hunting

Promoting Edible Insects to Improve Nutrition and Protect Lemurs in Madagascar

One programme is testing the farming of sakondry – a little-known hopping insect that tastes a lot like bacon – as part of broader efforts to boost entomophagy to reduce malnutrition and protect biodiversity.

Masoala Peninsula, Madagascar: It’s a lovely walk from the village of Ambodifohara to BeNoel Razafindrapaoly’s field. Nestled at the foot of the mountains of Masoala National Park in northeastern Madagascar, the rainforest tumbles down toward the sea, a fringe of smallholder plots the only barrier between these two elements. Everything seems to grow here: fruit trees (mango, papaya, guava), cash crops (clove, coffee, vanilla), staple crops (rice, yam, sweet potato). Everything is luminescent green, courtesy of the abundant rain and even more abundant sunshine.

Here, Razafindrapaoly has planted tsidimy, a native bean plant, to attract a small hopping insect called sakondry. Hardly anything is known about this insect, except that it’s edible, and most importantly, delicious.

A juvenile sakondry. Photo: Emilie Filou/Mongabay

That was enough to grab the attention of Cortni Borgerson, an anthropologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who has been studying the interactions between ecosystems and human health in Madagascar for 15 years. Her work has included the question of why people hunt endangered species, which conservationists have struggled to remedy. She is now leading a three-year programme titled Sakondry to see whether farming the insect and therefore increasing its consumption, could solve the twin challenges of malnutrition and biodiversity loss.

Also read: Forest Communities Pay the Price for Conservation in Madagascar

For despite the appearance of abundance and the stunning primordial landscapes, Madagascar faces serious human and environmental challenges. Three-quarters of the population live on less than $1.90 a day, and nearly half of children under the age of five suffer from stunting due to malnutrition, one of the highest rates in the world. In desperate times, “people turn to what they have, which is the forest,” said Borgerson. Her studies show that in some villages, 75% of animal-source foods come from forest animals, including lemurs. With 94% of lemur species threatened with extinction, this is unsustainable.

Borgerson also found that child malnutrition was higher in households that hunt lemurs, a strong indication that bushmeat is a last resort for families who have little else to eat. Another study by Christopher Golden, assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, shows that removing access to wildlife would lead to a 29% increase in the number of children suffering from anemia and a tripling of anemia cases among children in the poorest households.

A white-fronted brown lemur (Eulemur albifrons) on Masoala Peninsula. Photo: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay

“You can see that there is a clear correlation between malnourishment, food insecurity and lemur hunting,” Borgerson said. “But that also makes it very solvable: we just need to solve what you put on top of your rice. If we can fix this, people will shift off,” she said.

Local people are also becoming aware of the value of wildlife protection for tourism: “It’s important to keep lemurs for tourists,” said Lorien, a resident of Ambodifohara. The village is the gateway to Masoala National Park. Most of the 3,000 or so tourists who make it to Masoala each year, therefore, pass through the village. There are a handful of lodges nearby and the village has benefited from employment opportunities, financial support for the school and even the installation of a micro-hydro turbine, which provides free electricity.

Also read: Meet the Professor Who Thinks Dinners of the Future Should Include Insects

Insects are widely eaten in Madagascar, locusts and beetles being the most popular. In Masoala, Borgerson found that 60% of households have eaten insects in the last year, with sakondry the favourite. Insects also happen to be incredibly nutritious, containing high levels of protein, minerals and vitamins (see graph).

insect_nutrition
Infogram

Borgerson’s project, which is funded by the IUCN’s Save Our Species initiative, will, therefore, plant tsidimy, the sakondry host plant, hone farming techniques and monitor nutrition indicators as well as wildlife hunting at three test sites on the Masoala Peninsula. Its stated goal is to improve rural nutrition and food security in ways that reduce targeted lemur hunting by at least 50%. The project started last December, with villagers at the test sites planting more than 4,200 tsidimy plants. Early estimates suggest that more than 52,000 sakondry have now taken up residence among their leaves.

Borgerson said the priorities over the next few months are to understand the limitations of the current traditional farming system and to study the insect. “It’s amazing how much we don’t know,” she said. “We’ve established the genus, a Fulgorid planthopper, but we can’t tell male from female; we don’t know when females lay their eggs. We want to look at the life cycle, parasites, diseases etc.”They don’t even know what it eats: although sakondry lives on the native bean plant, it doesn’t feed on it. All this information will help Borgerson and her team develop and test enhanced farming techniques.

Female crickets lay their eggs at Valala Farms. Photo: Emilie Filou/Mongabay

Other insects

The Sakondry programme is part of broader efforts to boost entomophagy in Madagascar to reduce malnutrition and protect biodiversity. In Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, Valala Farms has been selling its cricket powder since 2018 to humanitarian organisations that provide free school meals in the capital and famine relief in the south of the country

The farmhouses about a million crickets at any given time, and produces around 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of powder per week, in a facility of just 100square meters (1,076 square feet).

If this sounds like a small footprint, it is pound for pound, insects require less land, less water and less feed than other meats (see graph). They also produce fewer greenhouse gases.

A staffer shows off a cricket at Valala Farms. Photo: Mongabay

Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences and one of Valala Farms’ founders, said that although the farm’s cricket powder will ultimately serve a predominantly urban market, the community element is fundamental to its work.

“You need breakfast before conservation,” he said. “We want to provide tools for conservation activities … We are thinking about replicability for local people, about community initiatives like Sakondry. Perhaps they could raise crickets for us to process or for their own consumption. It’s a much more powerful story if we can get local people involved.”

Back on the rolling fields of Ambodifohara, Razafindrapaoly, who is Borgerson’s project manager, is head-deep in his tsidimy (“never five” in Malagasy, because you only ever find four or six beans in the pod) looking for sakondry. These “wild fields” currently produce around a cup of insects per household every few days, but Borgerson reckons this could increase significantly once the plants get bigger and they tweak the rearing system.

Razafindrapaoly picks juveniles (the tastiest, he said), which are covered in a bizarre-looking plume of white dust. Once home, he washes off the dust, pinches their head to kill them and pops them in a pan with a little water and salt. “You can eat them in sauce, fried, with leaves or with rice but this is the best way,” he said. To Western palates, sakondry tastes like bacon or peanuts.

Virtually every household in the village is taking part in the programme. Lorien said he liked the idea of planting tsidimy to attract sakondry. “It’s food growing over food,” he said.

Be Denis with his chicken in front of a large tsidimy plant. Photo: Emilie Filou/Mongabay

Be Denis, a neighbour, said that although he’s eaten sakondry before, it’s always been quite opportunistic. “It’s not like fishing where you think, ‘the sea is calm, let’s go out,’” he said. “But it will become a bit like [fishing] with tsidimy because you go pick beans and you look for insects at the same time.”

Borgerson’s goal is to develop a system that is productive but doesn’t require much money or monitoring. “We’d like to produce a pictographic user manual, maybe one in the local language, with everything from best practice to troubleshooting,” she said.

A new chicken vaccine

Ambodifohara is also the test site for another conservation and nutrition initiative: a new poultry vaccine against Newcastle disease, a virus that decimates chickens. The vaccine is the brainchild of Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (Mahery), a research organisation set up by Golden.

Golden, like Borgerson, has been working on the intersection of human health and the environment in northeastern Madagascar since 2004. Over the course of his research in Makira Natural Park, another protected area in northeast Madagascar, Golden found that wildlife was widely hunted, with 16% of the population hunting bats, 23% hunting bush pigs, 40% hunting endemic carnivores like mongoose, 49 % hunting lemurs and 91% hunting tenrecs, small mammals that resemble shrews or hedgehogs. Golden also ran taste preference studies and found that although bushmeat ranked high, people’s favourite meat was, in fact, chicken.

