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National Geographic
01-07-2025
- National Geographic
Sea turtles are surviving—despite us
These reptiles have roamed the oceans for 100 million years. We've put them at risk, but with a little help, they're rebounding. Green sea turtles congregate near a dock in the Bahamas. They were so numerous during Columbus's day that 'it seemed the ships would run aground on them.' Photographs by Thomas Peschak This story appears in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. To see all that's hopeful and appalling about the way we treat sea turtles, there's no better place to start than the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah hotel. This shimmering tower of blue and white glass is shaped like the jib of a sailboat bound for shore. It rose two decades ago on an artificial island amid the steel forest of construction cranes that is Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. A royal suite, at 8,396 square feet, comes with a private cinema and 17 pillow options. A weekend stay can top $50,000. I have come here, though, to see its nonpaying guests. Passing a fleet of white Rolls-Royces, I meet British expat marine biologist David Robinson. We take an elevator down to a parking garage and walk by Lamborghinis to our destination: a labyrinth of pipes and plastic pools, the intensive care unit of an elaborate marine turtle hospital. In one tub a green sea turtle struggles with internal organ damage. One floor up, sick, critically endangered hawksbills fill aquariums. Blood seeps from a dying leatherback harpooned by an indigenous hunter near Indonesia's Kei Islands. Leatherbacks are the largest of the seven sea turtle species and one of the most imperiled. The West Pacific population has fewer than a thousand females. A flatback sea turtle kicks up sand while digging a nest on Crab Island, off Australia's northeast coast. Indigenous rangers with the Apudthama Land Trust brave saltwater crocodiles and other hazards to monitor and protect the flatback's important nesting beaches. The hotel housing this rehab center is owned by a holding group whose driving force is Dubai's emir. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the architect of the region's lightning growth, wants his city to become a model of environmental stewardship. But the reptilian miseries unspooling in this epicenter of consumption reveal much about the ills we humans heap on these creatures. Workers here have seen turtles with balloons lodged in their intestines, turtles with flippers broken after getting caught in fishing nets, a turtle bashed in the head and tossed off a boat. One female green turtle was struck by a ship just down the road, near the world's ninth busiest seaport. The impact crushed her shell, carving out a jagged three-pound wedge as big as an iron. 'People are doing this,' says Robinson, a former operations manager for this facility. 'Everything—every aspect, every single species of turtle, every threat that they face—is anthropogenic.' He certainly doesn't mean just here. From Kemp's ridleys no bigger than car tires to leatherbacks that can outweigh polar bears, six of the world's seven sea turtle species are considered vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. The status of the seventh, the flatback of Australia, is unknown. At a sea turtle rehabilitation center in Dubai, hawksbills and green turtles circle a tank before being set free. The rescue center has treated and released more than 1,600 sick and injured turtles in the past 15 years. And yet these beasts soldier on, despite the obstacles we place before them. Of the sea turtle nesting colonies that were reviewed in a recent analysis, more than twice as many were increasing as were trending downward. Scientists this year found that turtle populations protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act were on the upswing. Hawaii's green turtles, long in trouble, are rebounding far faster than anyone expected. One turtle released from Robinson's care after 546 days of treatment for a head injury made the longest documented journey by a green sea turtle. She traveled 5,146 miles, from the Middle East nearly to Thailand, before her tracking device finally gave out. Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year Sea turtles, it appears, may be more resilient than once thought. 'I've seen all sorts of crazy injuries, deformities, illnesses, and they just keep going,' says Bryan Wallace, who oversees sea turtle assessments for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. 