Evolving Conservation

(c) National Geographic

When I grew up 'conservation' meant (to me) saving the pandas or tigers or elephants. Oh my. Charismatic megafauna - the cute, squishy, and cuddly animals that you can put on posters. Conservation was about species.

Conservation has evolved. I don't know whether the NGOs (... I guess not everyone knows D.C. speak... it means non-profits) realized that people cared more about people than animals, that their efforts were wiped clean in a few years if they didn't address help the humans whose activity threatened the animals (and whole ecosystems), or if it was just a new way to get money... or something else completely. No matter what the driving force, the result is conservation as a more holistic set of activities that, I would argue, is more effective.

I have a new view and appreciation for conservation non-profits and the work they do. 

The other side of Indonesia

The big city side... The fishing coasts... The rice bowl. The terraced rice paddies. The stereotypical hats, and not so stereotypical hats.

They are all the unique, kind, and beautiful people of Indonesia. 

 

 

 

 

Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated

I got a rude awakening to my blissful ignorance about fishing practices around the world. I like to think about beautiful, picturesque fishing villages like this:

 

...where traditional artisanal fishing is still done and in a sustainable way.

While those are pictures I took during this trip and artisanal fishing is still done, much of it is not sustainable even without industrialization of the fleet. People are poor. They need to feed their families. Anything that they can get out of the sea to sell or eat is fair game. This is not to say that people are breaking the law. Some probably are, but in general, fishery regulations are lax and what few exist are often poorly enforced. 'New' species are being collected... "Baby Shark" and "Baby Tuna". The fish landings at these picturesque scenes also look like this:

"Baby shark." For scale the tiles are standard 12" x 12"

"Baby Tuna." Yellow fin and Skipjacks being weighed and sold. Yes the fish on the floor are tuna.

Sequester

The irony of it all. I've just completed uploading my budget and budget justification to Fastlane (NSF's system for electronic proposal submissions) last night. A large proposal with over 10 PIs, thus with only a small portion going to me, of course. Still, this will be my first proposal submission where I am listed as a PI.

Of course, you've probably heard about a little thing called the Sequester. Its almost as hard to ignore in D.C. as a Red Sox win while living in Boston. Our proposal is due next Monday... the first week when funds will be sequestered away from all of the federal agencies.  NSF has reassured scientists across the country that existing grants will be honored. However... new grants are on the chopping block. We may have put all of this effort in and in the end have a 0% chance of being funded (as opposed to the normal 5-30% chance).

Ah... its good to be an early career scientist.

Back from the haze and diving down deep

I've now mostly caught up from being away for 3 weeks and have gotten over the 12 hour jet lag. So, really, I have no more excuses not to post something. Luckily from me, Deep Sea News had a great post to day on what it takes to be a deep sea biologist. I'm a little afraid that I'm revealing too much about myself, as obviously gone through all of their points to fully embrace the insanity of deep sea biology.  Here's #1:

"Love and Pain…Like Sunshine and Rain. Welcome to Deep-Sea Science.  Before you start, you better realize what exactly you are heading into.  Deep-sea science can be both extremely rewarding and extremely heart breaking.  To be a deep-sea scientist is to be one part scientist, one part explorer, and three parts masochist. The logistical difficulties and financial requirements of sampling an environment covered with miles of water will pretty much make every project you want to do either impossible or close to it.  While other graduates students and scientists in your department drive a truck down to their field site and take samples till the cows come home, you will be having a nervous breakdown because of insufficient data.  A project that takes other scientists a weekend and $250 to do will take you three years and $250,000. So, deep-sea science is not for the faint of heart.  However, if you can manage to get a chance (which likely will not happen), then you will probably discover something new, a species, a habitat, a process, or a biological adaptation. Deep-sea science is a young field compared to many other science disciplines.  You will never be at a loss for questions, because most of the answers are still unknown.  Too bad you won’t be able address all of them.  I write this with tongue-in-cheek of course, but I am serious.  This is a tough field and doing deep-sea science isn’t easy.  Think about this for some time before you move to number 2."