BeNoel Razafindrapaoly feeds his chickens. Photo: Emilie Filou/Mongabay

Yet because of the presence of a virulent strain of Newcastle disease, chickens were not readily available. A vaccine does exist, but it requires a cold chain and a trained veterinary technician to inject it, two major obstacles for its use in remote areas such as Masoala or Makira. Mahery, in partnership with the Malagasy Institute of Veterinary Vaccines and vets from the US and Australia, therefore developed a vaccine tailored to the realities of rural Madagascar. The new vaccine, called I-2, is thermostable and administered as an eye drop.

“Thermostable doesn’t mean you can keep it in a hot truck for days, but it’s definitely better than the other one,” said Golden. Its big advantage is that eye drops can be administered by community vaccinators, basically local people who have been trained in the procedure. “That’s a gamechanger when there are only about 100 vets in the whole of Madagascar,” said Golden. Unlike its competitor, I-2 offers the potential for herd immunity, meaning that if a high enough percentage of animals are vaccinated, even those that aren’t vaccinated are protected.

Also read: Why Are so Many People Getting a Meat Allergy?

Mahery has been vaccinating chickens at eight test sites since 2016. Razafindrapaoly is a master vaccinator for the programme: he vaccinates and also trains community vaccinators. He said that although some families were initially reluctant to get their birds vaccinated, they quickly came around when they saw that immunised chickens didn’t succumb to the disease.

His only concern is the price. During the trial, the vaccine was sold at just 100 ariary (three US cents) per chicken, but its real price is likely to be 600 to 900 ariary (16 to 25 cents). With families having on average 15 chickens and the need to vaccinate every four months, it adds up quickly. “Livelihood is low around here; if the price increases, perhaps fewer families will vaccinate, or they won’t vaccinate all their chickens,” Razafindrapaoly said.

Lorien with one of his chickens. Photo: Emilie Filou/Mongabay

Golden said that one of the ways they’re trying to mitigate that is by embedding the vaccine into a larger chicken husbandry program that will give people a better understanding of how best to rear chickens.

Ambodifohara residents aren’t concerned, however. “Nine hundred ariary is nothing compared to losing a chicken,” when a fully grown bird sells for 20,000 to 25,000 ariary ($5.50 to $7), said Lorien, who lost ten chickens to Newcastle disease a few years ago. Be Denis agreed, going so far as suggesting that “people might forget to eat sakondry if chicken becomes plentiful.”

Razafindrapaoly said he thinks both initiatives are important: “Sakondry and chicken are parallel because you can’t eat chicken every day, they need time to grow,” he said. Both also offer income-generating streams on local markets, with the sale of eggs, beans, and insects.

The question is whether these initiatives will have an impact on bushmeat consumption. It is too early to tell with empirical data for Mahery and Sakondry. But the villagers, for their part, are convinced. “The reason people look for bushmeat is that there is nothing to eat: if there is bad weather, you cannot go fish,” said Razafindrapaoly. “But if there is sakondry and beans, you’re OK, and you don’t need to go to the forest.”

Lorien agreed. “People eat lemur to put on top of their rice; if there was plentiful meat through sakondry, chicken and fish, people would not need to eat lemur,” said Lorien. “Eating lemur is a sign of poverty.”

This article was republished from Mongabay under Creative Commons.

Where Are the Large-Bodied Waterbirds of the Wetlands?

A majority of the waterbird population occurs in wetlands not conserved under law. New research makes a case for the prevention of illegal hunting in such areas.

A painted stork at the Keoladeo Bird Sanctuary, Rajasthan. Credit: sankaracs/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Vrushal Pendharkar is a writer at IndiaBioScience.

Mughals hunted waterbirds for game and pot. The British continued the tradition and indulged in hunting them mainly for sport. Some of the most extravagant British hunting expeditions saw them shoot thousands of waterbirds and tens of tigers in a span of few days.

Although India banned hunting under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, hunting continues illegally. In a recent, and first of its kind, study, researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, and the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), Mysuru, documented the intensity of hunting and its impacts on waterbirds. The study found that hunters killed birds to cater to demands of the market and not necessarily for their sustenance, as was previously believed.

Several reports in the past from across the country have reported the hunting of waterbirds in lands both protected (wetlands) and unprotected (e.g., agricultural farmlands and city lakes). But no study has systematically recorded the scale, reasons and effects of hunting on waterbirds in any of these habitats. “We went in knowing there is absolutely nothing to compare [our results] with,” Kolla S. Gopi Sundar of the NCF, who supervised the study, told The Wire.

The researchers wanted to assess how hunting impacted the community of waterbirds in India’s wetlands.

To understand this, they surveyed 27 wetlands that varied in their size, shape, area under vegetation cover and water cover in Kanchipuram district, Tamil Nadu. Of these 27, only two – Vedanthangal and Karikilli – are protected bird sanctuaries, where hunting is prohibited, while remaining 25 are agricultural wetlands.

In total, the researchers counted 8,279 individual birds belonging to 53 species in these wetlands. The birds recorded were classified into three classes according to their sizes. The common sandpiper, cotton teal, common kingfisher, etc. were called ‘small-sized’. The pond heron, cattle egret, purple moorhen, yellow bittern, etc. were put in the medium category. The painted stork, Eurasian spoonbill, Asian openbill stork and grey heron were ‘large’.

This bird data threw up many patterns. The cattle egret was unsurprisingly the most abundant bird because it occurs commonly throughout the country. At the same time, it was the only species encountered across all the wetlands. Some other birds that also commonly occur in most wetlands in the region – such as the spot-billed pelican, painted stork, grey heron and Eurasian spoonbill – were spotted only in Vedanthangal, a protected waterbody. “This was a clear indication of something wrong going on in the landscape,” according to Sundar.

Although the habitat was conducive for birds to exist, they were not to be seen. “Probably outside the protected wetlands the birds were being targeted by hunters and that is the reason why we didn’t find them,” says Ramesh Ramachandran, a postgraduate student at NCBS at the time he carried out the study.

The researchers knew hunters operated in the wetlands and suspected they chose certain species over others. From this premise, they were able to identify 272 hunters and built trust over frequent visits to their hamlets. The researchers found out about their hunting habits and estimated the hunting intensity in a wetland.

The hunters looked for waterbirds seasonally between December and April. This period coincides with the winter migration of several waterbirds species, like the sandpipers, plovers and Eurasian spoonbill, from temperate regions to the tropics. The bulk of the hunting happened over weekends and at dawn and dusk – times at which the birds were active. According to Ramachandran, weekend hunts could be attributed to a spike in demand for meat on those days.

In total, the hunters took out 47 out of 53 species of birds. “With the hunting aspect, the scale of the number of species being affected is mind-boggling,” says Sundar. Although pond heron was the most hunted bird, all hunters preferred to bag large waterbirds like the Asian openbill, Eurasian spoonbill, glossy ibis, great egret, painted stork and spot-billed pelican. This explains why most of these large birds were missing from the agricultural wetlands: hunting has reduced their numbers.

The researchers report that even the hunters acknowledged observing fewer large-bodied birds over the last 10 years. “Historical records mention that the bar-headed goose and black ibis were commonly found in the region,” according to Ramachandran, but these birds weren’t spotted. The bar-headed goose otherwise occurs across south India in winter while the Indian black ibis can be regularly found in agricultural fields.

