In Sri Lanka’s Deep Waters Marine Conservation Goes Hi-Tech
March 27th, 2017
Via Eurasia Review, a look at how drones and mobile applications are changing marine conservation efforts in Sri Lanka:
As the midday sun rises higher over Gulf of Mannar, a drone hovers over the blue mass of sea water. Below, a motley crowd of fishermen gathers, straining their eyes at a drone.
A few metres from the crowd, conservationist Prasanna Weerakkody operating the drone raises it to 500 metres, before moving it slowly in different directions, allowing the device to film a large swathe of water.
One day, he believes, the roving camera of this drone will send images of one of the most elusive sea mammals in this ocean: the dugong.
“Dugong usually swims at a depth of about 5-10 metres. Being mammals, they also come above water every few minutes to inhale fresh air. The drone has the capacity of rising one km high, but we usually operate it at 400-500 metres. This is enough to capture images of dugong,” says Weerakkody, whose organisation – Ocean Resources Conservation Association (ORCA) – is a partner of the four-year Global Environment Facility (GEF) funded, multi-agency environmental initiative: the Dugong and Sea Grass Conservation Project.
Saving the Ocean’s Most Vulnerable
The dugong – a manatee-like creature known locally as “sea pig” – is listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is also a partner in the conservation project.
The world’s only vegetarian sea mammal, the dugong lives at a depth of 5-15 meters, feeding on sea grass. Its natural habitat is vast – stretching from Eritrea in East Africa to Vanuatu in the Pacific. However, there is no documented information on their numbers in Sri Lankan waters. Very little is also known about their behaviour and movement, such as when and how they move, which part of the sea or grass bed they frequent and why, and which seasons are the most favourable. In short, most questions that one can raise about a dugong here are unanswered.
The main reason, says Arjan Rajasurya, Project Manager at IUCN Sri Lanka, is that the dugong is a very “secretive” animal which rarely shows up. “There may be a dugong right under a boat, but you will not know of its existence because it does not jump through the water like a dolphin or squirt water like a whale,” he explains.
The secretiveness is proven by the fact that none of the officials involved in the multi-agency conservation project has ever seen a live dugong.
And yet as many as 13 dugongs are known to have been killed in the past three years, many of them reported by the local media. Sri Lanka’s National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency (NARA) – a marine research organisation – has also carried out autopsies on some dead dugong.
Locals – especially fishermen whose gill nets catch and kill dugongs – are also tight-lipped and seldom come forward to share information on the sea mammal, probably fearing punitive actions by the government or backlash from other fishermen.
Besides gathering missing information on the mammal and its habitat and chalk out a strategy to protect both, the 4.88 million dollar Dugong Conservation project, which took off in mid-2015, also aims to curb illegal fishing and bridge the communication and awareness gap with the locals. To help achieve this, use of a drone was decided as a crucial component, say the project partners.
Killer War Tool as Marine life Protector
Technically, a drone is an unmanned aircraft with powerful cameras that capture images below. It can be either remotely controlled or fly on its own using software such as onboard sensors and GPS. Extensively used by security forces in war zones, the drone has lately gained a reputation as a dangerous killer machine that drops bombs on people – ‘terrorists’ and civilians alike.
The most extensive – and controversial – use of drones has been in Pakistan and in the Middle East where the war against terror has been raging for years.
However, here in the deep waters of Sri Lanka, the technology is a last-mile effort to save critically endangered marine animals by monitoring their movement, studying their habitat and preventing their capture and killing by illegal fishers.
According to Weerakkody, who leads a dedicated team of marine life experts, this is probably the first time ever that drone technology is being used for marine conservation. “This is a Phantom basic pro robotic machine fitted with a camera that can shoot over 2 K video, which is almost three times as clear as the picture on your HD TV.”.
Apart from the drone, the ORCA team is using a side-scan sonar device that captures echoes from an object on the sea floor and creates its images after measuring the strength of how “loud” the return echo is.
However, this device can only work if it is placed on a moving object – such as a boat or an underwater vehicle – which produces a sound. So, if a dugong is right next to the sonar, but the solar carrier is still, the device will not be able to capture its image. Also, given that the dugong is a shy and secretive animal, it will most likely swim away when it senses a moving vehicle nearby.
An Everyman’s Mobile App
While the drone and the side-scan sonar are handled by highly skilled experts like Weerakkody, the project is also designing technologies that are user-friendly and can be used by community members with little or no training.
Channa Suraweera, Project Manager at Sri Lanka’s Department of Wildlife Conservation, demonstrated one such design to IDN: an application that can be used by locals to report sighting of a dugong or any other large sea animal.
Based on Smart Survey software, the app gives multiple options for a user to report what has been seen: a dugong, a dolphin, a whale or any other sea animal. In a few seconds, with a few clicks, someone can send a text and a photograph which will be stored at a government-run server. The department will analyse this information and add this is to a database on sea mammals which is currently being built.
