Tag Archives: endangered species

Who Craves Baby Eels: the Industry and its Black Market

The growing craving for eel over the decades, concurrent with the rise of China’s middle class, has triggered overfishing in Japan and Europe, leading to a decline in the species’ population. The European Union banned the import and export of eels in 2010, which led seafood wholesalers to look for alternative sources, bringing the trade—and thousands of poachers—to Canada… Fishermen say elver poachers outnumbered licensed harvesters 10-to-1 during the 2023 abbreviated season, closed after 18 days due to concerns about illegal fishing.

There is a lot of money at stake. Fishers use mesh nets to scoop up baby eels as they enter Canada’s east coast river systems, and sell them on to aquaculture operations in Asia to raise them until they are ready for market. Baby eell demand “has resulted in unsustainable eel fishing,” according to a Justice Department indictment filed in 2022 with the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, in relation to charges filed against a seafood distributor and eight of its employees—four of whom are based in China—on allegations of illegally trafficking large volumes of juveniles. “A multibillion-dollar international black market for freshwater eels flourishes.” At its peak, a pound of elvers fetched about $1,800, but fishers say the price has dropped due to black-market activity…

It is difficult to stamp out illegal harvesting entirely. Officials say it happens in the evening and often in isolated locations. The barrier to entry is low, because all poachers need is a pair of rubber boots, a headlight, and a good-quality dip net purchased from a sporting goods store. Illegally-caught baby eels can still be packaged and shipped to Hong Kong in mislabeled boxes, mixed either with legally-caught eels or other seafood, like lobster, officials say.

Excerpts from Paul Vieira, Guns and Death Threats Spur Canada to Reel in Baby-Eel Fishing, WSJ, Apr. 5, 2024

Can We Save the Giant Kelp?

At a salmon farm in Tasmania Australia is an experiment that researchers hope can save an entire ecosystem from warming oceans. Beneath the waves, scientists are growing several types of giant kelp—which in the wild can grow up to 175 feet tall—on rope to track which ones can thrive in hotter conditions. Rising water temperatures, more frequent marine heat waves and invasive sea urchins have already destroyed some 95% of the giant kelp forests in Tasmania, scientists say. The island south of Australia’s mainland is a global hot spot for ocean warming, with sea temperatures in the island’s east rising faster than the global average, a dynamic that has already wreaked havoc on some marine species in a place where fishing remains a key industry.

In Tasmania, scientists are conducting experiments to identify heat-tolerant giant kelp, plan to use artificial intelligence and genetic analysis to better understand why some types fare better than others, and will then have to figure out a way to plant them in the wild without it costing a fortune. Eventually, they could use the genetic information to breed kelp to be even more heat tolerant…But success is far from guaranteed. Running lab tests on kelp can be tricky, given the great size the plants can reach. Efforts to control the invasive long-spined sea urchins, including with government subsidies that encourage fishermen to catch them, could fail. Marine heat waves could increase beyond the ability of any kelp to cope. Scientists also still aren’t sure to what extent genetic factors allow giant kelp to survive in warmer water, or whether environmental factors—such as nutrient and light availability—are more important.

Excerpts from Mike Cherney, Inside the Quest for a Super Kelp That Can Survive Hotter, WSJ, Feb. 22, 2024

Essence of Fear: Fukushima Radioactive Water Dump in Pacific Ocean

Nearly three-fourths of South Koreans say they will eat less seafood after Japan starts releasing Fukushima radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The price of sea salt in the country skyrocketed and government reserves were released, as panic buying ahead of the nuclear-water dump emptied out the shelves…Japan’s plan to release the water into the sea after diluting the radioactive elements to what it says are safe levels has been affirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations body. The agency’s chief, Rafael Grossi, personally delivered the final IAEA report to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida this week. The report said radionuclides would be released at a lower level than those produced by natural processes and would have a negligible impact on the environment.

But….“The field of nuclear power is contaminated with fear,” said Michael Edwards, a clinical psychiatrist in Sydney who interviewed Fukushima residents following the nuclear accident. “Psychologically, people do not really understand and trust science, and know science can be an instrument of government.”…Beijing’s Foreign Ministry has slammed the Fukushima wastewater plan, accusing Japan of treating the surrounding ocean as the country’s own “private sewer.” China has expanded restrictions on food imports from Japan, which include a ban on food products from Fukushima and nine other prefectures.

Excerpts from Dasl Yoon and Miho Inada ‘How Could I Feel Safe?’ Japan’s Dumping of Radioactive Fukushima Water Stirs Fear, Anger, WSJ, July 7, 2023

Bickering is Easier than Acting: Saving Biodiversity

At the COP15 biodiversity summit in Canada in December 2022, more than 190 countries agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal including targets such as nations protecting and restoring 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. To ensure that all countries — particularly low- and middle-income nations (LMICs) — can meet these targets, those that signed the deal agreed to establish a trust fund by the end of this year and that, by 2030, wealthy nations should collectively be contributing US$30 billion per year. Disputes have re-emerged, however, on whether the trust fund should be independent or should be established under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility. Because LMICs don’t have an adequate say in how the GEF funds are spent, LMICs want the trust fund to be established as an independent fund.

These tensions could delay the trust fund’s adoption, which was planned for a GEF assembly in August 2023, delaying biodiversity action even more … Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: researchers have estimated that one million species are under threat of habitat loss because of factors such as climate change and agriculture.

Excerpts from Battles over Funding Could Threaten Historic Effort to Save Species, Nature, June 20, 2023

Chronic Malnutrition–Manatees and Sewage

Wildlife officials in Florida are relaunching a program in December 2022 to feed manatees in a coastal area where many congregate in the winter, part of efforts to address the aquatic mammals’ chronic malnutrition caused by the disappearance of seagrasses they feed on…A key factor for the depletion of seagrasses is poor water quality in the Indian River Lagoon, an estuary spanning 156 miles of Florida’s eastern coast that draws many manatees.

The situation highlights a broader problem with polluted waterways in Florida. Algal blooms have broken out in numerous areas in recent years, fueled by nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from improperly treated sewage, leaking septic tanks and fertilizer runoff, according to researchers. The outbreaks pose a threat to Florida’s economy, which relies heavily on tourism in coastal areas.

In 2021, mainly January to March, state and federal wildlife officials provided over 202,000 pounds of romaine lettuce, butter lettuce and cabbage to manatees gathering in warm water discharged by a power plant on the Indian River Lagoon. Many of the mammals, which typically are about 10 feet long and weigh more than 1,000 pounds, seek refuge there when waters cool in winter.

Excerpt from Arian Campo-Flores Florida Restarts Push to Feed Manatees, WSJ, Dec. 25, 2022

Stopping the Bleeding of the Horseshoe Crab

Every April in South Carolina, fishermen catch hundreds of horseshoe crabs as they crawl onto shore to mate. The crabs are transported to labs owned by Charles River, an American pharmaceutical company, in Charleston. There they are strapped to steel countertops and, still alive, drained of about a third of their blue-colored blood. Then they are returned to the ocean. This liquid is vital for America’s biomedical industry. A liter of it goes for as much as $15,000. Bleeding is not without harm to the crabs. Conservationists estimate that between 5% and 30% of them die on release…In 2016 the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed them as “vulnerable” to extinction…

Parts of modern medicine have been unusually reliant on the horseshoe crab. Its blood is the only known natural source of limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), an extract that detects endotoxin, a nasty and sometimes fatal bacterium. Drug firms use it to ensure the safety of medicines and implanted devices, including antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, heart stents, insulin and vaccines. The immune cells in the crab’s blood clot around toxic bacteria, giving a visual signal of unwanted contamination. As pharmaceutical companies ramped up production of the covid-19 jab, demand for the blue liquid soared. In 2020 nearly 650,000 crabs were bled in America, 36% more than in 2018.

As crab numbers fall and demand for LAL rises, America’s biomedical industry will face a crunch. Yet a synthetic alternative to LAL is already available and used in China and Europe.

Excerpt from In America, crab blood remains vital for drug- and vaccine-making, Economist, Sept. 3, 2022

What is your Extinction-Risk Footprint?

A new study quantifies how the consumption habits of people in 188 countries, through trade and supply networks, ultimately imperil more than 5,000 threatened and near-threatened terrestrial species of amphibians, mammals and birds on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. For the study, recently published in Scientific Reports, researchers used a metric called the extinction-risk footprint. The team found that 76 countries are net “importers” of this footprint, meaning they drive demand for products that contribute to the decline of endangered species abroad. Top among them are the U.S., Japan, France, Germany and the U.K. Another 16 countries—with Madagascar, Tanzania and Sri Lanka leading the list—are designated as net “exporters,” meaning their extinction-risk footprint is driven more by consumption habits in other countries. In the remaining 96 countries, domestic consumption is the most significant driver of extinction risk within those nations.

African trees logged in gorilla habitat, for example, could end up as flooring in Asia. Other species highlighted in the study include the Malagasy giant jumping rat, a mammal that can jump 40 inches high and is found only in Madagascar. Demand for food and drinks in Europe contributes to 11 percent of this animal’s extinction-risk footprint through habitat loss caused by expanding agriculture. Tobacco, coffee and tea consumption in the U.S. accounts for 3 percent of the extinction-risk footprint for Honduras’s Nombre de Dios streamside frog, an amphibian that suffers from logging and deforestation related to agriculture.

Excerpt from Susan Cosier, How Countries ‘Import’ and ‘Export’ Extinction Risk Around the World, Scientific American, May 31, 2022

The Forced Migration of Endangered Species

Rhino translocations have become a critical tool in the arsenal for the protection of these endangered animals. Recently, 30 white rhinos were flown into Rwanda from South Africa and introduced into the Akagera National Park, in what is the single largest translocation.

In the late 19th century, southern white rhinos were almost on the brink of extinction. This was due to poaching and hunting. But in 1895 a small population of fewer than 100 individuals was discovered in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. After more than a century of protection and good management, there are now around 17,600 white rhinos (as of 2018) living in protected areas and private game reserves…However, this success story is being threatened by the illegal trade in horn. Between 2006 and 2020, 10,600 rhinos across the continent have been lost. With the exception of a few areas, rhinos are surviving in well protected, smaller national parks and reserves.