Anyway, the hunting of large-bodied waterbirds has skewed the local avian community towards smaller-bodied birds. The researchers don’t yet know what the ecological impacts of such changes would mean for the birds themselves. “Instead, we are very likely to see disappearances of functions [for wetlands] we don’t know much about,” says Sundar.

The researchers also surveyed five markets and 681 eateries in the neighbourhoods to assess if these places had waterbirds on their menus. Some 426 did, and they got their bird-meat from over 75% of the hunters in the area. Changing food habits and rising demand for waterbirds in the market were strong incentives for hunters to hunt commercially rather than for their own consumption.

“The study is important as it helps to know that to conserve our natural resources what are the determinants of different livelihood options for local communities, because if that is not given a thought then it becomes big news,” says Goldin Quadros, a wetland ecologist at the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History.

Wetlands are among the most endangered ecosystems in the world. They are regularly dredged for buildings to be constructed over. Or they are converted to agricultural fields. Or are often treated as drains to discharge untreated pollutants into.

This is terrible news for waterbirds. But the NCBS study also shows how hunting can be an equally grave threat to their numbers. A majority of the waterbird population occurs in wetlands not conserved under law. The study makes a case for the prevention of illegal hunting in such areas.

How Do African Wild Dogs Decide to Start Hunting?

Biologists have found that they sneeze to vote. But not all sneezes are the same.

Portrait of an African wild dog. Credit: Andrew King

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

We sneeze to clear our nasal passages of irritants or phlegm. In African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) parlance, a sneeze says ‘Let’s go hunting,’ say biologists.

To live and hunt as a group, everyone has to agree to do the same thing at the same time. If a few want to sleep while the rest wish to go on a hunt, the first group would be left vulnerable and the second one may not be successful. Gorillas, for instance, grunt back and forth to each other before they all rise up and leave.

An alpha pair rules African wild dog packs. Often, the dominant female prevents other females from becoming mothers. When she retires to a den to give birth, the rest of the pack cares for her and her pups. For many years, biologists assumed the dominant pair makes the decisions and the other pack members had no option but to follow.

Scientists studying African wild dogs in Botswana say decision-making is democratic to a degree, with members casting their vote by sneezing.

After lazing in the tall grass of the savanna, a few restless dogs may energetically greet others, a behaviour biologists call ‘rally’. One runs up towards another with its head held low, mouth agape and ears folded back. When they are nose to nose, the approaching dog licks and pokes the corner of the other’s mouth as if begging, while making high-pitched whines, whimpers and twitters. Biologists thought this repertoire was a preamble to hunting.

Researchers from the US, the UK and Australia studied the behaviour of five packs of 49 dogs at Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, for a year. They located the packs using radio collars and identified each dog by its unique pattern of brown and black blotches. By viewing video recordings, they noted which animal started a rally and how the others responded.

They observed the packs don’t set off on a hunt after every greeting ceremony. Sometimes, after a rally, the whole pack settled back for another rest. If the rally itself wasn’t enough to shake the dogs’ inertia, what could?

Amongst the wild dogs’ vocal chatter, the biologists identified “audible, abrupt exhalation of air through the nose, or ‘sneezes’.” After one sneezed, the whole pack appeared to catch the contagion. More than the rallies, the research team realised, the number of sneezes predicted whether the pack set off to hunt.

“[We] couldn’t quite believe it when our analyses confirmed our suspicions,” Neil Jordan, University of New South Wales, Australia, and one of the coauthors, said in a press release. “The sneeze acts like a type of voting system.”

An African wild dog. Credit: Andrew King

But the researchers couldn’t definitely prove that sneezing was the signal to move. They couldn’t see through the thick grass if the canids voted by some other means. Perhaps they sneezed to shake off their lethargy and clear their nasal tracts so they can pick up scent trails during the hunt. Since the chances of the pack departing on a hunt were higher after a communal bout of sharp exhalations of air, it may well be a way of reaching a quorum.

“Playback experiments would be needed to fully disentangle this audible part to be the negotiating mechanism from any other behavioural display within the rallies,” Marta Manser, University of Zurich, Switzerland, who wasn’t involved in this study, told The Wire.

Other canids have a similar repertoire of sharp exhalations: foxes ‘pant’ as an invitation to play, coyotes ‘huff’ in alarm and dingoes ‘snuff’ when nervous. But unlike expressions of fear and anxiousness, the wild dog sneeze doesn’t disturb others in its pack. They don’t look askance or startled at the sneezer.

The researchers say they didn’t investigate what was critical to pull off the vote: the number of sneezes or number of sneezing dogs. Would a restless dog sneezing a few times count as much as several dogs sneezing at once? “Depending on the contribution of a single or several individuals, the decision-making process would then reflect rather different mechanisms,” says Manser.

Other social carnivores like meerkats use a similar decision-making process. But there’s a key difference between the species: in African wild dogs, not every vote is equal. Voting is rigged in favour of higher ranking members.

If the dominant pair didn’t initiate sneezing, “more sneezes were needed – approximately 10 – before the pack would move off,” Reena Walker, Brown University, Rhode Island, and the lead author said.

But when the alpha dogs give the signal, they need a minimum of only three sneezes to set their packs trotting.

Why do dominant dogs find it easier to rouse the pack than others? And why don’t meerkats behave the same way?

“The difference in the two species may be explained by their diets,” says Manser. “Meerkats search for their own prey and don’t share food with each other, while African wild dogs hunt for a single prey to feed them all.”

Meerkats aren’t cooperative hunters like African wild dogs. They call ‘shall we move’ when they are grubbing for beetles and scorpions in tall grass out of sight of each other. By the time one makes the first call, they’ve hunted out the area and it’s time to move. So it doesn’t matter who takes that call since there are fewer delectable grubs to pick anyway. But wild dogs call to decide whether to stay put and laze some more or go out and bring down a gazelle. Perhaps the different contexts play a role as well.

Instead of sneezing during the rallies, the wild dog pack seems to be on the move already when its members sneeze, as the videos above show. “We observed a peak of sneezing in the last minute of rallies, right before departure,” Walker told The Wire. “We defined departure as directed movement of the pack 20 metres away from resting sites. Sneezing occurs throughout the active, social parts of rallies as well as through quieter part of rallies right before the dogs move off.”

Irrespective of who initiated the vote to hunt, once they are on the move, the dominant ones lead.

“I look forward to learn more about why sneezing may come into play rather than an obvious vocalisation in African wild dogs,” says Manser.

Although other authors described the pre-hunt greeting behaviour in these canids, the research team writes that this is the first study to “quantitatively assess behaviour and decision-making processes in African wild dog pre-departure rallies.”

So if a sneeze says, ‘Yes, let’s go hunting’, what is African wild dog for ‘Let’s go north’?

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on September 6, 2017.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

Balancing Taboos in Arunachal Pradesh

In Arunachal Pradesh, tribal communities have elaborate taboos that govern their interaction with nature and thus manage conservation.

In the mountainous northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, tribal communities have elaborate taboos that govern their interaction with nature and thus manage conservation.

Buge Mena and his wife, Niriya Mena working at home, weaving and cleaning rice, respectively. Credit: Sweta Daga

“My Naba [father] always says you can’t challenge nature. If you challenge nature, you are asking for trouble. When you see a river and think, it’s so low, I can easily cross it, the next time you need to cross the river, it will rise and swallow you; nature is always stronger than you. You can have no ego with nature,” explains Tine Mena, a woman from the Idu Mishmi tribe in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in India.

