Dozens of Rare Reptiles Die in India
By BISWAJEET BANERJEE – 5 hours ago
LUCKNOW, India (AP) — Conservationists and scientists scrambled Tuesday to determine what has killed at least 50 critically endangered crocodile-like reptiles in recent weeks in a river sanctuary in central India.
Everything from parasites to pollution has been blamed for the deaths of the gharials — massive reptiles that look like their crocodile relatives, but with long slender snouts. The bodies, measuring between five and 10 feet long, have been found washed up on the banks of the Chambal River since early December, according to conservationists and officials.
The precise number of gharials that have died remains unclear, with the Gharial Conservation Alliance saying 81 bodies have been found since early December, butt Chief Wildlife Warden D.N.S Suman putting the number of dead animals at 50.
Conservationists believe there are only some 1,500 gharials left in the wild, many of them in a sanctuary based along the Chambal, one of the few unpolluted Indian rivers. The Chambal contains the largest of three breeding populations in the world.
In early December, officials found the bodies of at least 21 gharials over three days. The bodies have continued washing ashore in the weeks since.
The latest possible clue to what's killing the rare reptiles is an unknown parasite that scientists found in the dead gharials' liver and kidneys, according to Dr. A.K. Sharma of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute.
"We can say that liver and kidney of these gharials were badly damaged," said Sharma. "They were swollen and bigger than their usual size."
Other believe the gharials may have gotten sick and died after eating contaminated fish from the polluted Yamuna river, which joins the Chambal in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Pathological tests confirmed lead and cadmium in the bodies of the dead gharials, said Suman, the wildlife official.
"The Chambal river has clear water free from heavy metals. The only possibility seems that these gharials might have migrated from heavily polluted Yamuna river where they might have eaten fish," said Suman.
The gharial, also known as the Indian crocodile, was on the verge of extinction in the 1970s, but a government breeding program that has released several hundred into the wild has raised their numbers.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...6BH1gD8UARUFO0
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Deaths of Rare Crocodile in India Stir Alarm
By SAHER MAHMOOD
Published: January 22, 2008
NEW DELHI — Three decades after it was brought back from the brink of extinction, the rare Indian crocodile known as the gharial is turning up dead by the dozens on the banks of a river called the Chambal. Forest officials are at a loss to explain why.
Since mid-December, the National Chambal Wildlife Sanctuary has confirmed 76 deaths along the river, which begins in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and runs through Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
Gadiraju Sudhakar, a Chambal district forest officer, said the initial post-mortem reports suggested the cause of death to be liver cirrhosis and stomach ulcers. Further tests show lead levels in the liver that “though not toxic, can trigger suppression of the immune system,” Mr. Sudhakar added. All the more puzzling, other species that inhabit the Chambal River ecosystem, including dozens of fish species on which the gharials feed, appear to be healthy.
Follow-up tests on the fish also revealed heightened lead content. But in both the fish and the gharials, the lead levels are below levels considered lethal, the forest official said. Environmentalists are pressing forest officials for answers on the source of the lead and why the crocodiles died while their prey were unaffected.
The gharial, native to South Asia, is one of the most endangered freshwater crocodile species. The World Wildlife Fund believes it is extinct in its former habitats of Pakistan, Bhutan and Myanmar .
An estimated 1,300 gharials are left in the wild, mostly in India, according to the fund. The World Conservation Union has recently upgraded it from being an “endangered” to a “critically endangered” species.
The recent deaths have further depleted the stock of breeding pairs to less than 200, conservationists and the forest department believe. The Indian government, under pressure from conservationists, set up protected areas in 1979 along the Chambal River to prevent poaching of their skin for high-grade crocodile leather, and it raises eggs in captivity to protect them from predators.
The Chambal is one of the cleanest rivers in the country, according to the Central Pollution Control Board in New Delhi. The forest department suspects that a possible source of lead could be the Yamuna River, which gathers industrial waste from the capital and several nearby industrial towns and meets the Chambal further downstream. Fish swim upstream in search of cleaner water, particularly during the monsoons.
