Tico wins prize for work to halt shark finning

Photo: Matt Potemsky/Pretoma

A few weeks ago Tico environmental activist Randal Arauz was in San Francisco to claim a Goldman Foundation prize for his work to help stop shark finning in Costa Rica. The prize this year went to six environmental activists around the world; each recipient received US$150,000 to continue their grassroots efforts.

Shark finning is the practice of maiming and killing sharks for their fins, which often bring a very high price, especially in Asian markets, where Shark Fin Soup is considered a delicacy. In 2004, Costa Rica was the world’s third largest exporter of shark products, including 8,000 tons of fins.

Things have improved since 2004, but much work remains to be done. In his acceptance speech Arauz noted,

Sadly, shark finning is far from over. Global shark population declines are estimated at 90%, mostly due to shark finning. … More than 100 foreign longline shark finning vessels still operate illegally in private docks of Costa Rica. Recently, investigative journalists have exposed drug trafficking and indentured servitude alongside shark finning at these private docks, whose operators take advantage of lax customs enforcement.

So what’s next? What can we do? Read the rest of Arauz’s speech to find out.

Arauz is part of PRETOMA, a Costa Rican organization that works to protect the ocean’s resources, including sea turtles and sharks.

Costa Rica Syndrome: define this malady

Looking out from San Lucas Island towards the Nicoya Peninsula. Photo: Erin Van Rheenen

Did you know that there are at least three recognized travel-related maladies associated with well-known cities?

All can be grouped under the heading of Voyager Syndrome, the wonderfully poetic term for (mostly psychological) illnesses related to travel.

Paris Syndrome occurs when the reality of the modern French capital clashes with a visitor’s idealized expectations (Japanese female tourists in their 30s are at the highest risk). Jerusalem Syndrome is characterized by a sudden flaring up of extreme religious feeling, and can affect Jews, Christians, and Muslims, or even travelers who consider themselves irreligious. Florence Syndrome (also known as Hyperkulturemia, or Stendahl Syndrome, for the author who first described it) can strike travelers exposed to beautiful art, especially a lot of it in one place, like at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery; symptoms include dizziness, faintness, palpitations, and hallucinations.

As I contemplated these various syndromes, I wondered: what would a “Costa Rica Syndrome” look like?

Having interviewed a fair number of foreign residents, I can think of at least one possibility: a sudden and profound belief that you can communicate with monkeys, or turtles, or (this one’s trickier) crocodiles. Many of us in pavement-heavy realms live with Nature Deficit Disorder. Coming to Costa Rica, where nature is very much front and center, can be almost overwhelming. The drippy tropical tangle of the rainforest. The cacophony of a forest full of birds. Beaches where the only sound is the salty slam of wave on sand.

What’s your idea for the Costa Rica Syndrome?

More on the various Voyager Syndromes

More on what a San Francisco Syndrome might look like

Old biologists never die, they just develop DNA scanners

near Rincon de la Vieja in Guanacaste, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Ray Beise of Pura Jungla sent me a link to a great interview with Daniel Janzen, the pioneering conservationist who helped create the 300,000-acre Area de Conservación Guanacaste and proved that denuded tropical forests can be brought back from the brink.

In Yale’s Environment 360 magazine, Janzen is interviewed by Caroline Fraser, author of Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

Now 71, Janzen is currently working on a hand-held barcorder device designed to quickly identify the world’s organisms (viruses, invertebrates, plants, animals, and birds) by their DNA. This iPhone-type scanner could, says one biologist, “do for biodiversity what the printing press did for literacy.”

Janzen has been one of my heroes since I read Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica by William Allen. It’s a book about conservation that reads like a murder mystery, or rather a coming-into-being mystery, describing the hard-won rebirth of tapped-out pastureland and razed forests. It seems to be out of print (with an old copy going for $50 on Amazon), but you can probably get it at the library. You can also read large chunks of Green Phoenix on Google Books.

Turtle trouble in Costa Rica

A leatherback turtle; photo: scienceblogs.com

There was a great article in the New York Times in November about the plight of sea turtles in Costa Rica, home to some of their favorite nesting beaches.

I was recently in Tamarindo, a town just south of Playa Grande and its Las Baulas National Park (a baul is a leatherback turtle, which can be the size of a compact car).

