Chthonic Wildlife Ramblings

This continues my series on crocodile conservation- previous Part III is here.

The take-home lessons from the crocodile management programme for conservation, are pretty much that's okay to try new stuff out. Being too timid creates its own costs. Second, a lot of research on sustainable-use is overly pessimistic. That pessimism derives from assumptions about the fixed nature of the growth function, and the homogeneity of the wildlife product.

What made the crocodile story was also that the advocates the scheme, got it wrong. This was a programme that was going to use crocodile leather to get people to conserve wild crocodiles.

What actually emerged was a industry built around several value-points. Nobody predicted that a meat industry would also emerge- or that crocodile-tourism would emerge as a new industry. The explanation for this lies in what is sometimes called dispersed knowledge. Lots of people know lots of different things. They could have no connection at all to conservation, but say, know something about marketing. Or have an inkling about how to sell a new product. Or they might have private information about where crocodiles are. Aborigines knew about the female-dominance effect on nest sites- long before the Western scientists did. That is another piece of information that feeds into the success of the sustainable use programme.

All this information is dispersed over these people, and policy makers can't get to it. Most of this information wouldn't even considered relevant without a change in policy. Some of the information could be incomprehensible. Aboriginal knowledge about crocodiles isn't packaged together as a neat biological model. It has the form of myth and beliefs.

So, whether by accident or design, the sustainable use programme set in place a chain of events, when suddenly of this dispersed knowledge became relevant. It was employed by people to find solutions (and people are still seeking solutions to the challenges and opportunities). Crocodiles developed multiple values, and people started to see them as iconic (rather than a pest).

There is another take-home lesson for conservation here. It's that you are never going to find all the relevant facts before you begin. And the important thing isn't necessarily the information people have, it's their motivation to employ it. This comes back almost full circle to my first post. Conservation is a discovery process. Think of it that way, test the boundaries and try new ideas out. Conservation is not a prescriptive process. You're not going to be able to find out everything you need to know- and plan to a fine level of detail- the solution to all the problems.

This continues my earlier post on crocodile conservation.

An important factor behind the successful sustainable-use conservation programme was the fact that crocodiles lacked charisma. They weigh hundreds of kilograms, are efficient and deadly carnivores, and have no qualms at all about predating on people. In short, nobody was going out into these river areas and trying to convince people that crocodiles were worth saving because they were so cute. In the end, the argument came down to, save crocodiles because they're worth money.



That meant we had to find ways to make crocodiles worth money to locals. The obvious component of this was leather. Crocodile leather is used to make a variety of luxury products, including very expensive Hermes bags.

But what happened next, nobody predicted. This is what makes this story so fascinating from a conservation perspective. Everybody got it wrong. Critics of this programme in the early 80s said it would lead to over-harvest and poaching. Advocates never predicted that a crocodile meat industry would evolve out of the leather industry. They did not predict that a tourism industry would emerge out of this. And they certainly didn't predict that crocodiles would attain an iconic status in the north, and win much wider acceptance by people.

What the programme was designed to do was mobilise economic forces behind conservation efforts. Unfortunately, the use of economic forces is something that is conspicuously neglected in conservation education programmes. I learned exactly one model that looked at this in my graduate ecology classes. This model was that of optimal extinction. Crudely put, this predicted that if a species population growth rate was less than the interest rate, harvesters would be impelled to wipe out the species and put the money in the bank. This is often the only formal model taught in most graduate conservation classes even today.

Crocodiles were believed to fit this model of optimal extinction well. They took until 25-30 years to reach maturity, and the population grew relatively slowly. So, unleashing any kind of harvest regime on crocodiles again, was predicted to lead to the catastrophic hunting of the 50s and 60s.

In fact, the opposite outcome was achieved. The reason is simply that the model of optimal extinction gets lots of things wrong. It assumes that harvesters are morons. This is done through the logistic population growth equation. The logistic functions takes the birth and mortality rate as fixed. And it takes carrying capacity of the habitat (how much wildlife can be supported) as fixed. In short, the opening assumption is that people are too thick to manage any of these parameters. Farming and ranching of crocodiles has already been ruled out as management option, as this will cause reproductive success to soar. And that can't happen according to this model.

There are a lot of other things wrong with it too. The model assumes your wildlife has no age or sex structure, so there's no point shifting harvests away from adults towards eggs and juveniles. There are some pretty dubious assumptions on the cost side as well.