Why were rhinos translocated to Rwanda? Having a population in a Rwanda could create a secure new breeding stronghold in East Africa and help ensure the long-term survival of the species in the wild…

Any international translocation requires political support from national governments and conservation authorities and should be in full compliance with international agreements, such as CITES…Sourcing the animals is also an important aspect… South Africa has a vibrant wildlife industry based upon the buying and selling of wildlife.

Catching and Translocating the Animals: A lot of time is spent on planning for this and ensuring the animals are treated as well as possible. Moving animals over thousands of kilometers is a serious endeavor. With 30 animals, chartered jumbo jets are the best way. This requires considerable veterinary and logistical coordination to capture the animals, load into crates, transport to the aircraft, load as quickly as possible, unload similarly, transport to the site and release into well-sited and secure bomas.

Upon arrival, animals are put into holding bomas to get them adjusted to the local different foods that they’ll encounter…Once they’re in the new habitat, the next concern is security and making sure people can take care of them and monitor them.

Excerpts from Mike Knight, Africa: Moving African Rhinos – What It Takes to Translocate an Endangered Species, AllAfrica.com, Dec. 14, 2021

The Starving Manatees of Florida

Florida manatees are dying at a record pace, prompting a federal investigation and calls to relist the aquatic mammals as endangered. So far this year, 800 manatees have died in Florida, more than double the average for the same period over the past five years, according to state data. Their estimated population numbered 5,733 in 2019, the most recent year in which wildlife officials conducted a count….

At the heart of the problem is deteriorating water quality that has depleted the seagrasses that manatees eat, researchers say. It highlights a broader threat to other marine species, they say, and to Florida’s economy, which relies heavily on visitors drawn to the state’s coastline. Manatees, which typically measure about 10 feet in length and weigh more than 1,000 pounds, have faced numerous perils in recent years, including collisions with watercraft and exposure to red tide, a harmful algal bloom. Now, researchers say, they are experiencing starvation.

Excerpt from Arian Campo-Flores, Manatees Are Dying in Florida, and the U.S. Wants to Know Why, WSJ, June 23, 2021

Gorillas, Murders and Making $1.50 per day-Congo Rainforest

Protecting the forests of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo – home to endangered mountain gorillas – could be described as one of the toughest jobs on the planet. In the past 12 months, more than 20 of the park’s staff have been murdered – and last week rebels were accused of killing the Italian ambassador to DR Congo, his security guard and driver in an attack within the park. “The level of sacrifice that’s involved in keeping this work going will always be the hardest thing to deal with,” says Emmanuel de Merode, who is in charge of more than 800 rangers at Virunga, Africa’s oldest and largest national park.

The Virunga park spans 7,800 sq km (3,000 sq miles) and is home to an astonishingly diverse landscape – from active volcanoes and vast lakes to rainforest and mountains.
The park was set up nearly 100 years ago to protect mountain gorillas, of which there are only 1,000 left in the world. It’s a national park which is part of the Congolese state which has been affected by civil war for the most of its recent history.

In April 2020, 13 rangers were murdered in what park officials described as a “ferociously violent and sustained” attack by an armed group In January 2021, six rangers, patrolling the park’s boundary on foot, were killed in an ambush by militias. All of those who died were aged between 25 and 30. It’s a national park which is part of the Congolese state which has been affected by civil war….

It’s estimated that a dozen or so armed militia groups survive off the park’s resources – poaching or chopping down wood to sell for fuel. DR Congo’s natural resources have been fought over for decades. The country – which is the size of mainland western Europe – has more mineral wealth, with diamonds, oil, cobalt and copper, than anywhere else on the planet. These are some of the elements essential to modern technology, making up key components in electric cars and smartphones.
Virunga is no different. It’s rich in resources underground as well as in nature and wildlife. But the two million people living in the region of the park mainly live on under $1.50 (£1.08) a day. This tussle for survival is not lost on Mr De Merode who sees protecting the park as essentially a social justice issue.

“It’s not a simple problem of protecting gorillas and elephants; it is overcoming an economic problem at the heart of one of the most horrific civil wars in history,” says Merode.

Excerpt from Vivienne Nunis and Sarah Treanor, DR Congo’s Virunga National Park: The deadly job of protecting gorillas, BBC, Mar. 4, 2021

Turtle Eggs Can Fool Poachers

The InvestEGGator is used to reveal illegal trade networks and better understand what drives sea turtle egg poaching. The scientists deployed around a hundred of the fake eggs in sea turtle nests across four beaches in Costa Rica and waited. Each egg contained a GPS transmitter set to ping cell towers every hour, which would allow scientists to follow the InvestEGGator eggs on a smartphone app…Five of the deployed eggs were taken by unsuspecting poachers. The shortest route was roughly a mile, but one InvestEGGator traveled more than 80 miles, capturing what researchers were hoping for: the complete trade route, from the beach to the buyer. “Having that moment where the trade chain was complete….that was obviously a very big moment,” says Pheasey.

The InvestEGGator was the invention of Kim Williams-Guillén… The trick, says Williams-Guillén, was designing a device that looked and felt like a sea turtle egg while being precise enough to reveal trade routes. Sea turtle eggs are the size of ping pong balls, but unlike brittle chicken eggs, their shell is leathery and pliable. “Making [the trackers] look like eggs from far away was not going to be an issue, it was more making them feel like turtle eggs,” says Williams-Guillén. “One of the ways that [poachers] know that a turtle egg is good when they’re sorting their eggs is that it’s still soft and squishy.”…

Of the nests containing decoy eggs, a quarter were illegally harvested. Some of the eggs failed to connect to a GPS signal, while other eggs were spotted by poachers and tossed aside. Five of those poached eggs gave the team useful tracking data…This illegal trade network revealed that eggs are sold and consumed locally… The routes they discovered also suggest that most egg poachers in the area are individuals looking to make quick money, not an organized network.

Excerpt from Corryn Wetzel, 3-D Printed Sea Turtle Eggs Reveal Poaching Routes, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, Oct. 7, 2020

De-Extinction: Horse Revival

A little baby horse named Kurt is a symbol of renewed hope for the survival of his kind. Born on 6 August 2020, he is the world’s first ever successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse, an endangered wild horse native to the steppes of central Asia. What makes Kurt even more exciting is that he was cloned from genetic material cryopreserved 40 years ago – reviving genetic diversity thought to have been lost decades ago…

Przewalski’s horses roaming the steppes declined dramatically after World War II, due to a combination of factors such as hunting, competition with livestock as humans moved into their territory, and severe winters. The last confirmed sighting of a Przewalski’s horse in the wild was in 1969. Luckily, some of the horses still remained in zoos. But not many. A total of 12 horses made up the ancestors of a captive breeding program – 11 Przewalski’s horses wild-caught between 1899 and 1902, and another caught in 1947. Thanks to this breeding program, there are around 2,000 individuals today. That’s incredibly impressive, but the growing population isn’t without problems.

Those 12 ancestor individuals represent what is known as a population bottleneck – when a species undergoes a severe reduction in numbers. From that point, a population can recover, but it can also be the beginning of the end. One of the reasons for that is lower genetic diversity. With less variation, a population is less able to adapt to potential stressors or changes to their environment…

Enter a Przewalski’s horse named Kuporovic, who lived from 1975 to 1998. An analysis of the captive breeding pedigree revealed that Kuporovic’s genome had unique ancestry from two wild founders. This meant he offered significantly more genetic variation than any of his living relatives, so in 1980, scientists took a sample and preserved it in San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo. San Diego Zoo partnered with wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore and pet cloning company ViaGen Equine to create an embryo using Kuporovic’s genetic material. This embryo was implanted in a domestic horse (Equus ferus caballus) surrogate, and was born healthy after a normal pregnancy.

Excerpt from Scientists Clone an Endangered Przewalski’s Horse For The First Time, Science Alert, Sept 7, 2020

Oceans Restored: the 2050 Deadline

A study published in Nature on April 2, 2020 claims that marine ecosystems could recover in just 30 years because of the growing success of conservation efforts and the ocean’s remarkable resilience. Some of these conservation efforts include the increase in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) from less than 1 percent in 2000 to almost 8 percent today and the restoration of key habitats such as seagrass beds and mangroves

One great success is the restoration of humpback whales that migrate between Antarctica and eastern Australia. Their numbers have rebounded from a few hundred in 1968 to more than 40,000 today. Sea otters in Western Canada have also jumped from dozens in 1980 to thousands. Green turtles in Japan, grey seals and cormorants in the Baltic and elephant seals in the United States have all also made remarkable comebacks. However, “If we don’t tackle climate change and raise the ambition and immediacy of these efforts, we risk wasting our efforts,” Duarte, one of the authors of the study, told BBC News. The initial price tag on all this is hefty: $10 to $20 billion a year until the 2050 recovery date.

Excerpts from Oceans Can Recover by 2050, Study Shows, EcoWatch, Apr. 2, 2020

Better Alive than Dead: The Crocodile Trade

Around 6m tonnes of bush meat are thought to come out of the Congo Basin each year… The trade has emptied out parts of the forest; 39% of it is at severe risk of over-hunting, the study says. Everything from bonobos (an endangered species of ape) to cobras, antelopes and, occasionally, elephants, appear at market stalls in Mbandaka.

Over-hunting has made life more dangerous for crocodile hunters. The number of dwarf crocodiles, once common in the Congo river, is dwindling. So hunters have to chase the ferocious Nile crocodile instead. There are plenty of those. Their scaly bodies stretch to six metres and they often kill humans. Stalkers in canoes go after them at night, shining a torch while stirring the water. “The crocodile does not like that,” says Mr Nyalowala. “He begins to writhe and then comes to attack.” As the animal pounces so do its pursuers, spearing it.