'Where's the dodo or the passenger pigeon of the sea turtle world?' While a few local stocks are in real danger of blinking out—Malaysian leatherbacks, for example—all seven species are hanging on regionally and globally. As we've plundered the seas, built up coastlines, and set about heating the planet, it's reasonable to wonder whether we're dooming these animals. But after months of reporting on sea turtles in several countries, I think we should consider another query instead: How might these reptiles fare with a bit more help? Ida Mamarika and her husband, Christopher Maminyamanja, visit a cave on an island off northern Australia where a gallery of Aboriginal rock art believed to be at least 5,500 years old includes an image of a green sea turtle. Mamarika's clan reveres the green turtle as a totem, or spirit animal. Sid Bruce Short Joe and Christine Holroyd, with the Pormpuraaw Art and Culture Centre, use lost or discarded fishing nets to create sculptures of sea turtles and jellyfish, two totem animals of the indigenous people of Cape York. Ghost nets floating at sea are a known threat to marine life, including turtles. Spend enough time watching sea turtles and it's hard to escape how astonishing they are. They soar through oceans with winglike front flippers, dig nests using back appendages that scoop and toss sand almost like hands, and squeeze salt water, like tears, from glands near their eyes. Their mouths are similar to bird beaks, perhaps because turtles share a common ancestor with chickens. All but leatherbacks, with their layer of thick skin, have bony external skeletons covered in scutes of keratin, the material found in rhinoceros horns and our own fingernails. But each species is different. Hawksbills help reefs by eating sponges that can smother coral. Loggerheads use powerful jaws to crush horseshoe crabs. Leatherbacks feed on jellyfish and sea squirts and can easily migrate from Japan to California. Marine turtles split from their terrestrial relatives more than 100 million years ago. They survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and squeaked past a marine extinction two million years ago that cut their numbers almost in half. Today sea turtles are found on the beaches of every continent except Antarctica, and they swim in all tropical and temperate waters. Once or twice a month during Costa Rica's rainy season, female olive ridley sea turtles come ashore by the tens of thousands and lay eggs in a mass nesting event known as an arribada. Hatchlings begin emerging about 45 days later. Perhaps their ubiquity explains the many roles they've played for people. They tell our stories: In Chinese mythology, sea turtle legs hold up the sky. We turn to them for healing: Turtle meat in West Africa was once believed to fight leprosy, and bathing in a broth of loggerhead plastron, the bony undershell, was considered a tonic for lung ailments. Even today, bones and scutes are sold as medicine from China to Mexico. Through most of this shared history, turtles haven't just survived—they've thrived. 'The sea was all thick with them, and they were of the very largest, so numerous that it seemed that the ships would run aground on them,' a Spanish priest wrote of Christopher Columbus's view of Cuba's sea turtles in 1494, during his second voyage. Some scientists today believe the pre-Columbian Caribbean alone may have been home to 91 million adult green turtles. That's roughly 10 times as many as all the adult sea turtles of every species believed to be alive today. So many occupied the Cayman Islands in the 1700s that English settlers used them to supply Jamaica with meat. It wasn't long before West Indies turtles were being served in London pubs and John Adams was slurping sea turtle soup during the First Continental Congress. Within a century, though, Caribbean turtle populations had crashed, sending turtle hunters to new coastlines, foreshadowing a great transition. Infographic Dive deeper into the threats facing all seven sea turtle species—from accidental capture in fishing nets to overharvesting of eggs and widespread plastic pollution. The rain is just starting on a dark Costa Rican night when Helen Pheasey and I cut across a beach with a red flashlight. Pheasey, a Ph.D. candidate who studies the black market trade in reptiles, is working with a U.S.-based conservation outfit called Paso Pacífico. In her pocket she carries a fake turtle egg implanted with a GPS transmitter, and we're looking for its potential mom. She gestures toward an olive ridley, alone and kicking up sand in the dark. As the pregnant turtle drops her eggs, Pheasey crawls toward the turtle's tail, reaches into the mound of Ping-Pong ball–size eggs, and places the decoy in the middle of the pile. She's hoping hurried egg poachers will nab her fake along with their intended loot. Turtle eggs are hot commodities in parts of Asia and Latin America. They may be boiled in soup, cooked into omelets, or dropped raw into a shot glass with lemon, tomato juice, and pepper. Eggs don't bring huge dollars, but because most turtles lay 50 to 100 or more at once and leave long sandy tracks from sea to nest, they're easy to find and steal in volume. On the west coast of Australia's Cape York Peninsula, rangers from Pormpuraaw's land and sea management program cover sea turtle nests with cages to protect them from feral pigs, which eat turtle eggs and hatchlings. In most countries, selling turtle eggs has been illegal for years. Yet in 2018, police seized a pickup in Oaxaca, Mexico, loaded with garbage bags stuffed with 22,000 turtle eggs. Malaysian authorities two years earlier intercepted four Filipinos in wooden boats carrying 19,000 eggs. The $7,400 those sailors stood to make was nearly three times