At a biological level however, it is easy to see why crocodiles could be managed this way. Eggs have an extraordinarily high mortality rate (often by flooding). So removal of eggs has little impact on wild populations. Most would have died anyway. Shifting harvest away from a cohort with low mortality levels to high mortality levels kept harvest within ecological boundaries.

In order to get crocodiles eggs however, you need functioning and growing wild populations. Crocodiles also 'nest' according to female dominance. Dominant females go first. Aborigines already knew this. So, if you increase the area available for nest sites (say by fencing off areas from stock), then you got a fast payoff. The less dominant females would then have room to make their nests. More females would start nesting. Wild population growth rates start to take off.

This is basically what we observed. By making crocodiles valuable, human agents invested in management techniques to raise 'carrying capacity' and 'growth rate' constraints. This was a much stronger effect than the loss of eggs on the population.

I'm having a break from blogging (and much of everything else) for a bit. The reason is I'm going to be up in the Darwin area (Northern Australia) for a bit. Mostly it's a chance to go "feral" in the outback, and get some photos of some top-end Australian wildlife

For those of you interested in such things, I'm taking a fairly mobile mix of lenses. I've got two cameras (one being the excellent Minolta Dynax 7 film SLR, the other the Sony a700 DSLR). I anticipate most of the wildlife work will be done with a pairing of the Minolta 300/4 G and the Sony 70-300 G. The Minolta gets a bit more reach with the addition of a 1.4x TC.

My shot-list is basically crocodiles, other reptiles and birds, and creepy-crawlies. I'm afraid Australian mammals don't really do much for me. Perhaps it is the NZ conservation-culture where we have come to regard mammals as pests. Or maybe I'm just being contrary...

Recent news from Kenya (BBC link) show that the elephant black-market is resurgent. This matches earlier studies which show that poaching rates are higher than in the 1980s.



Unlike the 1980s when many and varied NGOs campaigned to save the elephant, there are no similar campaigns today. Part of the reason may simply be that in the 1980s, there was a simple target. Conservation groups campaigned to get the legal trade in ivory banned. Kenya destroyed seized ivory in pictures that appeared in media all over the world. In 1989 CITES agreed to put elephant ivory onto Appendix I. This sacrificed the legal trade, even where sustainable, to save the elephants in Africa. The last point is important. Several countries in Southern Africa had increased their elephant populations during the 1980s. The penalty they paid for better managing their populations was to lose their export income.

Today it is hard to pin down a nice, simple policy solution. Despite that, a number of conservationists remain wedded to the idea that the irregular shipments of stockpiled ivory from Southern Africa to Japan (and lately China) are fueling demand. Hence, a similar drop in poaching to that in the early 1990s, could be experienced by preventing the minute, legal trade that occurs.

The reasons for the rise in poaching are easy to diagnose.

• After poaching waned in the early 1990s, governments and law enforcement agencies relaxed their guard. The perception was that they had fixed the problem. This was matched by Western countries reducing their contributions to anti-poaching work.
  
• Smugglers rebuilt markets outside North America and Europe, and began shipping in clandestine ways rather than 'laundering' the ivory into the legal stream.
  
• Asian countries in South-East Asia, and especially China, grew more affluent. Ivory is a luxury product and rising incomes brought more people into the market.
  
• Asian stockpiles ran out. When the international ban was enacted, Japan had an ivory-stockpile that would last about 10 years. Stockpiles in Hong Kong were probably similar. As these stocks became depleted, ivory prices rose to 3-4 times greater than the early 1990s. In Vietnam, ivory is now priced over $US1000 per kg.
  
• Economic reforms in Asia reduced transaction costs in the black-market. It got easier to visit other countries, make connections with other criminal networks and just physically trade goods. China for instance, has three of the five busiest ports in Asia now.
  

What is not contributing to the poaching is the small, very irregular shipments of ivory from Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe to Japan. If anything, these have probably replenished stockpiles and kept ivory prices lower than they would otherwise have been. Keeping prices low is good, as it deters smugglers.

The least useful analysis we see reported in the media is that none of the points above are deemed relevant to increased poaching. Instead we get the same myth being reported uncritically- the myth that somehow, by making a product available legally you just end up fueling demand for the illegal substitute. The answer is more mundane. Black market ivory is worth 3-4 times more than it used to. Poaching is resurgent because it's got a lot more profitable again.