AMAZON ACTIVISM

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AMAZON ACTIVISM Marine biologist Fernando Trujillo has made it his life’s work to protect river dolphins

Fernando has spent his career collecting data on river dolphins

ALL IMAGES: FERNANDO TRUJILLO

W

e’ve often heard the Amazon described as the ‘lungs of the planet’, but Fernando Trujillo has a different anatomical analogy for the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

‘I see a heart, and all the rivers running through it are the veins. We are putting a lot of obstacles in these veins and the heart is in danger of collapsing sooner or later.’

It’s a simple and stark view of the incredible pressures we place on this environment, from someone who has called the Amazon their home for close to 30 years. Fernando is the director of environmental organisation, Fundación Omacha and has dedicated his career to the conservation of river life, and dolphins in particular, throughout Colombia and the wider Amazon basin.

‘Omacha’ means ‘pink dolphin’ in the Ticuna Indian language, and the organisation is best known for spearheading efforts to protect the Amazon River dolphins, also known as botos, who live in freshwater across South America.

Fernando has lost none of his fascination with the dolphins and their jungle habitat since he made his first trip to the Amazon as a 19-year-old marine biology student in Bogata, Colombia, prompted by a few encouraging words.

‘I had the opportunity to meet Jacques

Cousteau at a conference in my university,’ says Fernando. ‘He said to me, “Look, there is nobody doing research with dolphins in the Amazon, maybe you can go and try to do something.” That was my first motivation.

‘So in 1987 I ended up in a cargo plane, off to spend one and a half months there. I remember on that first trip looking for the dolphins very early in the morning – there was heavy fog on the river, and then I started to see them jumping out from the water. I thought at that moment this is magic, this is paradise. I just fell in love with the dolphins and the Amazon.

‘I was very young and innocent, thinking I was just going to learn about the dolphins and publish some research findings, but then I realised there were a lot of problems here. There was overfishing, deforestation, the rights of the indigenous people were under threat, and I came to believe that dolphins could be ambassadors for the aquatic ecosystem and help motivate governments and people to protect the Amazon.’

I WAS VERY YOUNG AND INNOCENT, THINKING I WAS JUST GOING TO LEARN ABOUT THE DOLPHINS AND PUBLISH SOME RESEARCH FINDINGS, BUT THEN I REALISED THERE WERE A LOT OF PROBLEMS HERE Autumn 2018 WHALE&DOLPHIN 33

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ACTION STATIONS

The desire to do something drove Fernando to further his studies, share these problems, and look for solutions. With financial support from WDC he was able build his first field station near Puerto Nariño in the Colombian Amazon and work at a local level.

He says: ‘The field station was the starting point, I think, for my strong conservation career in the Amazon and it changed everything because Fundación Omacha began to have some visibility. It was very important. WDC gave me the money to do that and I am really grateful.

I still keep a copy of the cheque!

‘I spent a lot of years working in Puerto Nariño but I needed to grow the scale of the project. So I started to expand, and work in the Orinoco River basin, and I began to travel to other countries to train others.’

So far Fundación Omacha’s programme to count and monitor population levels of river dolphins in South America has completed 28 different expeditions and surveyed almost 30,000 km of rivers in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.

WDC also supported Fundación Omacha in organising a river dolphin workshop in 2008, which brought together people from all over South America to develop a regional action plan for conservation.

In the early days of Fernando’s research it became clear that the most obvious threats to river dolphins are conflicts with fisheries in the region. Dolphins are at risk of being injured and entangled in nets and attacked by fishermen who view them as competitors for fish.

Fundación Omacha has therefore worked hard to spread the word about the importance of dolphins in the freshwater ecosystem and promote sustainable fishing techniques that will help conserve fish stocks.

DEADLIEST CATCH

Nevertheless, it’s no easy task, and in the last two decades a new practice has seen fishermen killing river dolphins to use as bait to target an edible scavenger fish (known as piracatinga in Brazil and mota in Colombia). The decomposing dolphin carcasses are used to attract fish in large numbers.

Fernando says: ‘Overfishing is causing the collapse of fisheries in the largest and most biodiverse river on the planet and now we are reduced to targeting a scavenger fish.

Something is wrong with that.

‘In Brazil it’s estimated that more than 1,000 dolphins per year were being killed to use as bait. There was a lot of international pressure, and in 2014 the government of Brazil banned the piracatinga fishery for five years. That hasn’t been enough, however, because the traders moved to Peru and Bolivia and started killing dolphins in those countries.’

Colombia was until very recently one of 34 WHALE&DOLPHIN Autumn 2018

Above: Puerto Nariño in the Colombian Amazon, near where Fernando built his first field station Below left and right: Two views of the distinctive pink skin of the Amazon River dolphin

WE WANT TO SHOW THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE A FUTURE FOR THE DOLPHINS, FOR THE BIODIVERSITY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE AMAZON the main markets for the fish, but Fernando’s efforts have helped to curb demand.

As he explains: ‘The dolphins were the collateral damage of the fishing but what we needed to work on was the fishery and its effect on public health. I started analysis on the fish and I found it contained a lot of mercury.

‘The source of mercury pollution in the Amazon River is mainly from illegal gold mining, and also where there is deforestation you can have natural resources of mercury that wash into the river when it rains. So, I created a lot of campaigns to stop the trade of that fish in Colombia because of the high levels of mercury it contains, and finally last year the government banned the trade of the piracatinga fish as it is a serious threat to human health.’

A documentary released last year called A River Below shows the intense opposition Fernando faced in bringing wider attention to this problem, which even included threats to his life. The film raises important questions about the ethics of conservation and how environmentalists try to use the media to save a species.

For Fernando, the battle to save the pink dolphin highlights deep-rooted issues with how the Amazon is colonised and worked.

‘Economic agendas here are based on extraction,’ he says. ‘They just take resources

with no consideration for the future at all. There are 34 million people who now live in the Amazon basin and we need to think about how to provide economic alternatives for all those people without destroying the ecosystems.

What kind of activities do we need to promote?’

Fernando nonetheless remains hopeful, and Fundación Omacha has recently achieved some success in helping designate three Ramsar sites in Colombia, which ensure international protection and wise use of wetlands and their resources. The dolphins have been key to this designation.

One Ramsar site is located between the Orinoco and the Amazon, while another covers 825,000 hectares across the entire Bita river basin, and is the largest Ramsar site in the country. The third is of particular significance to Fernando because it will safeguard where he has lived and worked for the past 30 years.

He says: ‘Biologists need to work with governments, with the media, with economists and with the indigenous people to produce changes. We want to show that it is possible to have a future for the dolphins, for the biodiversity, and for the people of the Amazon, all working together in a good way. We are beginning that process.’

And WDC is proud to have been there at the very start. n