Memories of a crocodile - The Hindu

I am gobsmacked by the picture of the keeper in a lungi and barefeet. 🙊🙊

I would not have got into that enclosure even if someone had offered me a million bucks. 

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/indias-largest-salite-crocodile-in-captivity-is-mourned-by-madras-crocodile-bank/article30622569.ece

Memories of a crocodile

Meghna Majumdar

V Gangadurai and S Nagarathinam are mourning a giant. Their giant.

"I fed Jaws for 40 years," says Gangadurai, chief reptile keeper at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, "My wife still asks me what happened, and some visitors still ask to see him. They get upset when we tell them he passed away."

It is Monday afternoon, so the park is shut for visitors. The only sounds to be heard are the chatter of monkeys and the calls of migratory birds, who seem to be visiting in larger numbers this year. Perhaps to pay their respects. Jaws III, the largest crocodile bred in captivity in India, passed away last week, at the ripe age of 50.

In the office of Zai Whitaker, joint director of The Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Centre for Herpetology, the two reptile keepers are gathered with curator Nikhil Whitaker, assistant curator Ajay Kartik, and joint director Allwin Jesudasan to share memories. There are many.

For Zai, the earliest ones revolve around his surprisingly fast growth. "I was living in Kodaikanal for a few years, and would come to the croc bank on holidays. I remember one year, when I came and thought, 'Who is this?' He had grown so much," she recalls.

Nagarathinam's memories are a tribute to the crocodile's intelligence: "He had learnt his feeding schedule. He could distinguish his feeder's voices, too. So even if we were just chatting nearby, he would come close expecting food."

Feeding would happen once a week — between three to five kilograms of chicken, fish, buffalo meat, large rats, bandicoots, and sometime emus. Exercise would also happen regularly, the simple act of tempting him with food and getting him to move from one end of the enclosure to the other.

But none of that means that Jaws, who fuelled Chennai's love of crocodiles for decades, was tame. Tame is not a word — or an approach — that the team here subscribes to. As Ajay puts it, "It is a process of mutual learning and discovery." Even as Jaws came to understand boundaries and patterns of human behaviour over the years, the humans learnt about him too.

 

Forging bonds

How else does one establish a working relationship with the largest member of the world's largest crocodile species? And who better to describe it than Gangadurai?

His way of establishing a sense of mutual understanding with a crocodile, was through constant, careful exposure. He would take his time to understand Jaws' movements and tendencies, and make sure that there was a point of exit open. "Some 20 years ago, when he was very fast and agile, he yanked my stick away and chased me a bit," he recalls with a laugh. "But later," adds Ajay, "He understood that a tap on the nose with the stick means 'Stop'."

It was all a matter of patience, of time, and — as Nagarathinam puts it — of Jaws coming to understand that food was involved. "Once he understood that people are in his enclosure to feed him, things became easier," he explains.

That might seem like a basic step up, but as the team points out, it was all still highly uncharacteristic behaviour for a saltie. "I wouldn't go as far as to call him cooperative, but he was certainly more tolerant of human presence in his enclosures than his brothers and sisters are," says Ajay.

There were, of course, boundaries never to be crossed. As Zai explains, no member of the team ever forgot that he was a salt water crocodile, a strong and wild animal. And no one ever expected him to behave otherwise. Nevertheless, he proved time and again to have an understanding that went beyond primal instincts. Nikhil remembers one in particular, from March 1997. "I learnt a lot of healthy respect for him that day," he begins:

"It was one of his Sunday feeding shows. He was about the same size as he was towards the end, but faster and much more agile. At one point, instead of taking the food, he suddenly grabbed hold of my hand."

 

To have a 500-kilogram salt water crocodile clamp your hand in its mouth is a situation no one wants to be in. But, even as Jaws backed into the pool till Nikhil was knee-deep in water, Nikhil's training and instinct helped him stay calm, and refrain from struggling.

Something restricted Jaws, too. Any crocodile in such a situation would instinctively, immediately start rolling, and that would serve as a death knell for its catch. "But Jaws didn't. His movements were slow. After a point, I could see his eyes turn red: a fairly good indicator that he was worried." The crocodile could seemingly gauge that the situation was not ideal. What could have happened next is something no one can predict, but Nikhil was saved by a brave act by his assistant Ramesh. "He distracted Jaws with a stick, and Jaws immediately let me go," says Nikhil. Later, when washing his hand in a bucket, Nikhil remembers being able to see through his hand into the bottom of the bucket, so severe were his puncture marks. "But he did let me go," he smiles.

Looking ahead

Memories, though, can only do so much. There remains a yawning gap in their schedules, and crocodile bank's weekly calendar. Every Sunday, visitors would gather outside his enclosure to watch the gargantuan creature be fed by his keepers. In more ways than one, he was one of the faces of The Madras Crocodile Bank.