#2 - 11 found here http://deepseanews.com/2009/03/so-you-want-to-be-a-deep-sea-biologist/

Adapt to this...

Part of what I'm in Indonesia to do is to review a marine program which includes efforts to help Indonesian coastal communities adapt to climate change. Most of the effort is focused on rural villages on remote islands. I must say, it makes for good site visits.... do you sense the but?  Here it is... but there's a HUGE problem in the urban areas.

While Jakarta looks like its headed towards Panem with the huge shopping malls and high fashion, its still a third world, developing city. I've already experienced the open sewers, ad hoc landfills and 100% unsafe piped water, but today was another adventure.

An hour or two of rain. That's all it took to cause massive gridlock (in an already congested traffic pattern) due to flooded streets.  After waiting 30 min for a taxi we ordered from the hotel (all of the taxis are full when in rains), we decided to trek it. We waded through ankle to mid-calf high water for about a mile to get to our hotel.

The water itself wasn't an issue - just standing water, no current - as long as I didn't think about what was IN the water. I mention the open sewers, right? Eww.  The bigger issue was that the sidewalks and streets are in such disrepair, you never knew if you were about to step in a giant hole. I also kept imagining a car going my and splashing us - like in the movies. But the cars weren't going fast enough to get more than a wave going. Luckily, we made it back to the hotel with no twisted ankles... just wet and with shoes that should likely be tossed out.

As a colleague at USAID said... "Welcome to Jakarta."

Meetings in Jakarta

The first thing that I learned about Jakarta was that physical displacement was HARD to do. Often you could walk to meetings faster than you can drive... that is if there were sidewalks and it wasn't 85-90 degrees plus 90% humidity, oh and yeah, the air pollution (though I'm told that its leagues better than it was 10 years ago). I learned my lesson the hard way... I was nearly late for my first meeting.

Brown flood waters fill the streets of central Jakarta

I took 45 min to go 2.5 miles; and then tack on another 10 minutes to get an elevator... and I was a couple minutes late for a meeting at the UN. Luckily it was an informal meeting and we ended up at Starbucks in search for air conditioning.

First, you might be asking why we were on the search for AC. Well, the UN's AC was out due to electricity problems following the massive floods in Jakarta after a rivers spilled over and flood gates had to be raised. Luckily for me, most of the flooding had receded by the time I arrived, but we still took some taxis through a couple of questionable streets in both Jakarta and then in Kendari.

Second, you might be thinking... Starbucks?  Yes, in many ways it was like taking a different mix of ethnicities and throwing them into a city in the USA. Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Ace Hardware, Gap, Banana Republic, and the list of familiar names goes on and on. The defining differences between Jakarta and a US city, the traffic is a little worse than say DC or LA, but really its the slums two blocks away that surround the skyscraper islands. Its a strange mix of modern and traditional, economic growth and adverse poverty. Thus is Jakarta... an embodiment of the two worlds of Indonesia.

After learning my lesson about the speed of physical mobility in Jakarta, I planned better for meetings across town with USAID, the Indonesian government, and with our "partners". "Partners" in USAID speak means the companies and NGOs to which we give money to actually implement the development activities. I'm not good at names and I've even worse when they're names I don't know.  Its a good thing I've been collecting business cards... though I'm worried I'm running out of my USAID cards!!

All and all it was a long and crazy week in a Jakarta.

Wakatobi

A conglomeration of three island names, Wakatobi is an amazing place at the far southeast arm of Sulawesi that has been set aside by the Indonesian government for protection - a Marine Protected Area (MPA). It was a wonderful place to get my introduction to the work that USAID does in the field.  That being said, I'm pretty bummed that I didn't actually get into the communities.  I arrived a couple days late due to flight and itinerary rescheduling at the last minute, so I missed the actually 'talking to the people' part. I did get to take a walk the morning of our departure and meet a couple of families, like this mother and daughter collecting octopus and starfish from the reef at low tide.
 