A live crocodile fetches more than a dead one in the markets in Mbandaka, so hunters bind their jaws and transport them some 200km downstream in their canoes. They sell for around $150 each. A teacher at a state school, by comparison, earns around $170 a month, though many did not get paid at all last year.

Croc in the pot: The toils and spoils of Congo’s crocodile-killers, Economist, Mar. 19, 2020

Beauty Secrets: Donkeys Exterminated for their Skin Collagen

Over the past 6 years, Chinese traders have been buying the hides of millions of butchered donkeys from developing countries and shipping them to China, where they’re used to manufacture ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine… Ejiao, in use for thousands of years, purportedly treats or prevents many problems, including miscarriage, circulatory issues, and premature aging, although no rigorous clinical trials support those claims. The preparation combines mineral-rich water from China’s Shandong province and collagen extracted from donkey hides, traditionally produced by boiling the skins in a 99-step process. Once reserved for China’s elites, ejiao is now marketed to the country’s booming middle class, causing demand to surge…

Despite government incentives for new donkey farmers, farms in China can’t keep up with the exploding demand, which the Donkey Sanctuary currently estimates at 4.8 million hides per year. Donkeys’ gestation period is one full year, and they only reach their adult size after 2 years. So the industry has embarked on a frenzied hunt for donkeys elsewhere. This has triggered steep population declines. In Brazil, the population dropped by 28% between 2007 and 2017, according to the new report.

African populations are crashing, too, says Philip Mshelia, an equine veterinarian and researcher at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. After buying donkeys at markets, traders often drive large herds to slaughter, sometimes covering hundreds of kilometers with no rest, food, or water. Those transported by truck fare worse: Handlers tie their legs together and sling them onto piles or strap them to the top of the truck, Mshelia says. Animals that survive the journey—many with broken or severed limbs—are unloaded by the ears and tails and tossed in front of a slaughterhouse. Some meet their end in an open field where humans await them with hammers, axes, and knives.

For donkey owners, selling their animal means quick cash—now more than $200 in parts of Africa…

Ironically, the booming ejiao trade, along with a developing donkey dairy industry in Eastern Europe, has stirred scientific interest in donkeys. Zhen Shenming, a reproductive biologist at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, says Chinese efforts are focused on increasing yields, for instance through artificial insemination…Chinese breeders are also testing new nutrition programs that expedite growth, leading to an adult-size donkey in only 18 months…

“They are very observant and sentient animals, and they create very strong bonds with other donkeys.” That’s one reason the current slaughtering practice, in which the animals often await their turn while watching other donkeys being beaten unconscious, slaughtered, and skinned is abhorrent. “They’re certainly quite well aware of what’s happening and what’s to come,” McLean says.

Excerpts from Christa Lesté-Lasserre Donkeys face worldwide existential threat, Science, Dec. 13, 2019

Dirty Little Secrets: Farming Tigers for their Meat and Bones

The area around the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a swathe of north-western Laos..is famous for its tigers. Not wild ones, which have nearly all been killed in Laos, but captive animals, illegally trafficked and bred for their parts, which sell for thousands of dollars.

A century ago, around 100,000 tigers roamed the world’s jungles. Because of habitat loss and poaching, there are fewer than 4,000 wild ones today. More than twice as many are being held in at least 200 farms across East and South-East Asia. These range from small backyard operations to enclosures breeding hundreds in “battery-farm style”, says the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO focusing on wildlife crime. Breeding tigers and trading them and their parts is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but this treaty is widely flouted in Asia because of poor law-enforcement and high demand for tigers. Belief in their medicinal properties has deep roots, especially in China. Tiger-bone wine, skins and jewelry featuring claws and teeth are status symbols. In Laos, carcasses can sell for as much as $30,000, officials reckon.

Some criminals choose to operate in Laos because…the government of Laos is allegedly complicit. America’s State Department recently reported that Laos was one of three countries that had recently “actively engaged in or knowingly profited from the trafficking of endangered or threatened species”. In 2016 an investigation by Britain’s Guardian newspaper found the Lao government had licensed two tiger farms and cut lucrative deals with wildlife traffickers smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of endangered animals—including tigers—through Laos.

The government has a 20% stake in Golden Triangle SEZ, a resort complex run by Zhao Wei, a Chinese businessman whom America’s Treasury last year accused of engaging in illegal trade in wildlife, as well as trafficking drugs and people (he denies the allegations). With its flashy casino and hotels, the SEZ is designed to attract Chinese tourists (gambling is illegal in China). In 2014 and 2015, EIA investigators found that restaurants in the SEZ were advertising “sauté tiger meat” and tiger-bone wine; shops were selling tiger skins and ivory tusks. Near the casino, 26 tigers stalked the length of their enclosure, destined for the slaughterhouse. Their bones were to infuse rice wine. Since the EIA’’s report, these establishments have closed.

Excerpt from: Tiger Farms in Laos: Law of the Jungle, Economist, Nov, 30, 2019

Saving the Giraffe from Trophy Hunting and Meat Production

In August 2019, countries agreed to monitor trade in giraffes and their body parts to help conserve the species, now deemed vulnerable to extinction. From 1985 to 2015, the wild giraffe population shrank by about 40% to approximately 68,000 adults. The declines were especially sharp in eastern and Central Africa where giraffes’ savanna and forest habitat has been turned into farms and the animals are poached for meat; most trophy hunting of giraffes happens in southern Africa, where populations have been increasing… The only figures on trade in giraffe parts show that about 40,000—including hides, carved bones, and hunting trophies such as mounted heads—were brought into the United States from 2006 to 2015.

Excerpt from Giraffe Trade to Be Tracked, Science, Aug. 30, 2019

Low Risk-High Rewards: Killing Endangered Species

The animals’ meat, hides and, above all, tusks are money-spinners. East Asia is the biggest market for ivory and for many illegally traded products, such as animal parts used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)—tiger bones, rhino horns, pangolin scales—or in its cuisine—pangolin meat, for example. In July, 2019 the authorities in Singapore seized 8.8 tonnes, about 300 elephants’-worth, of ivory, along with 11.9 tonnes of pangolin scales, from some 2,000 of the anteaters, the world’s most widely trafficked endangered mammal. The annual profits of the trade in illegal wildlife products are estimated at between $7bn at the low end and $23bn. This makes it the fourth-most profitable criminal trafficking business, with links to others—slavery, narcotics and the arms trade..

Athough China is trying to curb illegal trade, it is also promoting TCM as one of its civilisation’s great contributions to the world. It has indeed made breakthroughs, such as artemisinin, now a widely used defence against malaria. Artemisinin is isolated from the plant Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, a herb employed in TCM….Conservationists are alarmed that in 2019 the World Health Organisation (WHO) gave TCM respectability by including diagnoses for 400 conditions in its influential International Classification of Disease.

The WHO approved in June 2019 a new version of its International Classification of Diseases, a highly influential document that categorizes and assigns codes to medical conditions, and is used internationally to decide how doctors diagnose conditions and whether insurance companies will pay to treat them. The latest version, ICD-11, is the first to include a chapter, chapter 26, on TCM.

Excerpts from How to curb the trade in endangered species: On the Horns, Economist, Aug. 10, 2019; The World Health Organization’s decision about traditional Chinese medicine could backfire, Nature, June 5, 2019

Killing Popcupines for their Bellies: endangered species

Porcupines are been hunted for undigested plant material in their gut known as bezoars.

Varieties of porcupine bezoar

According to leading wildlife trafficking experts, the small, spiny rodents are at risk of becoming endangered across Southeast Asia. Demand is predominantly driven by China, where some believe that bezoars, which accumulate in the digestive tract, have potent medicinal properties, including the ability to cure diabetes, dengue fever, and cancer. Bezoars are sold either raw or in powdered form and may be processed into capsules. A few ounces of the substance can command hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. Most sought after is the dark red “blood” bezoar, believed to be the most potent of the several varieties. Prices for bezoars have “increased exponentially during the past few years, following recent claims of their cancer-curing properties,” according to a 2015 report by the wildlife trade monitoring organization Traffic.

Philippine porcupine
Asiatic brush-tailed porcupine
A Malayan porcupine

The Philippine porcupine, the Asiatic brush-tailed porcupine, and the Malayan porcupine, which live throughout Southeast Asia, are all flagged as threatened and declining in number by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the body that sets the conservation status of wildlife species. None has yet been listed as endangered, which would bolster legal protection and international awareness.

Excerpts from Porcupines are being poached for their stomach content, National Geographic, Mar. 22, 2019

Dragons v. Cattle in Indonesia

Komodo Dragon
Komodo dragons eating pig
Komodo dragon attacks deer

Is tourism endangering one of the world’s most iconic lizard species? It seemed that way after the unexpected announcement that Komodo National Park in Indonesia, home of the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) may be partly closed to visitors for a full year…

Komodo National Park consists of a group of islands with a total land area of 407 square kilometers. The two largest ones, Komodo and Rinca, are home to Komodo dragon populations and are open to visits by tourists; some 160,000 people came in 2018, most of them foreigners. Tourism has made the Komodo dragons “tame” and less inclined to hunt, according to Viktor Laiskodat, governor of the East Nusa Tenggara province, where the park is located. In addition, rampant poaching has reduced the number of Timor deer (Cervus timorensis), the dragon’s main prey; as a result, the dragons have become smaller in size, Laiskodat recently claimed. To “manage the Komodo dragon’s habitat,” Komodo Island should be closed to visitors for a year, Laiskodat said on 18 January.

And there is no need for the partial shutdown, says Maria Panggur, a scientist in charge of ecosystem monitoring at the park. According to government data, the park was home to a healthy population of more than 2700 Komodo dragons in 2017, more than 1000 of them living on Komodo Island…..Human activity does have some effects on the population. A 2018 study by Purwandana showed that animals exposed to tourism—which get fed—were bigger, healthier, less alert, and had higher chances of survival than dragons elsewhere. But tourists can only visit about 5 square kilometers of the park; 95% of the Komodo dragons are not in contact with them, so the impact is minimal, Panggur says…

“If the governor really wants to protect Komodo dragons, he should start looking at Flores,” the province’s main island, Panggur says. Northern Flores is home to a Komodo dragon population of unknown size that is “more sensitive to extinction,” because of its proximity to humans…There are several reports about people killing dragons because they attacked cattle.The Flores population is considered significant because “it has been historically isolated from the western populations,” Jessop says. A 2011 mitochondrial DNA study…confirmed that they are quite different genetically from the populations on Komodo and Rinca. “Retaining this diversity is extremely important” for the species’s ability to respond to climate and habitat changes, Jessop says.

