’), is a beingon the path of enlightenment for the sake of others
²Translated from Dzongkha to English by Tandin Wangmo
³Trulku, Wylie (prul sku), is a reincarnate custodian in a lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, often recognized as the rebirth of a previous practitioner.
⁴Pema Lingpa was a famous 15th century Bhutanese saint and revered discoverer of spiritual treasures, or Terchen, Wylie (gter chen)
From hiking in the forest to navigating to the best slice of pizza in New York City, GPS technology has transformed our everyday lives and become a mainstay in our travel and business sectors. For wildlife researchers, GPS technology has been nothing short of revolutionary. The first living being tracked from space was an elk, fitted with a cartoonishly large tracking collar by pioneering wildlife researchers Frank and John Craighead near Jackson Hole, Wyoming in February 1970. Dubbed ‘Monique the Space Elk’ by the national media, Monique’s rudimentary collar weighed a whopping 10 kg (the weight of an average car tyre), cost roughly USD 25,000, and boasted an average positional error of approximately 50 km² (about 10,000 football pitches).
Today, some 31 Global Positioning System satellites encircle the earth, providing geolocation information to GPS receivers almost anywhere with unprecedented precision (within 2–10 metres or better in optimal conditions). At the same time, the weight, storage capacity, and cost of GPS tracking devices have all improved significantly. These advancements have allowed for an increasing diversity of species—from meadowlarks to blue whales—to be tracked for days, months, or years at temporal resolutions (hours, minutes, or seconds) that would have seemed unimaginable during initial experiments so many decades ago.
Countless discoveries have been made thanks to data collected via GPS. Researchers have mapped the migratory pathways of ungulates across the North American intermountain west, estimated the area requirements of Mongolian gazelle—an astounding 11 times the size of Yellowstone National Park, revealed the importance of collective decision-making in gregarious primates, and assessed the role of long-term memory in how marine and terrestrial mammals select resources. These findings illustrate a brief snapshot of the breadth of research being conducted by scientists globally using GPS and highlight the importance of this technology in spurring scientific discovery.
Nearly concurrent to the development of GPS technology, earth scientists were also looking to the stars to better understand our changing planet. The recent launch of Landsat 9 in September 2021 marks an almost 50-year record of earth observation, with satellites capturing the entire surface of the earth every eight days at roughly 30-metre spatial resolution. Importantly, these data have been made freely available to the global science community, promoting a surge in earth science research and discovery. Data collected from successive satellite missions has led to a better understanding of agricultural productivity, changes in land-cover, forest health, water quality, climate, and even variation in the size of the polar ice cap. By linking these remotely sensed data sources and their derivatives with animal tracking data, researchers have appropriately taken advantage of the vast quantity of information now available to conduct global-scale analyses. These activities are providing an improved understanding of the range of conditions that are driving changes in the persistence of long-range species migrations and most recently, are providing insight into how animals are responding to reductions in human activities resulting from COVID-19 restrictions.
This ability to monitor shifts in animal movement at large spatial scales is increasingly important as anthropogenic pressures drive the alarming loss of animal migrations globally. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for example, estimates that nearly three billion migratory birds have been lost since 1970, representing a 28 percent decline in bird abundance over the past half-century. Studies led by researchers from Utah State University also show that large-bodied herbivores may be at the highest risk of extinction, with barriers from development further limiting the ability of animals to move and acquire the resources required for survival. These findings are concerning on many levels, but perhaps most importantly because animal migrations facilitate the redistribution of energy. The hooves of approximately 1.3 million migrating wildebeest, for example, aerate the soil with every step, circulating nutrients contained within their feces throughout the ecosystem, forming the foundation for ecological food webs and giving rise to diverse biological communities and burgeoning local economies.
To address the mounting challenges of these declines, researchers have joined forces to encourage information sharing and increase the diversity of species being tracked. As an example, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior initiated Movebank in 2007, a free and online digital archive for tracking data that now contains nearly three billion tracking locations from over 1,000 species. More recently, initiatives like the Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean (MiCO) and the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration (GIUM) have (literally) begun putting migrations on the map, with the aim of engaging policy makers and government officials with data highlighting actual movement pathways from tracked animals, to inform decision-making processes.