the average yearly wage in their community. Egg theft is often linked with poverty or drug and alcohol abuse, Pheasey says. But the hope is that fake eggs could help stop organized traffickers. On a recent Saturday near Guanacaste, Costa Rica, thieves raided 28 nests—a haul that included one of Pheasey's fake eggs. In Ostional, Costa Rica, olive ridleys nest so close together that they tend to crush and destroy one another's eggs, so authorities allow local residents to gather some turtle eggs for their own use and domestic sale. The harvest and sales are regulated. At 7 a.m. Monday, Pheasey watched on smartphone apps as her egg traveled from the peninsula to the back of a building on the mainland. After a delay, the egg moved again, to a neighborhood in San Ramón, 85 miles from the beach. Pheasey traced the route in her car. The egg had stopped at a supermarket loading dock. There it probably changed hands before being ferried to someone's house. Pheasey and Paso Pacífico are still working out kinks in their tactics, but even if the decoy eggs show promise in fighting smugglers, that's just one of the many problems turtles face. We're chewing up nesting beaches by erecting oceanfront skyscrapers, hotels, and subdivisions. We've illuminated coastlines with disorienting streetlights. When turtles manage to find sand in which to lay eggs, bright lights often send them wandering. Some get hit by cars. Pollution, from oily toxics to plastics, spills into coastal waters. Straws and plastic forks get sucked up turtles' noses. Hungry leatherbacks mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. New research suggests that nine million hawksbills were slaughtered in the past 150 years, mostly for their fiery red and gold carapaces, which were fashioned into hair clips, eyeglasses, jewelry boxes, and furniture. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) began banning the sale of turtle goods in the 1970s, but that hasn't always worked. In 2012, researchers found thousands of hawksbill pieces for sale in Japan and China. Solid numbers are unavailable, but scientists estimate that only 60,000 to 80,000 nesting female hawksbills remain worldwide. Meanwhile some countries still allow subsistence hunts for turtle meat. But even in countries where that practice has been outlawed, bans are meaningless without enforcement, buy-in from local residents, and alternatives for food or income. In Mozambique and Madagascar alone, for example, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of both young and adult green turtles are illegally killed each year by hunters. Olive ridley eggs, freshly rinsed in the sea, are dumped onto a sorting table in Ostional, Costa Rica, shortly after being gathered from nests. The eggs will be packed in plastic bags and shipped by truck to restaurants and bars around the country. To fight poachers in Costa Rica, researcher Helen Pheasey fits decoy eggs with GPS transmitters, then slips them into sea turtle nests. Pheasey has tracked stolen eggs to commercial outlets many miles inland from nesting sites. There has been some promise in places where residents have bought in to the idea of turtle conservation. One morning in Costa Rica I sit in a delivery truck as the ocean flickers through the royal palms. Our payload: 80 large bags filled with 96,000 turtle eggs. A few miles down the road, we back up to an open shed. Men unload this delicate cargo onto a sorting table, where women begin placing the eggs in smaller bags. Soon they'll be repackaged and sold to restaurants and bars as far away as the capital, San José. Here it's all perfectly legal—and may even help turtles. Every month this beach in Ostional, on Costa Rica's upper Pacific Coast peninsula, is the site of one of the world's largest mass-nesting events. Known as an arribada, it typically begins in the dark, as it did this morning. Female olive ridleys by the thousands congregate offshore, their forms silhouetted by the starry sky. Then, following some mysterious cue, they start crashing ashore. They come in waves, bumping and pushing past one another, oblivious to the threats around them: egg-scavenging vultures, wild dogs, hungry raccoons. Then they start digging, uncovering and crushing each other's eggs, filling the new holes with future offspring before lumbering back to sea. The humans arrive at dawn. Barefoot men perform an odd step dance, bouncing gingerly heel to toe, feeling for loose earth with their feet. Finding some, they squat and dig until they reach eggs. Then teenagers and women begin filling bags. Ostional didn't really become much of a community until sometime after World War II. But by the 1970s, settlers had come to rely on turtles. Soil nearby wasn't great for farming, and there were few jobs, so residents plucked turtle eggs to feed their pigs. 