Excerpts from Dyna Rochmyaningsih Is tourism endangering these giant lizards?, Science, Jan. 29, 2019

Saving the Scarlet Macaw

“Apu Pauni” is the name for the scarlet macaw in the indigenous Miskitu language. This brightly coloured parrot is the national bird of Honduras. It is said that it once traveled the skies throughout the country and that its song was heard by the ancient Mayans.

Today, the largest wild population of macaw in the country is believed to be in the eastern region of La Moskitia, …The “Apu Prana” (“the beauty of the scarlet macaw” in theMiskitu language) Community Association responsible for the initiative and the centre received training in hospitality, eco-tourism and business management….Although most of the bird monitoring processes are carried out by men, who walk up to six hours into the forest on the edge of the community, it is the women are responsible for caring for the birds in the rehabilitation centre. “This is where we bring the captured scarlet macaws*, those that do not have wings, those that are sick, even abandoned chicks.

The Mavita community has been recognized internationally by the Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation for its efforts in the conservation….The “La Moskitia” project was implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

Excerpts from Guardians of the scarlet macaw, UN Development Program, Press Release, May 9, 2018

*Poachers climb trees where the parrots nest and pinch the chicks before they learn to fly. People in China, Australia and Middle East pay $6 000 online. In 2014 not one newborn parrort reached adulthood in its native land, Economist, Jan. 12, 2019, at 30

Amazon Turtles are Back! Thanks to Local Vigilantes

The historically over-exploited Giant South American Turtle is making a significant comeback on river beaches in the Brazilian Amazon thanks to local protection efforts, say researchers at the University of East Anglia. Their results, published in Nature Sustainability, show that Giant Turtle populations are well on their way to full recovery on beaches guarded by local vigilantes. There are now over nine times more turtles hatching on these beaches than there were in 1977, equivalent to an annual increase of over 70,000 hatchlings. The beach survey showed that, of over 2000 turtle nests monitored on protected beaches, only two per cent were attacked by poachers. In contrast, on unprotected beaches, poachers had harvested eggs from 99 per cent of the 202 nests surveyed.The beach protection programme along the Juruá river is part of the largest community-based conservation programme in the Brazilian Amazon. Beaches are guarded on a shoestring budget by local communities carrying out round-the-clock beach surveillance throughout the five-month turtle breeding season.

Prof Carlos Peres, from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences and a senior author on the study, said: “This study clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of empowering local management action by stakeholders who have the largest stake and a 24/7 presence at key conservation sites. The beaches protected by local communities represent noisy islands of high biodiversity, surrounded by lifeless unprotected beaches, which are invariably empty and silent.”

Excerpts from Amazon turtle populations recovering well thanks to local action, Nov. 3, 2018

Cryopreservation of Endangered Species

In paper in 2018 in Nature Plants, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, detail for the first time the scale of threatened species that are unable to be conserved in seed banks. The paper reveals that when looking at threatened species, 36 per cent of ‘critically endangered species produce recalcitrant seeds . This means they can’t tolerate the drying process and therefore cannot be frozen, the key process they need to go through to be safely ‘banked’.

In the paper, Kew scientist Dr. John Dickie, former Kew scientist Dr. Sarah Wyse, and former Director of Science at Kew Prof. Kathy Willis, found that other threatened categories and global tree species list also contain high proportions of species that are unbankable including 35% of ‘vulnerable’ species, 27% of ‘endangered’ species and 33% of all tree species.

Among these species are important UK heritage trees such as oaks, horse chestnuts and sweet chestnuts, as well as worldwide food staples like avocado, cacao, and mango. This latest research reveals that the scale of plants unable to be conserved in seed banks is much higher for threatened species. The issue is particularly severe for tree species, especially those in tropical moist forests where a half of the canopy tree species can be unsuitable for banking…

Currently, seed banking is the most commonly practiced way of conserving plantsoutside of their natural habitats. Seed banking works as an ‘insurance policy’ against the extinction of plants in the world—especially for those that are rare, endemic and economically important—so that they can be protected and utilised for the future.

[The scientists proposed]cryopreservation—a form of preservation using liquid nitrogen which offers a potential long-term storage solution for recalcitrant seeds. In seed banks, seeds are dried and frozen at -20°C whereas cryopreservation involves removing the embryo from the seed and then using liquid nitrogen to freeze it at a much colder temperature of -196°C…As well as allowing ‘unbankable’ species to be stored, cryopreservation also helps to extend the lifespans of orthodox seeds that otherwise have storage lives that are too short at -20°C.

Excerpts from Seed banking not an option for over a third of threatened species
November 2, 2018, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The Biggest Bang for the Buck: Which Species to Save

Faced with a gulf between the species in need and the available resources, some scientists are pushing an approach that combines the cold-blooded eye of an accountant with the ruthless decisiveness of a battlefield surgeon. To do the greatest good, they argue, governments need to consider shifting resources from endangered species and populations that are getting too much attention to those not getting enough. That could mean resolving not to spend money on some species for which the chance of success appears low, such as the vaquita, an adorable small porpoise now down to fewer than 30 animals in Mexico’s Gulf of California.

The term “triage”—from the French verb trier, meaning to sort—was born on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe. Faced with a flood of wounded soldiers, French military doctors conceived of a system to decide who got medical attention and who was too far gone. The idea reached conservation biology as early as the 1980s. But in recent years it has moved from scientific journals to the halls of policymakers, thanks in part to an Australian mathematician and conservation scientist, Hugh Possingham.

Over the following decade, Possingham and others worked to create formulas that could point to the most efficient way to spend money on species preservation. They tried to quantify answers to key questions: What will species restoration projects cost? How likely are they to succeed? How distinct and important is each species? What actions will benefit multiple species or entire ecosystems, bringing the biggest bang for the buck?…

Today, conservation spending is influenced by a complex array of factors, including how close a species is to extinction and the pressure brought by lawsuits, lobbying, and media coverage. The result, Possingham and others argue, is that money is often poured into costly long shots or charismatic organisms, whereas species that could be secured for a relatively low cost go wanting.

A dozen years ago, New Zealand became the first nation to test Possingham’s approach. A nation filled with unique species, some 3000 of them at risk, the country is a poster child for the extinction crisis. But New Zealand had no clear process for setting conservation spending priorities, recalls Richard Maloney, a senior scientist in the country’s Department of Conservation in Christchurch.

In a bid to do better, officials asked Possingham to help craft a plan for spending roughly $20 million per year. The result was a list of 100 top-priority species, developed using a formula that balanced costs and benefits. In general, highly threatened species unique to New Zealand and ended up at the top of the list. But it also included representatives from a variety of species and took into account the cost and likelihood of success. Before that process, the government was working to recover 130 species. Now, more than 300 are getting attention, Possingham says. But for every species or population at the top of such lists, one is at the bottom. And that can lead to agonizing choices…

But saving th Canadian caribou might mean keeping the species on life support for decades… When Mark Hebblewhite, a caribou biologist at the University of Montana in Missoula, looks at how maps of woodland caribou habitat overlap with Alberta’s oil and gas deposits, his response is: Get real. Hebblewhite doubts the government will ever summon the will to impose the development restrictions necessary to save all herds. He points to a 2010 study indicating that such restrictions could mean forgoing extraction of oil, gas, and timber worth more than $125 billion in Alberta alone…

Instead of focusing on the most feeble herds, Canada should instead protect habitat in key areas where caribou populations still stand a good chance, he argued in a 2017 Biological Conservation paper. “We’ve prioritized the most screwed populations,” Hebblewhite says. “All I’m saying is that we prioritize the winners.”

That idea makes biologist Alana Westwood uncomfortable. A Vancouver, Canada–based scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative,… If Canada isn’t willing to take the necessary steps, she suggests officials rename its law “the ‘recover species that are most easy to accommodate under business as usual act.’”…”It’s an easy way out for managers who don’t have the balls to make tough decisions, and therefore we lose species after species,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has often sparred with Possingham in public forums. One problem, he argues, is that giving up on a species also means abandoning a potent tool to rally the public and the courts. Sometimes charismatic animals such as California condors or polar bears can help build political support for saving endangered species or habitats more broadly….

And some species stand for entire ecosystems, Pimm adds. Consider the Cape Sable seaside sparrow. The innocuous songbird lives in Florida’s Everglades, where water diversions threaten its marsh habitat. The species might not rank high in a triage system—in part because other populations of related seaside sparrows exist. But because of how the U.S. Endangered Species Act is structured, efforts to protect the sparrow have required policymakers to reallocate water, benefiting the entire ecosystem. “I’m afraid we have to make more complicated decisions than the simple recipes that Hugh comes up with,” Pimm says.

Possingham concedes that triage is not suited to every situation. Europe, for example, has wealthy countries and few native endangered species, which makes saving them all realistic. And sometimes a species is so culturally important that it gets special treatment. New Zealand, for instance, has departed from its triage system to give priority to protecting 50 cherished species, including five species of kiwi birds, the nation’s mascot.

Excepts from Warren Cornwall With limited funds for conservation, researchers spar over which species to save—and which to let go, Science Magazine, Sept. 6, 2018

How to Relocate Elephants

Diamond producer De Beers said on July 23, 2018 it was relocating 200 elephants from its private reserve in South Africa to neighboring Mozambique, part of wider efforts to restore wildlife populations ravaged by conflict there. The Anglo American unit said its 32,000-hectare (80,000-acre) Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve could support around 60 elephants but now had 270, causing “extensive damage to an ecosystem that must sustain a diverse wildlife population.”

