Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary Dries Up

From the Times of India, an editorial on the world famous Bharatpur bird sanctuary or what used to be a sanctuary. It has dried up. The sanctuary known as the Keoladeo National Park is an artificial wetland created in the mid 1700's as a hunting ground for Rajasthan royals and relies on annual release of water from various nearby rivers. Lately water that was meant for the wetland is being increasingly diverted to farmland, progressively drying up the park. The birds have already left for wetter pastures. If wetlands are not resorted soon, it will lose recognition as a world heritage site. What a shame! Below is an image of the Bharatpur wetlands.


In this image at low resolution there appears to be plenty of green within the park but take a look a a close up below.


The entire area is dry. Only in the vicinity of the green dot could I find some water. Few green patches indicate the presence of moist soil, but no water, no wetland and no birds. Looking at the close up one can understand how precarious the health of the wetlands always has been. Being an artificial creation, the boundaries of the wetlands are sharp and are surrounded by intense agriculture land use. The light colored rectangular quilt like pattern you see surrounding the central dark former wetland are farm plots. The conflict for allocation of water for people versus animals is a perpetual problem in India and the needs of the people win out.

Such degradation of our national parks is happening to various extents all over the country. Bharatpur is an extreme example of a small sanctuary whose support system has completely collapsed. Take another famous sanctuary, the Gir Forest National Park. This is world famous for being the last natural habitat of the Asiatic lion. Image below shows the Gir forest area.


At this scale all appears well, large green patches with no apparent disturbance. But image interpretation is about pattern recognition. Take a look the areas at the southern margins of the forest around the green arrows. The green patches around these arrows have a more speckled appearance compared to the green patches in the center. Close up below reveals all.

Again those rectangular patches you saw around Bharatpur, farmland making its ways into the forest following the water courses, small streams, water holes, the same water sources that wild animals use. A conflict in the making.

What is the future for India's wildlife and biodiversity? There are conflicting signals from the politicians. Yesterday the centre announced a package of Rs 600 crore for project Tiger, to be used for the tiger conservation programme. This for now should be seen as good news. On the other hand, political interference and interest in the exploitation of forests is alive and well. India Today recently reported on poaching rings in UP, and yesterday several Kashmir politicos have been accused of illegal exploitation of timber. The culture needs to change from viewing forests and wildlife as a resource to be exploited, as some obstacle to development, to one where our biodiversity is seen as an integral and important component of our development. Until then, tiger rescue packages notwithstanding, conservation plans will always be at the mercy of local political winds. I mean as a scientist I can well imagine the frustration of a senior forest officer who having carefully drawn conservation plans for a particular area is told by the local politico, oh-sorry no water for you this year!

Another big danger besides the increasing human wildlife conflict is climate change. Today's conservation plans are drawn on the assumption that the current ecological boundaries will remain so for the foreseeable future. But what if in response to shifting climatic belts, ecological boundaries also shift? This is an imminent danger facing India. Our current conservation plans are barely able to cope with problems of human encroachment into forest areas by rehabilitation and relocation plans for humans. What will happen if forests further fragment in response to climate change and ecological belts move? Where will the animals go?

Edmund Hillary The Humble Hero

This blog is primarily about science and I plan to keep it that way. But this piece about Edmund Hilary I thought was worth sharing. I listen to National Public Radio a lot and Wednesday is the time for sports journalist Frank Deford to dispense some words of wisdom. He spoke about Edmund Hillary some time back. Deford usually talks about today's super stars, sports culture, steroids in sports and a whole lot of current topics and occasionally on historical figures. In this audio essay he reminisces about the man who stood on top of the world.

In fact, he admitted that he'd felt a little guilty days before when he wasn't sure whether he really wanted his friends, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, to make it to the top first. They had to turn back barely 300 feet short.


"I wasn't very proud of my feelings," Hillary admitted to me, ruefully patting the old cat in his lap.


Two days later, Hillary and his teammate made it, and all things considered, I'd have to say that I think God picked the right guy to first stand so close to heaven on earth.

The entire text is also available but it is much more fun to LISTEN.

Indus Dolphin Sighted in Punjab

How long since the last sighting of a creature for it (the species) to be declared extinct? There is no clear answer to this. It is very difficult to definitively say that all populations of the species have vanished across its entire range. The Indus dolphin Platanista minor is one of the few freshwater dolphin species in the world. Besides the Indus dolphin the Indian subcontinent also has the Ganges Brahmaputra freshwater dolphins. Both species are endangered with numbers estimated to be at most in the several hundreds each. The Indus dolphin's range extends beyond the Indus main channel to its many tributaries such as the Sutlej and Beas. It was last seen in the Punjab rivers in the 1930's which is why the sighting of this animal in the Harike wildlife sanctuary south of Amritsar couple of weeks ago has caused delight among wildlife enthusiasts. The image below shows the Harike wetlands formed at the confluence of the Sutlej and Beas rivers.

