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ezatluba · 6 years

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Infectious Outbreaks Threaten the Last Asiatic Lions

Parasites and dog disease in India sweep through the cats’ only home, triggering fears for the species’ survival

Jaideep Hardikar on

December 10, 2018

When two lion cubs were found dead one day this September in India’s Gir National Park, forest officials shrugged off their demise as “natural.” Three weeks later, however, 23 lions had perished—sparking fears an epidemic could very quickly devastate the last surviving population of the Asiatic lion.

Suspecting a viral outbreak, authorities captured the 19 remaining lions in the eastern edge of the sanctuary—the part where seven of the deaths had occurred—and isolated them individually at a care center. Only three survived.

The canine distemper virus (CVD) was initially blamed as the main cause of the deaths, but experts caution other factors were probably involved. “We need a serious multidisciplinary investigation of the outbreak,” says wildlife biologist Ravi Chellam. The deaths have sparked debate not only over their immediate cause but also about conservation strategies—and have reignited a decades-old call for some members of the endangered lion species to be transferred elsewhere as insurance against future calamities. Wildlife scientists say an alternative home is key to long-term conservation of the species.

As a further precaution after the recent deaths, 33 lions from an adjoining forest range in Gir were also captured and quarantined; when they will be released back into the wild remains uncertain. And although forest officials asserted the epidemic had been contained, at least eight more lion corpses turned up in different parts of Gir since October, raising the recent toll to 31. (No cause has yet been confirmed for the latest eight deaths.)

WHAT WE KNOW

All known remaining members of the species Panthera leo persica—the Asiatic lion—are confined to Gir’s 1,880 square kilometers and roughly 18,000 square kilometers of human-dominated landscapes surrounding the sanctuary in the Indian state of Gujarat. The population rebounded from a mere 20 in 1913 to an estimated 600 at present, a source of much pride to the Gujarat government. But the protected area itself can only support about 300, so many lions live precariously outside of it—in fields and orchards interspersed with villages and towns, and crisscrossed by highways and railway tracks.

With development hemming them in, Asiatic lions routinely die in accidents. Since 2015 six were hit by trains and two by trucks, 13 fell into village wells and several others died of electrocution, according to the state government. (Many farmers use electric fences to fend off crop-threating wild animals such as deer and boar; lions occasionally get trapped in them and die.) Overall 184 lions perished in 2016 and 2017 as opposed to 310 over the preceding five years—a worrying jump in the mortality rate, even before the latest spate of deaths.

In early October researchers at India’s National Institute of Virology (NIV) and, separately, the College of Veterinary Sciences and Animal Husbandry examined blood and other samples from the dead lions. Confirming officials’ suspicions, they found CDV—a highly contagious airborne pathogen that usually infects members of the dog family—and Babesia, a tick-borne protozoan. The NIV team also recovered a complete CDV genome; alarmingly it turned out to be related to strains found in east Africa, where canine distemper in 1994 wiped out roughly 1,000 African lions, amounting to 30 percent of their population in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.

In the villages around Gir canine distemper is endemic to domestic dogs—a major food source for lions living outside the protected areas. “Lions could either have caught CDV directly from them or from other carnivores—hyenas, jackals or leopards,” says Hari Shankar Singh, a member of India’s Wildlife Board and a former administrator in Gujarat’s Department of Forests. At the NIV’s recommendation, the government vaccinated all the Gir lions they had quarantined.

But it remains unknown exactly how CDV spread to the Gir lions. The virus can be present in an animal without causing sickness or death, notes Meena Venkataraman, a Mumbai-based wildlife biologist who runs a consultancy organization called Carnivore Conservation and Research. A detailed examination of clinical symptoms, along with postmortems and other detailed tests, are necessary to establish the extent to which CDV is responsible—and also to answer multiple other questions such as the prevalence of the disease in both lions and domestic dogs, she says.