The world’s largest land mammals have a jumbo-sized impact on their terrain and in many South African parks, which are fenced to contain them, populations have reached levels where the vegetation cannot support their numbers. De Beers said the elephants would be moved 1,500 km (1,000 miles) to Mozambique’s Zinave National Park, which has over 400,000 hectares and an elephant population of only 60. Mozambique’s wildlife numbers were badly hit by a 15-year civil war that ended in 1992. In more recent years, its remaining elephant populations have been targeted by ivory poachers.

The operation is being conducted with the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) conservation group, and De Beers said it was providing it with $500,000 to support anti-poaching efforts…Elephants are extremely social animals and family groups will be kept together for the translocation, a huge logistical undertaking that will include darting operations and the movement of tranquilized animals over long distances by road.

Excerpts from De Beers to move 200 elephants from South Africa to Mozambique, Reuters, July 23, 2018

7 Frozen Embryos and the Resuscitation of Rhinos

SUDAN, the last male northern white rhinoceros on Earth, died in March 2018. He is survived by two females, Najin and her daughter Fatu, who live in a conservancy in Kenya. This pair are thus the only remaining members of the world’s most endangered subspecies of mammal. But all might not yet be lost. Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, in Berlin, in collaboration with Avantea, a biotechnology company in Cremona, Italy, is proposing heroic measures to keep the subspecies alive. In a paper published in Nature, he and his colleagues say that they have created, by in vitro fertilisation (IVF), apparently viable hybrid embryos of northern white rhinos and their cousins from the south. This, they hope, will pave the way for the creation of pure northern-white embryos.

Though stored sperm from Sudan and several other males are available, both Najin and Fatu now seem unable to conceive. This means, if the subspecies is to be preserved, that one or both of them will have to have some eggs removed from their ovaries and combined with stored sperm in a Petri dish;… and subsenquently implanted in the uterus of a southern white, who would act as a surrogate mother, with a reasonable hope of success. That has not yet happened. The seven embryos are now in a freezer awaiting the results of research on how best to transfer them to surrogates. In the meantime, having proved their technique with these hybrids, Dr Hildebrandt and his colleagues now hope to create more embryos, this time using eggs from the two remaining female northern whites.

Even if they succeed, though, it will be a long haul back for the northern white rhino. Members of any new generation resulting from IVF will have then to be bred with each other to create subsequent generations—with all the risks of reduced biological fitness which such incest entails. It is not so much a gene pool that Dr Hildebrandt is working with as a gene puddle.

Then there is the question of what to do with the resulting animals. Analysis of other rhinoceros species, both in Africa and Asia, points to a viable population in the wild needing to be at least 500 strong. Even if such a group could be created, and not collapse from lack of genetic diversity, releasing it into the tender mercies of what remains of Kenya’s savannah would be risky.

Excerpts from Animal Conservation: Drinking in the last-chance saloon, Economist, July 7, 2018, at 66.

The Game-Changers: oil, gas and geothermal

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has decided to degazette parts of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites to allow for oil drilling. Environmentalists have reacted sharply to the decision to open up Virunga and Salonga national parks – a move that is likely to jeopardise a regional treaty on the protection of Africa’s most biodiverse wildlife habitat and the endangered mountain gorilla…The two national parks are home to mountain gorillas, bonobos and other rare species. Salonga covers 33 350 km2 (3,350,000 ha)of the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest rainforest, and contains bonobos, forest elephants, dwarf chimpanzees and Congo peacocks….

On 7 April, 2018, a council of ministers from the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda agreed to ratify the Treaty on the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC) on Wildlife Conservation and Tourism Development. The inaugural ministerial meeting set the deadline for September 2018 to finalise the national processes needed to ratify the treaty.

The Virunga National Park (790,000 ha, 7 900 km2)is part of the 13 800 km2 (1 3800 00 ha) Greater Virunga Landscape, which straddles the eastern DRC, north-western Rwanda and south-western Uganda. The area boasts three UNESCO World Heritage Sites – Virunga, Rwenzori Mountains National Park and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. It also boasts a Ramsar Site (Lake George and Lake Edward) and a Man and Biosphere Reserve (in Queen Elizabeth National Park). It is the most species-rich landscape in the Albertine Rift – home to more vertebrate species and more endemic and endangered species than any other region in Africa.

According to the Greater Virunga Landscape 2016 annual report, the number of elephant carcasses recorded in 2016 was half the yearly average for the preceding five years. The report also mentions a high rate of prosecution and seizures. It cites a case study on Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park where 282 suspects involved in poaching were prosecuted, with over 230 sentenced….The GVTC has also helped to ease tensions between the countries by providing a platform where their military forces can collaborate in a transparent way. ..

Armed groups have reportedly killed more than 130 rangers in the park since 1996. Militias often kill animals such as elephants, hippos and buffaloes in the park for both meat and ivory. Wildlife products are then trafficked from the DRC through Uganda or Rwanda. The profits fund the armed groups’ operations.

Over 80% of the Greater Virunga Landscape is covered by oil concessions and this makes it a target for state resource exploitation purely for economic gain.

2015: Until recently, in GVL, extraction of highly valued minerals such as gold and coltan, were largely artisanal. The recent discovery of oil, gas and geothermal potential, however, is a game-changer. Countries are now moving ahead in the exploration and production of oil and gas, which if not properly managed, is likely to result in major negative environmental (and social) changes. Extractive industries are managed under each GVL partner state policy guidelines and legislation. Concessions for these industries cover the whole of the GVL, including the World Heritage Sites as well as national protected areas . Since 2006, Uganda discovered commercial quantities of oil in the Albertine Graben and production in Murchison will begin within the next few years. The effect of the extractive industries, similar to and contributing to that of the increase in urbanization is the increased demand for bush meat, timber and fuel wood from the GVL.

Excertps from Duncan E Omondi Gumba, DRC prioritises oil over conservation, ISS Africa, July 11, 2018//GREATER VIRUNGA LANDSCAPE
ANNUAL CONSERVATION STATUS REPORT 2015

How to Market Freshly-Poached Ivory

In spite of a ban, illegal ivory trading still flourishes in the European Union, as traders use a loophole allowing exchange of very old pieces, an Oxford University study sponsored by a campaign group found.

European law allows ivory obtained prior to 1947 to be traded freely. Ivory obtained after 1947 but before 1990 can be sold with a government certificate, while selling ivory obtained after the global ivory trade was banned is illegal.

Campaign organisation Avaaz purchased more than 100 pieces of ivory from 10 different EU countries to undergo carbon testing at Oxford University. Scientists concluded 75% of the ivory was from after 1947 and 20% was ivory obtained since 1989. Many traders use the provision which allows free trade of old ivory to illegally trade newer ivory, fuelling the market and incentivising the killing of elephants, Avaaz said.

Exceprts, Illegal ivory breezes past EU law – campaign grou Reuters, Tuesday, July 10, 2018

The Most Trafficked Animal in the World: Pangolin

Pangolins are a smuggler’s dream. For defence, and when asleep, they roll themselves up into spheres, scales on the outside, to thwart any predator. That makes them easy to handle and pack. And handled and packed they have been, in enormous numbers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a worldwide wildlife-preservation organisation, reckons that more than 1m pangolins were traded illegally from their African and Asian homelands over the decade to 2014. That may be a conservative estimate. A paper published in 2017 in Conservation Letters calculates the number of pangolins hunted in central Africa alone as between 400,000 and 2.7m a year. Based on statistics such as these it seems likely that pangolins, of which there are eight species, four African and four Asian, are the most trafficked type of animal in the world.

Some are consumed locally. That is not necessarily illegal, for laws vary from place to place. International trade, though, is a different matter. Early in 2017 CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, listed all eight pangolins as part of what is known as Appendix 1. This means signatories to the convention (which most countries are) cannot permit them to be imported or exported.

Most of those that are, nevertheless, exported illegally from their homelands end up in China and Vietnam. In these countries pangolins’ meat is a treat and their scales are used in folk medicine, even though those scales are made of keratin, the same substance as hair and fingernails, and thus have no medicinal value. Pangolin scales fetch as much as $750 a kilogram in China. A 12-tonne stash of them, the world’s biggest seizure, was found last summer by the authorities in Shenzhen….

Cracking down on poachers and traders is difficult, particularly in poor places…Part of the blame lies with ignorance. Awareness of pangolins is patchy. They are nocturnal and shy, and thus rarely feature on tourists’ tick-lists. That makes them a low priority, even to game-management authorities who know they are there. …The Hywood Foundation’s initiative is part of a larger effort in Uganda, sponsored by the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), the government’s conservation agency. Now that pangolins are on the UWA’s radar, it has stepped up intelligence and investigative work on poachers and traffickers…At the consumption end of the trafficking routes, too, things are starting to happen…. In theory, eating pangolin meat (along with that of many other wild species) is already illegal in China—not for conservation reasons, but as a reaction to the outbreak of SARS, a fatal respiratory disease…Persuading people to stop using the animals’ scales may be harder.

Excerpts from Conserving Pagolins: A Problem of Scale, Economist, Feb 3, 2018

Fixing the Earth: De-Extinction

Is extinction forever? Efforts are under way to use gene editing and other tools of biotechnology to “recreate” extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon. Could such “de-extinction” initiatives aid conservation by reviving species lost to habitat destruction and climate change?…. These are some of the questions addressed in Recreating the Wild: De-extinction, Technology, and the Ethics of Conservation, a new special report of the Hastings Center Report.

Advances in biology have revealed the ways the environment influences species’ genomes. Even if scientists could produce creatures with DNA identical to that of extinct species, different environmental pressures would alter their genomes in novel ways, raising the possibility that those creatures would differ from the extinct species…

Many scientists believe that although the maintenance of biodiversity benefits ecosystems, changes to the environment could make the reintroduction of extinct species difficult—possibly even ecologically disruptive. …Several commentators in the report raise the concern that the notion that extinct species might be “brought back” could weaken efforts to prevent extinctions. “By proposing that we can revive species through modern technology, we give the impression that species are ‘throwaway’ items,” write Robert DeSalle, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and George Amato, director of the conservation genomics program at the institute.