Still, much work remains to be done to increase the range of species that can be monitored effectively. Current GPS tag weight limits are around 5g, far too heavy for around 70 percent of birds and 65 percent of mammals that call our planet home. Various developers are pushing on this weight limit boundary, with low power GPS tags now as small as 1g that work for short periods—weeks or potentially months, if the frequency of data collection is reduced to less than a few points per day. Scientists associated with the ICARUS initiative are pushing on these restriction thresholds by developing a solar powered tag that could collect hourly data for multiple years, transmitting data on individual animals to a low-orbit receiving antenna attached to the International Space Station. Others, such as non-profits like Smart Parks, are taking advantage of technological spillover and working with a growing community of scientists and engineers to openly share their designs, creating new cost-effective solutions. Continuing to push these technological boundaries offers promise in increasing our understanding of migration, with fine-scale data that can be incorporated into analyses to assess species responses to human-driven environmental change.
These new data streams, however, are complicated in nature and require a unique set of skills to analyse. As a result, collaboration is again necessary to facilitate the sharing of new skills and ideas, often from other disciplines like physics or computer science, to ‘crack the code’ and develop tools that make use of the fine-scale data being collected. The Continuous-Time Movement Modeling framework represents a good example of years of development by quantitative ecologists working together globally, all the while aiming to democratise tools to the broader scientific community through user-friendly interfaces and specialised trainings (i.e., AniMove).
To save animal migrations from disappearing altogether, researchers must continue to push on these technological and analytical boundaries. In addition, researchers will need to broaden collaborations with other researchers, with officials in government and non-government organisations, and with members of local communities where studies are focused. Saving migratory routes will require researchers to connect with audiences beyond traditional academic outlets to provide results in a format that will inspire policy makers and the public to preserve and protect this invaluable phenomenon. Institutions could facilitate this process by evaluating employee contributions to outreach and communication as part of annual performance reviews. At the same time, researchers could create engaging learning opportunities for students by developing lesson plans with educators to showcase the near real-time tracking data being collected (such as the annotated track of a female pronghorn known to researchers as 700031A, as she traverses a diverse land-use matrix in central Wyoming). Indigenous knowledge about contemporary or even extinct migrations could also be incorporated into analyses where data are lacking. Lastly, training the next generation of scientists with the new tools that are being developed is also critical, inclusive of funding opportunities to facilitate trainings in countries where access to resources is more limited. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that global communication networks are allowing us to communicate across continents and time zones like never before. While virtual meetings and seminars are no substitute for developing long-term relationships with partners, they do offer more cost-effective means (and a reduced carbon footprint) to build the required set of skills to analyse data with partners globally.
While the field of movement ecology is a relatively young discipline (formalised in circa 2008), tremendous opportunity exists to build upon promising early achievements. Future studies will likely focus on broadening the historically narrow emphasis on tracking single taxa and individuals, with greater attention on ecosystem- wide interactions between different species. Technology has certainly helped spur this revolution forward, but saving these migrations will require an explicit focus on collaboration between local and international institutions, necessitating scientists to step beyond their comfort in academic dialogue to use data collected to impact decision-making processes and better engage the public. As shown effectively by the Census of Marine Life’s Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, migration knows no political boundaries. Therefore, saving migrations requires government officials at the highest international levels to develop agreements of mutual interest to find ways to facilitate connectivity across rapidly changing land and seascapes.
Further Reading:
Harrison, A. L., D. P. Costa, A. J. Winship, S. R. Benson, S. J. Bograd, M. Antolos, A. B. Carlisle et al. 2018. The political biogeography of migratory marine predators. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 1571–1578.
Kauffman, M. J., F. Cagnacci, S. Chamaillé-Jammes, M. Hebblewhite, J. G. C. Hopcraft, J. A. Merkle, T. Mueller et al. 2021. Mapping out a future for ungulate migrations. Science 372 (6542): 566–569.