On October 31 a dead lion cub turned up on a farm near Gir. According to Dushyant Vasavada, chief conservator of forests (Junagadh Wildlife Circle), it died of respiratory and cardiac failure caused by severe anemia and dehydration. These are symptoms of heavy tick infestation, indicating the possibility of Babesia infection. “The outbreak of CDV and Babesia protozoa may not kill a majority of Gir’s lions, but their threat looms large,” Singh says. He believes the underlying problem is not so much the presence of microbes and parasites (which is only to be expected) but rather compromised immune systems. “When immunity is lowered against the attack of any virus, the attack of CDV and Babesiaturns fatal to the animal,” he says.

Whether or not immunity is in fact impaired—and if so, why—also remain open questions. In principle, inbreeding could lower immunity by highlighting any deleterious genes present in the existing population.

Venkataraman doubts this is the case, however. Inbreeding can result in reduced survival rates for cubs; but she notes cub survival rates in Gir are comparable with or better than in similar habitats in Africa. Also, climatic factors such as drought can dry up water sources and make food hard to find, lowering immunity and aggravating infections.

THE WAY FORWARD

Once the latest outbreak is dealt with, India needs to institutionalize a response via disease management protocols, Venkataraman says. “We must have contingency planning; disease can occur,” she adds. “It’s our preparedness and honest evaluations of such situations that is critical.” She claims the Gujarat authorities currently have no action plan for preventing infections, screening for pathogens or dealing with disease outbreaks. Decisions such as vaccinating wild animals “should not be made at the 11th hour when animals are dying,” she says.

Ensuring the long-term survival of Asiatic lions would require further measures, Singh notes. These would include the intensive use of genetics, forensics and virology to swiftly detect and respond to disease outbreaks; restoring habitats in the areas around Gir; closely managing the lions to reduce interactions with domestic animals; and moving a few prides to alternative sites.

But Gujarat has habitually balked at any move to relocate any of the lions. Regarding the animals as part of the state’s exclusive heritage, it insists they are safe in Gir. In 2013 the Supreme Court of India directed the immediate transfer of a few lions to another wildlife sanctuary that had been readied to receive them. The Court stated that preserving an endangered species was of paramount importance, overriding matters of regional prestige—but Gujarat did not comply with the court order.

G. K. Sinha, the principal chief conservator of forest and head of Gujarat’s Forest Force, did not immediately respond to e-mailed questions about the state’s noncompliance and findings about the recent deaths.

Relocating some of the lions would maintain an ecological and biological distance between two populations—thus helping to avoid possible inbreeding and to contain the spread of epidemics, says Chellam—who in the 1990s led a committee of experts mandated by the Court to study moving Asiatic lions to a new sanctuary. The committee had suggested three alternative sites. Of them, the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh State—which lies 300 miles east of Gir and has historically been part of the range of Asiatic lions—was found to be best suited for their re-introduction.

With Gujarat showing no sign of relenting, however, the threat that the Asiatic lion could be extinguished by the latest crisis or by future ones remains a possibility. It is risky to “keep all eggs in one basket” irrespective of their numbers, Chellam says: “You’ll lose all the eggs if you drop the basket.”

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wionews · 7 years

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'This is the darkest period of our life'

What would Vishal do today, if he were alive? Perhaps the teenager would fly kites, or play with his friends. Maybe he’d work with his father on the family’s two-acre field or pick up an odd job for a daily wage as he occasionally did. He wanted new clothes, his parents remember. That’s all he had asked for.

But Vishal Khule died last November, just 10 days after Diwali, by consuming a bottle of weedicide that his father had bought a few days earlier to spray on their crops. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and blue pants that day, the police report says. Vishal was not yet 16 years old.

In Akola’s Dadham village: Vishal's father, Vishwanath Khule and his distraught mother Sheela (on the right); elder brother Vaibhav and their neighbour Jankiram Khule, Vishal’s ‘kaka’ (on the left) (Others)

“He collapsed here,” said his father, Vishwanath Khule, pointing to a spot beneath the window of the two-room shanty where the family lives. “His mother was in the adjoining kitchen, making chapatis. I was out there,” he added, gesturing toward the front yard. When her son collapsed with a thump, Sheela Khule rushed out to find Vishal lying on the floor, “a white fluid oozing out of his mouth.” The can of weedicide lay by his side, empty. Vishal died before reaching the hospital.