In years past hundreds of leatherbacks came to lay their eggs in the sands of Playa Grande. The Times article says that just 32 leatherbacks were seen on the beach last year. And this year, locals told me, only a handful of turtles have been seen. The park’s ranger station had been shut down and, according to Alvaro Fonseco (quoted in the Times), Playa Grande is no longer being promoted as a place for tourists to see leatherbacks.

Five or six years ago I was part of a midnight turtle tour at Playa Grande, where a ranger led a small group of us, lighting our way with a masked flashlight (light disorients the turtles) to where a few leatherbacks were digging holes in the sand and dropping in their large, white flexible-skinned eggs. At that time, there were almost always a few turtles laying eggs each night. Now there have been only a few spotted this entire season.

Playa Grande and Las Baulas is close to Tamarindo, a burgeoning town where massive condo developments sit cheek by jowl with funky surfer hangouts. There’s been a recent moratorium on certain kinds of highrise building, but some projects seem exempt from the new rules, and enough got in under the wire that development is now encroaching on turtle territory.

And even the national park, already encroached upon, is under further threat. President Oscar Arias has floated a proposal that would protect the first 55 yards from the high tide mark but allow limited development on the next 80 yards. Critics say this would have the effect of making the area not so much a national park as just another zone for development, albeit with stricter rules for where lights can shine.

Expat Stephen Duplantier, a resident of San Ramon, and Alvaro Ugalde, former environment minister of Costa Rica, have put together an excellent online book about the current leatherback turtle situation in Costa Rica.

Many things threaten sea turtle survival, including development and its attendant lights, which can disorient the creatures and cause them to either not come to the beach to lay their eggs or to return to the water without having laid them. Drift net fishing (where there’s a lot of bycatch, or unintended catch, including turtles) is another culprit, as is climate change. Turtles can die in the hotter, more acidic seas caused by global warming, eggs on beaches are washed away by higher tides from more violent storms before they can hatch, and warmer sand can cause more females than males to be born, upsetting the gender balance of the turtle population.

When turtles lay eggs, the gender is not yet determined. Warmer temperatures produce more female eggs.

Playa Junqillal, where olive ridley turtles nest

South of Tamarindo is nearly-deserted Playa Junquillal, a favored nesting spot for Olive Ridley turtles. Even there, turtles are in trouble. Markers placed at the high tide mark are now often completely underwater, verifying that the seas, at least here, are indeed rising. Turtle eggs get washed away, eaten by predators, heated up to femalehood, or literally boiled by hot sands. A local crew of young people are paid $2/hour to collect the eggs and keep them safe in a hatchery kept at 85 degrees farenheit, which yields both male and female hatchlings.

Mobbed by grasshoppers in a Guanacaste treehouse

There's no escaping the bugs in a house with no walls; photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Imagine a house up in the trees, open to the elements, with a view of a pristine stretch of Costa Rican beach. It’s Paul and Jeanne Pidcock’s house, on the Pura Jungla eco-reserve, where Ray Beise took a dried-up cow pasture and lovingly reforested it into something lush and beautiful. He sells lots to like-minded people who agree to abide by the eco-friendly rules of the realm.

Sound good? Well, yes and no. In theory, the idea of no walls (and of course, no windows, and no screens) sounds pretty cool. You are one with the toucans and the monkeys.

And, it turns out, an army of insects.

Things got ugly at dusk. It wasn’t so bad if you sat in the dark and listened to the wind. But if you turned on a light—to cook, to read, or to write, you were mobbed by flying insects, from no-see-ums to oh-my-god-did-you-see- that?

Where in Costa Rica might there be screened windows? Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Leaf-green grasshoppers as long as my finger seemed especially friendly. They alighted on my book page, on my computer screen, and on the map I was studying to figure out the fastest road out of here. One crawled inside the bedside lamp I’d brought to the kitchen table (the lighting was dismal, probably because lights only attract bugs). The lamp was sideways so I couldn’t see the hopper’s body, but its long front feelers undulated out of the fixture as if the light itself had become insect-like.

When I conceded defeat and got up from my chair, I saw that I had sat on one of the poor little buggers.