It is astonishing that there was not a single confirmed sighting of this dolphin in the Punjab for about 70 years. These are not some isolated stretches of rivers. Punjab is heavily populated, with extensive agriculture land use along the banks of its rivers. Biologists are not sure if the Indus dolphin is really broken up into semi-isolated sub populations or there are regular encounters between populations in the Sutlej-Beas with those in the Indus main channel. Is it possible that the Sutlej population went extinct and these latest sightings represent a new population recently migrated from the Indus channel. Do the many barrages on the Punjab rivers pose a serious barrier to migration or can the dolphin negotiate these barriers especially at flood times? Many questions and I hope wildlife authorities take this opportunity to extensively study this species. Just to give you an idea of the range of this species the image below shows the Indus river basin from its delta up to the Harike wetlands.

Sightings such as these makes me think about how many species are yet to be discovered. The focus in recent years and correctly so has been on the accelerated rate of extinction. But around 300 new species are being formally described by scientists daily across the entire range of life. A new mammal species is reported once every 3 years and a large new vertebrate from the open ocean once every 5 years. There are currently about 1.6 million species recorded but at the current rate of discovery these could represent about 10% of the total species currently living on earth. What rate of species loss can the biosphere sustain without shrinking overall? It is estimated that about 99% of species that have ever lived are now extinct. The diverse biota today must reflect then a slight excess of speciation over extinction. Using the fossil record the background extinction rate has been calculated to around 2.5 species per year which suggests a slightly higher speciation rate to maintain overall diversity. This estimate should be regarded as a canonical speciation rate and the variance around this mean speciation rate is more useful in understanding speciation patterns and diversity. A recent measurement suggests this approach to understanding the problem. If there are about 16 million species at present then every year the tree of life grows by an additional 16 million years of branch length. The average age of living species is about 5 million years. To maintain overall branch length i.e. to sustain current levels of biodiversity will require not more than 3 species per year going extinct. Measured extinction rates since the 1600's suggest that about 25 species have gone extinct every decade a figure that agrees with the above theoretical expectations. This rate however should be considered an underestimate since many extinctions would have gone unnoticed and has definitely increased recently. For example the last century has seen about 20 mammalian species alone going extinct. The effect of natural extinction on overall biodiversity is very different from a mass extinction such as the one human activity has almost certainly induced. Unlike natural background extinctions the current increased rates of extinction may be non-random i.e it may not just prune the branches of life but wipe out related branches of the tree of life causing similar types of organisms to selectively disappear. The overall structure of the tree of life may change with certain ecosystems or tiers within ecosystems disproportionately emptied than others, causing genuine reductions in biodiversity. Something like this may already be going on, for example amphibians have been assessed to be at greater risk from global warming than other vertebrate groups. Anyways its great to see the dolphins back in Punjab. May the force be with them.

Meanwhile in another wetland that dried up some time back, this sighting of an incredible rare creature.

From NASA Mars explorer image, what looks like a humanoid female clambering down the slope towards a dried up lake bed in search of .... maybe water, food or dry ice? The Indian media has had a field day with this with experts coming and giving long talks on the possibility of martian life. Amazing stuff!

Follow Up On The Monkey Business

Sadanand who blogs at Chintan had some interesting comments about my previous post on Harbhajan Singh and his alleged monkey comment:

The third chart is a family or genealogical tree as you have clearly identified. Since structurally all three charts use the same technique of depiction, an unwary or uninitiated reader is likely to perceive that, contrary to your lucid commentary, all charts are about speciation. S/he may then wrongly conclude that Harbhajan & Symonds belong to different species. This may lead to an unintended & unexpected outcome where "racism" may be replaced by "specism". An honour indeed to father a new 'concept', but one that you would certainly hold dubious & shun like "Maa ki".

A very valid point. Iconography about evolution has always lead to misinterpretations. Check out this great site for diagrammatic depictions of evolution. In this case Sadanand is saying that since my technique of depicting species and family relationships is the same i.e. branching diagrams, can Harbhajan and Symonds be misinterpreted as belonging to different species? In my defense I can say that the explanation clearly mentions that one is a species diagram and the other is a family one, but in fact the diagram of the family tree I drew is flawed. Species by definition are reproductively isolated groups. Once they originate, the branches remained separate. In contrast, within a species, family branches often come together through intermarriage. This happens at all levels of family relationships, i.e. branches which have been separated for hundreds of years may come together, as when populations which have been living on different continents start intermingling through migrations, or it may happen within closely knit families when cousins marry. So a modified depiction of the human family tree is shown below. Black dotted lines depict intermarriage between different family lines.

Successful mating between even relatively isolated human populations is the reason why Harbhajan and Symonds belong to one species. Thanks for pointing that out Sadanand.

Sadanand also comments:

I wonder if you have been uncharacteristically brazen in using RED for Vajpayee & Newton, though with Bhishma you are on safer grounds. You would have done well to put a sign "(?)" after the first 2 names. It is one thing to say they have left no legal heirs, but quite another to assert that they have no descendants.

