A fight to survive

BrokenWing Chronicles
A fight to survive

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - "Asia can be a very crowded place, especially if you are an elephant. The shrinking natural habitat of Asian elephants in recent decades has forced them into increased and often violent contact with humans, said environmentalists and wildlife experts who met recently in Colombo to find ways to tackle the problem.

In India alone, home to more than half the continent's estimated 35,000 pachyderms, about 200 wild elephants die every year in conflict with people or killed for ivory.

"Elephants are shot, snared, electrocuted, run into by trains, poisoned in retaliation and everywhere deprived of habitat," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder and director of the Save the Elephants group.

Elephants are reduced to scavenging for food in such places as a stinking garbage dump in Mannampitiya, in Sri Lanka, an island that is home to about 3,000 elephants. The dump is now an infamous elephant-watching spot."
The Link
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/2255...


Hawksbill turtles fight losing pollution battle in Indonesia

Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 (EST)
On an island just a stone's throw from Jakarta, turtle conservationist Salim starts his day by scrubbing moss from the carapaces of his tiny charges.

PRAMUKA ISLAND, Indonesia (AFP) - Here they are safe, but soon they will fight for their lives in the increasingly polluted ocean lapping nearby.
"Not even my family can be bothered to do this," he sighs as he puts another squirming reptile back into its blue plastic tub, where it will stay until it is deemed strong enough to be set free.
For two decades, Salim has been working to protect the critically endangered hawksbill turtles found around the Thousand Islands, an archipelago of white-beached isles scattered 45 kilometres (29 miles) north of Jakarta.
The wiry, moustachioed 57-year-old has seen the waters surrounding the islands slowly become more poisoned as run-off from the teeming Indonesian capital, home to 12 million people, expands ever further from Java's shores.
A large portion of the Thousand Islands, or Kepulauan Seribu, was declared a national park in 1986 so in theory the flora and fauna here is protected. But in practice, nothing can stop the invasion of the muck.
A 2005 Indonesian study declared Jakarta Bay, which abuts the park, a "dying ecosystem." Organic and heavy metals are well above safe limits, though the most recent tests officials provide are dated from 1995. These found dangerous PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) at a level of 1,320 parts per billion -- well above the safe limit then of 0.03 parts per billion.
The hawksbill, one of the world's seven marine turtle species -- six of which are found in Indonesia -- used to be so prevalent here it was named the official mascot of the islands.
National park head Sumarto says that 20 years ago, the turtles laid eggs on almost all of the islands here. Divers spotted turtles four out of every five forays underwater.
By the 1990s, they were found on only 13 of the 110 islands. While the turtles should instinctively return to where they were born, they are repelled by the pollution and forced to seek out different places to nest.
Today eggs are laid on just three to five of the northernmost islands -- the ones furthest away from Jakarta's pollution.
"Now you would be very lucky if you were to meet them during a dive at all," says Sumarto.
The turtles lay a total of around 14,000 eggs a year here, though only about one in 1,000 makes it to adulthood, the average for all marine turtles.
The government estimates that about 40 percent of Jakartans dump their domestic garbage directly into the rivers that criss-cross the megacity. The refuse ends up in Jakarta Bay and oozes towards the islands.
Besides polluting the waters, the debris itself poses a direct threat. Some turtles mistake plastic bags for jelly fish and try to eat them, or get entangled in them and eventually starve to death.
On top of this, for the past three years oil slicks from an exploration area north of the islands have repeatedly washed back around the turtles' nesting grounds.
Salim, who was one of the national park's earlier employees and has won an environment award from the president for his work, points out one turtle with a carapace so deformed that it is convex rather than the normal concave.
"We found three young turtles like this, but only this one survived. We had never found anything like this before," he says. That was 1993, when alarm bells were starting to ring. But things have only got worse.
Humans have been direct predators of the turtles too -- hunting the eggs to eat, and selling their attractive shells as souvenirs, says the park's Sumarto.
This is why the local population -- some 21,000 people living on six islands in the park -- are included in conservation programmes here, he says.
But experts are not upbeat about the prospect of turtles lasting much longer so close to Jakarta.
"The programme is fine for education but it cannot be successful," says Ismu Sutanto Suwelo, a turtle specialist with the Indonesian Wildlife Fund, a local environmental group.
"It is too close to (human) populations and from the north there are threats from oil exploration and ship waste dumping," he said, adding however that the animals would likely find other places to nest in the archipelago nation.
One of Indonesia's most experienced divers, Cipto Aji Gunawan, has visited the islands here repeatedly over the past three decades. He too dismisses efforts now as too little in the face of the onslaught of filth from Jakarta.
"Unless Jakarta gets it act together and starts managing its waste responsibly, there will be no hope for Kepulauan Seribu," he tells AFP.
The Link
http://ahmadzamroni.multiply.com/journal/item/11


Iberian Lynx
The Iberian lynx is the rarest wild cat in Spain—numbering about 150 animals in two locations in the southern part of the nation. But new research from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid has found signs of lynx in four of five areas surveyed in central Spain, mostly on private estates used for hunting. How many new lynx live in the surveyed areas is unknown—they probably number in the tens—but nevertheless they offer hope for expanding the gene pool of Iberian lynx being raised in captivity for release into the wild.


Tasmanian Devil
A new threat to the survival of the Tasmanian devil. Populations of this increasingly rare marsupial hunter and scavenger have been infected with an invariably fatal cancer that causes the growth of debilitating facial tumors. Scientists comparing breeding behavior in infected and uninfected populations have discovered that female devils in disease-ridden areas are breeding earlier than those in uninfected regions. The females usually breed during their second, third and fourth years—only about 10 percent breed in their first year—and generally do not live longer than five years. But in areas where the disease has ravaged the species, up to 80 percent of female devils are breeding at only a year old. Why they are doing so is unknown; perhaps because of declining competition for food as older animals have died off prematurely. In any event, increased breeding among the young may not counteract the effects of the cancer, which could wipe out the species within the next 25 years: Although producing babies earlier, animals in infected populations also are dying earlier, at only 2 to 3 years old.


Sturgeon

A recent study at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France, asked people at upscale receptions to sample and compare two types of caviar—one from a common species of sturgeon and one from a rare sturgeon species. Seventy percent of participants preferred the rare caviar. The researchers conducted the same taste test at a supermarket, targeting people who were not familiar with caviar, and they, too—by 74 percent—preferred the rare caviar. The punchline is that in both tests the caviar offered was exactly the same, coming from farmed sturgeon. The results bode ill for an ancient fish species already losing the battle for survival to habitat loss and degradation as well as to commercial egg collection. One hope for sturgeon has been the potential for replacing eggs collected in the wild with farmed eggs, but this test suggests that people’s taste buds respond more to the label on a caviar jar than to the caviar itself, creating a market for the rarer, more expensive forms even if there is no noticeable difference in taste. Caspian Sea sturgeons, which produce some of the most expensive caviar in the world, could become extinct by 2012 at current rates of egg collection.—Roger Di Silvestro


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