Excerpt from Recreating the wild: De-extinction, technology, and the ethics of conservation, https://phys.org/news/, Aug. 2017

Whale Wars and 2017 Armistice

Environmental activists are abandoning their annual anti-whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, saying Japan’s threat to defend its fleet is too daunting. Capt. Paul Watson, the founder of anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, said Japan’s threat to dispatch its military was unprecedented.“For the first time ever, they have stated they may send their military to defend their illegal whaling activities,” Capt. Watson said in a statement Tuesday. “The Japanese whalers not only have all the resources and subsidies their government can provide, they also have the powerful political backing of a major economic superpower.”

The Japanese embassy in Canberra, Australia, didn’t immediately respond to Sea Shepherd’s announcement, but it previously accused the group of sabotage and “acts of violence which seriously endangered the safe navigation of vessels.” Some of Sea Shepherd’s tactics include ramming whaling vessels and throwing stink bombs onto the decks of Japanese ships. In January 2010, one of Sea Shepherd’s boats sank after a collision with a whaling vessel.

The group’s decision to suspend its campaign after 12 years leaves Japan’s fleet free to resume whaling through the coming Antarctic summer without disruption. Japan’s whaling fleet reported in 2016 killing 333 minke whales, with plans to cull about 4,000 whales over the next 12 years under a quota set by the Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo.

The International Whaling Commission put in place a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. The next year, Japan embarked on a cull that it said was in the name of science, not commerce. Japan says it has a right to monitor whales’ impact on the fishing industry, though it also claims they are an important part of its cultural and culinary heritage.

Activists say scientific whaling is aimed at circumventing the 1986 ban.Last month, Japan’s Parliament passed a series of laws allowing for the protection of commercial whaling fleets. The International Court of Justice ruled against Japan in a scientific-whaling case in 2014. Australia’s government condemned Japan’s new whaling laws in July 2017 saying they weren’t consistent with the 2014 ruling. Tokyo has withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction with regard to whaling cases…

Capt. Watson said Sea Shepherd would resume anti-whaling efforts in the future, not only against the Japanese, but also in opposition to Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic whaling. “This is what we have been doing for 40 years,” he said.

Excerpts from Foes of Whaling End Campaign, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 30, 2017

National Parks: Benin

Benin is hiring scores of extra park rangers and bringing in conservation scientists to rehabilitate part of West Africa’s largest wildlife reserve, which contains big cats and thousands of elephants that have largely died out elsewhere in the region. The W-Arli-Pendjari (WAP) complex is the region’s biggest remaining expanse of savannah, covering more than 30,000 sq km of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso.

The tiny nation has partnered with NGO African Parks for the 10-year project centred on the 4,800 sq km Pendjari National Park, part of WAP and seen as the most viable tourist hub for the area, officials involved told Reuters.

“Pendjari is an opportunity for Benin and the region,” Jose Pliya, director of Benin’s national tourism agency, told Reuters. “This partnership will help us make it a sustainable tourism destination and a lever for development and employment for Beninoise.”

Boosting ecotourism faces challenges, not least because jihadists are thought to have infiltrated parts of the wider reserve. France, former colonial master of the three nations straddling the park advised it citizens against all travel to the Burkina Faso side of the expanse.

To better police the park, the project will recruit 10 officers or specialists, train 90 guards, set up a satellite communications network and put a 190 km fence around it, a joint statement from African Parks and Benin said.

Excerpts from Moves to save part of west Africa’s last big wildlife refuge, Reuters, June 2, 2017

Survival of Bluefin Tuna

Japanese call bluefin tuna “the king of fish”. They eat about 40,000 tonnes of it a year—80% of the global catch. Demand is also growing rapidly elsewhere. Yet Pacific bluefin stocks are down by 97% from their peak in the early 1960s, according to a recent report from the International Scientific Committee, an intergovernmental panel of experts. (Japan disputes its findings.) In some places, fishing is three times the sustainable level, the committee says.

Aquaculture might seem to offer a way out of this impasse. But the bluefin is hard to breed in captivity. In the open sea, it can roam for thousands of miles and grow to over 400kg. It is highly sensitive to light, temperature and noise. Early attempts to farm it fizzled, but Kindai University persisted long after an initial research grant from the government ran out in the early 1970s. In 2002, funding itself from sales of other fish, it managed to rear adult tuna from eggs for the first time, rather than simply fattening up juveniles caught at sea. Now the chefs in Ginza can have a tuna zapped with an electric prod and yanked out of the university’s tanks on demand.

However, just 1% of the bluefin the university rears survive to adulthood. “We expect this to improve but it will take time,” predicts Shukei Masuma, the director of its Aquaculture Research Institute. Worse, the tuna gobble up lots of wild mackerel and squid. Scientists have experimented with soy-based meal and other alternatives. A company in south-western Japan said this month that it had managed to raise tuna using feed made of fishmeal, but it is costly and the fish are slow to thrive. Using wild fish for feed makes bluefin farming unsustainable, says Atsushi Ishii of Tohoku University. He sees aquaculture as a distraction from the thorny task of managing fisheries properly.

This debate is slowly seeping into the public consciousness. In 2014 the media made much of the decision of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a conservation body, to put bluefin tuna on its “red list” of species threatened with extinction.

Excerpts from The Japanese Addiction to Tuna: Breeding Bluefin, Economist, Sept 24, 2016

Rhino Parks and the US Military

A group of American military veterans plans to train rangers at private wildlife farms and reserves in South Africa where rhino poachers have been active.The US military publication, Stars and Stripes, reports that the “small conservation group Vetpaw had previously operated in Tanzania but was ordered to leave, partly because of a video in which a member spoke about killing poachers”.Former US Marine and head of Vetpaw, Ryan Tate, said the member did not speak for the organisation and since the incident he has sought to rebrand Vetpaw.

The name is an acronym of “Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife” and the organisation has as its aim employment for skilled post 9/11 US military veterans….The majority of Vetpaw members have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq...They plan to offer training including marksmanship, field medicine and manoeuvring at night. “People are desperate and want to try any and everything they can,” Peaton told the publication in reference of owners and operators of “private wildlife parks” that lack the resources State-run parks receive.

Earlier this month Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa met with the Private Rhino owners Association (PROA) to discuss rhino conservation in South Africa.PROA said rhino poaching had had “a detrimental effect” on private reserves which held more than a third of South Africa’s total rhino population.

Last week suspected poachers shot and killed a ranger at a private reserve in Bel-Bela before killing a rhino for its horn.Earlier this week two Kruger National Park field rangers were arrested on suspicion of involvement in rhino poaching activities.

US military veterans coming to help in the fight against rhino poaching, defenceWeb, June 22, 2016

Trees Worth More Than Gold

To protect incense trees, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora restricts trading in agarwood. But Hong Kong does not single out those who destroy or damage the trees for harsh treatment. If an incense tree is on government-managed land, the maximum sentence for cutting it down is the same as it is for felling any other kind of tree on such property: a fine of HK$25,000 ($3,210) and a year in prison. Such penalties do little to deter thieves from mainland China, who are encouraged by growing demand for exotic medicines among members of the mainland’s fast-growing middle class. Professor C.Y. Jim of the University of Hong Kong reckons that in 2013 high-grade agarwood was worth $1,600 a gram on the black market. That is more than gold. According to Mr Jim, Hong Kong may be the “last refuge” of the tree, so it has become a “honeypot” for tree-snatchers.

Most of the thieves work for criminal gangs based across the border in mainland China. In recent years a relaxation of restrictions on travel from the mainland to Hong Kong has made their work easier. They often pretend to be hikers, sometimes camping out for weeks while gathering the timber. A local NGO has produced a map showing about 200 sites from which it says around 500 trees were stolen in the past year.

Very few incense trees form agarwood, so they are often destroyed indiscriminately. On Lamma, a plaque marks a spot where three young trees were uprooted. A short scramble up a steep slope reveals a gorier scene: splintered woodchips are all that remain of an aged tree. Mr Yeung, the beekeeper, says “hunters” felled and butchered it in situ. As supplies diminish, the gangs are becoming more desperate. Thieves are raiding private gardens; some residents have begun organising patrols to frighten the thieves away. Alarms and monitoring cameras are being installed.

Excerpts from Trees in Hong Kong: Fragrant Arbour, Economist, Feb. 22, 2016, at 37

Why Rhino Poaching Goes on Forever

Mistrust in police ranks, a shortage of proper intelligence structures and an easy exit through South Africa’s more than nine harbours are all stumbling blocks specialised police experience in the ongoing battle against rhino poaching.

This was how Colonel Johan Jooste, operational commander of the Hawks endangered species unit in South Africa outlined some issues facing his unit. He was addressing the 35th international conference of crime fighters in Cape Town this week, Netwerk24 reports.“…We find instances where police are involved in rhino poaching syndicates,” he said, adding police detailed to anti- and counter-poaching should receive specialist training….

Knowledgeable hunters in South Africa are recruited by buyers of rhino horn. They are also responsible for removing the horn and taking it to the next person in the chain, usually someone responsible for transport. “It can be someone who knows the area well and can also be either a policeman or a traffic officer,” he said, adding the horn was stored or taken to places such as harbours for illegal export. The Kruger National Park has this year lost 503 rhinos to poachers out of a national total of 787.

Excerpts, Rhino poachers present different challenges to the Hawks, defenceWeb, Tuesday, Oct. 14 2014

Deaths of Rhinos in National Parks

In cold statistics the number of rhinos poached a day in South Africa has now reached three with 769 of these Big Five animals killed to… (Sept 2014). That equates to 3.027 animals a day and the country’s (South Africa’s) internationally renowned Kruger National Park remains the preferred hunting ground for rhino poachers. Bordering on both Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the park, increased security and patrol activities notwithstanding, offers poachers fairly easy access and egress with their bounty. So far this year Kruger’s rhino population has been decimated by 489 – well over half the national loss.