Kays, R., M. C. Crofoot, W. Jetz, M. Wikelski. 2015. Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet. Science 348 (6240).
I rise from my bunk and stagger to the mess for coffee and to check the ambient conditions at Scott Base. This New Zealand base is nestled on the southern side of Ross Island, nearly 78°S of the equator. It is late February and the first sunset of the year is soon approaching. I check the weather station—outside it is a balmy -10°C, but most importantly the wind is less than 15 kmph. This means that we should be able to safely head out on to the sea ice without risking drifting away, as strong winds can break up the ice. The team gathers at the Hagglund (a Swedish track truck that handily floats) after a hearty breakfast. Dressed in multiple layers we head down from base, over the transition (the point at which we cross from driving over land to driving on the ice) and towards a cluster of black dots moribund on the ice. As we trundle along, windows fogging, the excitement is palpable. Soon, the black dots grow to large mounds, and a few heads turn briefly to inspect our approach.
We have arrived. We are parked amid a group of moulting Weddell seals, the southernmost breeding mammal on earth. These beautiful 400 kg plus animals have large, oversized brown eyes for gathering light deep under the sea ice, disproportionately small heads and big fat tummies. Their large round shape is a product of their several centimetre-thick blubber layer, which keeps them warm in this most extreme of environments, whether sleeping exposed on the ice to katabatic winds that send freezing air down from high on the Antarctic continent, or hundreds of metres deep in the subzero polar waters. They are lazing around moulting last year’s coat, in readiness for the coming darkness of winter, when the sun doesn’t rise again until spring and they must forage under the ice for fish and other prey, building reserves for the coming breeding season. Many of the females are pregnant and will spend many hours hundreds of metres below the sea foraging in the darkness, only returning to pup the following October.
Antarctic seals and threats to their habitat
Weddell seals are pinnipeds—a group of 33 fin-footed species of carnivorous, semi-aquatic mammals, many of which are migratory, that includes true seals, eared seals (fur seals and sea lions), and the walrus. Female Weddells number around 200,000. All seals give birth out of the water, either on ice or land, but feed at sea. True seals, such as Weddells, feed their young for a relatively short period (from a few days to a few weeks), mate and then may disperse widely across oceans remaining at sea for months. The five species of Antarctic seals—Weddell seal, Ross seal, crabeater seal, leopard seal, and southern elephant seal—show a variety of migratory patterns. Crabeater, leopard, and Ross seals give birth on the pack ice, which forms around the continent each year. Thus, they remain pelagic, feeding below the drifting ice, although leopard seals are also often found near their prey, at penguin colonies. At the other extreme, elephant seals disperse widely from the subantarctic islands they breed and moult on, migrating at times more than 1000 km away to feed in Antarctic waters. Weddells, on the other hand, breed on the fast ice the ice ‘fastened’ to the continental edge—and then disperse to various extents into the seas around their natal areas. This migratory behaviour is what we are here to investigate.
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are critical components of the world’s climate and weather systems. Amongst all continents, Antarctica is the farthest from the equator, as well as the coldest, windiest, and driest. Each winter the sea freezes around it to cover a total area of about 14 million square kilometres. The combination of a circumpolar ocean with the massive freezing and melting of the ice shelves and the extreme cold and dynamic atmosphere, drive interactions that have global implications. It is the most remote of all continents and the only one not permanently inhabited by humans. Yet, even here at the end of the world, there is evidence of anthropogenically-driven climate change playing out in a complex manner, but with effects predicted to grow over the next century, and many implications for, amongst others, these beautiful Weddell seals.
Beyond climate change, human pressures within the region are managed through international cooperation, which is imperative for pinniped conservation given their long-range movements. Within the Southern Ocean, toothfish are not only a valuable fishery, but also form an important prey base for Weddell seals as well as for killer whales and sperm whales. Since Antarctica has been named a continent for science, activities there are managed carefully to comply with the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, also known as the Madrid Protocol. Thus, fishing is also carefully regulated and scientific monitoring of its impacts on other predators is a unique feature of management in the region. Moreover, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources uses an ecosystem-based management approach that includes establishing a network of Marine Protected Areas in the Southern Ocean. This showcases the importance of international cooperation for the conservation of seals, as they often travel between areas under various political jurisdictions.