Part of the two-room home where Vishal consumed a bottle of weedicide (Others)

“This is the darkest period of our life,” Vishwanath said.

Dadham, with a population of 1,500, is among the poorest villages in this region. It is about 25 kilometres from Akola, a major city in western Vidarbha, Maharashtra’s cotton- and soybean-growing belt, which has been in the news since the mid-1990s for a continuing spell of farmers’ suicides. The region is reeling under successive years of drought and an agrarian crisis that has only gone from bad to worse.

While the unabated spell of farmers’ suicides in rural Vidarbha and Marathwada, Maharashtra’s eastern and central regions, has been reported on and acknowledged by the government, a related tragedy has gone all but unnoticed: suicides by the young children of debt-ridden farmers. (Farmers’ children have taken their own lives in the past, but newspaper reports indicate that the incidence has spiked in the past two years.)

While there is no specific data on suicides by children (under 18; or by youth under 20), in India as a result of agrarian distress, several studies and reports – from the 2005 door-to-door study commissioned by the Maharashtra government to subsequent studies on farm distress and suicides by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research – have pointed to the impact of debt and distress on children in peasant households. Many adolescent children of farmers inherit their parents’ debts and are forced to take on adult responsibilities, dropping out of school, tilling the fields, succumbing to depression, and for girls, being married off early so the family has one less mouth to feed.

Over the past decade, this writer has documented several such suicides, particularly in households where a suicide has already occurred. Sometimes farmers’ children commit suicide because they fear that if they don’t, their parents will, a phenomenon is known as ‘altruistic suicide’. In one particularly poignant case in 2005, 19-year-old Neeta Bhopat hanged herself in Aasra village in Maharashtra.

In a neatly written suicide note in Marathi, she said: “If I don’t commit suicide, my father will [take his own life]; my family can’t even earn a thousand rupees a month. I have two younger sisters. My parents can’t bear the burden of our marriages when we don’t have enough to eat. So I am taking my life.” Nobody should be held responsible for her decision, she wrote. Committing suicide was the only way she could relieve her parents of some of their tension.

Scarcity and struggle

With a few months to go before the next kharif (monsoon) crops sprout, Dadham is still coming to terms with Vishal Khule’s suicide. Severe water scarcity is already testing the villagers this summer. The entire vicinity is arid. Local newspaper reports suggest that the groundwater table has fallen alarmingly. Dadham has to wait for tankers to supply water every alternate day, or people must trek several kilometres to fetch drinking water. And as if this is not difficult enough, no work is available in the village.

“This is the worst year” of a three-season drought, said Akola district collector G. Sreekanth in his office earlier this year. “We began preparing for the coming summer in September last [year],” he added, even before the 2015 monsoon had officially ended.

Like many districts in the Marathwada, Vidarbha and western regions of Maharashtra last year, Akola district received only 60 per cent of its average annual rainfall of 692 mm. “That’s around 500 mm rains,” said Sreekanth, “which may not sound all that bad, but we got 400 mm of that in two days, on August 4 and 5.” This meant the fields flooded and rainwater could not percolate into the ground.

Such a downpour and a long gap between rainy days is a new and alarming feature of the changing monsoon pattern, according to studies by the Indian Meteorological Department and Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and other research institutions studying climatic aberrations. After August 5 last year, Akola didn’t see another drop of rain for 41 days, a devastatingly long dry spell. “Every crop failed: soybeans, cotton and tur,” the collector added.

With no crops to sell, and domestic expenses and other exigencies to meet, the Khule family borrowed from moneylenders. According to their bank records, they also have unpaid bank loans of about Rs. 50,000 over the last five years.