Statistics released by the Department of Environmental Affairs this week show all nine of South Africa’s provinces, including mostly urban Gauteng, have now been hit by rhino poachers. The latest kill figures come ahead of next week’s United States-South Africa: Border Surveillance Technology Co-operation Symposium at the CSIR International Convention Centre. All eyes will be on retired SA Army general Johan Jooste, now Commanding Officer: Special Projects for SANParks based in Kruger. The title of his keynote address is “Turning the tide – borders, poaching, technology”…

US Ambassador to South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, is also carded as a speaker alongside senior representatives (unnamed at the time of publication) from Armscor; the CSIR’s Defence, Peace, Safety and Security section; SA Aerospace, Maritime and Defence Industries Association (AMD); the US Army Research Office and the US Corps of Engineers.

Excerpts from Kim Helfrich, Three rhinos shot every day in South Africa, Defence Web, Sept. 12, 2014

$10 Billion Illegal Market for Wildlife

At $10 billion a year, illegal wildlife makes up the world’s fifth-largest illicit market behind drugs, counterfeit products, trafficked people and smuggled oil. An intergovernmental conference in Geneva from July 7th-11th, 2014 revealed the special worries about ivory smuggling in Thailand, rhino-horn trafficking through Mozambique and trade in tiger parts across South and South-East Asia.

According to TRAFFIC, a lobby group, the street value of rhino horn is $60,000 per kilo—more than the price of gold. Gram for gram, bear-bile flakes or powder sell in Japan [slightly less] than cocaine in Asia. Booming demand from Asia’s growing middle classes is pushing some species close to extinction. As supply dwindles, prices rocket, which tempts criminal gangs to sink their claws in even further.

Elephant ivory is valued for aesthetic reasons. Demand for rhinoceros horns, the paws and bile of Asiatic black bears and sun bears, tiger bones and penises, and deer musk, is stimulated by the healing powers ascribed to them in traditional Chinese medicine. Rhino-horn shavings boiled in water are said to cool and to cure headaches; the brew is akin to fingernail clippings in water (both are mainly keratin, an indigestible protein). Bear bile does help with gallbladder and liver problems—but no more than the synthetic version of ursodeoxycholic acid, its main component.

In February 42 countries, including China and Japan, and the European Union signed a declaration against trade in illegal wildlife products. Chinese law punishes the purchase or consumption of endangered species with up to ten years in jail. But in May, when Philippine forces seized a Chinese vessel carrying sea turtles, giant clamshells and live sharks off the disputed Half Moon Shoal, China expressed outrage at the “provocative action”—not the illegal cargo.

The illegal trade in wild-animal products: Bitter pills, Economist, July 19, 2014, at 54

Cheap Wild Meat: Nigeria

Just as the bush meat delicacy is gaining acceptance in all parts of the country [Nigeria] and fast becoming a source of living for many Nigerians, infrastructural development, including roads construction, have also contributed greatly in threatening plant species with most plants going into extinction. It is a common site when travelling across the country to see hunters, women and children displaying bush meat on the highway for sale.

The bush meat business, according to Mrs Janet Efe, a bush meat merchant a long Okpela-Benin road, has come to stay. “There is no job for our husbands and children and rather than going into robbery and other dubious trades it is better they hunt in the forest where the animals roam about.” She said that so long as human beings exist, animals will always be available for people to eat.

Bush meat is a recognised trade at rural and urban centres. Wild animals’ meat is the main source of cheap protein for the majority of rural communities in Nigeria. Over 80 per cent of the population are rural dwellers who depend on bush meat, compared with urban dwellers that depend on abattoir supplies of cow and other ruminant meat…

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the present level of information on the status of non-fish aquatic animal resources in Nigeria is still scanty and limited to a few inventories of wild stocks in the National Parks. A holistic approach to their management and conservation is required and recognition that the conservation of aquatic animals, including fish, is important because of their genetic resources, biological, and food values and the socio-economic implications of their extinction.

Excerpts from ALEX ABUTU, Nigeria: Biodiversity – Nigeria’s Wasting Goldmine, AllAfrica, May 21, 2014

Conservation: a Military Operation

Mander, founder and chief executive officer of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF) – registered in Houston, headquartered in Zimbabwe, and training rangers across Southern Africa [states]…”while we’re trying to win people [over], tens of thousands of animals are being killed every year. We need to do something now, on the ground, to stop the hemorrhaging. Otherwise there won’t be anything left by the time we’ve won all the hearts and minds.”

Mander’s urgency is not misplaced. Poachers in South Africa killed the equivalent of one rhino every eight hours in 2013. They hacked or sawed off their horns and sold them on the world market for as much as $27,000 per pound – more than the price of gold. That makes the average horn on the average rhino worth close to a quarter-million dollars. Across Africa, the number of elephants has fallen from 1.3 million 40 years ago to fewer than 400,000 today. Each year, the continent loses somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of those that remain. This has prompted organizations such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to predict that Africa will lose a fifth of its elephants in 10 years. Other groups warn that the African elephant could be extinct within a generation, consigned to picture books, zoos, and eventually fairy tales, like the unicorn.

Mass killings of Africa’s wildlife have happened before, notably in the 1970s and ’80s, a period known as the “ivory holocaust.” In 1989, an international ban on trade in elephant ivory curtailed the supply of illicit animal parts, and populations of the hardest-hit wildlife began creeping up again. But so did the demand. Asia’s growing middle class increasingly sought out the animal contraband that serves both as ancestral trappings of wealth and a source of traditional medicines.

To supply these expanding markets, poaching has surged again. But this time the sophistication, funding, and malevolence of the poachers and their big-time criminal underwriters have reached new heights. The few who are caught are often found with their own night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, bandoliers of ammunition, and other specialized gear. Big-money backers equip the gunmen with helicopters to land inside the electric fences that guard wildlife. They bribe veterinarians to supply the poachers with powerful animal tranquilizers, which are used to fell the beasts all the more quickly.

In the face of this onslaught, the world’s conservation organizations have significantly increased their efforts despite chronic underfunding. But Mander argues that the conservation “industry,” as he calls it, is “dangerously fragmented” and wasting energy pulling in different directions.”It’s a world wildlife war. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s anything else,” he says back at his main encampment in Zimbabwe. “And the way we’re heading, we’re going to lose.”

Mander is an unlikely poster boy for an environmental conservation movement… At age 19, he joined the Australian Navy and soon transferred into the force’s equivalent of the US Navy SEALs. Six years later, he had become a fully trained Special Forces sniper and specialist diver. But his commission ended, and he shifted into private security and protection of VIPs in Iraq. Twelve tours and three years later, he’d become a wealthy man but decided to quit. …

In Zimbabwe, a wildlife reserve manager with a team of rangers out in the bush decided that hiring Mander was worth a try…Seeing the need to teach rangers about military tactics, and using money from investments he had made during his high-paying days in Iraq, Mander set up the IAPF in 2009. To date, it has trained rangers from 10 separate wilderness areas in Zimbabwe and is expanding into Mozambique. IAPF is also leading efforts from South Africa to create an international standard for wildlife rangers around Africa and beyond….

He teaches intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as overt and covert patrolling. He shows them how to set up observation posts, how to use force properly, and how to deal with battlefield casualties. Mander deploys the gear he used when he was in Iraq, the night scopes and the infrared lights. He’s working on a new gas-driven drone that can spend five hours in the air scouring the landscape for poachers. His rangers go through physical training drills every morning. Their uniforms are new and spotless. “People will try to package it up in a softer way – I don’t know why – but antipoaching is a paramilitary operation,” he says. “Law enforcement should be a ranger’s No. 1 job, but it’s been turned into a minor role.”…

Mander is not the only one militarizing ranger training. In Kenya, the British Army is helping teach similar battlefield techniques. In South Africa, former special forces soldiers are doing the same. Drones are undergoing trials in a dozen wildlife reserves across Africa. The key ingredient in Mander’s approach is a perpetual show of force, which he believes acts as a deterrent…

Critics in the conservation community worry that militarizing the antipoaching movement raises the risk of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire. They think it sidesteps the judicial process at a time when courts are beginning to impose harsher sentences on poachers….

“A lot of people will argue that we need to be focused less on the military approach I’m trying here and more on community work and hearts and minds and sustainable alternatives for communities,” Mander goes on. “Look, I’m all for that. Let’s have people out there working on that. But while they’re at it, I’m going to be here on the ground trying to stop the bleeding and hold on to what we’ve got left before everything’s dead.”

Excerpt, Mike Pflanz, The ivory police, Christian Science Monitor, Mar. 2, 2014

Saving the Elephant: $300 Million

Six tonnes of elephant tusks and ivory trinkets were destroyed in a tarmac crusher in the factory city of Dongguan in China on January 6th, 2014. Most of the 33-tonne stockpile of Hong Kong—home to many of the world’s most avid buyers of ivory—as well as those of several European countries will soon meet the same fate. In the past few years ivory has also been destroyed in the United States, Gabon, Kenya and the Philippines.

These scenes lack both the curling smoke and dramatic setting of the vast pyre of tusks burned in Kenya’s Nairobi National Park in 1989. (Most ivory is now destroyed by crushing, rather than burning, to avoid polluting the atmosphere.) But they may prove equally significant in the long fight to stop poaching and save the elephant from extinction. The bonfire near Nairobi was the prelude to a global ban on trade in ivory, a collapse in demand and a lull in poaching that gave the African elephant population time to recover. But in the past five years poaching has picked up again. An estimated 25,000 elephants are killed each year by poachers, many of them linked to organised crime. In some places the species is close to being wiped out…

Links between ivory traffickers and African militias such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, a thuggish band of guerrillas that originated in Uganda, have put the issue on the national-security agenda in America and elsewhere. The result is attention from political heavyweights including Bill and Hillary Clinton; John Kerry, America’s secretary of state; and David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister. African governments have agreed to to beef up park patrols, create anti-poaching police units in the states where elephants roam and strengthen anti-poaching laws. The measures have so far been underfunded. Making them stick would cost an estimated $300m over ten years, much of which it is hoped will come from the rich countries at the conference.