'Turtles were no more special to us than our chickens,' Maria Ruiz Avilés says during a break from labeling egg bags. At dawn on Trinidad's Grande Rivière, one of the most important leatherback nesting beaches in the world, an adult female uses her front flippers to toss sand over her egg chamber, hiding her future offspring from predators. Leatherback hatchlings dig their way out of their nest toward the surface. As the last layer of sand crumbles away, hatchlings boil out of the nest and scramble for the ocean, facing a gantlet of predators on land and at sea. Costa Rica began trying to prohibit egg harvests in the 1970s, but enforcement was lax. Researchers eventually recommended an arrangement: a regulated, legal, domestic trade. So many turtles show up during an arribada that they dig far more nests than the beach can accommodate. Even without poaching, up to half of the eggs on the beach were being destroyed, mostly by other turtles. Costa Rica's national government allows the few hundred residents of Ostional to legally collect a portion of the eggs. Today Ostional's egg harvest is viewed by many as a success. Residents take a small number of eggs, and some biologists think ridding the beach of the excess keeps microbes from killing more. Sales pay for beach patrols and enforcement to keep poachers out. Paperwork follows every sale, so buyers know the eggs are legal. Invested residents drive off predators to help remaining hatchlings get to the sea. 'We do a good job,' Ruiz Avilés says. That doesn't mean this model should be exported. Demand for eggs here is a fraction of what it is in, say, Mexico. And arribadas here offer an embarrassment of riches, because culling eggs may help more baby turtles survive. 'In my opinion, Ostional should never ever be taken as an example for conservation anywhere else—ever,' says Costa Rican Roldán Valverde, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. While some experts suggest this legal harvest prevents far more eggs from being taken illegally, others fear that legitimizing any of this trade perpetuates the black market. Unfortunately, we're stuck making decisions with imperfect information. Leatherback hatchlings encounter plastic bottles and other debris as they crawl across Trinidad's Matura Beach to reach the ocean. Nature Seekers, a local conservation group, organizes regular beach cleanups that have helped leatherbacks rebound there. In fact, it's often unclear how many sea turtles of each species remain—or how many is enough to ensure their survival. New research suggests that some population counts based on nesting beaches may be far too generous. But nest counts can also underestimate turtle numbers. 'We need to understand a lot more about what's happening in the water, where sea turtles spend 99 percent of their lives,' says Nicolas Pilcher, a sea turtle biologist who does fieldwork for governments and nonprofits. Pilcher is piloting a boat across shallow seagrass beds about 50 miles west of Abu Dhabi. He's conducting a turtle rodeo, chasing a green turtle as it zigs and zags just below the water's surface. Near the bow Marina Antonopoulou, with Emirates Nature-World Wildlife Fund, perches on the gunwale. When Pilcher shouts the signal, she launches onto the carapace, trying to wrestle the turtle to the surface and into the boat. But it wriggles free. Antonopoulou stands in the water, frustrated but amused. Pilcher pushes on. Antonopoulou and a team of scientists, including some from the Abu Dhabi government, are cruising the U.A.E.'s Marawah Marine Biosphere Reserve to gauge where these speedsters are headed. Near Pilcher's feet a half dozen green turtles lounge. A quick surgical procedure will tell him whether these animals are male or female and ready to mate and nest. The team will attach tracking devices to some, then release them all. 'We're trying to link where these turtles live, which is here, with where they lay their eggs,' Pilcher says. That's key to saving turtles. But turtles often feed in waters controlled by one government and nest on beaches controlled by another. This is especially true in the Middle East, where U.A.E. turtles may lay eggs in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, or even Pakistan. Conservationists and the Abu Dhabi government can't negotiate with neighboring countries for more protection without knowing which turtles go where. That matters, of course, because development in the Middle East is booming, and 'nesting habitat for turtles is continually shrinking,' Pilcher says. After harpooners land a leatherback in Indonesia's Kei Islands, villagers gather on the beach to watch the butchering process. Weighing up to 2,000 pounds, leatherbacks have long been a significant source of protein for the island communities. Sea turtle conservation has made great strides in recent decades in many places around the globe. In Florida and Hawaii, coastal resorts and hotels are reducing beachfront lighting. Use of devices that let unsuspecting turtles escape fishing nets helped save Kemp's ridleys in Mexico and loggerheads in the Atlantic and is being tried in other areas. We've closed fisheries and changed commercial fishing hooks to prevent accidental snagging. A few fishing fleets employ observers who document turtle interactions. Still, even as we make progress, complex new challenges are emerging. The sex of turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand where eggs gestate. Warmer sands produce more females, so as climate change drives sand