The Khules, who belong to the close-knit tribal Andh clan, are marginal peasant farmers. They have long been living hand-to-mouth, and Vishal Khule’s death has only made life more precarious. His mother barely speaks, recounts their neighbour, Jankinath Khule, who recently retired from the government service as a naib tehsildar (a minor-rank revenue official). Vishal’s two sisters, both married, are taking turns to return to the home to be with their mother, he said. Vishal’s elder brother, 18-year-old Vaibhav, has dropped out of school after Class 10 and has taken to working odd jobs.

When her son collapsed with a thump, Sheela Khule rushed out of the kitchen to find Vishal lying on the floor (Others)

According to Jankinath Khule, a village elder, Vishal’s suicide was the culmination of his growing frustration with poverty, combined with a feeling of helplessness.

“He would often talk with me about the village poverty and the difference between him and his schoolmates,” said Khule, who Vishal affectionately called Khule kaka (uncle). “[Vishal] spoke of his parents’ troubles, and was resigned to the fact that this situation would never end.”

During the Diwali holidays in recent years, Vishal and Vaibhav would help their father in the fields. In 2015, the kharif crops – mainly soybean – had failed. Though the lentils they grew fetched a good price, inadequate rainfall had affected the yields. Vishal’s father planted green gram in winter, thanks to the state government’s distribution of free seeds to struggling farmers. But the relief measure did not work, villagers said, as there was no water or moisture in the soil to nurture the crop.

With no work in the fields, Vishwanath Khule said, the brothers went to Akola over the school break with friends to find a job that would pay a daily wage but came back empty-handed. Vishal was upset that he could not afford a pair of new clothes for himself, says Khule kaka, or help his father with the cash crunch.

Vishal’s was not the only suicide of its kind. Last October, Latur district, about 400 kilometres from Akola, reported a suicide by the 17-year-old daughter of a farmer, a student in junior college.

In her note, Swati Pitale explained in some detail why she was committing suicide. She could no longer suffer the plight of her father, she wrote in Marathi and didn’t want to be a burden on him. She would soon be of marriageable age and didn’t want her father to incur additional expenses on her wedding. In the note, she made a plea to the banks and moneylenders her father owed. She asked them not to harass her father, for, she said, he would surely repay his debts once her elder sister was married.

Swati had stopped attending college for a while, as her monthly bus pass had run out and her parents did not have the money to renew it. Her mother borrowed Rs. 260 for the pass from a neighbour, but Swati had missed crucial classes and wasn’t able to take the exam.

According to reports in the local newspapers, when Swati consumed pesticide in her family’s fields in the village of Kingaon, her father had left home for Karnataka, in search of work.

Back in Dadham, Vaibhav looks nervous. He says he must work to keep the firewood burning. At 18, he is now his father’s last hope – and perhaps his only support.

This article was originally published on 07/ 05/2016 on the People's Archive of Rural India.

Photo Credit: Jaideep Hardikar

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nishit-smokeinc · 7 years

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RT @journohardy: Pesticide poisoning. My first story in BBC today. BBC News - The Indian farmers falling prey to pesticide https://t.co/rKqA2j5hBn

Pesticide poisoning. My first story in BBC today. BBC News - The Indian farmers falling prey to pesticide https://t.co/rKqA2j5hBn

— Jaideep Hardikar (@journohardy) October 5, 2017

via Twitter https://twitter.com/nishit_smokeinc October 05, 2017 at 06:44PM

#IFTTT #Twitter

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indizombie · 4 years

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Since 2010 till July 2018, about 330 people have died in Maharashtra in wildlife attacks, mostly by tigers and leopards; as many as 1,234 were seriously injured and 2,776 people suffered minor injuries, according to the data compiled by the wildlife wing of the Maharashtra Forest Department. While the data is state-wide, a majority of these incidents were reported from around the tiger reserves and sanctuaries in Vidarbha. In the same time span, at least 40 tigers are believed to have been poached by organised gangs in Vidarbha, four ‘problem’ tigers were killed by the forest department in the last 10 years, several others had to be captured and sent to zoos or rescue centres in Nagpur and Chandrapur, and many others were electrocuted to death.