Island Ecology Workshop 22/27 Nov 2010

 

Andaman and Nicobar Islands!

The Andaman Islands are an almost fabled archipelago with clichéd sun-kissed beaches, blue waters and incredible coral reefs. However, there is a lot more that is spectacular on these islands! There are mangrove forests, intertidal zones and rainforests as well and all these habitats are dependent on each other, as are the flora and fauna that live within them.

We will explore four separate habitats, better understanding the dynamics at play within them and how they affect each other. Along the way, we will build skills in surveying techniques, canopy access, snorkeling and scuba diving.

We’ll be staying at the premier conservation and research body on the islands- The Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team’s field station and get involved with their experiences, work and endeavors. The field station is located with mangrove forests and inter-tidal zones adjoining it and the five-acre campus is a well-preserved rainforest!

The workshop will encompass a lot of learning skills, experiencing new ecosystems and getting numerous photo opportunities. We’ll see many species that are unique to the islands and some that are adapted specifically to life in island habitats.


One day will be dedicated to snorkeling and another will be spent scuba diving to better experience the coral reefs and also build skills.



ACTIVITIES:

• Understanding Island Ecologies
• Mangrove walks- Searching for specialized animals
• Intertidal Zone- Understanding this unique niche
• Visits to the reef
• Looking for crocodiles
• Herpetofaunal surveys
• Photography sessions
• Ecology presentations
• Canopy access
• Snorkeling for marine life
• Scuba Diving
• Loads of hands on experience
• Night surveys

Andaman and Nicobar Islands Environmental Team (ANET)
The Andaman and Nicobar islands are a chain of some 300 little known archipelagic islands situated on the eastern rim of the Bay of Bengal. Closely guarded by the Indian Government, they remain a pristine tropical island paradise, complete with stunning coral reefs, crystal blue waters and unspoiled equatorial rainforest. Most extraordinary, many of the islands are a bastion for some of the last remaining aboriginal tribes on earth that continue to shun all contact with the outside world. The Andamanese, as these tribes are collectively known as, inhabit a significant percentage of the islands in fully protected areas that remain completely off limits to the general public.

Shortly after setting up the Croc Bank in the 1970s, the Whitakers realize there were needs for basic herpetological and other ecological work in the then much neglected islands. Over the next several years Rom, together with Satish Bhaskar and Alok Mallick, set about crafting a strategy to effectively address these issues. The Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team (ANET) was conceived in 1989 and shortly thereafter five acres of land was purchase and a base station constructed in Wandoor, on the southern tip of South Andaman island.
ANET has since carried out extensive work on marine turtles, herpetofaunal biogeography and a host of other biological studies. In addition, ANET has been actively involved in the broader ecological and social spheres including work on natural resource utilization, socioeconomics and the management of protected areas.

As one of the most capable NGOs in the region, ANET  played a pivotal humanitarian and disaster relief role in the Nicobar Islands after the infamous 2004 tsunami devastated the region. Today, although still very active in the reptile arena (with a recently described genus of Agamid named at the base to prove it!) ANET has a very broad curriculum of environmental development work, including marine and terrestrial components. ANET is the only environmental research base in the islands and remains one of the Croc Banks most exotic and luxurious projects – our very own Treasure Island!


Program Dates- 22nd to 27th November, 2010.


For further details or to register please get in touch with Conan on 9449010673 (conan@gerrymartin.in)

Worse than pollution?!

On a dark night last week a group of animal rights activists in Donegal made their own special contribution to the International Year of Biodiversity. They cut their way into a fur farm and released 5,000 mink . This, within their circles, was considered a clever thing to do. A spokesperson for the Alliance for Animal Rights said: "I commend whoever risked their freedom to do this." The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade announced that "we fully support what has happened".

Had these people tipped a tanker load of bleach into the headwaters of the river Finn, they would have done less damage. The effects would be horrible for a while, but the ecosystem could then begin to recover. The mink, by contrast, will remain at large for years, perhaps millennia. Like many introduced species, American mink can slash their way through the ecosystem, as they have no native predators, and their prey species haven't evolved to avoid them. Is there anything the animal lovers in Donegal could have done that would have harmed more animals?