No tests have been carried out yet to determine the source of the lead. Devendra Swarup, head of the veterinary medicine department at the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Izatnagar, Uttar Pradesh, which conducted the liver tests on the dead gharials, emphasized the need for international expertise on this issue, which, if unresolved, could have “dire consequences” for the future of Indian wildlife.
Conservationists say the gharial deaths are important because they could be the first sign of river contamination and of potential threats to the rest of the ecosystem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/sc...ml?ref=science
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Killer disease wipes out ghariyals
There's a mysterious disease stalking the gharial (the Indian crocodile). Even as I write this, dead bodies of the gharial are being dragged out from the river Chambal. Females, males and sub-adults - the death toll continues to rise day after day.
It's a mass slaughter and it's not due to poaching - it's an epidemic, which has already wiped out a massive chunk of the gharial population. Almost a hundred gharials have died at the National Chambal wildlife sanctuary alone, the only one in the country that extends into three states, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The MP government has been swift to react. But Rajasthan still refuses to acknowledge the problem (even though the Environment Minister at the Centre is from Rajasthan). The UP government, too, is foxed.
But other than sending the dead bodies for a routine post-mortem, everyone is clueless.
Renowned wildlife filmmakers Naresh and Rajesh Bedi, who have been filming gharials for the last decade, could not believe what they saw this December: a male gharial heaved and trembled as it raised its snout in the air and died a slow death. Gharials are not easy creatures to film and will jump into the water even if you are 30 feet away. This time around, the gharials just lay there as the filmmakers went right up to them. The female gharial was too sick to even jump into the water for cover. A few days later, the bodies continue to be dragged from the river.
It's a virtual mortuary on the banks of the Chambal: gharials succumbing to a disease that scientists are unable to identify, while a forest department looks on helplessly. Fewer than 200 breeding adults of gharials are found in the wild today and with the latest deaths, the numbers have shrunk rapidly.
Why should we care if a few hundred gharials have died? Well, because the gharial was once a symbol of all that was right with Indian conservation. Having shrunk to very low populations in the 1980s, gharial numbers had revived solely because of an active captive breeding programme. Sand mining used to be one of the biggest problems affecting the habitat. Last year, this too was stopped following orders from the Supreme Court. Things were beginning to look up.
Until these sudden unexplained mass deaths.
What flummoxes wildlife managers is that none of the other species of the Chambal river ecosystem like the otter, the gharial's cousin, the Indian mugger (crocodile), and over a 100 species of migratory birds such as the pelican, which also feeds on the same waters as the gharial, have been affected. The post-mortem reports show a high content of heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and chrome in the stomachs of the dead gharials. But where did the lead come from? If you have ever visited the Chambal sanctuary, you may be forgiven for thinking that it's on the edge of the world. Because of the traditional fear of dacoits, hardly any industries have set up base here and human habitation is sparse. The river is sparkling clean with no industrial contamination.
So how did the lead get into the water? Could it be from the Yamuna, which meets the Chambal further downstream at Etawah in Uttar Pradesh? Could it have been some fish that the gharials had eaten? But then, why has no other wildlife in the Chambal been affected? These are questions which only wildlife disease specialists can answer. Provided, of course, that the wildlife specialists are called in. The nature of the disease is such that it will require international experts who have experience in containing wildlife diseases and epidemics.
And why is the gharial worth saving? There are many reasons apart from the obvious one: the need to save a species. But most important is this: because it is possible to save the gharial. It's a localised problem - unlike the more complex problems of poaching or habitat loss that have plagued other Indian wildlife species like the tiger.
Wildlife maybe a subject handled by state forest departments but the reality is that it takes central interest for states to recognise they have a crisis on their hands. It took the Prime Minister's intervention to recognise that the tiger was being poached to extinction. At this point, immediate steps need to be taken. Ask the World Conservation Union to step in. Monitor the area, bring in scientists from within and outside the country. Cordon off the area to ensure the disease does not spread. Set up a task-force consisting of the forest department of all three states, chaired by the Ministry of Environment and Forests at the Centre, which can monitor the disease till it has been identified.
In an Indian conservation scene plagued by habitat destruction and poaching, here is one species that can be saved. And if we don't act now, the gharial will be the first species in independent India to have gone extinct.
Only because we didn't care enough.
http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/bahardu...ghariyals.html