Tine is the first woman from the seven states that comprise what is popularly known as the northeast to climb Mount Everest. She is also the daughter of Buge Mena – popularly and respectfully addressed as Naba by all – one of the most respected tribesmen in the Mishmi Hills, known for his skills as a renowned hunter.

While growing up Tine was dragged on hunting expeditions, crying throughout the trips. Sitting next to her now 70-year-old father, she teases him and says, “Naba would not care if I was in pain or hungry. I couldn’t make a sound in the jungle. Sometimes he would just disappear and I wouldn’t know what to do.” Buge starts chuckling at this point in the story, and concedes that he had done that.

He moved to the town of Roing 40 years ago, but stories of his hunting exploits stretch back six decades. There is a legend about his single-handed fight with a Himalayan black bear. Tine points to a prominent scar on Naba’s face. “Most people think this is a dimple, but this is where a bear clawed Naba.”

‘Naba’ Buge carries not dimples, but scars. Credit: Sweta Daga

Slaughter begets mauling

“When I was in my late 20s, I was in Echali, my village. I went hunting right before the monsoon when the jungle is full of berries,” Buge begins. “Sometimes after gorging on berries, the bears just fall asleep on the trees. Once, I saw five bears sleeping on one tree – two were sleeping on the lower branches and three were on top. I shot four of them,” Naba says. “But I was only able to carry back two of the bears. I stopped in a friend’s village to rest and share the meat. When I arrived at his house, an old woman ordered me to take the meat away. She seemed angry.”

He drew a breath before recounting the rest of the story. “A stillborn baby had been born in that house. We are not supposed to bring jungle meat into a house where someone had died, but I had not known. I left immediately, but I knew I had broken a ghena.” A ghena is a taboo, and breaking it has consequences.

‘Naba’ Buge cleaning his hunting dao with warm water after sharpening it. Credit: Sweta Daga

“A few months later, I went back to the jungle. I was setting up my traps. From a distance I saw a mother bear and cub, so I didn’t pay them much attention. Suddenly I heard heavy breathing behind me, and the mother bear attacked me. I was absolutely terrified. She threw me to the ground with a strength I had never felt before. She mauled me with her huge claws – I thought I was going to die. After five or ten minutes of struggling, I pushed her off me with all the strength I had. I don’t know how it happened, but even the bear was surprised! She left. I was left bleeding and alone in the jungle. The entire right side of my body was damaged,” Buge said pointing to his stomach and legs. “There was a big hole in my cheek and when I went to drink water, it came out of that side of my mouth.” He paused and then quietly finished, “I managed to find people who helped me, but I knew this happened because of my ghena.”

The ghenas

In Arunachal, there are dozens of tribes and sub-tribes. The Idu Mishmis are dwindling; numbering about 12,000 people. Their lives are profoundly shaped by rituals, myths, and taboos. These rituals are intertwined in cultural practices related to food, death, prayer, and even hunting. Referred to as ghena, these restrictions provide ecological balance for the Idu tribe.

Ghenas can function as an intricate conservation device. Large animal killings demand various personal sacrifices, usually for at least five days. The hunter is not allowed to sleep with his wife, bath, eat garlic or salt, or wash clothes. Even if you only eat the meat from the jungle there is a penance. An important ghena applies to tigers, the apex predator in the region. Tigers can only be killed in self-defence, or if one has turned into a maneater. If a tiger is killed otherwise the ghena attaches not just to an individual but the whole village, and all of them suffer, making the protection of tigers a collective responsibility. Ghenas ensure that the Idus continue to respect the ecosystem they inhabit because it remains at the forefront of their mind.

Demonstrating a high-tension trap for squirrels, birds, rats, and bandicoots, designed to break their necks on triggering. Credit: Sweta Daga

“If you don’t follow the ghena, you get sick or there is a chance an accident will happen the next time you hunt. If you hunt too much you won’t have children,” Buge elaborated.

Hunting is a big part of Idu life. Hunters would go out into the jungle for months at a time. The practice supplements kitchens, and during it the Idu also collect medicinal plants. Children go hunting and foraging because it is a matter of survival, custom, and ritual. Hunting enables children to learn about nature and imbibe traditional knowledge that generations before them have cultivated.

Thinking twice about hunting

Ghenas require people to think twice about hunting; they are not to be taken lightly. Buge is an exceptional hunter and in the Idu community he is a legend, but even he has suffered the consequences of breaking ghena and disrespecting nature. Buge reduced his hunting after the bear attack, but in spite of that, all his sons died over the course of his lifetime. He thinks this is because of his ghena of hunting too much.

‘Naba’ Buge dressed for hunting, complete with all the gear he needs to survive for months. Credit: Sweta Daga

Lipa Mena, Naba’s younger brother said, “Half the Idus don’t follow ghena now – or they follow them half-heartedly. But if you are an Idu, you must.”

As Arunachal Pradesh opens to the world with increasing development and tourists coming to see its natural beauty, it is at risk of becoming another destination hotspot, with pressure on ecological resources. Naba wonders what will happen to the next generation. Many of them are not interested in the Idu ways. He is seeing things rapidly change before his eyes. “If people stop going into the jungle and lose their connection, how will we keep our balance?”

A worse thought may be that if people go into the jungle, and do not observe the ghenas – a mauling by a bear may be the least of dangers. Like Buge, they may live to see their children die.

Sweta Daga is a freelance journalist, she extends her thanks for help in this piece to to the Mena family, Further and Beyond Foundation, and Devraj Chaliha.

This article was originally published on The Third Pole. Read original here.

Does Dental Disease Push Big Cats to Prey on Humans?

One of the infamous lions of Tsavo suffered from a debilitating abscess that may have been the cause of its macabre diet.

John Patterson with one of the man-eating lions of Tsavo. Credit: The Field Museum

Researchers have known of the bad state of man-eating lions’ dental health for at least two decades. Now, they have revealed that one of the infamous lions of Tsavo suffered from a debilitating abscess that may have been the cause of its macabre diet.

Over the course of nine months in 1898, two large cats named The Ghost and Darkness picked on labourers constructing the railway line connecting Mombasa, Kenya, with Kisumu, on the eastern bank of Lake Victoria in Uganda. When fear of the lions stopped work on the Lunatic Line, as the British press referred to it then, engineer and lieutenant-colonel John Henry Patterson shot the cats. Although the railway company put the toll at 28 Indian labourers, Col. Patterson claimed the cats had killed 135 workers in a famous book he wrote about his exploits, The Man-eaters of Tsavo (1907).

The skulls and skins of the two Tsavo lions are preserved at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. In 2009, scientists used the stable carbon-to-nitrogen ratios, an analytical technique, of hair and bone to estimate that the lions ate no more than 35 people in those nine months. The researchers say a lack of animal prey drove the lions to feast on humans. This was plausible since a rinderpest epidemic had wiped out wild and domestic animals at the time.

Lions prey on ungulates, eating the flesh and crunching the bones. “I could plainly hear them crunching the bones, and the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days afterwards,” Col. Patterson wrote. He describes hearing the duo of lions nosily grinding bones outside his tent and at the stakeout where he sat over the remains of a donkey.

But did he really hear them chomping on bones?

Chewing bones leaves telltale traces on the teeth. Larisa DeSantis of Vanderbilt University created casts of their teeth and examined them for microscopic wear and tear in 3D. In addition to the two Tsavo lions, she also investigated the skull of another lion reported to be a man-eater from Mfuwe, Zambia. Then she compared them with the dental sets of wild and zoo lions. She discovered the man-eaters’ teeth were not as worn out as was a normal wild lion’s enamel.

