Should India start commercial ranching of crocodiles?

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http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1170/is_n6_v24/ai_16364232 I

married a croc man - Romulus Whitaker

<http://www.findarticles.com/p/search?tb=art & qt=%22Zai+Whitaker%22>

 

When Zai married Rom, she might have expected children--but what about those

10,000 crocodiles in the backyard?

 

LATE ONE HOT JUNE NIGHT in 1974, my husband Romulus Whitaker and his friend

Rajamani, an Irula tribesman from southern India, crouched on an embankment

of a large reservoir in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, each holding one end

of a tightly stretched net. I sat nearby in the humid darkness, waiting.

 

We had come here in response to a desperate telegram from the local

irrigation engineer, who wanted us to catch a 2-meter (7-ft.) mugger, or

marsh, crocodile that had been hunting in nearby rice paddies, trampling

crops and perhaps killing a goat. Since crocodiles have been dwindling in

India for at least 50 years, the summons could not be ignored. If we did not

catch the mugger, villagers would likely kill it. The engineer told us to

set our net at the embankment, the mugger's frequent haunt.

 

Chewed by mosquitoes and soggy from the damp ground, I sat as immobile as

possible, ears straining, waiting for the croc. Around midnight I heard

squishing footsteps. I backed away as a low, dark shape materialized and

slid toward me. I prepared to bolt, but just then the mugger slid into the

trap. Rom and Rajamani jumped on it, and it bellowed like a cow being

slaughtered.

 

Next morning we unravelled Chitra, as Rajamani had named the female croc,

and packed her into our Jeep for the ride to Vadanemmeli, a village on

India's south coast where we were starting a crocodile breeding facility

called the Madras Crocodile Bank. Chitra became one of the bank's first

residents.

 

Indiscriminate killing and habitat loss have led to serious declines in most

of the 23 crocodilian species worldwide. Several face extinction, posing a

significant biological and economic loss. As the largest predators in their

habitats, crocodilians play an important role in the natural balances of

their ecosystems. By digging burrows and deep pools, they create water holes

that sustain many other creatures during droughts. Yearly international

trade in croc skins, accounting for some 1.5 million hides, is worth about

$200 million.

 

Trade, both from controlled hunting and farming, has proved a useful

conservation tool when well regulated, since it makes the reptiles valuable

to local people who might otherwise kill them indiscriminately. In recent

years, conservation groups and government agencies have. initiated crocodile

recovery projects, including restocking programs in India for which the

Madras Crocodile Bank has served as a source of animals.

 

Rom's interest in reptiles dates to his childhood in upstate New York, where

he kept wild snakes as pets and learned his ABCS with " A is for Amphibian, B

is for Brontosaurus, C is for Coral Snake, " and so on. In 1951, when Rom was

8, his mother's second husband, a Bombay filmmaker, moved the family to

India. The new home was a reptile lover's heaven, and Rom soon became versed

in the ways of the Indian forest and its mildlife.

 

He returned to the United States for college, but soon dropped out to work

on a Florida snake farm. Later, after a stint in the U.S. Army, he went to

the American Southwest and caught enough rattlesnakes to make $500 from

venom

 

dealers. With the money he bought passage on a slow freighter to India,

where, in 1969, he opened his own snake farm near Madras.

 

In 1972, Rom approached. World Wildlife Fund-India (WWF) for a grant and met

my father, Zafar Futehally, who had started the group. Rom became active in

WWF activities, lecturing on snake conservation, which is how I met him. The

tall, blond snakeman who spoke Hindi and Tamil was a hit with the crowds,

and also with me. We married in

 

1974 and spent our honeymoon in a forest chasing down pit vipers, king

cobras and other snakes.