Another good point, although my intention was simply to make a distinction between broken and unbroken family lineages. In order to avoid more controversies I will stick to the official version on the reproductive success of the concerned people :-)

Maa Ki or Monkey?

Did Harbhajan Singh say Maa Ki... or Monkey to Andrew Symonds? This cricket controversy erupted more than a week ago when the Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds who is of West Indian descent accused Harbhajan Singh of calling him a monkey, a charge which Harbhajan denies. I would be more offended by the former. Any discussion of my mother's anatomy is strictly off limits. But I would care less if someone called me a monkey or a donkey or a dog. There are plenty of qualities in all these animals that I admire. But monkey is considered a racist slur by most and Harbhajan who was found guilty by the match referee Mike Procter is now facing an appeals hearing. The hype has died down somewhat so let's get back to the science. Why is monkey considered a racist slur and what does it mean when people say that someone has descended from a monkey.

The root of this perceived insult is the theological notion of the great chain of being (see image to the left) whereby all life on earth is arranged by divine design in a linear hierarchy, a ladder of progress so to speak with lowly animals at the bottom and humans occupying the pinnacle. In order to assert the superiority of the west over other people this chain of being was refined and humans were ranked according to western pre-conceptions of superiority. Since in the past the relationship of Africans to Westerners was mostly one of slave and master, this led to Africans occupying the lower rungs of the human part of the chain with western whites occupying the top. To call someone a monkey meant that you occupy the bottom part of the human chain. You are a human of less worth and are somehow "closer" to the animals than the rest of humanity. You would think that the concept of evolution would have broken us free from this chain, but perversely it seems to have reinforced the notion of a ladder of progress. This because the vast majority of people still think of evolution as a linear process whereby each species on the ladder evolved from the species one rung down the ladder. The thinking goes that since evolution theory tells us that we evolved from the apes in Africa, then Africans are somehow closer to the apes than Asians and Europeans who migrated and evolved "superior" traits.

Darwin taught us to think differently about life. He argued successfully that evolution is a branching process whereby an ancestral species can give rise to two or more descendant branches or species and those in turn can give rise to more descendant branches like I have show in figure below which is an evolutionary tree of the primate family.

In this scenario humans did not evolve from the chimpanzees as is supposed in the chain of being but the human lineage and the chimp lineage arose from a common ancestor some 6-8 million years ago. That ancestor evolved not from monkeys but from an even more ancient ape ancestor which also gave rise to the gorilla branch around 10 million years ago. And so on back in time about 30 million years ago when an ancient primate ancestor gave rise to the ape lineage. This was the common ancestor apes share with the monkey lineage. If you study this branching tree of evolution you will realize that monkeys, orangutans, gorillas and chimps are not intermediate frozen stages of evolution towards humans. They are all species on separate branches of the primate evolutionary tree, representing lineages which have been evolving independently of the human lineage for millions of years. I have shown the human lineage in some detail, but if you zoom into any of the branches that lead to the other great ape and monkey lineages you would likely see a similar branching structure as ancestral species within that branch gave rise to descendant species. Just as modern humans are different from their Homo erectus or even more remote Australopithecine ancestors, modern chimps, gorillas and monkeys have evolved characters different from their remote ancestors.

Zooming onto modern Homo sapiens we encounter an even more detailed branching structure which I have shown in figure below.

This is the family tree of humans composed of individuals and their descendants. This sort of a family tree is not unique to humans. Each of the various branches of the apes and monkey lineages will be composed of similar family trees of ape and monkey individuals and their descendants. Coming back to the human tree, famous people who did not leave descendants are shown in red. Harbhajan Singh, Andrew Symonds and Beckham are representatives of lineages with an unbroken chain of ancestors going back to the dawn of humanity. All family lines converge at this point which is the ancestral population from which modern humans arose. The implication is that since all humans share a common ancestor, then all humans are genetically equidistant from a member of any outgroup. For example, Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds are on average equally related to chimpanzees, or gorillas or monkeys or for that matter dogs, cats and bumble bees. When the West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding remarked in an attempt to diffuse the tension that we all descend from monkeys it really means that we are all equally related to monkeys and not that monkeys are our ancestors.

I would recommend a crash course in evolution 101 to both Harbhajan and Symonds. Harbhajan will realize that calling someone a monkey is really holding a mirror to one's own ancestry, and Symonds will realize how pointless it is to get worked up over something meaningless as this. If international sports bodies are bold enough they would remove the word monkey from the list of racial slurs. Historical injustices are hard to forget but this silly notion of one group of humans being closer to monkeys or being descended from monkeys gives undue importance to the discredited idea of cultural and genetic "superiority". We humans are certainly a very diverse bunch. But that should be cause for celebration and not a futile comparison with some other animal. As for Brad Hogg, that Aussie bastard seems to have gotten away Scot free :-)