“The microscopic wear of the lions’ teeth were less complex and ‘chewed up’ than you’d see in an animal that eats lots of bone, like a hyena. Instead, their dental microwear is similar to what you’d see in a zoo lion,” DeSantis said in a press release.

“It’s a fantastic piece of work using highly advanced and varied scientific techniques,” said Ravi Chellam, who studied lions in Gir in the 1980s and is currently the executive director of Greenpeace-India. “It’s a very good example of how scientific investigations can provide us with data that advances our understanding of complex issues and enables us to gain informed insights that would otherwise not be possible.” Chellam wasn’t involved with the study.

The skull of the first Tsavo man-eater. Credit: Bruce Patterson and J.P., The Field Museum

One of the two Tsavo lions indulged in man-eating more than the other. An infection at the root of a canine tooth would have made gnawing on hard objects like bones painful. The Mfuwe lion endured a fractured mandible. The infected root canal and fracture were likely sustained from a kick of a large prey animal during a hunt.

“These injuries may have been decisive factors influencing their consumption of humans,” write the researchers. Their paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports on April 19, 2017.

Since humans may have removed the remains of the deceased the next morning, the lions perhaps didn’t get a chance to get to the bones. But only one of the two lions had a bad toothache. The other suffered minor injuries that didn’t interfere with his hunting abilities. According to the carbon isotope study, this lion continued to hunt zebra, cape buffalo and East African oryx and would have had ample opportunity to chew on bones. So why didn’t his teeth show any signs of heavy wear and tear? The study doesn’t offer answers.

The lack of heavy wear and tear on the teeth also shows the lions ate only soft tissue for the last three months of their lives.

“Human bones are much smaller and probably less tougher than that of wild ungulates,” says Chellam. “As a result, feeding on human bones is unlikely to result in the same levels of dental wear and tear. This aspect has not been considered while interpreting the data. I would also think that it would not be easy for lions to have separated the flesh from the bones while feeding on human bodies, especially from the upper limbs.”

Could such infirmities drive carnivores to preying on humans? Jim Corbett blamed broken canines and injuries from porcupine quills for turning tigers into man-eaters. Today, wildlife managers and researchers in India often cite his reasoning to explain man-eating – even though it has little scientific basis.

In 2001, two researchers, Julian C. Kerbis Peterhans and Thomas Patrick Gnoske, wrote, “Man-eating is not a guaranteed outcome of the serious trauma affecting the predatory behaviour of large pantherids.” As an example, they cited the Pipal Pani tiger in Corbett’s The Man-eaters of Kumaon (1944). Even after a buffalo gored and seriously wounded the tiger and a local hunter had shot it in the shoulder, it didn’t take to killing humans.

Peterhans and Gnoske examined specimens of lions held at the Field Museum of Natural History, the National Museums of Kenya, the Milwaukee Public Museum and the United States National Museum. They write that some of these lions suffered worse dental problems than the main Tsavo man-eater. Although some had severe skeletal ailments, none of these lions were reported to be man-eaters. In fact, a radio-collared lioness killed an adult eland even though her canines were totally worn out. She didn’t gum it to death, but she may have easily broken the neck or suffocated it. This shows lions don’t need canines to kill their prey.

“Our data suggest that only 15% of disruptive lions (including man-eaters) are so impaired,” Peterhans and Gnoske wrote.

Another study, after examining data from the Ugandan archives, says only 14% of attacks on humans were caused by injured lions.

The Tsavo lions. Credit: John Weinstein, The Field Museum

Lions seem to run a high risk of injury in bringing down large prey animals that buck and kick, so a fair number of man-eaters may be afflicted. Do dental problems cause man-eating? Or are they coincidental?

“Young lions have little or no damage while progressively older lions show more and more [injuries],” says researcher Patterson. “However, crippling dental disease is rare. Superficial examinations of damage are poor indicators of the extent to which functionality is hindered. The root-tip abscess was only detected by X-ray exam, something missing from any of the [previous] analyses.”

However, Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota isn’t convinced. “A tooth abscess isn’t the reason for [a lion] becoming a man-eater. You have lots of man-eating leopards and tigers in India, and like most man-eating lions, they have perfectly good teeth!”

He cites two key criteria: whether the lions have enough natural prey and whether people are unusually vulnerable (for the cats to turn on humans).

Patterson agrees that opportunity and lack of prey are key factors in provoking lion attacks on people and livestock. The arrival of railway workers provided the opportunity – “but evidence shows that dental disease was the trigger that tipped the scales,” he says.

The Indian countryside is overrun by livestock and feral animals. Any predator that doesn’t have access to choice wild ungulates can pick from a range of domestic prey, from dogs to cattle. The lions of Gir certainly don’t know the difference between wild and domestic. Given half a chance, they take cattle as they would sambhar or nilgai. Nor do the 100 lions that live in villages around Gir see their human neighbours as easy prey.

“It is remarkable how low the number of attacks by large cats are on people,” says Chellam. “These attacks often have clear patterns in terms of space and time, an indication that these attacks are likely a result of the aberrant behaviour of one or may be a few large cats. Wild cats, in general, fear humans and try their best to avoid them. Most attacks – accidental or provoked – do not result in deaths of the people attacked. Even when people are killed, not all human bodies are eaten by the wild cat. These point to different motivations driving and influencing the behaviour of wild large cats with respect to human beings they encounter.”

The painful infection, lack of animal prey and opportunities notwithstanding, humans made up only 30% of the main Tsavo man-eater’s diet, according to the carbon isotope study. “This publication [examining dental wear] does not suggest that the man-eating lions were primarily dependent on humans as a food source,” stresses Chellam. “This is very important for us to understand that even man-eating wild cats continue to prey upon wild ungulates and other prey animals.”

If we are not an important source of food, why do man-eaters target people at all? That’s the million dollar question that defies easy answers.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

The Global Road-Building Explosion is Shattering Nature

A new mapping study shows that roads have sliced and diced almost the entire land surface of Earth, leaving huge areas prone to illegal logging, mining and hunting.

There is a severe need to track rapid road development. Credit: CC by James Byrum/Flickr

There is a severe need to track rapid road development. Credit: James Byrum/Flickr

If you asked a friend to name the worst human threat to nature, what would they say? Global warming? Overhunting? Habitat fragmentation?

A new study suggests it is in fact road-building.

‘Road-building’ might sound innocuous, like ‘house maintenance’ – or even positive, conjuring images of promoting economic growth. Many of us have been trained to think so.

But an unprecedented spate of road building is happening now, with around 25 million kilometres of new paved roads expected by 2050. And that’s causing many environmental researchers to perceive roads about as positively as a butterfly might see a spider web that’s just fatally trapped it.

Shattered

The new study, led by Pierre Ibisch at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Germany, ambitiously attempted to map all of the roads and remaining ecosystems across Earth’s entire land surface.

Its headline conclusion is that roads have already sliced and diced Earth’s ecosystems into some 600,000 pieces. More than half of these are less than one square kilometre in size. Only 7% of the fragments are more than 100 square km.

That’s not good news. Roads often open a pandora’s box of ills for wilderness areas, promoting illegal deforestation, fires, mining and hunting.

In the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, our existing research shows that 95% of all forest destruction occurs within 5.5 km of roads. The razing of the Amazon and other tropical forests produces more greenhouse gases than all motorised vehicles on Earth.

Animals are being imperilled too, by vehicle roadkill, habitat loss and hunting. In just the past decade, poachers invading the Congo basin along the expanding network of logging roads have snared or gunned down two-thirds of all forest elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.

