I am not sure that you can blame capitalism for this one... unless it
was of that particularly twisted form carried out by the UN (whom I
understood were responsible for the second release).
One part of this tragic tale that the Guardian article overlooks was the
reason for the deforestation and erosion - the locals needed to smoke
the Nile Perch because it was harder to sun dry.
In the words of the great Kyle Broflovski, "things are pretty f*cked up
right here".
Cheers, Andrew
Michael Adams wrote:
> Thanks for posting this...It's sad how much damage is done to people
> and the environment in the name of capitalism...
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* finsen at optusnet.com.au [finsen at optusnet.com.au]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 09, 2005 6:24 AM
> *To:* r_m_l at yahoogroups.com
> *Subject:* [RML] Little fish fights back
>
>
>
> Something of interest?
>
> caio
>
> Graeme
>
> From http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1541613,00.html
> The little fish fight back
>
> An award-winning documentary portrays Lake Victoria as the site of an
> ecological disaster. But, says Laura Spinney, the story may yet have a
> happy ending
>
> Thursday August 4, 2005
> The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>
>
> When film director Hubert Sauper showed the mosaic warts on his feet
> to a Parisian doctor, his reaction was, "Woah! Where did you get
> those?" Sauper explained that he had just returned from making a
> documentary in Tanzania, and he thought he had probably picked them up
> in the fish-bone yard, where barefooted women squelched through a
> seething mass of maggots, inhaling dense ammonia fumes, to hang
> skeletal fish carcasses on racks to dry in the sun.
>
> The fish-bone yard is one of the more memorable images in Sauper's
> brutal film, Darwin's Nightmare, which opens in US cinemas this month,
> having already won 18 first prizes in international film festivals. It
> shows the social and ecological catastrophe that was set in motion
> when, in the early 1960s, a man tipped a bucket of Nile perch into
> Lake Victoria and spawned a fishing industry. It does not have a happy
> ending. But the sequel, should there be one, just might. Biologists
> now believe that the lake is balanced on a knife edge between total
> disaster and possible recovery.
>
> Lake Victoria is the largest tropical lake in the world, the source of
> the Nile and once upon a time, paradise for evolutionary biologists.
> Until the 60s, it was home to 500 species of small, colourful cichlid
> fish, each of which was behaviourally and morphologically specialised
> to exploit a niche in the lake ecosystem. The majority of the species
> evolved in a record-setting 15,000 years, making the Lake Victoria
> cichlid "superflock" one of the world's most spectacular examples of
> explosive radiation in vertebrates.
>
> Then along came the man with the bucket. Nile perch are not native to
> the lake. They are beefy, fecund fish that can grow to almost two
> metres in length, and they eat cichlids. As it happens, he was only
> the second man with a bucket. The lake, which is the size of Ireland,
> straddles Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. The first introduction of
> species related to Nile perch took place in 1954 in Uganda, when that
> country was still a British colony, but the predator did not take off.
>
> On both occasions it was introduced with nominally good intentions: to
> provide local people with a richer source of protein than the bony,
> bland cichlids they had hitherto lived off. The more cynical view is
> that it was to improve sports fishing for European expats. Either way,
> the second introduction was irresponsible, because by then ecologists
> had warned that the consequences of introducing a top predator to an
> as yet poorly understood ecosystem were entirely unpredictable.
>
> With the benefit of hindsight, Sauper's film shows what those
> consequences were - for humans. Within a couple of decades, Nile perch
> numbers had exploded. Men flocked from the poverty-stricken hinterland
> of Tanzania to make a living on the lake shore, leaving their families
> behind. Lawless "fish cities" grew up around the filleting factories,
> peopled by fishermen, prostitutes and feral, gluesniffing kids.
> Factory owners grew relatively rich on the proceeds of a thriving
> export industry, while the locals ate the sundried leftovers. Aids
> ravaged the fishing settlements and, when the terminally sick limped
> home to be comforted by their relatives, the inland villages as well.
>
> Meanwhile, the lake itself grew sicker and sicker. By the mid-80s, it
> was already estimated to have lost two-thirds of its cichlid species
> in a massive wave of extinction. By the time Sauper finished filming
> last year, commercial trawlers had been banned and the Nile perch,
> overfished themselves, were eating each other - presumably because
> there were not enough cichlids left to feed them.
>
> The lake is also suffering from creeping eutrophication - an influx of
> nutrients due mainly to deforestation of the lake shore,
> industrialisation and human pollution. These nutrients feed large
> algal blooms that die and sink to the bottom to be consumed by
> bacteria, which use up oxygen in doing so. The water grows murkier,
> which suits the perch, because they can see better in low light than
> cichlids. And crucially, female cichlids can no longer distinguish the
> markings of males, which is how they select their mates.
>
> As male colour becomes obsolete as a signal for mate choice, Ole
> Seehausen of the University of Bern, Switzerland and colleagues are
> finding that the reproductive barriers are breaking down between some
> cichlid species which sport different colours, and hybridisation is
> taking place. Red and blue males of different species are giving way
> to males of a dull brown, and losing their ecological specialisations
> - the difference in their feeding habits, for instance - in the process.