But there's a second question raised by this act of preternatural imbecility: what were the mink doing there anyway? In other respects the Irish Republic appears to be a civilised country, in this case it looks barbaric. While the United Kingdom banned fur-farming in 2000, Irish governments have resisted prohibition, to protect a tiny but wildly destructive industry. The republic's five remaining fur farms are the sole source of continuing releases of mink, either through raids or accidents. They are also places of astonishing cruelty, in which intelligent carnivores are confined to cages the size of a few shoeboxes. The Irish government is considering phasing out fur farming in 2012. Until then, its citizens will continue to pay more to eradicate mink than they make from breeding them.

But Ireland is a small player. Two-thirds of the world's mink farming and 70% of its fox farming takes place in other EU countries. Denmark alone produces 40% of the global supply of mink pelts. Feral American mink on the continent are even more damaging than they are here, as they drive out the endangered European mink . The EU's 6,000 fur farms are an affront to the values it proclaims.

This month governments meet at Nagoya, in Japan, to review the Convention on Biological Diversity . It has, so far, been a dismal failure. Perhaps the starkest botch has been their inability or unwillingness to control the spread of invasive species. The stories I am about to tell read like a gothic novel.

Consider, for example, the walking catfish , which is now colonising China, Thailand and the US, after escaping from fish farms and ornamental ponds. It can move across land at night, reaching water no other fish species has colonised. It slips into fish farms and quietly works through the stock. It can burrow into the mud when times are hard and lie without food for months, before exploding back into the ecosystem when conditions improve. It eats almost anything that moves.

Its terrestrial equivalent is the cane toad, widely introduced in the tropics to control crop pests. It's omnivorous and just about indestructible: one specimen was seen happily consuming a lit cigarette butt. Nothing which tries to eat it survives: it's as dangerous to predators as it is to prey. Unlike other amphibians, it can breed in salty water: it's as if it had waddled out of the pages of Karel Capek's novel War With the Newts .

The world's most important seabird colony – Gough Island in the South Atlantic – is now being threatened by an unlikely predator: the common house mouse. After escaping from whaling boats 150 years ago, it quickly evolved to triple in size, and switched from herbivory to eating flesh. The seabirds there have no defences against predation, so the mouse simply walks into their nests and starts eating the chicks alive . Among their prey are albatross fledglings, which weigh some 300 times as much as the mice. A biologist who has witnessed this carnage observed that "it is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus".

On Christmas Island the yellow crazy ant does something similar: it eats alive any animal it finds in its path. It is also wiping out the rainforest, by farming the scale insects that feed on tree-sap. Similar horror stories are unfolding almost everywhere. The species we introduce, unlike the pollution we produce, don't stop when we do. A single careless act (think of the introduction of the rabbit or the lantana plant to Australia) can transform the ecology of a continent.

According to a government report, invasive species cost Britain several billion pounds a year. The global damage they cause, it says, amounts to almost 5% of the world economy. A single introduced species – a speargrass called Imperata – keeps 2 million square kilometres in the tropics out of agricultural production, equivalent to the arable area of the US, while ensuring that the native ecosystem can't regenerate.

In most cases there's a brief period in which an invasive species can be stopped. So you would expect governments to mobilise as soon as the threat appears. But in many parts of the world the policy appears to consist of staring dumbly at the problem while something can be done, then panicking when it's too late. When museum weed (Caulerpa taxifolia) escaped into the Mediterranean from the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, the authorities responded by bickering over whose fault it was. In 1984, when the invasion was first documented, the weed occupied one square metre of seabed. It could have been eradicated in half an hour. Now it has spread across 13,000 hectares and appears to be uncontrollable.

Australia, the continent that has been hit hardest by introductions, still seems incapable of regulating the trade in dangerous species. As the Guardian's new Biodiversity100 campaign shows, 90 potentially invasive plant species are being sold in nurseries there, while 210 species of aquarium fish can be imported without a licence. The UK has some good policies at home. It spent £10,000 in 2006, for example, on a strategy (successful so far) for excluding the South American water primrose, whose control now costs France several million euros a year. But in its overseas territories – of which Gough island is one – it reacts slowly, if at all.

The mink, the walking catfish, the cane toad, the mutant house mouse, these are potent symbols of humanity's strangely lopsided power. We can sow chaos with a keystroke in an investment bank, one signal to a Predator drone, a seed dislodged from the sole of a boot, a fish tank emptied into a canal. But when asked to repair the mess we've made, we proclaim our impotence. Our challenge this century is to meet our capacity for harm with an equal power for good. We are not, so far, doing very well.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

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Herpetology Workshop

Hunsur; October 2010

Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people who are interested in reptiles and their conservation. This heartening change has also manifested in numerous snake rescue organizations in almost every town in the country. Another manifestation is in the information at the fingertips of children these days. They are able to name species from all over the world, know about their natural history and even their venom.
However, in all this change, there is very little context. This has given rise to a lot of damage - whether it is from our practices, or people getting hurt through less than ideal protocols and also, a lot of snakes getting injured or killed.