Worse than it looks

As alarming as the study by Ibisch and colleagues sounds, it still probably underestimates the problem, because it is likely that the researchers missed half or more of all the roads on the planet.

That might sound incompetent on their part, but in fact keeping track of roads is a nightmarishly difficult task. Particularly in developing nations, illegal roads can appear overnight, and many countries lack the capacity to govern, much less map, their unruly frontier regions.

One might think that satellites and computers can keep track of roads, and that’s partly right. Most roads can be detected from space, if it’s not too cloudy, but it turns out that the maddening variety of road types, habitats, topographies, sun angles and linear features such as canals can fool even the smartest computers, none of which can map roads consistently.

The only solution is to use human eyes to map roads. That’s what Ibisch and his colleagues relied upon – a global crowdsourcing platform known as OpenStreetMap, which uses thousands of volunteers to map Earth’s roads.

Therein lies the problem. As the authors acknowledge, human mappers have worked far more prolifically in some areas than others. For instance, wealthier nations like Switzerland and Australia have quite accurate road maps. But in Indonesia, Peru or Cameroon, great swathes of land have been poorly studied.

A quick look at OpenStreetmap also shows that cities are far better mapped than hinterlands. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, my colleagues and I recently found three kilometres of illegal, unmapped roads for every one kilometre of legal, mapped road.

What this implies is that the environmental toll of roads in developing nations – which sustain most of the planet’s critical tropical and subtropical forests – is considerably worse than estimated by the new study.

This is reflected in statistics like this: Earth’s wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth in just the past two decades, as my colleagues and I reported earlier this year. Lush forests such as the Amazon, Congo basin and Borneo are shrinking the fastest.

Road rage

The modern road tsunami is both necessary and scary. On one hand, nobody disputes that developing nations, in particular, need more and better roads. That’s the chief reason that around 90% of all new roads are being built in developing countries.

On the other hand, much of this ongoing road development is poorly planned or chaotic, leading to severe environmental damage.

For instance, the more than 53,000 kilometres of ‘development corridors’ being planned or constructed in Africa to access minerals and open up remote lands for farming will have enormous environmental costs, our research suggests.

This year, both the Ibisch study and our research have underscored how muddled the UN Sustainable Development Goals are with respect to vanishing wilderness areas across the planet.

For instance, the loss of roadless wilderness conflicts deeply with goals to combat harmful climate change and biodiversity loss, but could improve our capacity to feed people. These are tough trade-offs.

One way we’ve tried to promote a win-win approach is via a global road-mapping strategy that attempts to tell us where we should and shouldn’t build roads. The idea is to promote roads where we can most improve food production while restricting them in places that cause environmental calamities.

The bottom line is that if we’re smart and plan carefully, we can still increase food production and human equity across much of the world.

But if we don’t quickly change our careless road-building ways, we could end up opening up the world’s last wild places like a flayed fish – and that would be a catastrophe for nature and people too.

Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Moray Eels Knot Themselves to Pry Prey

The tricks moray eels use to hunt may mean that they can have a bigger impact on their ecosystems than any other predator of similar size.

A fimbriated moray eel. Credit: elevy/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

Moray eels are a large group of 200 species. At night, many of these snake-like creatures sniff out fish and crustaceans hiding among rock crevices. Their long tubular bodies pose a challenge when they hunt large prey. Without razor-sharp, cutting teeth to tear off chunks of flesh, they jerk and shake their heads to rip pieces off. If this isn’t successful, they perform what crocodile people call a ‘death roll‘. They grab a mouthful and spin their bodies rapidly along their lengths until the piece comes detached. One species, the American eel, rotated as many as 14 times per second. Other creatures with a similar body shape such as the amphibious caecilians that live underground also use the same tactic.

Seven species tie knots in their bodies to either compress prey or pin it while they take bite-sized morsels. Tracy J. Miller of Michigan University described this behaviour for the first time in 1987. The “knotting behaviour is a complex series of movements in which the eel, in a backward motion, moves the tail under the middle of its body to form a loop, passes the tail back up and over the body, down through that loop to form a second loop, as the tail again passes up and over the body. The loops are tightened and the eel quickly draw its head backward through them, resulting in the facilitation of the prey item being swallowed whole, or decapacitation, or removal of a piece of the prey, which is then consumed.”

This eel behaviour is reminiscent of constriction in snakes. Snakes like pythons that eat enormous meals have elastic jaws. The bones of left and right side of their jaws are not rigid. Instead, muscles and ligaments connect them. They sink the recurved teeth of one side into the prey while moving the other side forward. With no tongues to aid the swallowing process, snakes “walk” over their prey until they envelop it with their bodies. Eels cannot open their mouths wide like snakes and they live in tight places, so swallowing large prey whole is not an option. Knotting may help them overcome these restrictions.

Shanta Barley, then a doctoral student at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues lowered a metal frame with a pair of remote video cameras in underwater housings. Such systems called ‘stereo-BRUVS’ are becoming popular tools to study cryptic fish like moray eels. But the researchers’ intention was not to study moray eels; they wanted to study the role of sharks in coral reefs. The cameras sat 30 centimetres above the seabed, since more sharks cruise at this level. Fishing had reduced shark numbers at Scott Reefs, off the north-west Australian coast. But the Rowley Shoals marine reserve abounded with them. Comparing the two locations would show the role sharks played. To attract fish to the camera rig, the researchers attached a plastic mesh bag stuffed with a kilogram of crushed pilchards.

At Scott Reefs, the researchers saw moray eel behaviour never seen before. “It was purely serendipitous that we observed moray eels performing these unusual behaviours,” Shanta Barley told The Wire. One laced moray spent more than five minutes struggling to rip the bait bag. It swished its tail like a paddle to push water towards the bag. This gave it the leverage to rip the bait bag.

Another, a fimbriated moray, held the mesh bag with its mouth while its tail looped a loose overhand knot. The knot moved up its body, over its head, and pushed hard against the bag while it tugged with its mouth. Then the knot unravelled and the moray looped another knot. It repeated this over and over again for 90 seconds in its efforts to break the bait bag or squeeze the crushed fish bits through the mesh.

While researchers have observed morays used the paddle and knot tricks before, this is the first time eels were seen putting them to different use. “The knotting and paddling behaviours were so dramatic and unusual that I noticed them immediately,” says Barley.

A fimbriated eel attacks the bait bag (top left), forms a “knot” in its tail (top right), and rapidly pushes the knot into the bait bag (middle left). A laced moray attacks the bait from two angles (middle right, bottom left) before using its tail as a “paddle” to rip open the mesh bag (bottom right). Credit: Shanta Barley

“I was particularly excited when Shanta showed me the videos,” says Rita Mehta, University of California-Santa Cruz and a co-author. “I’ve observed quite small individuals knotting in the lab.” But these eels looped their bodies to break down a large meal into bite-sized pieces.

Another marine creature with a similar tubular body plan uses the same technique for another purpose. In the absence of any objects in the deep sea against which to rub, the yellow-bellied sea snake knots itself to remove barnacles and slough its skin. Barley and her team suggest that use of the knotting and paddling tactic to pry prey wedged between rocks might be more widespread.

“As stereo-BRUVS become more common in marine research, we will undoubtedly start to uncover a host of exciting new behaviours in ocean wildlife that will revolutionise our understanding of marine ecosystems and show how important it is to conserve this environment,” says Barley.

Is knotting a superior technique to rip the bag? After all, the laced moray paddled for five minutes to achieve its aim while the fimbriated moray by knotting itself took less than two minutes. “That’s a hard question to answer,” replies Barley. “However, it is possible that knotting is overall a more versatile behaviour than paddling as it can be used in multiple ways to achieve different objectives in different contexts.”