temperatures higher across the tropics, more turtles are being born female. On a warm evening in a San Diego, California, bay, I watch a crew of scientists hold an adult green turtle while Camryn Allen quickly draws a vial of blood. For several years Allen, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has used hormones such as testosterone to track the sex of sea turtles. Here the ratio of females to males has increased slightly, but her recent work in Australia truly alarmed her. Raine Island, a 52-acre half-moon of sand on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, is the biggest nesting island on Earth for green sea turtles. More than 90 percent of the northern Great Barrier Reef's green turtles deposit eggs here and on nearby Moulter Cay. But Allen and her colleagues discovered that as temperatures have risen, female green turtles born on Raine have come to outnumber males 116 to one. 'Seeing those results scared the crap out of me,' Allen says. A conch fisherman draws the attention of green sea turtles at Little Farmer's Cay in the Bahamas. Once prized for their meat, the island's green sea turtles are now valued more as tourist attractions. A large green turtle erupts from the muddy bottom of a mangrove-fringed inlet along the west coast of Fernandina Island in the Galápagos. Turtles here often seek refuge in warm water when winds cause cold-water upwelling. It's not the only threat climate change poses. As hurricanes become more powerful, they're wiping out more turtle nests. Rising seas also are flooding nest sites and drowning eggs. And yet for all that, there are hopeful signs. Turtles didn't survive 100 million years without developing strategies to weather hard times. They can slow their metabolism and go months without eating. Some females have skipped nesting seasons for years, only to show up again a decade later. New research suggests males may mate with many females when populations are stretched thin. And sea turtles may switch nesting beaches in times of stress. Allen's initial fear has tapered off as she's seen turtles' versatility. 'We may lose some smaller populations, but sea turtles are never going to go away completely,' she says. 'I think turtles, out of all the other species, might actually have a pretty good shot.' They just can't do it by themselves. Staff writer Craig Welch reported on thawing permafrost in the September issue. This is photographer Thomas P. Peschak's tenth assignment for National Geographic. Photographic coverage for this story was supported by Hussain Aga Khan, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, and the Save Our Seas Foundation.
National Geographic
04-06-2025
- Politics
- National Geographic
Niassa was a conservation paradise. Then ISIS attacked.
The stunning nature reserve in Mozambique—known for its lions, elephants, and honeyguide birds, and home to some 70,000 people—is reeling in the aftermath of a brutal terror assault. Following the terrorist attack, nine conservation and tourist camps, as well as 22 scout camps, now sit abandoned along the Lugenda River. Some 300 miles of the river flow within northern Mozambique's Niassa Special Reserve. Photographs by Thomas Peschak Just after 7 p.m. on the evening of April 29, conservation ecologist Colleen Begg was having dinner with her husband, Keith, and their two teenage children when her phone beeped with a WhatsApp message: The Mariri Environmental Centre she had founded in Mozambique's Niassa Special Reserve had been attacked by terrorists. Two thousand people from a nearby village had fled into the bush. Begg spent a sleepless night organizing rescue efforts, but by morning she confronted a grim reality. Five of the ranger scouts on her team were missing, and a conservation dream she and Keith had spent more than 20 years nurturing was on the brink of collapse. The village of Mbamba, one of many within the reserve, was closest to the attack. Elsewhere in Africa, villages were often removed to make way for protected areas, but not in Niassa, where humans have lived alongside wildlife as part of the ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. The reserve is one of the last refuges for the critically endangered African wild dog, with some 300 of them roaming Niassa's plains. The dogs sleep for most of the day, grow active in the evening, and then hunt at night. Before the April terrorist attacks, conservation efforts in Niassa were flourishing. The reserve's lion population blossomed to between 800 and 1,000 animals, one of only seven populations of that size left in Africa. The reserve could hold twice that number, a unique prospect in a time of shrinking wild spaces. At some 17,000 square miles, bigger than the country of Switzerland, Niassa is one of Africa's largest and wildest protected spaces. This aerial view takes in the grandeur of its granite inselbergs, which rise like gray giants from the woodlands and plains of Niassa. Today, more than a month after the attack, the situation in Niassa remains perilous. The death toll from multiple attacks has risen to at least 10, with more injured and missing. And with each day that passes, the threats to years of careful conservation work and vital economic growth become more acute. Fully half of the Niassa reserve is now closed and under full military occupation as the Mozambican Army continues to patrol the park for Islamic State insurgents. The reserve's economic and business models are crumbling as families flee for safer ground, and tourism operators scramble to do damage control. Along the Lugenda River, nine conservation and tourism camps and 22 scout posts now sit abandoned. The United Kingdom and the U.S. State Department have issued travel warnings for Mozambique. 