The Gerry Martin Project will be running a herpetology workshop at the end of October this year.

This workshop is aimed at creating a strong context to reptile conservation. We will not focus solely on snakes, but, work towards creating a larger understanding of reptile biology and conservation.

The workshop will start on the 30th of October at 10:30 AM and end on the 1st of November at around 4 PM. The location is a fruit orchard on the banks of a large lake in Rathnapuri, near the town of Hunsur on the Mysore - Coorg highway.
We will be staying in tents and coconut shacks, sleeping on mattresses.

The workshop module will include:
· Learning taxonomy of snakes, lizards and turtles/ tortoises
· Understanding the micro-habitat usage of reptiles
· Learning game tracking
· Snakebite first aid and treatment protocols
· Safety Protocol
· Build your own equipment
· Conservation issues
· Outdoor safety



Workshop Dates: 30/10/10 – 1/11/10
Venue: Ratnapuri, Hunsur
For further details and to register, please get in touch with Conan Dumenil on 9449010673 or conan@gerrymartin.in.

Urban Wilderness!

A naturalist’s beginning

With the explosion of media coverage of various wild subjects from whales and walruses to herpetologists and adventurers, children today are more exposed to what lies ‘out there’ than ever before. There is an ever-increasing interest in the animal world and adventure in the outdoors. However, much of this remains fantasy and children aren’t able to easily access wild areas or expanses of wilderness to explore.
Further, possibly because of the schedules they need to keep, children have not built the skills to safely and optimally explore and experience the outdoors.

The Gerry martin Project is trying to make these skills and contexts more accessible. Towards this, we are running a weekend workshop in October that will help children between the ages of 10 and 16 learn new skills, experience urban wildlife and develop ways in which they can start the process of conservation at home.

This workshop will be conducted at the Martin Farm on Sarjapur Road. In addition to all the naturalistic learning and skill building, children will also learn how to camp in the wilderness, cook on outdoor wood fires, follow safe protocol in the wild and generally develop a personal connect with the outdoors.
Gerry Martin will head the program along with two or three other naturalists. There will be at least one female instructor along and all faculty will have gone through a thorough orientation before the program.

Workshop Date: October 23rd and 24th.
Age Bracket: 10 to 16 years.

Activities will include:
• Exploring habitats used by various urban wildlife
• Understanding the role of the lesser known animals in the ecosystem
• Things to do to bring Nature home
• Canopy access systems
• Ornithological basics
• Herpetological basics
• Outdoor skills
• Creating aquatic ecosystems
• Night surveys
• Fun and games!

For more details or to register, write to conan@gerrymartin.in
or call Gerry on 9845779666 or Conan on 9449010673.

The Island Ecology Workshop!

The Andaman Islands are truly one of the last spots on earth that will undoubtedly inspire you with each visit. This archipelago provides anthropological, socio-economic, historic, culinary, adventure and ecological experiences that are amongst the best in the world.

 With the diversity in habitat surrounding it, the Andaman and Nicobar Research Team (ANET) field station is ideally placed to be a real live laboratory for learning about island ecosystems. You can travel from rainforest, through mangrove and intertidal zones and reach coral reefs on a transect that is barely half a kilometer long!

This October, when the monsoons begin to ease off, The Gerry Martin Project (TGMP) and ANET will be running a six day workshop that will take participants through a structured and focused experience of the islands.

Through the workshop, there will be a combination of experiences, presentations, exploration and skill building. We will visit and explore various habitat types from rainforest and coastal habitats to inter-tidal zones and coral reefs.We will look at the various habitats from numerous perspectives. There will be the single species approach like dugongs and coral reefs or shorelines and sea turtles. Then there are ecosystem and ecological perspectives of how numerous organisms work simultaneously with their environment to survive and succeed, consequently affecting the environment and often the others in the system.

We will also be using the various habitats to help us build skills. We will learn the basics of canopy access using rope systems. There will be the basics of snorkeling, night surveys, bio-statistical sampling and more.