These tricks may mean that morays can have a bigger impact on their ecosystems than any other predator of similar size. They can eat prey that is larger than their mouths, a trick most fish cannot perform. “As sharks are removed from coral reefs, moray eels may increasingly become the top predators,” says Barley. “It is, therefore, crucial that we develop a better understanding of how moray eels regulate reef ecosystems through their diet and feeding behaviours.”

Just how widespread are knotting and paddling behaviours among the moray eel group? “Are the behaviours ‘one offs’ or are they in fact employed regularly by moray eels as they hunt for prey in the crevices of the reef? Do moray eels ‘transmit’ these behaviours to each other?” Barley suggests more research is urgently needed to understand the effects of over-fishing on marine predators.

The study was published online on October 8, 2015, and included in the September 2016 issue of the journal Marine Biodiversity.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

How Humpback Whales Save Other Mammals from Being Hunted

On two occasions, mother humpbacks with calves joined other humpbacks to chase away killer whales from sea lions. They even put their calves at risk.

Astonishingly, on two occasions, mother humpbacks with calves joined other humpbacks to chase away killer whales from sea lions. They even put their calves at risk.

One killer whale from a pod hunting a crabeater seal on an ice floe when a pair of humpbacks (one in the foreground) charged in and drove off the killer whales. Credit: Robert L. Pitman

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

The seal slid from the ice floe on which it had been perched precariously. A moment earlier, a pod of killer whales, also called orcas, swam in a line to create a wave large enough to wash over the ice floe. The desperate seal swam towards a pair of humpback whales that were nearby. One humpback rolled over on its back and caught the seal on its chest. Intent on their prey, the killer whales followed. The larger whale rose out of the water and the seal rose in the air, out of reach of the predators. But the hapless little animal slid down the slope of the behemoth’s body. The whale shoved it back to the safety of its belly with an enormous flipper. After the frustrated predators left, the seal made its way to a large ice floe. The humpback’s solicitous behaviour intrigued a human observer, the marine biologist Robert Pitman of the National Marine Fisheries Service, California, US.

This was the third such incident Pitman had witnessed. During the preceding week, he had seen a pair of humpbacks prevent killer whales from making a meal of two seals off the southern tip of South America. Best known for their haunting songs, the humpbacks warded off the predators by bellowing loudly and slapping the water with their flippers and tails. Initially, the killer whales, which are half the length of humpbacks, appeared to be harassing them as is their wont. Only on reviewing video footage of the first encounter did Pitman spot a seal jammed between the two humpbacks.

Killer whales are formidable predators; their coordinated hunts earning them the sobriquet ‘the wolves of the sea.’ They don’t prey on seals alone; they also target the calves of large whales such as humpbacks. In some populations, up to 40% of the 15-metre giants had scars from confrontations with orcas. In the North Pacific, the marine wolves take as many as 18% of humpback whale calves before they turn a year old. To safeguard their young, humpback whale mothers take circuitous routes through areas generally avoided by killer whales. Often other humpback whales, most probably males, accompany mothers with calves. In the event of an attack, they surround the calves, boxing them in. Or, the adults may enclose the calves within a formidable ring by pointing their heads in and tails out.

When killer whales target humpback calves, the large slow-swimming whales cannot outrun their pursuers. They put up a fight, slapping their enormous tails and flippers on the surface, charging at the predators, and bellowing. Mothers hoist their calves out of the water and perch them on their heads or backs. The humpbacks that rescued the seals behaved similarly.

Was the behaviour of rushing to the aid of other species widespread?

Pitman and 13 colleagues compiled 115 cases of humpbacks confronting killer whales documented by at least 54 observers between 1951 and 2012 in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Numerous observations indicate humpback whales in the vicinity rush to the rescue of their own kind. On one occasion, three humpbacks that were 6 to 7 kilometres away converged on a pod of killer whales. They couldn’t possibly see their antagonists or their quarry from that distance. They most probably hear their calls, say the researchers.

Killer whales are silent hunters since their prey have an acute sense of hearing. But once they have cornered their prey, they call to each other to coordinate the attack or summon reinforcements.

However, humpbacks don’t react to any killer whale call. Orcas are either predominantly mammal or fish eaters and the calls of these two groups are distinctly different. Humpbacks seem to know this and surge in the direction of meat-eating orcas, where they harass and sabotage their hunts. When they meet fish-eating killer whales, they get along amicably.

Since they are reacting to the calls of the attackers, they probably don’t know the species being attacked until they arrive on the scene. If the prey animals were not humpbacks, they didn’t usually abort their attack. They persisted in chasing away the predators, but several moved away or hung back. One male humpback was photographed rescuing Stellar sea lions on two occasions separated by 15 years.

In their rescue attempts, humpbacks often work in pairs. However, in one case, as many as 13 of them ganged up on a pod attacking a humpback calf. Even if they are alone, they still think nothing of taking on pods of killer whales 10 or more strong. Nearly 90% of their rescues were of other species, including other whales, seals, sea lions, and an ocean sunfish.

Each instance of aid may last up to an hour. On occasions, their efforts can last as long as 7 hours. They forgo opportunities to feed, rest, and socialise. But the humpbacks were not always successful in saving others’ lives. In a few cases, they arrived too late to prevent the preys’ deaths.

How did other researchers miss this unique behaviour for so long?

“Maybe two things,” Pitman told The Wire. “Whales are still recovering from near extinction due to 20th century whaling. Perhaps there have been just too few around for people to observe. The other thing may be observer bias: when people, even researchers, see spirited interactions between humpbacks and killer whales, they usually assume that the killer whales are attacking. I think that people will look at these these interactions with a different perspective from now on.”

Astonishingly, on two occasions, mother humpbacks with calves joined other humpbacks to chase away killer whales from sea lions. Why do they put their calves at risk?

“It is curious to me that not all humpbacks seem to be interested or willing to interfere with attacking killer whales,” says Pitman. “Perhaps it is only those individual humpbacks that were involved in killer whale skirmishes with their mothers when they were young. Teachable moments. My hope is that with this new perspective on humpback-killer whale interactions we will have answers to some of these questions before too long.”

Humpbacks don’t have any teeth. Instead, they have baleen plates that help to sieve their prey from the water. Nor is their large size alone a deterrent. The flippers of these giants measure 5 metres, a third of their body length, and weigh a ton. They are the largest of any marine mammal. Male humpbacks, unlike other baleen whales, use their flippers to compete with other males for access to females. They use their disproportionately large limbs to advantage in chasing killer whales away, say the researchers. In addition, the barnacles encrusted on the leading edge can gouge out the flesh of their opponents. Their tails are larger still. The gigantic crustacean-studded flippers in the front and the powerful fluke at the rear are the humpbacks’ best weapons.

“These ponderous appendages are potentially a lethal threat, and killer whales keep their distance around excited humpbacks,” says Pitman. “This aggressiveness might account for the fact that humpbacks are the only baleen whale known to accost killer whales.”

No doubt humpbacks whales deprive orcas of prey by interfering with their hunts. The much smaller orcas are adept predators and the sabotage probably doesn’t cost too much.

Humpbacks don’t target killer whales alone, they also mob other predators like false killer whales and pilot whales.

Are humpbacks being altruistic? Why do they rush to save humpbacks that may not be related? What do they gain by harassing killer whales? Humpbacks may mob a predator, much like birds target raptors. This isn’t unknown in the undersea world. Seals and sea lions chase sharks while dolphins gang up on sharks and killer whales.