'The attack decimated the revenue structure from tourism,' says Begg, who runs the Niassa Carnivore Project. 'Visitors won't come.' Years of critical conservation work are at risk of coming undone. Niassa was established as a hunting reserve in 1954 when Mozambique was still under Portuguese colonial control. It was transformed into a protected area in 1999, after years of civil war. More remote and less well known than the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania or Kruger National Park in South Africa, Niassa is unique for both its immense size and its approach to conservation. Unlike other reserves in Africa, where a so-called fortress conservation mentality—which prioritizes animal conservation at the expense of local communities—often prevails, the Niassa reserve has a thriving human population that has lived side by side with animals from earliest times. At Chemambo, which is considered a sacred site in Niassa, people come from far and wide—including Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, and across Mozambique—to receive blessings. Many who come to Chemambo believe that yellow baboons house the spirits of their ancestors. Visitors give them offerings in the form of sugar, maize, corn, and peanuts. Some 70,000 people are scattered across 47 villages in a fenceless expanse of more than 17,000 square miles of pristine wilderness. The reserve occupies an area larger than Switzerland, where humans coexist with the highest concentration of wildlife in Mozambique, including thriving populations of lions, elephants, hyenas, wild dogs, and honeybees. The 17 conservation and tourism concessions spread across the reserve run the gamut from budget eco-tourism to luxury safaris and sport hunting operations that bring in millions of dollars in revenue and employ tens of thousands of people. 'The attack was very emotional,' says Agostinho Jorge, the director of conservation for the Niassa Carnivore Project. 'The most painful part was the suffering of the communities. It's one of the poorest areas of Mozambique, and the last thing we would want is the area to get destabilized from these attacks.' (Nature makes a comeback in Mozambique) Before the attack, Mariri rangers loaded up the skulls of four dead elephants that were killed by poachers several years ago. The skulls were used in a memorial to remember the rampant poaching that once occurred in Niassa. By day this water hole is used by women to wash clothes. By night elephants like this one can access it to quench their thirst, just one of many examples of how humans and wildlife have cooperated in Niassa. Before the April attack, elephant herds that had been decimated during a decade-long poaching crisis beginning in 2008 had begun to rebound. Most people who live in Niassa are subsistence farmers and fishermen, and conservation is far and away the largest employer in the district. The attacks occurred just days before the year's maize harvest, meaning locals were unable to reap the benefits of the year's crop. Over the years, local conservationists and authorities have developed a series of extensive regulations prohibiting poaching and the consumption of bushmeat, while also helping build alternative revenue streams and community tourism camps. 'Now all of that is gone,' says Begg. A large part of the reserve's annual million dollars in tourist revenue comes from trophy hunters, most of whom have now been forced to cancel upcoming trips. 'I'm worried about the wildlife,' says Jorge. 'If these areas aren't protected, the numbers will start to drop if this situation goes on for too long.' Before the attack, a wilderness success story Before the April terrorist attacks, conservation measures in Niassa were flourishing. In recent years, the reserve's lion population blossomed to between 800 and 1,000 animals, one of only seven populations of that size left in Africa. Elephant herds that had been decimated during a decade-long poaching crisis beginning in 2008 started to rebound. Some 350 African wild dogs roam Niassa's plains, while honeyguide birds waft through forests looking for wax to eat and leading people to hidden honeybees' nests, benefiting both species in a remarkable example of cooperation. To reach these high branches of the baobab tree, honey hunter Luís Iwene free-soloes using wooden hammers and pegs to access his beehive. Smoke from the fire torch relaxes the bees and brings them out of the hive. 'In Niassa, people and wildlife not only coexist but collaborate,' says Claire Spottiswoode, an evolutionary ecologist leading a research project working in collaboration with the Mariri Environmental Centre and the nearby village of Mbamba for over a decade. 