Rom Whitaker

Sensing Change: How Sound, Light and Smell Can Affect Plants and Animals

A complaint by ‘snake man’ Rom Whitaker last week against a hotel blasting loud music next to India’s largest crocodile sanctuary is a good occasion to remember that we often harm animals in more ways than we think.

Last week, Romulus Whitaker, known popularly as India’s ‘snake man’, published an Instagram post expressing his concern about the Sheraton Grand Hotel next door to the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, outside Chennai, blasting loud music that was “triggering aberrant behaviour” among the animals.

“Sound is a weapon,” he wrote, “and I’m guessing that this auditory torture may well change their breeding and behaviour patterns. If any of you out there have come across information on the effects of noise on reptiles, please share.”

Message from our founder trustee Rom Whitaker: *UPDATE*There was a meeting at the Crocodile Bank today which was…

Posted by Madras Crocodile Bank Trust/Centre for Herpetology on Friday, 1 February 2019

Indeed, conservation narratives have chiefly focused on direct threats like consumptive use (fishing, hunting, etc.) and exploitation. Experts have also rightly blamed land-use change and habitat destruction for biodiversity decline. In general, the more indirect or intangible the threat, the less it is likely to have both decision makers and civil society concerned.

Most reasonably environmentally conscious citizens argue for conservation by railing against the use of wildlife, but may not recognise how many normal items of daily use – such as rice, tea, detergents, etc. contribute to the decline of biodiversity and environmental degradation. While pollution is a well-recognised threat, it is chemical or biological pollution that gets the most attention.

Human activities similarly result in many other forms of pollution that can have severe impacts on wildlife and biodiversity.

For example, sea turtles can be heavily impacted by light pollution. While adult nesting turtles can be deterred by excessive coastal lighting, the impact on hatchlings is much worse. Sea turtle hatchlings emerge on the shore at night from their nests and locate the sea by moving towards the brighter horizon. Under natural circumstances, this would be the seaward side, which is open and has moon- and star-light reflecting off of the water’s surface.

Also read: In Lighting Up Our World, We Are Losing Sight of Others

Any form of lighting, including streetlights, residences and industry, can completely disorient hatchlings and prevent them from finding the sea, resulting in their deaths. Hundreds of thousands of turtle hatchlings die due to coastal lighting around the world.

A night-time map of lighting around the world indicates just how widespread this problem is. While ‘turtle-friendly’ lighting has been devised, it is used in few locations, and the problem is only mitigated by conservation NGOs relocating nests to hatcheries. In Rushikulya in Odisha, the forest department works with local villagers to rescue hatchlings by the thousands during mass-hatching events.

Large amounts of anthropogenic light affects the visual ecology of many animals. Apart from turtle hatchlings, fish, frogs, salamanders and migrating birds have their behaviour disrupted by excess light in the environment. Bees foraging at night and plants changing their phenology are also examples.

Light can particularly disrupt the behaviour of nocturnal species, but in general, scientists have found that bright days and dark nights are necessary for various aspects of physiology – from hormone production to brain activity – in many animals.

The Middle East and North Africa in the New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness, as seen in Google Earth. Source: Science Advances

Anthropogenic sound or noise has been known to disrupt behaviour in both terrestrial and marine animals. Noise pollution can affect animals by masking their ability to detect prey or predators and to communicate with each other. As a result, it indirectly affects reproduction and survival.

Many birds sing at a different pitch or volume in response to noise. One well known example is of European robins, which sing at quieter times of the day or at night in noisy environments. The problem is that this can disrupt mating and affect breeding success. Similarly, studies on great tits and chaffinches show that ambient noise can affect their behaviour and survival. One can extend the results of these studies to infer that noise can potentially have negative impacts on many such endangered species as well.

Noise has perhaps been linked most directly to impact on whales and dolphins that use bio-sonar. The use of military-grade sonar equipment has been linked to the beaching of whales and to changes in behaviour that lead to decompression sickness in some whales. Some species are also known to sing louder and for longer in the presence of submarine detectors.

Another source of sensory disruption is through olfaction. The impact of chemical pollution on humans, wildlife and the environment through its lethal or sub-lethal toxic effects is well known. However, chemicals in the environment can also disrupt behaviour as many animals use olfactory cues.

Also read: How Noise Pollution Is Silencing Whale Songs – and Why That’s a Problem

Volatile organic compounds, which are produced by agricultural practices and urbanisation, for example, can interfere with plant-pollinator communication. These can have negative effects on both communities, resulting in the declines of both wild plants and crops, with downstream effects on the animal communities that depend on them. Given that many natural landscapes are fragmented and surrounded by human dominated areas, these impacts can affect ecosystem function at a very large scale.

