Wild Tobago

Not only birds, all nature is threatened by humans’ burgeoning population, our demand and consumption of more resources. Faraaz Abdool sounds the alarm: where the birds go, there goes our wellbeing. All photos by Faraaz Abdool It is an established fact that we are on the verge of a major ecological collapse. More than sixteen thousand species of plants and animals are currently listed as endangered, and a far greater number are still experiencing precipitous declines. We are losing species at a rate never previously experienced in human history – and there is little or no effort being made to change our ill-fated trajectory.   The Caribbean's only native species of toucan, the Channel-billed Toucan, is found on Trinidad and is officially listed as “vulnerable to extinction.” Right here in the Caribbean we are still in the process of discovering new species. The commonly seen horsewhip was described as its very own species only in late 2020 – now officially called Rutherford’s V...

A kind of underwater archaeology is telling us how important sharks were - and still are - to healthy reefs. Dr Anjani Ganase looks at a recent study based on shark scales collected in the sediment on coral reefs.   In my fifteen years of diving on   reefs of Tobago and the Caribbean, I can count the number of sharks that I’ve encountered on one hand. This is a tragic reflection of the impact of mismanaged fishing pressures. Over decades, we have decimated the shark communities regionally. This decline is also an alarming trend in other parts of the world. Even on reefs with a management system, sharks are declining because of loss of reef habitat and the ravages of climate change. In 2012, when I first surveyed the far-northern reefs of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia, our team would encounter dozens of reef sharks on every reef we visited. Four years later, after two major bleaching events hit the GBR, we were lucky to encounter a single shar...

  Unusually high temperatures on the west coast of North America, more violent tropical storms are just some indicators of climate change. What happens when changes become irreversible? Dr Anjani Ganase considers a few indicators of ecosystems approaching tipping point.     Tipping points are the environmental conditions beyond which an ecosystem can no longer cope with change. There is no going back when a tipping point is reached. The result is an irreversible shift to an alternative ecological state. Such shifts are usually associated with loss in biodiversity and changes in ecosystem services. Climate change drives unstable environmental conditions; and push organisms beyond their thresholds of tolerance; leading to mass die off and no recovery in a permanently transformed environment. Scientists are concerned about the global reach of climate change driving ecological tipping points that will permanently change the biomes that we depend on to survive.   Th...

An economy based on continuous growth will deplete the natural systems sustaining life. It’s time for a mindset shift to balance and well-being, according to Kate Raworth’s proposal for a doughnut economy. Anjani Ganase considers the challenge for Trinidad and Tobago.   Ideas of the growth economy took hold in the last century; here was a global mission to get people out of poverty and improve social well-being. For the most part, we have been incredibly successful in improving the quality of lives by getting people out of poverty. In 1981, 42.7 % of the world’s population was in extreme poverty; and in 2018, only 9.3 % of the world is still in extreme poverty (World Bank).   However, experts have come to realise that endless growth of economies comes at significant ecological cost, especially as many economies are based on extractive industries such as oil and gas, minerals and agriculture . Continuous extractive processes will undermine the very ecolo...

  Whale or shark? Whale sharks are called whale because of their immense size but they are fish not mammal, sharks that do not bite. Anjani Ganase recalls an encounter with a gentle giant.   Even though my job as a marine biologist has allowed me special encounters when working in the ocean environments, the whale shark seemed to be a creature of legends only heard about through chance encounters. Their mystery continued to build in my mind after several occasions of poor timing and missed opportunities where others in the cohort got the opportunity to see what these whale sharks were all about. I resigned to the fact that I probably would never see one, and it was at the moment – as usually happens when you go diving - that I got my first meeting with a whale shark.   We were surveying the reefs off Karimunjawa in Indonesia and as we swam along shallow coral reefs, we noticed a wall of fish cruising towards us. The fish were taking advantage of the slipstream of ...