Now, the mantle might be taken up by Thor, a saltie who was born in the croc bank in 1982-83. Says Ajay, "When last measured in 2013, he was 4.3 metres long. He must be about 4.4 now. He is different from Jaws: more assertive and less used to people. He is less tractable for now; that will change over time."

Bring me a nightmare - Asia’s hunger for sand is harmful to farming and the environment | Asia | The Economist

https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/01/16/asias-hunger-for-sand-is-harmful-to-farming-and-the-environment

Bring me a nightmare Asia's hunger for sand is harmful to farming and the environment

But governments struggle to curb illegal sand-mining

Jan 16th 2020

THE MINERS usually prefer to work under cover of darkness. This dredger is more brazen. It is not yet sunset when the boat's crew begin hoovering sand up from the riverbed and pumping it onto a nearby bank, where it will be collected and sold. At least seven barges are doing the same thing on this stretch of the Red River, about an hour's drive from Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. Such teams often work without the right permits, but the rewards outweigh the risk. Whereas the average Vietnamese makes $269 a month, miners can earn between $700 and $1,000 for every boatload they scoop up. The teams working here have deposited so much sand on the bank that dunes have formed.

There has probably never been a better time to be in the sand business. The world uses nearly 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel a year—almost twice as much as a decade ago. No other natural resource is extracted and traded on such an epic scale, bar water.

Demand is greatest in Asia, where cities are growing fast (sand is the biggest ingredient in cement, asphalt and glass). China got through more cement between 2011 and 2013 than America did in the entire 20th century. Since the 1960s Singapore—the world's largest importer of sand—has expanded its territory by almost a quarter, mainly by dumping it into the sea. The OECD thinks the construction industry's demand for sand and gravel will double over the next 40 years. Little wonder then that the price of sand is rocketing. In Vietnam in 2017 it quadrupled in just one year.

In the popular imagination, sand is synonymous with limitlessness. In reality it is a scarce commodity, for which builders are now scrabbling. Not just any old grains will do. The United Arab Emirates is carpeted in dunes, but imports sand nonetheless because the kind buffeted by desert winds is too fine to be made into cement. Sand shaped by water is coarser and so binds better. Extraction from coastlines and rivers is therefore surging. But according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Asians are scooping up sand faster than it can naturally replenish itself. In Indonesia some two dozen small islands have vanished since 2005. Vietnam expects to run out of sand this year.

All this has an environmental cost. Removing sand from riverbeds deprives fish of places to live, feed and spawn. It is thought to have contributed to the extinction of the Yangzi river dolphin. Moreover, according to WWF, a conservation group, as much as 90% of the sediment that once flowed through the Mekong, Yangzi and Ganges rivers is trapped behind dams or purloined by miners, thereby robbing their deltas both of the nutrients that make them fecund and of the replenishment that counters coastal erosion. As sea levels rise with climate change, saltwater is surging up rivers in Australia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, among other places, and crop yields are falling in the areas affected. Vietnam's agriculture ministry has warned that seawater may travel as far as 110km up the Mekong this winter. The last time that happened, in 2016, 1,600 square kilometres of land were ruined, resulting in losses of $237m. Locals have already reported seeing dead fish floating on the water.

Nguyen Van Thoan, a farmer whose pomelo orchard lies not far downstream from the barges scouring the Red River, says that 30 years ago a kilometre of land stood between his house and the river. Today only 20 metres separates them. He blames sand-miners. So do the 6,000 fishermen who have had to abandon their coastal villages in the Indian state of Kerala in recent years, after extraction and erosion left them vulnerable to flooding.

Curbing sand-mining is difficult because so much of it is unregulated. Only about two-fifths of the sand extracted worldwide every year is thought to be traded legally, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. In Shanghai miners on the Yangzi evade the authorities by hacking transponders, which broadcast the positions of ships, and cloning their co-ordinates. It is preferable, of course, to co-opt officials. Ministers in several state governments in India have been accused of abetting or protecting illegal sand-mining. "Everybody has their finger in the pie," says Sumaira Abdulali of Awaaz Foundation, a charity in Mumbai. She says she has been attacked twice for her efforts to stop the diggers.

Ms Abdulali is nonetheless "a bit hopeful". Scientists are experimenting with alternatives to concrete and cement. Architects are trying to find ways to use such materials more sparingly. Even the odd government is taking action. In 2018, Maharashtra passed regulations requiring contractors to use plastic waste as filler when building or repairing roads. Singapore is creating a new patch of land by draining it of water rather than piling it with sand. Kiran Pereira of SandStories.org, which promotes awareness of the issue, says "there are plenty of solutions" if only governments would find the will to implement them. Time to pull heads from the sand. ■

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Asia's hunger for sand is harmful to farming and the environment"

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