>
> Hybridisation can lead to a loss of diversity and is, therefore,
> generally seen by biologists as a bad thing. But it could also be a
> force for successful adaptation, and eventual recovery of diversity,
> Seehausen argues. "By reshuffling the genes of two species, it can
> generate the genetic raw material for new species with new
> specialisations - a novel combination of a certain feeding behaviour
> with a particular habitat, say."
>
> If that combination can fill an ecological niche not yet fully
> exploited by other species, the hybrid could establish itself and
> thrive. There is evidence that that is happening in Lake Victoria. A
> handful of the 200 or so species once thought to be extinct seem to be
> reviving. But, says Seehausen, "Many of the reviving populations look
> like recombinants of pre-existing species."
>
> Until the early 90s, most was known about the bigger, fish-eating
> cichlids that swam in open waters and were the first to become
> extinct. But then Seehausen's group discovered more than 100
> previously unknown rock-dwelling cichlids that kept to the shallower,
> coastal areas, where Nile perch do not stray. They covered a broad
> spectrum of cichlid niches - from small plankton-eaters to large
> algae-scrapers and fish-eaters. Since then, cichlids have been found
> further out in open waters. Some of them could be hybrids derived from
> these rock-dwellers.
>
> Seehausen speculates that the lake's coastal bays and gulfs, where the
> water is murkiest, act as a "hybridisation belt". Individuals of novel
> genetic makeup are engendered here, and those that are well-adapted to
> life in the altered lake may then move out into clearer, open waters,
> where there is a greater choice of niches to exploit, and the females
> can see. Both ecological and sexual selection then act to enforce
> their genetic isolation one from the other - creating new species.
>
> The key, then, is to have this balance between hybridisation and
> diversifying pressures, between murky and clear. The lake is grossly
> over-murky now. But, says Seehausen, "If the water clarity can be
> improved again, it may yet be pushed back to levels where more
> diversity would again be promoted." That is not such an unrealistic
> goal. But while there have been some reforestation projects, and
> attempts to change farming practises in the region, these have not yet
> halted the decline. So cichlid diversity hangs in the balance. "It is
> always tricky to predict evolution, particularly in cichlids," says
> Walter Salzburger, an evolutionary biologist at Konstanz University in
> Germany. But he thinks it likely that new cichlid species will adapt
> to the perch's presence. He and his colleagues have found cichlids
> hiding in floating islands of papyrus in the lake, which are too dense
> for the bulky perch to penetrate, and he thinks they probably have
> other refugia - areas where the local conditions are favourable to
> them, and where they can hang out until it is safe to leave and
> radiate again.
>
> Victoria's satellite lakes may also act as refugia, he says. Some of
> these are connected to the lake, some are not. Over geological time,
> connecting channels may have formed and dissolved due to fluctuating
> water levels. But even the fact that two lakes are presently cut off
> from one another does not prevent cichlids from hopping between them.
> One explanation is that they are carried by birds. Cichlids are mouth
> brooders, which means that females can carry up to 30 juveniles in
> their mouths. Even if the mother dies in a cormorant's beak, the fry
> could potentially survive to repopulate a new lake. That hypothesis
> has yet to be proven. But, says Salzburger, "Cichlids have colonised
> all the lakes - remote lakes, satellite lakes, crater lakes - and they
> must have got there somehow."
>
> So if hybridisation does not drive a new radiation, then
> recolonisation from refugia could, but over a much longer time course
> - millennia as opposed to decades. The two scenarios generate two very
> different short-term outcomes for the lake and the people who live off
> it. But they could also work in concert, says Salzburger, just as they
> may have done during the initial Lake Victoria cichlid radiation.
>
> Tijs Goldschmidt, a Dutch biologist who worked at the lake in the 80s,
> says he is now careful about predicting the lake's future, since he
> warned that once the cichlids were gone, the Nile perch population
> would crash, and their corpses would be seen floating on the surface.
> That never happened, and it was only in retrospect that he understood
> why not: with most of the cichlids removed, prawns in the lake took
> their chance and boomed. Small Nile perch ate prawns, slightly bigger
> perch ate prawns and a sardine-like fish native to the lake, and the
> largest perch became cannabilistic, feeding off the smaller ones.
> "That is a very unstable system, but so far it works," says Goldschmidt.
>
> Even if the lake does recover its former diversity quickly, it will
> not be the same diversity. For one thing, it will never now be rid of
> Nile perch. There is also the major threat posed by eutrophication to
> consider. Human beings, like cichlids, are distinguished by their
> adaptability, but if eutrophication continues at the rate it is, then
> the lake will one day stop providing both drinking water and protein.
> "A lake without oxygen would be a disaster for about 30 million
> people," says Goldschmidt.
>
> In that case, the misery portrayed in Sauper's film would only be the
> tip of the iceberg, and recovery would be delayed by a major human
> catastrophe on a scale that is, perhaps, impossible for us to imagine.
>
> * More at www.darwinsnightmare.com <http://www.darwinsnightmare.com>
>
> * What did you think of this article? Mail your responses to
> life at guardian.co.uk <life at guardian.co.uk> and include your name
> and address.
>
>
>
> Regards
> Paul Blake
> paul.blake at nrm.qld.gov.au
> Block A
> 80 Meiers Road
> Indooroopilly QLD 4068
> --------------------------------------
> Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is
> those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively
> assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. -
> Charles Darwin
>
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