Tagging Weddells
So here we are, standing on the sea ice, careful not to approach too close to the ice edge. We are on a brittle surface and even though metres thick, the ice can break away and float off into the Ross Sea in a frighteningly swift manner. We drill holes through the ice to measure the ice thickness and make sure we don’t fall through as we work, and we stake out safe areas to work using flags on bamboo poles. We check the seals for their moult status, as we will be attaching tags that measure the sea temperature, salinity and depth, as well as their location, and send us ocean profiles of all these parameters throughout the winter. These tags have transformed our understanding not only of these beautiful animals but of their environment and how it is changing.
Our research is twofold. First, as a collaboration between Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System and our New Zealand cousins at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, we are assessing the impact of fishing in the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area on Weddell seals by tracking their movements and foraging behaviour through the winter. Second, it is part of a huge global initiative, the Global Ocean Observing System, that is monitoring the world’s oceans. Seals like these Weddell seals and their cousins, the elephant seals, have provided over 70 percent of all ocean profiles south of 60°S. These tags send us information through satellites to our warm and comfy offices as our seals roam freely across the Southern Ocean and dive deep to feed in areas extremely difficult, dangerous and expensive to get to with ships during the harsh Antarctic winter.
We find a suitable candidate, a fat, freshly moulted female with the tell-tale shiny stripe of new hair down her back. We carefully approach and pop her into a hoop net, quickly inject a sedative, then release her and move away stealthily, allowing the sedative to act and for her to fall back to sleep. As there are no land predators, Weddell seals are relatively calm in our presence. Many of her compatriots have given us but a cursory glance and fallen back to sleep, and she quickly does the same. When our veterinarian gives us the signal, we approach, place her in a sling below a tripod, hoist her up to get a body weight, lower her back to the ice, and work quickly to collect all our necessary biological samples. We then clean the fur on her head and glue the transmitter to her head, making sure not to let it move out of position as the quick dry glue sets. She will proudly wear this hat until she moults the following October, giving us positions and ocean profiles right throughout the winter and allowing us to track her movements up to 1000 km north of where we stand.
The information we have gathered is critical to understanding the effectiveness of Marine Protected Area boundaries and fishing zones, but also provides us with so much more. This research allows us to see what sort of habitat these animals prefer, and by tracking animals from three different areas of Antarctica, we have shown that movements and habitat preferences are shaped by their local environments. Once they have moulted, our seals disperse. Some do not move very far, and may stay within a few kilometres of where they were tagged throughout the winter, feeding in shallow water over the continental shelf. Others will disperse up the coast and then venture out into the pelagic zone, roaming far into the winter ice, foraging pelagically, all the while preferring areas of high ice concentration. Whether stayers or roamers, all keep to areas of high ice density—perhaps as a way of avoiding their key predator, the killer whale. As more Marine Protected Areas are proposed, this sort of data should allow us to predict how effective they may be for protecting these animals and their prey. At the same time, the oceanographic data and in particular the many ocean profiles are incorporated into, and therefore improving, the models which bodies, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are using to predict future climate change.
Further reading:
Harcourt R. G., M. A. Hindell, C.R. McMahon, K.T. Goetz, K. Heerah, R. R. Holser, J-B. Charrassin et al. 2021. Regional variation in winter foraging strategies by Weddell seals in Eastern Antarctica and the Ross Sea. Frontiers in Marine Science 8: 720335. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2021.720335.
Treasure, A. M., F. Roquet, I. J. Ansorge, M. N. Bester, L. Boehme, H. Bornemann, J-B. Charrassin et al. 2017. Marine mammals exploring the oceans pole to pole: A review of the MEOP Consortium. Oceanography 30(2): 62–68.
