Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Shrinking grasslands, rising rainfall levels
Desert ecosystems are among the most misunderstood. The Thar Desert, for instance, is widely considered barren land, and has suffered as a result, subjected to years of unscientific greening, land-use changes, farming and unrestrained urban development.
Wildlife filmmaker Pradeep Hegde, 27, headed from his home in Sirsi, Karnataka, to Rajasthan in October 2019, to document its secret lives. He had been commissioned to make a series of films for RoundGlass Sustain, a digital storytelling platform focussed on India’s wildlife.
He shot the spiny-tailed lizard, a rare herbivorous reptile; five species of resident and migrant vultures; the dune-dwelling rare Rajasthan toad-headed lizard; and caught up with a swarm of desert locusts from across the ocean in Africa, outside the Desert National Park.
None of this was easy. For the little lizards, he had to lie on the ground, dead still, for hours, in temperatures that reached 40 degrees Celsius. “Cameras tend to overheat and shut down, so it’s always good to travel with more than one camera body or you have to take it out of the sun and wait for it to cool down,” he says.
But Hegde’s greatest challenge was trying to find the Great Indian Bustard. With only about 150 of the ground-nesting birds left in the wild, he knew the search would be daunting. A local guide, Radheshyam Bishnoi, 24, a cowherder from the local Bishnoi community, helped him in his search. It took them a day and a half to spot their first bustard, walking an average of 15 km a day in scorching sun.
The changing landscape is one of the biggest threats to the bustard. “Earlier they would nest in the grasslands of the Thar, which provided some protection,” says Bishnoi. “Now, with the grasslands shrinking, their nests are in danger from a number of predators.”
A recent study by the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, reported a steady increase in rainfall and floods in Rajasthan over the last 20 years as a result of changing climate patterns. Bishnoi says his community is living through the change. “The summers are hotter, the winters colder, and the cyclonic storms more frequent.”
When Fredi Devas returned to South Georgia, a remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, in OctoberNovember 2017, the UK-based filmmaker noticed two big differences.
He started to see whales from the boat, something that hadn’t happened on his first visit nine years earlier. He realised this was because the whale populations were booming; one of conservation’s rare success stories.
The second thing he noticed, he says, was frightening. There was land where there had been nothing but ice. A massive glacier on St Andrew’s Bay had retreated by what he estimated was half a kilometre. And day temperatures reached 16 degrees Celsius on the warmest day of his trip. Spring temperatures in Georgia in those months usually didn’t go above 4-5 degrees Celsius.
“Seals are wrapped in blubber, penguins are covered in down feathers,” says Devas, 43. “So that is a major issue for them.”
Devas first visited the Arctic and Antarctic regions when working on the BBC documentary series Frozen Planet (2011). He returned to many of the same spots in Antarctica almost a decade later, for the Antarctica episode of the 2019 BBC series Seven Worlds, One Planet.
Both shows documented how animals have evolved to survive in the extreme natural conditions, and explained the vital role both polar regions play in regulating weather systems across the globe.
Devas prefers Antarctica to the Arctic, he says. Aside from the breathtaking landscapes, the animals are touchingly friendly because they’ve had little or no interaction with humans and have developed no fear of the species. That’s particularly helpful when shooting a nature documentary.
At one point, a polar bear terrified the crew by seemingly walking right up to them. It turned out the bear just wanted to get back into the sea. Another time, Devas remembers setting up his camera, looking up and finding himself surrounded by a sea of penguins. “They’d crowded all around me, all the way to the front of my lens,” he says. “They were just looking. It was absolutely exquisite.”
One of the big realisations when shooting in such a place, Devas says, is that what humanity is doing far away is having a profound impact on creatures that may not even have ever seen a human.
When the weather warms, for instance, it rains and floods the nests of animals like the chinstrap penguins, wetting chicks that then freeze to death.
“If it snows, the nests don’t get flooded. They’re insulated from the cold and can survive,” Devas says. “Going back and covering stories in the Antarctic, almost ten years on, you are very aware that the situation is getting worse rapidly. It’s frightening and it’s sad.”
It’s been just over 80 years since Man began to explore the seabed at depths beyond 1,000 metres. There have now been deep-sea explorations to nearly 11,000 m, within the Mariana Trench (the bottom of which constitutes the deepest known point on Earth).
It is at these depths that the strange creatures that now typify the dark deep in the popular imagination were uncovered. With no light and temperatures usually just a few degrees above freezing, some of these creatures carry their own little lanterns in front of their faces (powered by light-producing organs called photophores), others have no vision, some are entirely transparent. And all have bodies and organs equipped to deal with the crushing pressure.
Jon Copley has seen these creatures up-close. The marine ecologist at the University of Southampton was on the first manned mission to Earth’s deepest-known hydrothermal vents, in the Cayman Trough, 5 km or 5,000 m below the surface, in 2013. He’s been on 20 deep-sea expeditions in all, investigating undersea hot springs, a brine lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and underwater mountains around Antarctica.
There’s no job he’d rather have. “It’s as close to a Star Trek adventure as we’re likely to get for a few centuries,” Copley says. Excerpts from an interview.
The area of deep ocean floor that has been seen by human eyes, either peering through the portholes of manned vehicles, or from remotely operated vehicles and cameras, is quite small. It’s probably less than one two-hundredth of one per cent. And that’s just the ocean floor. The vast volume of water above it, forming the interior of the ocean, is even less investigated.
What are some of the unique adaptations you have seen in living things at these depths?
In some deep-sea environments, food can be scarce, so some predator species such as viperfishes have huge teeth and jaws. Other deep-sea species can make a meal of things that other animals can’t digest, such as zombie worms that secrete acid to dissolve the skeletons of animals that have died and sunk to the ocean floor. In some deep-sea environments where life is sparse, anglerfish males, for instance, become small parasites on the females, dangling from their partner, ready to fertilise her eggs when she spawns them.
What are the deep seas teaching us about how the world works?
Most of the geological processes that shape our world also happen in the deep ocean, from undersea volcanoes and volcanic rifts to ocean trenches where the plates of the Earth’s crust collide. Studying life in deep-ocean environments has also given us clues to some of the big questions in biology, such as how life might begin on a planet. Then there are spin-offs from ocean exploration for our everyday lives. Just like space exploration gave us nonstick pans, ocean exploration is helping design better fibre-optic cables, from studying the glass skeletons of deep-sea sponges. In medicine, new therapies for conditions such as some types of prostate cancer are being developed based on adaptations of deep-sea microbes. There is so much more we could learn from the ingenuity of nature in the deep ocean, which is why we need to continue to explore it, and protect it from human impact.