Thus, wildlife can be affected in a variety of way by our actions. Too often, we focus on the direct and immediate threats or attempt to ringfence our activities in a way that we believe does not impact wildlife.

Often, hunting is equated with poaching – though communities may have been practicing it for centuries – but the sustainable use of wildlife may have a far lower impact on biodiversity and ecosystems than these pervasive threats.

Like climate change, pollution from sound, light and smell does not confine itself to the artificial boundaries we have created. Driving a car, using a mobile phone, drinking tea, taking a flight or using lights at night can be far more detrimental than we realise. And yet, though most people are guilty of these everyday actions, there is little recognition of the impact they have on conservation.

Kartik Shanker is a faculty member at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, and trustee at the Dakshin Foundation, Bengaluru.

Review: Self-Aware, but Not Sentimental, Conversations With the Unglamorous Wild

The most striking thing about ‘My Husband and Other Animals 2’ is the strong and unapologetic woman at its centre

The title, My Husband and Other Animals 2, first registered as too similar to Gerard Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (1956), and then as something cloyingly conjugal. But understanding that this book is far from any sort of mawkishness is crucial to appreciating it.

It’s straight-faced and straight-talking, and demolishes tropes of heroism awarded to conservationists, in a break from the way they’re often showcased. It presents an often funny but deeply felt take on the wonder and worry in Indian conservation. Romulus Whitaker, the titular husband and reptile conservationist, appears in many chapters as a muse rather than a messiah. The author Janaki Lenin clearly adores him, but this is more about her than him.

Wildlife writing in India, represented by authors such as M.K. Ranjitsinh, A.J.T. Johnsingh, Kenneth Anderson and Jim Corbett has focused chiefly on native wildlife in forests and wildernesses. In Lenin’s telling, there is no obvious ‘endangered species’ list the author goes through, and nor does it address all of India. Instead, the animals – which include both wild and domestic, both exotic and native – are ones the author has encountered and, more meaningfully, has taken the time to observe.

So you have pet emus, millipedes, leopards, oystercatcher birds, king cobras, crocodiles and chippiparai dogs. In an easy narrative style, Lenin seeks to answer a single question: Why do animals behave the way they do, and what is our relationship with them?

Also read: A Forest Is a Story, and Two New Books Narrate It Through the Perfect Eyes

An intense curiosity pervades the pages. Lenin asks questions about animals the way other people might about human beings. For example, why did the emus eat a particularly stinking millipede? Because they wanted to. Why do lemurs rub centipede juice on their bodies? To ward mosquitoes off. Why didn’t a particular king cobra bite her, even though Lenin was unwittingly in its presence for nine hours?

Many of the reptiles that show up are dangerous, and generally considered uncharismatic. The Government of Gujarat, for instance example, is ‘freeing’ lakes near the Statue of Unity of almost 500 mugger crocodiles so tourist sea-planes can land there. In other places, crocodiles are at the centre of an intensifying human-wildlife conflict.

My Husband and Other Animals 2: The Wildlife Adventures Continue
Janaki Lenin
Westland Books, 2018

Sympathy for these animals is rare. Lenin’s gaze is unblinking: she accepts the animals for what they are, pointing out things that stood out to her. Like the tender gender-benders that crocodilians are good fathers. It seems a mugger at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust (MCBT) would carry his hatchlings to the water, and shield them from birds and other predators.

A recent and unusual event in Bawa Mohtara village, Chattisgarh, where villagers mourned the death of a 130-year old crocodile, reminded me of a crocodile from the book’s pages. The MCBT’s first crocodile, which had been rescued from a zoo, died when a tunnel he was digging collapsed. Lenin writes about him: “The croc that survived spirit-crushing solitude for 15 years with equanimity, and a governor’s threat too, sired hundreds of babies in his decade-long career as a crocodilian stud.”

The book rises above observation and repartee because it doesn’t shy away from difficult topics in conservation… as much as in life.

Lenin writes in one place about how crocodiles are fed at the mausoleum of Khan Jahan Ali, a 15th century Sufi saint, in Bangladesh. The MCBT offered crocodiles to the shrine, which turned them down because it said the crocs were “heathen”. Whitaker then argued they would be blessed if the crocs drank the shrine’s water. MCBT also spotted a saltwater crocodile among the crocs already being fed and advised it be removed. But the shrine refused, thanks to a mix of superstitious beliefs and devotion. It ended up mauling people and was beaten to death.