“As of now, we have very little data on dugong and we cannot build an entire database on our own. So we built this app to involve the general public in collecting information and sharing it with us,” said Suraweera.”It’s very easy to use and any mobile phone user with an internet connection can provide us with data. Once we have enough data, we can create a concrete plan to protect the dugong. We can also use the data to popularise tourism in the country, especially in the southern part of the ocean where whales are seen.”
Promoting Digital Communication
Suraweera explained that he mobile app is actually a part of a larger plan to build a fully computerised marine conservation coordination centre given the current communication gap among various government agencies, locals and civil society organisations on the issue of sea mammal conservation.
Once established, the centre will help loop in each of these agencies – including the Sri Lankan Navy and Coast Guard – and providing training in the latest digital technologies developed by the department. “It will be a centre that will strengthen communication and also help create a robust digitised database on marine conservation,” Suraweera predicted.
High End Technology for a Biodiverse Future
Mekala Christopher is a young boatman in Kalpitiya who often ferries officials and tourists to the high sea to see corals and dolphins. On several occasions, Christopher has seen a drone in the sky, but he says he has “no idea what it is actually for” and that he is also unaware of the massive conservation initiative to protect sea mammals such as the dugong.
According to Suraweera, if this conservation project is to succeed, members of the local community like Christopher must have a way to extend their support to it. “This project can only create guidelines and a framework for action, but the real action can be taken only by locals. They need to take part in the information sharing system,” he says, pointing at the fishermen’s village on the shore.
Veerakkody, on the other hand, hopes that the future will see deployment of more drones with more sophisticated features. The accomplishments of the drone in the project’s first year have been satisfactory: images have revealed that the sea grass bed is largely fine, except for some sporadic damage caused by fishing trawlers. But a higher end drone with more advanced technology such as a 4k camera could help better monitor their movement and map the habitat. “Those devices could decide the course of tomorrow’s conservation,” he says confidently.
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Read More »A Splash of River Water Now Reveals the DNA of All Its Creatures
March 10th, 2017
Via Yale’s e360, an interesting look at how quick and inexpensive DNA sampling of a river, stream, or lake can now divulge what fish or other animals live there, and how this rapidly growing environmental DNA, or eDNA, technology is proving to be a game-changing conservation tool:
A U.S. Forest Service technician heads out to the Blackfoot River in western Montana and pumps water through a small filter, five liters every time she stops. In a single day, she gathers dozens of samples, bringing back to the lab each of the fine mesh filters that the river water passed through.
The filters contain DNA for species — whether brook trout, stone flies, wood ducks, or river otters — that have swum in that stream in the last day or two, up to a kilometer above the sample site. Every insect, fish, or animal continually sloughs off bits of its DNA — in its feces or from its skin — and just a single cell of the invisible, free-floating genetic material can tell researchers which species are present in a river or other water body.
Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is at the center of a brand new kind of fish and wildlife biology, and it is such a powerful tool that it’s transforming the field. eDNA was first used to detect invasive bullfrogs in France a decade ago. It was used in North America for the first time in 2009 and 2010 to detect invasive Asian carp in and around the Great Lakes. Since then, its use has grown exponentially, primarily in marine and freshwater environments.
“You can’t manage a species if you don’t know where it is — even 80-pound Asian carp, because you can’t see them underwater,” said Cornell University biologist David Lodge, who participated in the Asian carp study. “So eDNA is particularly powerful in aquatic systems.”
The DNA is so easy and inexpensive to gather and assay — $50 to $150 to test each sample — that the U.S. Forest Service has launched a project to collect DNA from all rivers and streams across the western U.S. to create an Aquatic Environmental DNA Atlas.
“Environmental DNA is turning out to be an amazing tool in allowing us to detect the distribution of species, a distribution that has been invisible to us in the past,” said Michael K. Schwartz, director of the Forest Service’s National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation in Missoula, Montana. “It has remarkable efficiency.”
The U.S. Forest Service has launched a project to collect DNA from all rivers and streams across the western U.S.Experts say use of the technology is in its early stages and that as it evolves it will become even more powerful, providing an even deeper look into the genetics of aquatic ecosystems, including ocean environments.
The next step in the evolution of the technology would be to estimate the abundance of a species in a river or other water body based on the quantity of DNA found in samples. “That is going to continue to be a research frontier,” said Lodge.
Scientists say that eDNA can be used not only to detect the presence of invasive species in a river, lake, or ocean, but also to help reintroduce native species, to study genetic diversity among fish stocks, and to better manage commercial and endangered species.
Until now, the primary way to conduct distribution studies was to physically see, count, and describe species, a time-consuming process that is expensive and often hit-or-miss. That leaves huge gaps in the knowledge of where species are, which often confounds species management.
One of the best examples of the transformative nature of eDNA is in assessing the distribution of bull trout across its entire range. Bull trout are a threatened species in the U.S. Northwest, and their habitat is declining because of deteriorating water quality and warming water temperatures. Cold water is essential to their spawning.
