Plants and Animals

There were once only about 5,000 crocodiles in the Northern Territory. The population was decimated in the late 1940 and 1950s by hunters. A ban was placed on hunting and the exportation of skins in the early 1970s. Croc numbers have bounced back and are now estimated at 70,000.

I took this photo of a crocs eye today in Darwin –
view image. My image editing software is not on this computer and thus this image is rather large at 450 kbs and might take a little while to download.

Dr Grahame Webb was involved with the program to rebuild croc numbers. He told me the following three principles were promoted:
1. public education;
2. a program to contain problem crocs including trying to keep crocs out of Darwin harbour;
3. ensuring crocs had a commericial value – so landholders saw them as an economic asset rather than a pest.

About 20,000 eggs and 600 crocs are harvested from the wild each year under a permit system. Eggs sell for about $40 each while crocs sell for perhaps $500.

Many locals wish there weren’t so many… so they could swim at the beach again.

ABC Online reports that more than 200 koalas will be relocated from French Island to Yarra State Park near Gladysdale today.

Iam Temby from the [Victorian] Department of Environment says the move is part of an annual project to protect koala feeding habitats.

“Part of the reason is that French Island doesn’t have [the] disease chlamydia and chlamydia inhibits breeding in populations, so it slows the rate of population increase,” he said.

“The koalas breed prolifically on French Island and they need to be removed regularly each year otherwise they’re going to eat all the trees that sustain them.”

Baby echidnas are called puggles. They start life when the mother lays an egg about 22 days after mating.

According to abc science online getting an echidna egg from the cloaca to the pouch, is not an easy feat and no-one’s actually seen it happen.

I was sent an email yesterday with an image apparently of three cute baby echidnas.

I am still pondering the image.

Don’t puggles look more like this, view image ? (The image is from this website, http://www.fauna-rescue-qld.org.au/ .)

Up TO 10,000 elephants, including whole families, are facing slaughter as South Africa prepares to end its ten-year ban on culling according to various news reports, including at Times Online.

The South Africa government is expecting an outcry from animal rights groups across the world and is trying to temper this through an 18-month ‘consultation period’ to precede the cull. The cull will involve rounding up and shooting entire family groups.

The cull is necessary because the thriving elephant population in the Kruger national park is eating itself out of vegetation and drinking itself out of water.

An adult elephant consumes about 170kg of vegetation a day. And this is what it produces …

Photo taken in Kenya in about 1990 .

The article in Times Online continues,

The inevitable outcry about the cull disguises South Africa’s remarkable achievements in bringing the Kruger elephants back from the brink of being wiped out. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only 50 or so wild elephants in the whole of South Africa.

Major James Stevenson-Hamilton, a short, stocky Scot, Laird of Fairholm in Lanarkshire, started the recovery when he created the Kruger Park in 1902 at the end of the Boer War. There are now 17,000 elephants in 31 separate South African reserves.

It is unknown how many elephants there are globally. It is generally accepted/quoted that in 1930s there were 5-10 million elephants in Africa. But by 1979 only 1.3 million. The current estimate is about 600,000. But I am not sure how any of the above figures were calculated/estimated.

I can’t find any information on elephants numbers at the CITES site.

It seems particularly sad if there are so few, that any have to be killed. Many of the Kenyan National Parks were being poached out when I was working there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I have really enjoyed reading ‘Going Native: Living in the Australian environment’ by Michael Archer and Bob Beale (Hodder, 2004). The book promotes the commercial potential of Australian native plants and animals – from kangaroos and koalas to tea-tree oil.

Archer and Beale make an interesting observation on page 142:

“If the natural world is to have a future, we need to understand that the love of animals based on use and dependence has always led to a commitment to conserve.

Indigenous peoples who remain hunter-gatherers have a love and respect for animals, plants and ecoystems that most of us simply do not understand because they, unlike us, are still an indivisible part of the environments upon which they depend.