Lenin writes, “I couldn’t help thinking: the road to this conservation hell is paved with our good intentions.”

She tries to understand human behaviour through animal behaviour, exploring why the males rape and or why homosexuality might have evolved. This could seem forced to some readers; I didn’t always buy into the associations. However, this is a new kind of writing in the wildlife and nature canon for India.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the book is the strong and unapologetic woman at its centre, who transformed from a city girl into a wildlife-lover. The bittersweet qualities of a hermetic life aren’t glossed over. Lenin takes the time, like a slow bildungsroman, to lay out her chequered journey. At the heart of it, this is a woman’s story – a woman in her own right, a woman following unglamorous animals. A woman growing deeply into what she followed. In my favourite chapter, ‘Marriages are made on earth’, she writes:

Rom was a single-minded reptile freak who loved the wild and the company of wild animals more than people. I was a city girl. I had never been in a forest or seen a wild animal before I met Rom. I chafed when trading colourful handloom saris for drab, jungle attire. I left behind armfuls of silver bangles, as they made too much noise in the forest. Beads could get caught in the undergrowth, so off they came. I confined my feet in shoes, a reminder of a hated school life. I didn’t look like me anymore.

These are moments of pure joy and pure confusion in other chapters.

Also read: Janaki Lenin’s series for The Wire on amazing animals

“While I enjoyed living at the Croc Bank, I also remember aching to get away… we only had other staff for company. We were in each other’s homes and lives much more than is healthy. Even the best friendships can dissolve in such a fishbowl.” The kind of space the forest presented didn’t make things easier. She writes:

To an outsider, I must have seemed like a demure bride, following her husband with her head bent down. I was hypnotised by the ground that was seething with brown worms.. Leeches. More than their dietary preference for warm blood, I was terrified of contact—of their cold, slimy bodies attached to mine. The thought made me feel icky.

There aren’t many autobiographies or memoirs of women, particularly of women close to nature. There’s the sweeping Born Free by Joy Adamson (1960) and the intensely literary H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014), but little else.

Lenin’s book turns its gaze both outwards to nature and inwards to her own self. She knows her weaknesses and she owns them. If not for the creatures, read the book for just that rarity: a frequently funny, self-deprecating woman who isn’t afraid to be flawed, to be ‘unfeminine’ with minimum fuss, and who prefers self-awareness to sentimentality.

Neha Sinha works for the Bombay Natural History Society. The views expressed here are personal.

To Get Ahead on the Fight Against Snakebite, We Must See Beyond the Big Four

India has about 60 species of venomous snakes ,and to treat their bites, doctors administer polyvalent anti-venom, a combination of anti-venoms raised against the four snakes that cause most serious and fatal bites.

Sometime in late 2006, a 24-year-old female agricultural worker from Rajasthan was bitten by a snake while working in a field. Being very superstitious, she prayed and offered gifts to a saint in a temple, believing this would end her suffering. But the pain persisted. As her condition worsened, she was rushed to a hospital. They identified the venom as being from a Sochurek’s saw-scaled viper, which is found in northern India, Pakistan and Iran.

Doctors began treating her with anti-venom and, in a few hours, she began developing hives on her skin; some patients respond adversely to anti-venom. This was treated using epinephrine, a drug that controls allergic reactions. A CT scan also showed bleeding outside the brain. Sixteen anti-venom vials, a surgery to remove the clot in her head and 20 days later, she regained consciousness. She was subsequently discharged after her gruelling stay at the hospital.

This case was reported in 2007 by doctors studying the efficacy of anti-venoms against Sochurek’s saw-scaled viper, and it reflects poorly on the condition of snakebite treatment in India and draws our attention to two major issues.

First, India has the highest burden of snakebites with an estimated death toll of 45,900 every year. Many believe that these numbers are underreported because a majority of these incidents occur in neglected rural areas. (However, Indian government reports based on hospital records give a figure of less than 1,500 snakebite fatalities per year.)

“Treatment in public health centres is free but many do not have the capacity to treat snakebites,” Priyanka Kadam, of the Snakebite Healing and Education Society (SHE), an NGO that works to create awareness, told The Wire. Often, “patients end up spending a lot of money at private hospitals or missionary hospitals. The treatment can cost anything between Rs 10,000 and Rs 30,000 depending on the number of vials of anti-venom administered.”

Second, the anti-venom we use today are inefficient. The manufacturing process hasn’t changed much since the 1890s. First, small doses of snake venom are injected into horses. In response, the horse’s immune system mounts an attack and produces antibodies that seek out and neutralise the toxins in the venom. The binding of an antibody to a toxin molecule is highly specific – analogous to how a key fits in a lock. These antibodies are extracted and sold as anti-venom.