If you are reading this, you are likely a human. We humans are terrestrial beasts—we live on land and we can learn to swim, but we require air to breathe. Through our skin, we can feel changes in air or water temperature, the wind blowing, and even water currents nudging or pushing against us. We can hear a range of sounds, taste with our tongues, and communicate with our voices. We are also visual creatures—we can see a spectrum of color, and use color and light to communicate with each other. As humans, we experience the world through sensory windows unique to us; hence, it is easy for us to forget that other creatures may experience and sense the world in very different ways.
Now imagine that you are a sea turtle hatchling, smaller than a deck of cards. You are so small you can easily fit in a human hand. You slowly become aware of your surroundings—you are in a closed dark space. You feel movement around you. The temperature drops a little and that movement becomes more frantic. Something gritty gets in your eyes and many leathery appendages hit your face and body. The temperature drops a little more and you feel a sense of urgency—to move, to climb up through a collapsing substrate. As you climb, it feels like you are swimming through something thick that you can’t quite grasp, like trying to climb up an escalator that is going down. You suddenly emerge from your collapsing hole with other small beings just like you, all boiling out onto a beach at night.
You are on your own now.
Everything looks blurry; there is darkness behind you and a faint glow of light in front of you. You are drawn to the light. You also develop a sense of place—you imprint on the Earth’s magnetic field, taking note of this location because it will be important sometime in the future. You may have a sense of where you must now go. You start to move and crawl, crawl, crawl towards this brighter horizon. The moon and the stars are reflecting in the ocean. There is where you must go. To get there you may encounter rocks, hills, and valleys you must traverse—some of these are far, far larger than you. It takes time and every second you spend crawling towards the bright horizon you are in danger. Large strange creatures may try to attack and drag you away. They have claws and beaks. They are much stronger and faster than you. If you are lucky, if you are quick, and if you persist, you reach the ocean.
Enormous walls of water crash on top of and around you, tumbling you in the surf, relentlessly pushing you back towards the beach and the predators you need to avoid. But you are energized and keep moving. You orient into the onslaught of each wave, using the force of the wave to direct your movements. Your vision clears when you are underwater and what was fuzzy on land becomes clear in the ocean. You swim through the surf into surface waters that rise and fall with less urgency. You keep swimming, swimming, swimming at the sea surface. Your lungs are so small that you can’t afford to remain at depth for long. You swim through the sunrise and a day of sunshine that heats your shell and your body, helping to quicken your movements. Then sunset, cooling through another night of darkness. As you swim, large creatures appear below you or swoop down at you from above. You use up your energy reserves, energy from the yolk that gave you life in your dark egg, to swim, swim, swim away from these new predators. Swimming into deeper waters that hopefully offer you safety. You must reach those waters before your energy reserves are exhausted.
As you swim, swim, swim, you encounter a change in the water—a physical force that pulls at you. You are near the end of your energy reserves and you can’t fight the force. When you finally give in to this pull, allowing your body to move and drift with the water, you find that you travel faster and you can rest a little. You have encountered a surface current that helps you move away from shore, away from the near-shore predators, the hungry birds and fishes that are interested in eating you as an afternoon snack. As you ride the current, this oceanic highway, you encounter some floating algae—brown and tangled, it traps water at the surface of the ocean, wrapping you in warmth. You climb on top of this algal mat and finally rest.
You are safe.
This new home buoys you as you travel. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets. At night, overhead you are surrounded by a bowl of darkness with the twinkling lights of the stars, and the glow of the moon. This new home continues to slowly drift along the oceanic highway. Sometimes, in the middle of the ocean, the winds start to blow, causing the waves to get larger, crashing on top of you and your algal home. When this happens, your home starts to break up—bunches of algae float apart from each other, diminishing your safe, warm, food-filled algal home until it is scattered over kilometres of ocean.