 

Once back home, Rom forged ahead with his newest project--the Madras

Crocodile Bank. Rom conceived the bank in 1973, when he and Rajamani

conducted crocodile surveys in four Indian states whose rivers, at the turn

of the century, had teemed with crocodiles. By 1973, India's three crocodile

species--the mugger, saltwater croc and gharial--were in trouble. Poachers,

egg collectors, fishermen and dam projects contributed to the species'

declines. India's gharial was nearly gone--fewer than 200 survived in the

wild. Rom's plan was to breed crocs in captivity and release some into the

wild.

 

We set up the Madras Crocodile Bank on India's Coromandel Coast, an ideal

site because it offered a reliable water supply and also a heavy tourist

flow along the nearby Madras-Mahabalipuram road, which leads to famous

temples. Rom figured that some travelers would stop to buy tickets and see

the crocodiles, ensuring that we could meet our overhead. Today, a million

visitors a year make the bank self-sufficient.

 

Since the 1970s, various organizations have hired Rom to survey vanishing

crocodile populations. Early in our marriage I joined Rom on these trips,

but since the arrival, of our two sons I usually have enjoyed Rom's field

experiences vicariously--and in the comfort of home --through the gnarled,

blotched letters he writes while traveling primordial swamps. These letters

reveal the hardships that field biologists endure.

 

For example, when Mozambique recently undertook drainage of he Zambezi River

flood plain for agriculture, wiping out crocodile habitat, the UN Food and

Agriculture Organization (FAO) sent Rom there to determine whether enough

crocs remained to sustain a skin trade (Rom found that crocs could produce

more income for impoverished local fishermen than could crops). While on

this assignment, the skies proved the worst enemy:

 

Dear Zai: We forged a channel in the fleshy papyrus with our machetes. Frog

calls rose from the two ends of the lake like a natural stereo system;

closer to us, the grunting laugh of hippos foraging in the reeds. I was on

Massingir Reservoir with two hefty Chengana fishermen as guides.

 

When we started back across the wide lake at midnight, jagged fingers of

lightning exploded from every direction. The wind picked up, gentle first

then whip ping up the water until waves crashed over the side of the boat.

We headed into the wind to keep from being tipped over, but where was the

shore? We listened to the oncoming roar of the rain.

 

Then another sound, closer: right under us. We'd hit a floating log,

snapping the shear pin of the propeller. Helpless, we were tossed and shoved

by the wind back across the lake. Holding on to the reeds to keep from

turning over, we searched frantically for a substitute prop pin. Screws,

pieces of wire, safety pins--these would work for a while, then snap.

Eventually we could fight the wind no longer and found ourselves firmly

wedged in a floating island of papyrus with hippos grunting and snorting all

around us.

 

Early in the morning the wind died down, and we were able to pull loose

from the papyrus stems and nurse the motor along with a last nail that had

held our only paddle together.

 

One sheaf of Rom's letters concerns a World Wide Fund for Nature assignment

in Irian Jaya, an Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea. Rom

sought to determine whether the area held enough crocodiles to support a

skin trade. Native people proved a danger:

 

Dear Zai: Here I am on the last lap of our expedition into the Asmat, the

region which gained notoriety when anthropologist Michael Rockefeller

disappeared there in the late 1950s. With me are the head of WWF in Irian

Jaya and two officials of the wildlife department. Our guide stayed behind,

refusing to venture into the land of the Orang Hutan, the jungle people. The

area is far beyond the patrols of the Indonesians or the camps of the

missionaries. But it's here on the remote unhunted stretches of the Eilanden

River, I'm sure, that the crocs live. We were all nervous, but so far all

we'd seen of the Orang Hutan were abandoned hunting and fishing camps.

 

Then it happened. Up ahead, four naked men walked slowly up the bank toward

the oncoming boat. All were armed with bows and arrows, one carried an

ornately carved shield. We exchanged glances: How should we react? Just then

one of the men smiled and waved, and we decided to stop and meet them. We'd

have to pass this way back down the river, and must be careful not to

initiate any feeling of hostility. Besides, our rubber boat seemed a

tempting target and was far from arrow--proof.

