Although located hundreds of miles away in the Mozambique Channel, villages within the Velondriake Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) felt the effects of cyclone Funso’s outer edges last week. A recent report estimated that 3,000 people within Velondriake and neighbouring areas were displaced from their houses. The cyclone’s most aggressive day happened to coincide with one of the highest tides of the year, and crashing waves pulled at the first line of houses. The flimsy homes – constructed of reed and mangrove – collapsed with ease and scattered out to sea. The bad weather also made fishing (the main source of food and income here) nearly impossible and highly dangerous. Locals reported that it was the worst storm since 2005.

Disastrous climatic events in this region actually occur relatively frequently. A recent survey from the National Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) found that nearly 30% of households in the southwest region have experienced a natural disaster over the 12 preceding months including cyclones (13.3%), flooding (5%), drought (11%) and insect invasion (3.8%); these disasters have resulted in houses and infrastructure damaged or destroyed in 23% of cases, food insecurity in 75%, and destruction of lifestyle in nearly 10%.

Storms often batter the Velondriake LMMA

The destruction of this storm, along with these other recent disasters, highlights the extreme vulnerability of coastal populations to extreme weather events. As climate change impacts continue to materialize, villages like those in Velondriake will certainly witness an increase in the frequency and intensity of these events.

Blue Ventures’ integrated activities aim to reduce this vulnerability within the villages of Velondriake. Conservation measures such as limiting destructive fishing and permanent marine reserves ensure a healthy reef, better able to protect villages against big swells and provide enough fish to feed households. Supplemental income generation through sustainable aquaculture allows families to increase their incomes, allowing them to invest in better housing or save for future food shortages. Looking in the longer term, providing access to family planning and community health further reduces vulnerability in that it allows couples to choose how many children to have and gives them the knowledge to keep their families healthy; healthy mothers can contribute to increased household income and savings. Finally, providing education to children allows them to eventually enter careers that are more stable and higher paying – not necessarily dependent on natural resource exploitation.

Cyclones like Funso, and other natural disasters, are predicted to only increase in the coming decades. Luckily, there are interventions, such as these implemented by Blue Ventures, that can build adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities.

When Ryan Walker, a biologist based at the Open University, and his team crawled on their hands and knees through 60 kilometres of clothes-shredding, hair-plucking spiny forest between Toliara and the Mangoky River, racking up 150 man-hours of surveying, they found just 96 spider tortoises, a critically endangered species found only in southwest Madagascar.

On the 30th January, however, Blue Ventures volunteers counted 99 spider tortoises in a single day and in a far smaller area — five hectares – near a fishing village south of Andavadoake, in a survey that lasted just 50 man-hours. “Mbo misy tsakafy maro ty etoy laha hoary amy ty tany sasany agny satria fady ay mihina azy,” the President of the village told me – “The tortoises are more abundant here than anywhere else, because it is taboo to eat them.”

Will the spider tortoise soon be a memory?

The spider tortoises belonged to Pyxis arachnoides brygooi, the northern subspecies of P.arachnoides, which is endemic to a 600 kilometre long sliver of spiny forest. The subspecies is extinct across 50% of its original range, and numbers may have fallen by as much as 90%. Not only is the spider tortoise the target of an international yet illegal pet trade – each tortoise, thanks to the golden spider-web like patterns on its carapace, fetches up to $10,000 – but it is also roasted alive and eaten by the Mikea, an elusive forest people. In addition, the spider tortoise’s habitat, spiny forest, has halved in area between 1970 and 2000.

Using a $5000 grant from the Turtle Conservation Fund, Blue Ventures will continue to gather information about the spider tortoises, including their age, sex, weight and carapacial dimensions, in addition to raising awareness about the plight of this unique species: spider tortoises are the only tortoises on Earth that have an anterior plastral hinge, a ‘drawbridge’ at the front of their carapaces that they can winch up.

With 57 of the world’s 131 species of chameleon, including the largest and the smallest, Madagascar has a monopoly on the family’s diversity. This unusual individual (see photo, below) was spotted clinging to a wooden fence during breakfast today. Named for its wart-like scales, Furcifer verrucosus is one of the largest species of chameleon in the world – just 10 centimetres short of its title-holding cousin, Furcifer oustaleti, which has a maximum length of 70 centimetres. The warty chameleon, as it is commonly known, also possesses a fearsome row of 40, four millimetre long spines on its back. Like all chameleons, it is well-adapted to tree life, with tong-like hands and feet that latch on to twigs and a long, prehensile tail that acts as a back-up lasso.

The warty chameleon, a handsome fellow

Although some species of chameleon change colour to blend in with their backgrounds, the majority only do so to express irritation or anger when they’re cover has been blown. As we watched, the individual blanched and developed vertical brown bars – the chameleon’s equivalent of a grimace. Humans are only just starting to catch up with this astounding ability to change colour to suit mood: in 2006, scientists at the University of Connecticut in Storrs developed threads that, when exposed to an electric current, change from orange and red to blue, a technology that paves the way for “smart,” mood-sensing garments. Of course, the chameleon’s control over its canvas is far more sophisticated – but then it has had over 20 million years of evolution to perfect the art.