You realize that you generally know where you are in the world—you were born with the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field—you have an internal “map” sense, similar to an internal GPS or compass. So, when you feel the temperatures dropping too much and your body and limbs start to slow down due to the cold, or when you start traveling to places that are too far to the north or south, away from waters where you are most comfortable, you know you must move, and travel back to the safety that is ingrained in your understanding of where you are and where you should be. And if you are lucky, you are able to find more of the brown, floating algae that provides warmth, food, and safety from predators lurking—swimming and circling—below your perch on top of the tangled habitat. While you drift with the algae, you bask in the warmth of the sun. This warmth makes you hungry and you find plenty of food lurking in the tangled algal mats you call home. You are cold-blooded; the more you eat and the warmer you are, the faster you grow— outgrowing the jaws of those predators who live and wait, hungry, just below you.
The years pass.
You have grown larger than a dinner plate or even a toilet seat. You find you can dive deeper and deeper, relying less and less on the sea surface as a place of safety. You can now hold your breath longer and you find that you are able to outswim and outsmart some of those predators that lurk in the waters beneath. You need more and more food to sustain your larger size—food that isn’t available in the quantities you require in the open ocean. These resources are thousands of kilometres away, in those treacherous, predator-filled coastal waters that you first encountered as a hatchling. So, you slowly make your way back. Perhaps you use your innate compass sense and your “GPS superpower” on your return journey, or perhaps you simply follow the currents. You are bigger now, no longer the snack-size of a deck of cards, making it harder for other creatures to eat you.
As you transition back to coastal habitats, your diet changes and you start spending more time at depth, diving through different temperature layers searching for food on the seafloor. You no longer nibble on the small creatures found hiding in floating algal habitats offshore. If you are a green sea turtle, you may become a vegetarian—a coastal lawnmower, grazing on seagrasses and algae found growing in shallow coastal waters. If you are a loggerhead, then you become the terror of the same creatures that once would have eaten you! You develop a taste for crabs, those scary creatures that once chased you as a hatchling. You discover that your powerful jaws are built to crush and you start feeding on whelks, horseshoe crabs, and other crunchy creatures. But the abrupt changes to your diet combined with diminished resources or polluted waters can stress your body. You may get sick, or become infected with a virus that causes tumors to grow on your skin. You might have hitchhikers join you on your travels. Algae or barnacles may grow on your back, or little crabs, leeches, and other small creatures may make a home on your body. Too much algae or too many creatures may slow you down, making it harder to swim through the water.
From your oceanic home, you have migrated to coastal foraging grounds—areas along the shallower continental shelf waters or closer to land within bays, lagoons, and rivers. Some of these foraging grounds may be too cold for you in the winter, so when the temperatures drop at the end of the summer and the days grow shorter, you become restless and feel the need to swim, swim, swim out of the cooling waters. You may spend the winter on the edge of warmer currents within deeper shelf waters. You bide your time, waiting for the seas to warm in the spring so you can follow the warming temperatures back to the productive foraging grounds you visited before. Back to the bays, lagoons, and rivers that provide a banquet of prey for you during the warm months, making the winter wait worthwhile. You face a number of threats in these coastal habitats. Human activities are everywhere; any time you travel between habitats, you swim through a gauntlet of fishing gears, boats, and unhealthy waters that assault you and your senses. Over time, the once-abundant food in your foraging areas may become scarce, causing you to spend more and more energy searching for the resources that will help you grow, grow, grow to maturity.
Decades pass.
If you are clever and fast enough to avoid the increasing human presence in your coastal home, you mature into an adult female, ready to reproduce. Your growth slows, your hormones change, and you feel the urge to migrate back to those beaches that you crawled down decades before as a hatchling. You feed, feed, feed in anticipation of your reproductive migration—fuelling up for the long journey back to your natal beaches, because you know you won’t eat again until much later. You might use your “GPS superpower” once again to return to the region you “bookmarked” in your brain when you were a hatchling. To the same beaches that your mother, your grandmother, sisters, and cousins all return to every few years, to find mates and to lay eggs.