Though campaigners welcome the plan they argue that curbing the supply of ivory is not enough. Since 1989 countries with elephant populations have twice been allowed to sell stockpiled ivory from elephants that died naturally under CITES, a global agreement on international trade in endangered species. Before the second sale, in 2008, conservationists warned that it would revive the market in China, where ivory ornaments have long been prized, and make poaching profitable once more. They were right. The ivory bought by the Chinese government is drip-fed onto the domestic market at a rate of five tonnes a year. That comes nowhere close to meeting demand, estimated at 200 tonnes a year. And the sales have coincided with an explosive increase in poaching.

The ivory trade: Up in smoke, Economist,Feb. 8, 2014, at 60

Conservation Drones Against Poachers

A South African foundation on Wednesday received a 232.2-million-rand (about 21-million-U.S.- dollar) grant for combatting unchecked rhino poaching in Southern Africa. The grant was donated to Peace Parks Foundation from the Dutch and Swedish Postcode Lotteries. Of the total donation, 217 million rands (about 19 million dollars) came from the Dutch Postcode Lottery, while 15.2 million rands (about 13.7 million dollars) was contributed by the Swedish Postcode Lottery.

“This is the largest single contribution made by the private sector to combat rhino poaching and wildlife crime. We welcome this public-private partnership to help ensure the survival of the species,” South Africa’s Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa said.

The South African government and its public entities—South African National Parks (SANParks) and Ezemvelo KZN (KwaZulu-Natal) Wildlife (Ezemvelo), are working closely with Peace Parks Foundation to develop a multi-pronged approach to combat rhino poaching and wildlife crime, the minister said.

The main focus will be the devaluation of the horns of live rhino, through a combination of methods, including the physical devaluation and contamination of the horn, as well as the use of tracking and monitoring technology…In particular, the emphasis will be on intelligence gathering and on technology applications such as conservation drones and other specialist equipment. It will also include training and capacity building, as well as incentives and rewards for rangers, communities and members of the public who support the conservation of rhino…The Peace Parks Foundation was established in 1997 to assist the region’s governments in their development of transfrontier conservation areas.

South African foundation receives multi-million-dollar grant for fighting rhino poaching, Xinhua, Feb. 8, 2014

The Slow Death of Rhino: South Africa

The Kruger National Park’s rhino population remains under heavy threat from poachers with no less than 63 carcasses found in the world famous game reserve in the first 30 days of the year…This equates to a national kill rate of 2.8 animals a day at the start of the year while arrests in connection with poaching stand at 21 for the first 30 days of the year…One of these gaps is widely seen to be the ease with which poachers come into and leave South Africa from particularly Mozambique. A proposal allowing for hot pursuit of suspected poachers across the international border has been put forward to the SANParks board and the Environmental Affairs Ministry for inclusion in a memorandum of understanding due to be entered into between South Africa and its eastern neighbour. The memorandum was originally due to have been signed this month but Mozambique has indicated it is not yet in a position to sign.

Excerpt, Kim Helfrich, Rhino killing continues unabated, http://www.defenceweb.co.za/, Jan. 31, 2014

Smuggling Endangered Species and Drugs

Criminals involved in smuggling endangered species from Latin America into Spain are using the same routes as drug traffickers, Spanish police told Efe. Some drug traffickers have actually turned to the business of smuggling exotic animals because it is lucrative and less dangerous than the narcotics trade, Spanish Civil Guard Wildlife Protection Service Capt. Salvador Ortega said. Spain is one of the main entry points used by animal smugglers from Latin America to penetrate the European market, Ortega said.

The trade in exotic species is “very lucrative” and continues growing, the police officer said. Animal smugglers use “the same routes as the drug trade and some have traded their businesses for exotic species,” Ortega said. A small egg can easily be smuggled across international borders, with the parrot that later hatches being sold for more than 15,000 euros (about $20,500), Ortega said Reptiles, amphibians, turtles – smuggled from Morocco – and parrots are the exotic animals most commonly illegally introduced into Spain, the police officer said.

Animal Traffickers Use Same Routes from Latin America as Drug Smugglers, Police Say, Latin American Herald Tribune, Jan. 3, 2014

The Polar Bear: An Animal or Icon

The Inuit see the animal as a fierce predator, a cultural symbol and a valuable source of food, warmth and money in a part of the world where all three are in short supply.Yet to animal-welfare and green groups in warmer places the polar bears are both an icon in the fight against climate change and an animal under threat of extinction. The melting of the Arctic’s ice cap, which the bears use as a hunting platform, means the estimated population of between 20,000 and 25,000 will decline sharply, they say. They see hunting the bears as an anachronism and want international trade in bear pelts and parts, already severely restricted, completely banned.

These opposing views are set to clash at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an intergovernmental agreement, between March 3rd and 14th in Bangkok. Having failed at the previous meeting of CITES in 2010, the United States is again leading a move to switch the polar bear from Appendix II of the convention to Appendix I, which would ban trade in all but “exceptional” circumstances. The American proposal is backed by Russia but opposed by Canada, Norway, Denmark (which represents Greenland) and the CITES secretariat.

The debate promises to be emotional. What it lacks are facts. The Americans acknowledge that only eight of the 19 known groups of polar bears have been surveyed since 2000. Of the remaining 11, four have never been surveyed. The submission relies on a controversial forecast undertaken for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007 that suggests the decline in sea ice will lead to the disappearance of two-thirds of the world’s polar bears by 2050. Should the United States obtain the two-thirds majority needed to change the bear’s status, it will be a blow to the Inuit. Their trade in walrus tusks and narwhal horns has dried up because of curbs on sales of ivory designed largely to protect elephants. The trade in seal pelts and meat was curtailed by a 2009 import ban by the European Union, though this granted a limited exemption to indigenous peoples.

In Canada polar bears are hunted under annual quotas set by territorial governments. The Inuit trade bear pelts, claws and teeth, and sell some of the quota to trophy hunters, who employ local guides and buy local supplies…..

Countries which want to become observers at the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body, will be reluctant to vote against Canada, Norway and Denmark on the issue. Canada takes over as chairman of the council in May. Still, it will take resolve to stand up to the United States, also a council member, and the array of animal-welfare and environmental groups backing its position.

The Inuit also argue that if the problem is climate change, to ban trade in polar bears is to attack the symptom rather than the cause. That was the argument of the European Union’s environment commissioner, Janez Potocnik, when the European Parliament debated the issue earlier this month. But the MEPs still voted in support of the American position.

Canada’s Inuit: Polar-bear politics, Economist, Feb. 23, at 36

How to Save the Lions

In the dark the safest way to attack the lions was to catch them in the headlights of a car and run them over. Once the adults were downed it was easy enough to dispatch the cubs with spears and arrows. When the killing stopped last year in Kitengela, on the plains outside Nairobi National Park, six lions were dead. It was the worst such incident in recent memory.

Killing lions without a licence is a criminal offence in Kenya and the slaughter was witnessed by a trio of park rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service. Outnumbered, they decided not to try to stop what one of them described as “mob justice” by locals angry that their goats had been eaten. Seven months later no one has been arrested. Whereas elephant and rhino poachers often end up dead or in jail, no lion killer in Kenya has ever ended up behind bars.

Recent estimates put their number (lions) in Africa at 15,000-25,000. LionAid, a conservation group based in Britain, says it knows of only 645 still in west and central Africa. Paula Kahumbu of Kenya-based Wildlife Direct says their fate Africa-wide will be decided in Kenya, home to one in ten of the surviving beasts. Kenya is losing about 100 every year, its wildlife service estimates, most of them killed by herders whose cattle graze the land where lions hunt. Cheap pesticides, such as Carbofuran, which is tasteless and odourless, have replaced spears as the chief killer. Kenya’s human population, up from 8m at independence in 1964 to 42m-plus today, has deprived the lions of habitat and prey.

Laurence Frank, who runs Living With Lions, a Kenyan charity, says that the big cats are viewed as an expensive nuisance by rural people who see few benefits from tourism. Compensating owners for livestock lost to lions may have reduced locals’ incentive to look after their herds. Paul Mbugua of the Kenyan Wildlife Service suspects that last year’s Kitengela killings were meant to send a message that the local Masai wanted bigger compensation. Paying them to guard the lions has worked better…..Most successful of all has been the sprouting of private conservancies turning ranches into wildlife havens that earn their keep from tourists as well as farming, and recycle the income into local communities better than national parks do. Several such ventures in Laikipia, a plateau north-west of Mount Kenya, are reversing the downward trend in lion numbers.

Excerpts, Kenya’s lions: Sad for Simba, Economist, Jan. 26, 2013, at 45

Another War to Save the Rhino

Retired SA Army Major General Johan Jooste was this week unveiled as the man who will be in overall command of the Kruger national park’s (located in South Africa) efforts to for once and all stop rhino poaching. So far this year 381 rhino have been killed by poachers in Kruger, well over half the national loss of 618. Jooste… was his usual straightforward self when commenting on the new task. “I am no messiah. What I am is a proven leader as well as a team player…The battle lines have been drawn and now the team and I are going to work hard to push back poachers. It is a fact that South Africa as a sovereign country is under attack by armed foreign nationals. This can be seen as a declaration of war. We are going to take the war to these bandits and we aim to win it,” the highly decorated and respected retired two-star general said in Skukuza. SANParks chief executive Dr David Mabunda who is on record as saying the country was engaged in “a low intensity war” against poachers, said the arrival of Jooste in Kruger was another indication of the high priority the national conservation agency was giving to the scourge of rhino poaching. “We are fully aware we will never be able to put a ranger behind every rhino. That’s why we are developing modern and innovative ways of protecting rhino against a well-organised onslaught.”

Jooste’s appointment is in line with SANParks multi-pronged approach to rhino poaching including a single operations command. He brings with him experience in military intelligence, border and area protection as well as contemporary knowledge of modern military technology, its use and integration at operational level as well as conservation knowledge.

Kim Helfric, War on rhino poaching intensifies as general joins the fray, The NewAge, Dec. 13, 2012