India has about 60 species of venomous snakes (15 of which are known to cause fatalities), and to treat their bites, doctors administer polyvalent anti-venom, a combination of anti-venoms raised against the four snakes that cause most serious and fatal bites: cobra, krait, Russell’s viper and saw-scaled viper.

A growing body of evidence suggests this one-size-fits-all-approach to treating snake bites is no good. Depending on genetics, their diet and habitat, snakes can show differences in their venom composition. For example, Sochurek’s saw-scaled viper is a subspecies of the saw-scaled viper. Because of the possible differences in venom composition between them, doctors had to treat the 24-year-old with high doses of anti-venom.

A major cause of concern is that around 80% of all polyvalent anti-venom are raised against snakes caught in one district of Tamil Nadu by the Irula Cooperative Venom Centre, and this may not be very effective in treating snake bites in other parts of the country. A study conducted to test the efficacy of anti-venom in a hospital in Chandigarh showed that, on average, doctors administered 51.2 vials of anti-venom for each cobra or krait bite. Such high doses put patients at risk of developing adverse reactions.

Instead of relying on non-specific polyvalent anti-venoms, monovalent anti-venoms raised against a particular species of snake venom may prove to be safe and economical because it could reduce the need to administer higher doses of anti-venom. However, Nicholas Casewell, who studies snake venom at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said, “The main issue with monovalent anti-venoms is identifying the snake that caused the attack. It is best to run diagnostic tests but such tests only exist in Australia for Australian snakes – there are no diagnostic tests available for use in Africa or Asia at this time.” And these tests are expensive and could waste valuable time.

Alternative strategies

Snake venom is a complex mixture of toxins that hijack and disturb specific cellular processes. For example, neurotoxins attack the nervous system and paralyse while haemotoxins disrupt blood-clotting and precipitate organ failure. Tapping into advancements in genomics and proteomics has helped scientists screen individual toxins in venoms to predict their pathologies. “We can also compare which toxins are shared or are different among different snake species,” Casewell said.

Studying venom composition has also helped scientists realise that polyvalent anti-venoms do not neutralise certain toxins that cause tissue damage at the bite site. Ashis K. Mukherjee and his team from Tezpur University, Assam, found in 2017 that polyvalent anti-venom didn’t neutralise certain toxins in the venom of the saw-scaled viper. In other words, these toxins didn’t provoke the immune systems of horses from which they were derived. Some of these substances, including phospholipase A₂, metalloproteinases and hyaluronidase cause widespread tissue damage and, in some cases, cripple victims, robbing them of their ability to earn a living. Efforts are on to design molecular inhibitors against these toxins.

Adopting another strategy, researchers from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are working on pathology-based anti-venoms that promise to be specific and affordable. “Since relatively few toxin families are responsible for the various specific pathologies we see after snakebite, directing treatments towards these groups of toxins may help clinicians treating patients,“ Casewell explained. “For example, if they see evidence of pathologies such as haemorrhage or coagulopathy, they could use the anti-venom specific to them.”

“This strategy contrasts with current polyvalent anti-venoms that seek to neutralise all of the diverse toxins found in venoms of all the snakes from a single geographical area, irrespective of the pathologies they cause,” he added.

With these recent developments, things are definitely looking up. But Casewell cautioned that “developing new types of treatment for snakebite is likely to take many years before they reach the clinic.”

David Warrell, an emeritus professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, believes that polyvalent anti-venom has to be redesigned to accommodate more species than the current “big four”. He emphasised the need to improve production methods to reduce high rates of adverse reactions, and to carry out clinical studies in line with those of all other medications to establish their efficacy in human patients, their safety and to guide dosage.

How much longer before a breakthrough, then? “Research on all aspects of snakebite has been neglected because of its low public health profile and mainly the underestimated burden of human morbidity and mortality,” Warrell said. “Recognition of the importance of snakebite by national health authorities, advocacy by influential figures such as Kofi Annan and investment by funding agencies will help stimulate research.”

In India, there is approximately one snakebite death for every two deaths caused by AIDS, yet this field does not receive the attention that cancer or tuberculosis do. As for what the government should do, Kadam of the SHE said, “They should increase GDP spent on health and medical infrastructure, equip all public health centres to manage snakebite cases, revisit guidelines for anti-venom production, and invest in regional snake venom research centres”.

Rohini Krishnamurthy is a writer at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.