Simon Gear, 10 May 2018.
My master’s supervisor was the world expert on ice rats. By the time she got her PhD, no-one on the planet knew more about rodents that lived above 3000m in the Lesotho Drakensberg than she did. And even fewer people cared. At around the same time, members of her department were doing work on lions and wild dogs. We had the world leading expert on elephants. Even in her own ecosystem, the Cape Vulture (South Africa’s equivalent of the Californian Condor) dominated conservation efforts. What’s interesting is that it didn’t really matter. Every ecosystem needs a champion. And when you work to conserve the glamorous species, the rest get protected as well.
The best example of this in recent times are the fantastic results displayed by conserving grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park. In a tribute to the odd mores of the time, wolves were not protected in the Park around its proclamation in the early 1900s and the last one was shot in the 1930s. This led to an ecosystem imbalance. Elk were no longer wary of predators and so hung out along river banks where they could browse willow trees to their hearts’ content. Without these trees, beaver populations collapsed and the rivers themselves became less habitable to the fish that required the cool shade of the beaver dams for shelter. Songbirds that nested in the willow and birch stands disappeared. Populations of ravens, lynx, coyotes and bears, all of which relied on a steady supply of wolf kills, suffered.
Then, wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s and all of these impacts were reversed. Despite an explosion in elk numbers over the same period, the ecosystem re-balanced and today, Yellowstone is a far healthier ecosystem now that its apex predators have been reinstated.
The point to all of this is simple. Every species needs a chance at protection. But donor fatigue and academic capacity means that we often cannot spend the time and money necessary to truly understand every last beetle, moth and rat in a habitat. Luckily, research shows that when we focus on the charismatic species, the animals that tourists will spend money to come and see, everything else gets conserved as well.
The concept of charismatic species is well known in conservation circles and there has been a lot of hand wringing as to whether our focus on animals that impress us means that large parts of the world go unconserved. A classic example would be the WWF’s panda emblem. As luck would have it, we tend to be impressed by animals that are the key anchors to ecosystems.
In Africa, lions and elephants are the primary shapers of ecosystems. Elephants actively manage their landscape, pushing over trees to maintain a grassland that is to their benefit. Lions, like the Yellowstone wolves, modify the behaviour of herbivores right through the system, having untold impacts on things as arcane as river flow. Conserving them requires space and complex management. A reserve that can cope with those two species also provides a home to thousands of other animals right the way down to dung beetles. The same is true of tigers in India, orangutans in Borneo and Blue-fin Tuna everywhere.
The lesson here is to not over think your conservation support. As long as you are giving to programs that are demonstrably effective, it is fine to support the charismatic species. When you save a highland gorilla, you save thousands of acres of Ugandan rain forest. When you save an elephant, you provide salaries to anti-poaching units who also protect every other animal on the Savannah. By their nature, lions cannot co-habit with humans, so as we protect them, we are forced to dedicate large areas of African landscape to pure wilderness, devoid of cattle and goats.
So, when you ask, “What can you do?” the answer is often very simple. Pick a species. Pretty much anything. Make it your personal focus. And give to the people working on conserving it. Invariably, the work done on that animal will land up keeping thousands of other critters safe.