… Once we build the fence and climbed over it, we lost the plot and threatened the future. The mindset of animal rights advocates who argue against the value of using animals would seem incomprehensible to hunter-gatherers – as it would to the animals themselves if they were somehow able to conceptualize it. To argue, for example, as some animal rights advocates do, that a koala would rather be starving in an eaten-out forest remnant than sold to become an exhibit in a Japanese zoo strikes us not only as absurd but extraordinarily presumptuous. It seems certain to us that the koala would be as willing to chew gum leaves in Tokyo as in Taronga Zoo or Tower Hill.”

I reckon the koala would probably be happier in Tower Hill (western Victoria). But hey, if it was a question of life or death – well even I might move to Tokyo.

There is an organisation with website based on the principles promoted in the book, see http://www.fate.unsw.edu.au/ .

There was a story on ABC Television’s Foreign Correspondent last night (that I didn’t see) about an organization trying to save ‘near extinct’ wildlife in Cambodia’s national parks including tigers, monkeys, sun bears, deer, and elephants. According to the website, poaching for Asia’s million-dollar trade in exotic wildlife is part of the problem with wildlife traders protected by government and the military.

I was alerted to the story by Graeme McIveen, a friend who has a long standing interested in wildlife conservation. He sent me an email that included comment:

“We have involvement with a project in Iran that is close to a nature reserve for Asian cheetah – I didn’t even know there was such an animal – one estimate is a total population of around 60 of an animal that once ranged across much of Asia Minor, but no one really knows.”

And I had previously read that the Liberian Iberian lynx was the world’s most endangered cat with only 100 animals in Spain and Portugal – numbers down from about 100,000 at the turn of the 19th century.

And just a few weeks ago I read that the Australian kangaroo is facing extinction including that,

“The collapse in kangaroo numbers was inevitable once a combination of rampant exploitation and drought came together …The world’s largest wildlife massacre is being justified on the basis of so-called ‘scientific management’ programmes …”

This story does not accord with the piece at Farm Online today claiming roo numbers are up, demand for roo meat is up, there are just not enough roo shooters.

How does someone living in Japan, for example, work out whether they should donate to save the Iranian cheetah, the Cambodian sun bear or the Australian kangaroo? … while perhaps enjoying a meal of Minke whale.

The Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) has raised millions of dollars for koala conservation and even successfully campaigned to have koalas listed in the United States as an endangered species in Australia.

The political and fund-raising success of the group has been aided by its claiming that there are less than 100,000 koalas remaining, with numbers on the decline.

Yet, as I detailed in my article for the June issue of the IPA Review, by simply counting up a few of the know koala populations it is evident that there would be well over 100,000 koalas in Australia. There are about 59,000 in the mulga-lands of southwest Queensland, 25,000 in southeast Queensland, 8,200 in North Coast NSW, 27,000 on Kangaroo Island South Australia. This quick count does not include Victorian Koala populations with a Monash University researcher suggesting in 1998 that the Victorian koala population could total one million (that was before the January 2003 bushfires).

I concluded in the IPA article that the lack of information and honest reporting on Koala numbers perhaps reflects a broader issue for conservation. It is the koala as victim, the koala as a species in decline, which attracts funding, and thus power and influence for organisations like the AKF. There is no incentive to report that koala populations might be doing OK.

There really is a need for someone, or some organization, to start compiling basic statistics on icon species from the sun bear to the koala.

There might be ‘lies, damn lies and then there are statistics’ but statistics tend to lie less than newspaper headlines.

PS I have read somewhere that sun bears caught in Cambodian National Park could be sold as pets, or have their paws amputated and made into soup, and/or be kept alive in a small cage with a tube inserted into them extracting bile for traditional medicines.

Update 8.30am Thursday 8th

I have received some offline comment quering roo numbers – I probably should have provided the following link in the post:

http://www.kangaroo-industry.asn.au/morinfo/BACKGR1.HTM

There is an annual census of roo numbers in Australia with information at:

http://www.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/trade-use/wild-harvest/kangaroo/stats.html .

I was hoping for general feedback on the problem of what to do about those who ‘cry wolf’ as this can result in real and pressing problems not being addressed. For example, we worry about koalas when there is really a crisis with African elephants? Also we worry about landclearing impacts on koalas when most mortality has been the result of feral bushfires? Also, how does one find reliable information on, for example, sun bear population numbers?