Enjoying the sunrise before our dive.

 Outside of all of the meetings, I did get to squeeze in a single early morning dive.  It was a great way to start a day full of sitting in a darkened room... full of beautiful healthy corals. Now I guess my colleagues can officially justify calling my first trip a "junket".  It was great to see that there was both something on the reef to save as well as immediately see threats to the reef.  All of the corals were amazing... large plate corals, one of which had a medium sized fish sitting in the middle like a fish on a dinner plate; gorgeous soft corals, whips and sea fans gently swaying. My personal favorite was the variety of crinoids - black, stripped, purple... The other divers liked the lobster and giant clam.  However, the diversity of fish was largely depleted. There were very few large fish and only a few large schools. The dive master, Bryony (I swear pronounced "Briny"), said that there was a crown-of-thorns bloom on parts of the island.  So clearly there are some direct threats.

It was encouraging that the government appears to be committed to marine conservation. We toured the construction site of a new academy (similar to vocational school) dedicated to marine conservation practice. It was an impressive building. May be this child waiting on the stairs for his mom or dad to finish construction for the day will be a pupil in the new school.

First TDY

TDY - Temporary Duty; Temporary Duty Yonder, Testis-Determining Factor on Y, Temporarily Divorced for a Year, Typically Developing Youth.  (Dictionary definitions of TDY)

The world of the USG (U.S. Government) is filled with acronyms, often with out definitions. I think what I'll be doing is the first definition, which will hopefully not lead to the second to last definition. For all intensive purposes, here, TDY will mean a three week trip to Indonesia.

This trip could mean:
 Days on end in a room (I hope is as nice as) this:

or days spent visiting sites like this:

Likely it will be mostly option number 1, but I'll be happy if I get any of option number 2... and it sounds like I might. There is at least one day that says 'snorkel/diving' on our itinerary. It does make sense that we would check out the marine resources that the programs are working to conserve, preserve and utilize to improve peoples' lives.

I've been told that this rarely or never happens on a TDY for our office. But I've also heard the same thing about high profile projects... so we'll see what happens!! I'll at least get a better sense of how our work is translated 'on the ground'.

Human dispersal and fish

Fallen democracies, civil war, and overall conflict. What do these have to do with fisheries, aquatic ecosystems, and dispersal?  At times... everything.

During World War II, fishing effort drastically plummeted as ships and men were repurposed to fight in the war. This resulted in a double blip in fish catches -- a drop during the war and an increase in size and numbers after the war when fishing resumed. In ecological terms, the top predator had to allocate resources to survival which decreased predatory pressure... additionally, the top predators were dispersed to other parts of the world.

I had the privileged to meet a researcher, Cullen Hendrix, from William and Mary who along with Sarah Glaser has made strides in establishing the connection between conflict and fish beyond just the WWII 'blips'. Globally, when there is sustained conflict reported fish catches decrease. However, unlike WWII, Cullen and Sarah found that fish catches did not rebound to exceed or even meet ore-conflict levels until decades after resolution of conflict. There are many possible reasons for this lag - illegal and unreported fishing in poorly patrolled waters, destruction of infrastructure or capital (such as piers, boats, nets, etc), and my favorite... loss of human capital through the dispersal/migration of people.

There are some exceptions. It is possible to have the opposite effect. If conflict displaces refugees towards a coast, distant conflict can indirectly create an increase in fishing pressure and thus fish catch. 

These drastic changes in fishing pressure due to conflict can have ripple effects through the ecosystems. As far as I can tell, exactly how the ecosystems react to temporary changes in human dispersal during conflict is a wide open question with fascinating implications for the economic and environmental costs of conflict.


Cullen S. Hendrix and Sarah M. Glaser. (2011) Civil conflict and world fisheries, 1952-2004.  Journal of Peace Research.  48: 481-495.  (link) (pdf) **Awarded the Nils Petter Gleditsch Journal of Peace Research Article of the Year Award, 2011**