:: Wildlife Trust Of India :: Walking in water

I have been in conservation more than two dozen years but the terrain I was walking in was unfamiliar to me. And the ecosystem reminded me almost instantly, as a jagged edge caught my shin and nicked it, drawing blood. I saw the tiny trickle seep into the water like a tiny polychaete limb. The fact that I knew what a polychaete was, was also new knowledge, gleaned from the eager WTI team. I was visiting the most unique field station of WTI, the marine station at Mithapur. And I was walking on coral.

When I say walking on coral I mean not exactly on live coral for that would be anathema. But we were skipping on a dead reef exposed by the low tide. At least three different species of large crabs skulked around the little tidal pools and a hundred tiny hermit crabs clustered in their borrowed colony of shells. Both Gautam and Subbu were excitedly pointing out new species. That was hardly a difficult feat as most of what I saw was new to me. Manoj was showing how a crab can be held by its pincer without getting bitten. I was mesmerised by what I saw but also astonished at my own ignorance. I have spent most of my career in deciduous and scrub forests. This was a marine biotope, new for me and surprisingly an unfamiliar terrain for most conservationists.

For a country obsessed with its tigers and elephants to think that polychaetes and sea slugs as part of conservation is new. As I can’t swim, the only part of it exposed to me was the intertidal zone. I could walk on some water but to get into it full blown would take more courage. But surprisingly, I was told that this was normal even for marine biologists. Most of them in India, I was told, could not dive, a reason why they preferred a job in a laboratory. This was as strange as a carnivore biologist who could not walk in the forests and could only watch tigers on You Tube to analyse their behavior. But come to think of it, that was how terrestrial ecological work was a hundred years ago. Lorenz dived amidst geese in his pond, Mendel counted the peas in his garden and even the legendary Darwin went outside his country home and London for only that one epic voyage of the Beagle. Yes there were the odd Wallaces toiling in the tropics but these were pioneers. Now, what we need in India are a few marine conservation pioneers.

What the team is trying to do in Mithapur is equally pioneering both in a conservation sense and in a process sense. They are transplanting coral species of a kind that is locally extinct and bring back a reef. Not something that has never been done before but no one has tried it off our shores and Gujarat is as good as a place as any to try it. The coral reefs of India are in their worst shape in western India and restoration of reefs is a conservation imperative. Equally pioneering is that this is a private public project with a twist. WTI is partnering both the Forest Department of Gujarat (public) and the Tatas (corporate) in this project. The reef is just off the leased land of the Tatas and they are keen to be doing the right thing and protecting it. Given that Tata Chemicals had taken a lead in the whale shark conservation story, it was a natural extension for them to do something for corals at home, right next to their mother plant.

Even the small reef that exists at Mithapur is yielding undescribed treasures. The team has already identified a nudibranch or sea slug that has not been seen in those waters for a long time. They feel another one might even be new to science.

It is early days yet for the project but there is hope that over the years the technique to restore reefs can be perfected just as techniques to restore forests are being done in the terrestrial ecosystems. While protecting virgin ecosystems are critical for biodiversity, it is increasingly clear that the world has fewer and fewer of such spots. What we are left with is a mosaic of a few islands of virgin ecosystems linked by swathes of degraded, fragmented habitat, some of them anthropogenised beyond repair vis-a-vis their original ecological values. There are some, though, which can still be brought back- if not to their original virgin states, then at least to an honorable compromise, increasing biodiversity, sequestering carbon and having human and nature refugias as a result. This coral experiment at one scale is a building block for such theories.

WTI has always been about pioneering out of the box aspects of conserving India’s natural heritage. Coral restoration at Mithapur is an excellent example and for me also a humbling one to have stumbled into a regime that I knew so little of.