'It's one of the few remaining places where the unique cooperative partnership between people and honeyguide birds still thrives.' (How locals have a stake in helping Niassa Special Reserve flourish) ISIS in Mozambique The latest attacks have their origin in an Islamic insurgency that began spreading across northern Mozambique in 2015. ISIS-M, as the group is known, has attempted to gain territory, add recruits, and spread fear through coordinated campaigns across the region. Its strength peaked around 2021 when the group's fighters were estimated to number around 3,000. That year, insurgents struck Niassa for the first time, decapitating a Christian pastor in a local village and threatening conservation efforts. In response, forces from Rwanda and South Africa struck back, dramatically reducing the group's strength and size. But by mid-April of this year, militants were once again targeting several small villages just outside Niassa's eastern border. 'The insurgents have shown a lot of adaptability,' says Nicolas Delaunay, the International Crisis Group's senior analyst for Mozambique. 'We can see the contours of a multipronged strategy.' On April 19, they attacked the Kambako hunting lodge, across the Lugenda River from Mariri. They lingered there for four days, looting food, fuel, and supplies. Before leaving, they beheaded two local carpenters and burned the camp to the ground. Carefully managed hunting tourism bolsters Niassa's economy, along with income from safaris and conservation projects. Here, buffalo, sable, and other species are measured before being shipped to trophy hunters. Within days, a contingent of 21 Mozambican Army soldiers were deployed to Begg's camp as a protective measure. Begg cleared Mariri of its vehicles, computers, and aircraft, but left a small team of 12 anti-poaching scouts in place to prevent looting. It wasn't enough, however, and on the 29th a group of well-armed, mask-wearing insurgents swarmed into Mariri and began shooting while crying, 'Allahu Akbar.' On Begg's instructions, the scouts scattered into the bush. Insurgents killed two scouts and six soldiers. One member of her team, Mário Cristovão, happened to arrive at the camp on the day of the attack. Insurgents shot him three times, but he managed to drag himself into a grove of long grass to hide. He bound his legs together in a makeshift splint and stayed hidden for three days and four nights without food or water, while fending off a scavenging hyena with the bloody boot of his left foot. He was eventually rescued when the Mozambican Army moved back in to secure the camp. 'If I had slept, I would have died,' he told a local Mozambican newspaper from his hospital bed in the capital of Maputo last week. (Inside the ISIS antiquities pipeline) Rallying to help Niassa In the weeks since the attack, a worrying psychological shift has taken root. Fully 85 percent of Begg's local staff were born and raised inside the Niassa reserve. But today, because of the attacks, close to half of them have already left their homes and are seeking housing and safety outside the reserve. Many more are expected to follow. Several rangers are receiving trauma counseling. Thousands of people are unable to visit the many sacred natural sites, including the baobab trees, mamba woodland, and inselbergs that have been cherished by their communities for thousands of years. Begg worries that the younger generation may never return to live in the reserve. 'Their children will not have the deep connection to the land that [their parents] had,' Begg says. 'That is such a shame because they are the best guardians of Niassa.' As a result, conservation work could suffer. Unless and until the insurgency is wiped out definitively, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. 'In all the years I've lived there, I've never felt afraid,' says Begg. 'But now I do.' Mariri scout Fernando Paulo Wirsone was killed by ISIS-backed insurgents in the April attack. In this photo, taken in November 2021, he and other scouts working for the Mariri Environmental Centre had set up a remote field camp to protect one area of the reserve from the growing threat of terrorist attacks after ISIS first entered the reserve earlier that month. Other conservation groups have rallied to help in recent weeks. 'Years of progress have been undone, hurting the wildlife and human communities who call Niassa home,' says Paul Thomson, senior director of conservation programs at the Wildlife Conservation Network. 'We are monitoring the situation daily, yet as the situation remains unstable, the long-term threats to conservation, community safety, and tourism-based livelihoods continue to grow. In the coming weeks and months, supporting local conservationists will be crucial.' For now, Begg and her colleagues are choosing to forge ahead with their efforts. Two of her staff rangers are still missing, but her teams still there have been providing financial support, food, and moral support to anyone they can help. Says Begg: 'The only antidote to extremism is to keep going with conservation.'