At the base, we will stay in quaint cottages that are erected on stilts, with bamboo thatch roofs. The huts are also well visited by much of the small local wildlife. The food is all very authentic and truly mouth watering!

   ACTIVITIES:                 

· Understanding Island Ecologies

·Mangrove walks- Searching for specialized animals

· Intertidal Zone- Understanding this unique niche

· Visits to the reef

· Looking for crocodiles

· Herpetofaunal surveys

· Photography sessions

· Ecology presentations

· Canopy access (weather dependent)

· Snorkeling for marine life

· Loads of hands on experience

· Night surveys

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andaman and Nicobar Islands Environmental Team (ANET)

The Andaman and Nicobar islands are a chain of some 300 little known archipelagic islands situated on the eastern rim of the Bay of Bengal. Closely guarded by the Indian Government, they remain a pristine tropical island paradise, complete with stunning coral reefs, crystal blue waters and unspoiled equatorial rainforest. Most extraordinary, many of the islands are a bastion for some of the last remaining aboriginal tribes on earth that

continue to shun all contact with the outside world. The Andamanese, as these tribes are collectively known as, inhabit a significant percentage of the islands in fully protected areas that remain completely off limits to the general public.

Shortly after setting up the Croc Bank in the 1970s, the Whitakers realize there were needs for basic herpetological and other ecological work in the then much neglected islands. Over the next several years Rom, together with Satish Bhaskar and Alok Mallick, set about crafting a strategy to effectively address these issues. The Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team (ANET) was conceived in 1989 and shortly thereafter five acres of land was purchase and a base station constructed in Wandoor, on the southern tip of South Andaman island.

ANET has since carried out extensive work on marine turtles, herpetofaunal biogeography and a host of other biological studies. In addition, ANET has been actively involved in the broader ecological and social spheres including work on natural resource utilization, socioeconomics and the management of protected areas. As one of the most capable NGOs in the region, ANET played a pivotal humanitarian and disaster relief role in the Nicobar Islands after the infamous 2004 tsunami devastated the region. Today, although still very active in the reptile arena (with a recently described genus of Agamid named at the base to prove it!) 

ANET has a very broad curriculum of environmental development work, including marine and terrestrial components. ANET is the only environmental research base in the islands and remains one of the Croc Banks most exotic and luxurious projects – our very own Treasure Island!

DATES: 11th - 16th October 2010
GET IN TOUCH! gerry@gerrymartin.in

Arunachal Reptile Survey - September, 2010

Arunachal Pradesh, India’s Northeastern-most state is like a different world. We leave the plains in Assam and as soon as we cross the border, enter a mountainous realm with steep slopes and increasingly lofty peaks. The people, culture, terrain and wildlife are all unique and fascinating.

 ...Unfortunately, because of its remoteness, security issues and the difficulty in obtaining permits for travelers, the state has been relatively ignored when it comes to research or even eco-tourism. It hosts some very interesting fauna and flora. The red panda, binturong, clouded leopard, golden cat, takin are just a few examples. Its diversity in reptile and amphibian life is no exception. Species diversity here is quite jaw dropping and many of them are found only in this small region in India.

Herp Guru - ROM WHITAKER

This is precisely the reason why Rom Whitaker is heading there. He needs to conduct a survey of the venomous species there to contribute to his national snakebite survey. He will be assisted by Gerry Martin and a small team of naturalists, herpetologists and even enthusiasts. The first location for this survey is Pakke Tiger Reserve about seven hours from Guwahati.

Pakke is primarily a lowland forest between 600 and 1000 meters ASL. There are, however, some reaches of the park that extend up to 2000 meters ASL. We’ll be focusing our searches in the lowland area. We reach the ‘West Bank’ where the park begins and then (depending on the level of the river) have to walk around 15 kilometers to the Khari Camp. We will set up base here, staying in tents and cooking our own food.

We will explore the area around Khari and then also radiate to other camps on day or overnight visits. We will have two friendly elephants to help us along most of the way!

Hands-on with GERRY MARTIN

We will get a chance to go ‘herping’ with India’s premier reptile conservationist, learn from his experience and also build context from the general dialogue, which is inevitable when in Rom’s company. Gerry will guide us on safe protocol while working in the field. Most of all, we will have contributed to some very valuable and long overdue work that will, hopefully, improve our understanding of snakebite in the country and enable us to treat it more efficiently.

Program Dates: 20th to 29th September; ex-Guwahati
For further details, contact Gerry on gerry@gerrymartin.in

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