By knowing where the fish live, managers can direct funding for protecting and restoring riparian habitat. Until recently, though, the only way to find and count bull trout was to do an electro-shocking census. That means a biologist would take equipment to the river to shock fish in the water and count them as they float, stunned, to the surface. That technique is time-consuming, not always permitted, and can survey only a fairly small area with each census.
With eDNA, a single sample can tell which species have been in a river a kilometer upstream from the sample site within the last 24 to 40 hours — that’s how long the DNA lasts in the water. Tests with caged fish have shown that just three fish in a river can give a 100 percent detection rate, and one fish 85 percent.
The range-wide bull trout study, conducted by the Forest Service, first looked at the temperature of streams that fit bull trout requirements. Then eDNA samples were taken to detect the trout’s presence in those reaches. “We’ve been able to detect bull trout in streams in a matter of days that have taken some of our colleagues years to confirm,” says Schwartz. And there were surprises. “In a couple of locations where bull trout were not supposed to be, we have multiple detections throughout the drainage,” Schwartz says.
eDNA technology is being used in other parts of the world as well.
In the Dinaric Alps, a mountain range that runs through Croatia and Slovenia, there’s a curious creature called the olm — a blind, flesh-colored salamander also known as a baby dragon — that lives its entire life underground. “They are a symbol of our country, but are still as mysterious as they were a hundred years ago,” Peter Trontelj of the Department of Biology at the Ljubljana Faculty of Biotechnology told an English-language news site. The only way to know where they lived was to dive into a cave and find them or to see them washed out of a cave after a heavy rain. But after testing for eDNA, biologists confirmed their presence in 10 caves where they were known to exist, and discovered new populations in five others.
In Japan last year, scientists found that eDNA sampling gave them a rough “snapshot” of the distribution and biomass of fish species in a bay in the Sea of Japan.
eDNA assessment has also become a new, powerful weapon in the fight against invasive species.
The first published study of the use of eDNA for conservation purposes was in 2008 in France. The American bullfrog has become an invasive species in France and around the world; not only does it displace native species, but the bullfrog also carries the virulent amphibian killer fungus, chytrid. Early detection of bullfrogs can make a big difference in the ease of eradicating them, but they are hard to find. Calling the frogs only locates a small portion of the population – and even then the census needs to be done at night and in certain weather conditions. With eDNA, French researchers were able to easily confirm the bullfrog’s presence in some ponds and target those for removal.
The identification of fugitive DNA is also playing a role in the detection and eradication of invasive fish, a growing problem. Asian carp, a voracious plankton eater, would pose a huge threat to the ecology of the Great Lakes if they become established there, since they eat so much plankton they starve young fish of other species. While a few have been detected, biologists are monitoring rivers and canals that feed the lakes for early signs of more invaders.
In the western U.S., one target of eDNA searches has been brook trout, an interloper from the East that outcompetes native species. In one eradication scenario, managers would capture native fish and then use poison to kill the brook trout, so that native species could be re-introduced. If biologists find brook trout DNA after poisoning a river, they could go back in and electrofish to see where the stragglers may be hiding.
“Sometimes they have detected one or two or three fish finding refuge in a side channel,” said Schwartz. “In one case they found a dead brook trout under a rock that didn’t flush out of the system.”
That’s one of the drawbacks of the technology — there’s no way to tell if the DNA of an invasive species is dead or alive. A great deal of time and effort could be spent trying to find an exotic carp, for example, that was already dead.
‘Any group of students can collect samples in lakes, rivers, and ponds,’ says one researcher.
The ease and low cost of collecting samples has enabled widespread use of the powerful technique and eDNA can be gathered by just about anyone. It would be prohibitive to test all of New York state’s 7,600 lakes and 70,000 miles of rivers and streams for invasive species. So researchers at Cornell University send detection kits to schools across New York as a citizen science project. Students gather water samples as part of their science class and ship the filters to the university. When the results are returned, the students enter them in a database.
“Any group of students can collect samples in lakes, rivers, and ponds,” said Donna Cassidy-Hanley, a senior research associate at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. “Once the data is plotted, the people doing the eradication work can see where the species has spread.”
Students recently found DNA from the round goby, an aggressive invasive fish, and confirmed its presence in Oneida Lake in the Finger Lakes, where it was not known to exist. “It sets the stage for corrective action,” Cassidy-Hanley said.
As new techniques evolve, a single water sample will be sufficient to detect which communities of organisms exist in a waterway or in the ocean. “In the future,” write Phillip Francis Thomsen and Eske Willerslev, two Danish experts from the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, “we expect the eDNA approaches to move from single-marker analysis of species or communities to meta-genomic surveys of entire ecosystems to predict spatial and temporal biodiversity.” That would greatly enhance conservation efforts.
One of the problems facing conservation biology these days is that not all populations within a species have the same DNA. Some populations of bull trout might be better adapted to surviving in warmer water, for example, or even adapted to specific drainages. If the DNA for those adaptations are known — and in most cases they aren’t yet — then finding certain specially adapted populations to be relocated or protected will be a lot quicker and easier with eDNA.
“This technique will help solve a lot of the problems of conservation across broad scales,” said Schwartz.
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