 

But it was an anxious half hour. We could communicate only by smiles and

gestures, and the uncertainty about our intentions made them skittish; they

began muttering to each other and seemed clearly irritated. I pulled out

some chunks of the black tobacco much favored by bush people throughout New

Guinea island. Leaving that in their hands, we made a reasonably graceful

getaway.

 

Perhaps it had been foolish to come chugging into this hidden land. But the

reward was hundreds of crocodiles, some of them so unused to humans I could

get out on the bank and walk right up to them.

 

Rom found greater threats closer to home. Straddling the border of India and

Bangladesh and fringing the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers is a

10,400 square-kilometers (4,000-sq.mi.) mangrove swamp called the

Sundarbans, an area synonymous with man-eating tigers. While Rom was there

for a three-week croc survey, tigers ate six people. The threat of tiger

attack led to some claustrophobic restrictions:

 

Dear Zai: An armed guard shadows me day and night, even grudging me a

private moment behind a bush. At first this entire loss of privacy irks me.

But then the reminders are everywhere: accounts of the latest attacks on

fishermen and honey collectors, warnings from the Forest Department about

especially troublesome tigers, shorts or sarongs of victims hung on poles

along the waterways to mark scenes of recent deaths. Tigers kill an

estimated 100 people in the Sundarbans every year.

 

We have been cruising the side creeks at night in a dinghy, looking for the

eye-shine of saltwater crocs. By day we stumble through dense thickets of

tiger fern, looking for croc nests, tigers constantly on our minds. Some of

the biggest crocs in the world live here but are too wary to approach. On

Ihinbaria Khal (creek) a 5-meter (16-ft.) salty swam lazily ahead of us for

long minutes, the powerful tail swinging slowly from side to side.

 

That evening I took a walk inland (along with the obligatory armed tiger

guard) among the spiky mangrove roots. There was a sudden, almost

imperceptible movement behind us and Omar Ali spun round, cocked rifle

disconcertingly close to my head. A beautiful dark cobra poised upright,

hood spread and alert, watching us from the chocolate ooze.

 

All the stress and strain has proved worth enduring, because the Madras

Crocodile Bank is a big success. Today it is home to more than 10,000

crocodiles of 10 species and serves as a base for a number of conservation

projects, from reforestation of cleared lands to research in the remote

Andaman Islands, home of the saltwater crocodile. Chitra, still with us, has

proved a super-efficient egg machine, laying more than 700 eggs with a

92-percent hatch rate.

 

In 1975, the Indian government, with FAO help, set up its own

captive-breeding facilities, and the Madras bank has supplied them with

stock. Captive breeding has permitted the release of more than 1,300

gharials and 1,000 saltwater crocodiles and has helped restock the mugger

crocodile in 28 national parks, wildlife reserves and crocodile sanctuaries

throughout India.

 

Some state governments have been resisting further mugger releases because

they think crocs compete with fishermen. Ironically, the largest mugger

population in south India lives in the Amaravati Reservoir, which also has

India's highest fish catch. Nevertheless, the government has stopped

releasing muggers, which breed better in captivity than do the other two

species and threaten to outgrow breeding facilities.

 

The solution to overcrowding, Rom and I think, is sale of excess muggers to

the skin trade. Croc trade has worked in Papua New Guinea, where

government-monitored trade in croc skins brings in $2 million yearly, with

much of the money going directly to tribal communities. For India, where

half a billion citizens live on the edge of A poverty, trade could help both

people and crocs.

 

However, the Indian government opposes croc trade out of fear that it could

be used to mask poaching of wild crocodiles.

 

With or without trade, life goes on at the croc bank. As this is being

written, a fax arrives inviting Rom to Bangladesh as part of a wildlife

consultant team. This of course means more mud, tiger guards and mosquitoes.

 

 

I think I'll just wait here at home for his letters.

 

Zai Whitaker's book Snakeman, published in India, tells more about Rom and

about Zai's life with him. London-based photographer Michael Freeman has

visited the Whitakers twice on assignment for International Wildlife.