During your journey, you bump into male turtles who will court you by gently biting the back of your neck and rear flippers. Those that you like, you will choose as your mate. You have your pick; more than one is successful in getting your attention! Those that you don’t like, you treat them like any other predator and try to swim away or hide from them on the seafloor. And then, when you are “home”, back in your natal waters, you prepare to leave the ocean and return to the beaches where you once hatched. When the sun goes down, you swim towards shore, getting pushed by the waves towards the beach, where you emerge from the water and slowly drag your now enormous body across. Your vision blurs and things are not as clear to you as they are underwater. The beach is different than you remember. More lights. You get a bit confused, unsure of where to go once on the beach. There are many artificial lights glowing on the beach and you aren’t sure if you should be scared of or attracted to them.
The beach is different than you remember.
There are more signs of humans and the creatures that humans attract—raccoons, dogs, coyotes, even armadillos. Your perception of the beach environment has changed now that you are an adult female turtle. What once were rocks, hills, and mountains are now small shells or ripples in the sand made by human footprints or human vehicles. The beach is smaller, due to human development and storm erosion. You need to find a suitable place to lay your eggs. Somewhere that the eggs will be safe and protected from terrestrial predators, high tides, and beach erosion. You will dig, dig, dig your nest patiently, slowly. You carefully lay your eggs, then cover, cover, cover them. You will leave them there on the beach, incubated by the sun and the warmth of the sand, until your hatchlings emerge, just like you did many decades ago. You will repeat this process for more than a month, returning to lay more eggs every week or two.
When you lay your last nest of the season, you start the long migration back to the foraging grounds you know, where you will find food to recover from the excitement of the last several months. You will remain on these foraging grounds for a couple of years. Banking more energy to make the long migration—the remigration—back to your natal, and now nesting beaches to mate, and lay more eggs before once again returning to your foraging grounds to refuel.
Over the decades, it becomes harder and harder to find the food and energy you need to make this mating and nesting migration. You once only needed two years to refuel, but now it may take you three or four years to bank the energy needed for the long trip home to your natal beaches. And over the decades, you notice that there are more and more changes to those nesting beaches—more erosion and habitat loss, obstacles like seawalls appear, blocking your path up the beach to lay your eggs. It now takes you even more time and energy to find safe places to lay your eggs; you may not have the energy to nestas many times as you once did.
Sea turtles have been following this life-long pattern of migration and movement across varied habitats for millions of years and you are no different. You continue to repeat the cycle of foraging, migrating, mating, nesting, migrating, foraging until you are too old, or until the threats from humans make it impossible for you to continue. Or, perhaps, until humans realize how their actions and activities may make you work harder, harder, and harder to achieve your basic life goals: to survive, to thrive, and to reproduce.
There is a human idiom that states before you judge someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. What if we humans tried to swim a mile, or thousands of miles with your flippers? We humans are terrestrial creatures and experience the world differently than sea turtles; we lack the same sensory “window” and capabilities to sense and experience the world as turtles do. Sadly, humans can’t sense the Earth’s magnetic field and we don’t have an innate sense of place. Like the young, oceanic stage sea turtles, we, too, must remain close to the sea surface to breathe. We can sometimes feel layers of temperatures when we wade into the ocean, or be buffeted by currents. But we do not have to swim thousands of kilometres to reach our destinations, so we may not realize that there are hidden highways, currents, within the oceans that can help a turtle travel from one place to another. And we may not realize that our actions add up over time, over the lifetime of sea turtles, making their lives so much harder. Maybe, if humans could better understand and imagine what sea turtle lives are like, it is then possible to define effective conservation measures to better protect them from the gauntlet of human activities that turtles encounter over the course of their long, long, long lives.
Further Reading
Lohmann K., C. Lohmann, L. Ehrhart, D. A. Bagley and T. Swing. 2004. Geomagnetic map used in sea-turtle navigation. Nature 428, 909–910. https://doi.org/10.1038/428909a
Mansfield K. L. , J. Wyneken, W. Porter, J. Luo. 2014. First satellite tracks of neonate sea turtles redefine the “lost years” oceanic niche. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281: 20133039. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3039
Mansfield K. L. and N. F. Putman. 2013. Oceanic Habits and Habitats. Caretta caretta. In: The Biology of Sea Turtles, Volume III (eds. Wyneken, J., K. J. Lohmann and J. A. Musick). Pp 189–205. CRC Press.