Although humpbacks are generally solitary, they may form relationships with others when they congregate at feeding grounds. Going to the rescue of others of their own kind may build reciprocal relationships. If one whale helps another, others may come to its rescue when the time comes.

However, what makes them rush to the rescue of other species at considerable risk and cost in time and energy? The authors speculate it may be a spillover of the same behaviour, but this needs more research.

The study was published in the journal Marine Mammal Science on July 20, 2016.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

The Unwarranted Killing of Adivasi Hunters

Two adivasis, armed to hunt as custom demands of them, in a forest that is theirs, were automatically identified as Naxalites and shot fatally. For them, their families and friends, justice remains to be done.

Two Koya adivasis, armed to hunt as custom demands of them, in a forest that is theirs, were automatically identified as Naxalites and shot fatally. For them, their families and friends, justice remains to be done.

A village boy holds up photographs of . Credit: Javed Iqbal

Ganga Madkami (50) and Podiami Madkami (40), the two hunters from Balikota, Malkangiri, who were shot fatally. Credit: Javed Iqbal

On February 21, 2016 two adivasis, who were a part of a traditional hunting party, were killed when Andhra Pradesh’s Greyhounds mistook them for Naxalites.

It has been over two months since then. The sole survivor, 50-year-old Irma Kawaisi of Tumsapally village in Kurukonda block of Malkangiri, Odisha, wants to know why the perpetrators have not yet been punished. Kawaisi is still recovering from the two bullet wounds he received.

The incident was portrayed by the police and the media as a “fifteen minute exchange of fire” with “members of Galikonda Area Committee” who were on their way “to incite locals on the bauxite mining issue”.

However, what really transpired was this:

Twenty-two adivasis of the Koya tribe from the villages of Balikota, Tumsapally and Nemelguda had set out for their yearly traditional hunt, armed with bows as well as licensed homemade guns, and had ventured deep into the Puttakota forests in Vizag agency, or as they call it, “Jantamamri jungle”. They had already been in the forest for eight days, since it takes two whole days to reach Puttakota alone. Four of them, including their expert tracker Podiami Madkami, had set out alone to track a wild buffalo – when there was a burst of firing. Podiami (40) and Ganga Madkami (50) were shot repeatedly in the head and chest. Both died instantly.

Kawaisi, shot twice, managed to escape and hide in a church near Puttakota, while Mukka Madkami, who managed to escape without injuries, rushed to inform the rest of the group that had scattered back to the village in alarm. (Tragically, Mukka died soon after on March 30, of a snake bite: there is a dire lack of adequate healthcare and transport in the Kurukonda area even though the villages are well-connected by road. Policymakers build roads, but what do they build them for?)

Kawaisi, delirious after the firing, was found by the police. They took him to a hospital, where he received treatment for his serious injuries and was released on March 16.

Forty-five days later, on May 2, he is preparing to go back to the hospital to get the external fixation rod removed from his upper arm.

Irma in his home, his left arm fixed with external fixation rods. Credit: Javed Iqbal

Irma Kawaisi in his home, his left arm fixed with external fixation rods. Credit: Javed Iqbal

A way of life

Kawaisi remembers the first time he went on a hunt, or “veta,” with his father Joga. He was fifteen years old and had managed to kill a lupi with an arrow with the help of another hunter. Since then, he has gone on hunts every year after the Wijja Pandum (seed festival) or the Aam Pandum (Mango festival).

The hunters can be out in the forests for eight days or more, sometimes not encountering any of the animals they pine for: the lupi, or spotted deer, and the ghoil, or the bison, a magnificent beast that can be as heavy as 600 kilograms, as aggressive as a bear and as lethal as his hunter himself. It can sometimes take over sixty people to find and kill a ghoil. Regardless of whether the victory is big or small, the villagers must bring back a story of success to the village. They never hunt small animals or ones they don’t eat, like the bear.

The hunting parties range from ten to a hundred people in size and hunt as ‘a combing operation,’ scattered in groups, trying to draw the animal out from their lairs and corners into a “killing zone.” Kawaisi recalls how the most memorable hunts were when more than 150 hunters would go into the forest together.

The aftermath

On February 21, when two of his friends were shot by the Greyhounds, it was the first time Kawaisi had seen a human being die.

He broke down in grief, knowing that he could have done nothing to help them. “How could they fire?” he wants to know, “We’re not Naxalites. How could they fire without warning? We were in an open area. They did not ask us anything, but they could have, and we would have told them we were there to hunt.”

Kawaisi had raised his hands when the firing began, yet at a mere distance of twenty feet, a Greyhound shot him twice on his upper arms, shattering the upper humerus bone in one arm and damaging the other so that it now requires a metal rod through it. The external wounds may have healed, but the lack of physiotherapy has led to his arms becoming almost listless. Kawaisi feels pain within his bones; he has been sitting upright with his left arm attached to external fixation rods for 45 days, after all.

It is noteworthy that the Andhra Pradesh police, while hushing up the matter, has been cooperating in Kawaisi’s treatment. He was given Rs. 5000 when he was initially discharged from the hospital and Rs. 10,000 when he returned to get his rods removed. The police also gave Rs. 10,000 to the family members of the deceased.

The “shoot first, ask questions later, and then accuse of being Maoists” policy seems to have been slightly shaken by this case. Perhaps someone with a tinge of conscious realised the immensity of the blunder.

Family tragedies

It was two days after the firing that the villagers of Balikota knew something had gone wrong.

Hadme, the wife of Podiami, remembers that something strange seemed to be going on even before she received the news: a cat kept crying and a long imli branch fell onto the roof.

Eventually, the rest of the hunters from the party had returned home. The next few days were frantic. Four young men from the families of the victims were taken to identify the bodies. But the bodies were not shown to them. The police would only show them photographs of their fathers.

It was five days later that the bodies finally arrived at the village.

Soma, the eldest son of the deceased Ganga, recalls how his father would tell him about hunting lupis. He himself has never been on a hunt, but he was now returning with his father’s body in an ambulance from Andhra Pradesh, a journey that can take over eight hours.

Ten-year-old Irma, Ganga’s third son, moves swiftly with a cane to support himself. His left leg is bent inwards. It is wrapped in a thick bandage upto his thigh. He is affable and curious and behaves like the man of the house. He doesn’t know why his leg is the way it is; it has been like this for over three years now and has only gotten worse by the year.

When the bodies of the dead hunters were returned to the village, the villagers mourned quickly, cremated the bodies and then took Irma to a hospital in Vishakhapatnam. The fatherless boy was diagnosed with chronic osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone or bone marrow.

Irma never saw his father’s body. But nobody really did, for the men had been shot in their faces.

Chandan and Bijudi are the youngest of Ganga’s children. They were studying in Bhubaneshwar at the time of the killings. They were informed by the headmaster about what had happened but had refused to believe it. They demanded that their father be put on the phone.

Ganga’s children Irma, Chandan and Bijudi in their home. Credit: Javed Iqbal

Nine adivasi children will be growing up without fathers because the state has no standard operation procedure in dealing with adivasi culture.

Twenty-two adivasis, armed to hunt as custom demands of them, in a forest that belongs to them, were automatically identified as Naxalites and shot at without warning.

The Human Rights Forum sent notices about the killings to the Odisha Human Rights Commission and the National Human Rights Commission on April 11. But these notices have been met with pindrop silence. The Ministry of Home Affairs doesn’t count how many innocent people the security forces kill, for such information is not meant to be recorded.

But the adivasis will remember.