The word has successfully rid itself of all non-vegetarian, pescatarian, lacto-vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian, and other contrarians. Only vegans remain, led by their Supreme Leader, Wonald Vegan. The only butcher shops are in the museums of horror. Fishing fleets have been converted into game parks. Poultry and dairy farms lie vacant, and grass, unleashed from the pressures of herbivory, runs amok.
Wonald Vegan was a meat-store truck driving man. He was the head of the chunky chicken (coo clucks) clan. But one day, he had a dream, or maybe it was a vision. Anyhow, it had funky colours and harps. He saw the souls of a million slaughtered animals. He heard the voices of those clamouring to be saved. He hears them still.
Now he rules with a steely eye. No one is allowed to so much as look askance at an animal. Anywhere, anyhow. Birds chirp, fish jump, and frogs frolic. They need no longer fear the hungry human. A world without butchery and pain. Or domestic animals. Since they were no longer needed, the last one died in 2069. In an Orwellian twist, pigs survived.
Wonald Vegan rules with a vengeful verb. His language police ensure that no one says things such as ‘Can you flesh that out?’ or ‘I’ve got a frog in my throat’ or ‘Get the monkey off your back’. If the ‘cat has got your tongue’, then in all fairness, it must literally be so. And of course, you cannot ‘let the cat out of the bag’, because the very thought of a cat in a bag can unleash mobs. And, needless to say, it cannot ‘rain cats and dogs’. You are not allowed to ‘chicken out’, ‘pig out’, ‘go the whole hog’ or ‘horse around’. You cannot under any circumstances ‘take the bull by horns’, and the worst offence is, undoubtedly, ‘to kill two birds with one stone’.
But all is not milk and honey. Because those, of course, are banned. There are many groups that think Wonald’s way doesn’t go far enough.
The most vocal are the fakefoodians, a cult that demands that cruelty to plants must stop. Given all the advances in transgenics and tissue culture, most food can be grown in the lab. Lab cultured food such as ‘Beyond beans’, ‘Impossible potato’, ‘Benevolent banana’, and ‘Can’t believe it’s not tomato’ have become the vogue.
Their last press release said, “As we very well know, plants have feelings too. With every slaughtered soy, with every culled cob, with every crying onion, the universe loses an ohm of its resonance. Stop breeding them, stop eating them, stop killing them. Stop it, stop it, stop it now!!!”
And then, there are the pillpopperians, a miniscule caucus who believe that all manipulation of living things must stop, including in the lab. They hypothesize that nutritional demands can be reduced to capsules and tablets. They deduce that this will make the world a better place. Their motto is ‘Food is falsifiable’. They are a pill.
In a far-flung corner are some freshbytairians, a commune that genuinely believes that one can survive on love and fresh air alone. Fights break out constantly between the love faction (heart- throbs) and the fresh air fraction (airheads) about how much of each is required. But these don’t last long, as they run out of energy pretty quickly.
Another problem exists. In this world, animals are still allowed to kill each other. One clique thinks this is wrong. The antipredatorians have been campaigning for (a) the genetic modification of all predators, or (b) the supervised extirpation of all predators. An extreme subgroup that fights for universal plant rights argues for the extirpation of all animals.
And some are just confused. There is a contingent who flip-flop between cults, caucuses, communes, and cliques. They have been variously described as irksome, exasperating, maddening, and vexatious. The calendarians have a specified belief system for each day of the week.
But none trouble the Great Wonald as much as the meatheists. Different camps of these primitive tribes are believed to live deep in forests, where some have learned to hunt, fish, farm, and brew their own booze.
Wonald’s blood boils when he thinks of them. We managed to acquire a transcript of a conversation between Wonald Vegan and his trusty sidekick, Franny Fruitloops, as they plan a definitive campaign to shut them down.
Wonald’s World may be here to stay. Or maybe there will be another revolution. Or then again, perhaps this is the end, my friend.