For more info on how chameleons are influencing fashion please visit this web page by National Geographic

What constitutes a duvet day for a Vezo shark fisherman? Not the threat of capsizing in seven metre waves, it turns out. Yesterday, Andava bay was peppered with pirogues en route to the Mozambique Channel – exactly where a powerful, dangerous cyclone called Funso is currently fuming. Ten kilometres out to sea, the fishermen will unravel and sink 200 metre long nets, anchoring them with heavy weights to keep them stable in the powerful currents. When the fishermen haul the nets in, there’s a distinct possibility that their pirogues will capsize and they will drown. “Rozy mivaka,” explains Thomas, an ex-shark fisherman who is now heads up Blue Ventures’ shark fishery monitoring project – “they’re terrified.”

So why do they do it? Surprisingly, it’s because the Vezo believe sharks are easier to catch during violent storms, explains Thomas. One hypothesis is that blinded by turbidity, hammerheads and guitarfish fail to see the net before it’s too late, and become hopelessly entangled. Tuna and other large pelagic species of fish are also more likely to be trapped in the nets when visibility is poor, and the smell of their blood attracts sharks (Sharks are incredibly sensitive to the smell of blood: it is said that they can detect the equivalent of one teaspoonful in an Olympic sized swimming pool).

Could sharks such as this (blacktip reef shark) be just a memory soon in Madagascar?

Despite the dangers of shark fishing in a cyclone, it certainly pays off: shark fins fetch up to $50 per kilogram, a seventh of the annual income of fishermen in these parts. Ratsimba, a fisherman from Andavadoaka, has caught seven sharks this week. “One for every day,” he jokes. Yet the plight of sharks in Madagascar is no laughing matter: exports of shark fin plummeted from almost 50 metric tons in 1992 to around 15 metric tons in 2003 — and according to Blue Ventures’ own research, over 1300 sharks were caught along a 50 km stretch of coast in Velondriake between 2006 and 2007.

Such overfishing of sharks can have unpredictable and catastrophic impacts on marine ecosystems. Sharks consume rays, skates and smaller sharks, and when their populations crash, the abundance of their prey rockets. A study published in Science in 2007 found that a decline in the abundance of eleven species of shark in the coastal, northwest Atlantic led to an explosion of cownose rays, which feed on scallops. As a result of the explosion, a century-old scallop industry in the region died out (Ransom A. Myers, et al., 2007, Science 315, 1846).

Fishermen rely on catching sharks like this hammerhead as a large of their income

The good news is that marine reserves can reverse the decline, while providing economic benefits to local fishing communities. A protected area in Mexico that is no bigger than Manhattan, and was established in 1995, saw a tenfold increase in shark biomass between 1999 and 2009 (Galland, G. et al., 2011, Coral Reefs 30, 215). Despite just 35 per cent of the reserve being ‘no take,’ very little fishing takes place because many locals have realised that working as an eco-tourism guide is far more lucrative than fishing.

If such a small reserve can have such a large impact on shark abundance, then imagine what Velondriake could accomplish…

Please use this link to see a video by Jon Slayer which documents the Connecting Classrooms participants trip to a baobab forest. This film highlights the importance of activities like this in youth centred conservation.

Please do check our website  and Vimeo page regularly for updates and the latest videos from Madagascar & Belize.

“I was free diving in the seagrass meadow, looking for Murex shells,” he explained. “I looked up and there was a huge pig-like animal snuffling in the sand, right next to me.” He had never seen anything like it, he added. Afterwards, the fisherman came home, mentioned the bizarre creature to his wife, and fell asleep. “Someone must have overheard me and got the story wrong, but it’s not my fault,” he pointed out.

What the fisherman might have seen was a dugong, otherwise known as a sea cow. Dugongs are the only herbivorous, truly marine mammal in the world. They can put away as much as 40 kilos of seagrass every day, rooting up the rhizomes that lie beneath the sand with sharp incisors. They are only found in the calm waters of lagoons and bays, and are prisoners of their sluggish metabolism, unable to generate enough heat to colonise the cool waters found outside the tropics. According to village elders, dugongs used to be common in the seagrass meadows south of Andavadoaka. In fact, the name of a nearby village in the Bay of Assassins, Lamboara, means “dugong” in the local language, Vezo (“lambo” means pig, “hara” coral). Now, however, they are now extremely rare – so rare, in fact, that even experienced fishermen no longer recognize them. The decline is partly due to hunting, but also because the dugong’s primary habitat, seagrass, is under threat. The world’s seagrass meadows are shrinking at an unprecedented rate: between 1980 and 2006, seagrass meadows disappeared at a rate of 7 per cent of their total global area per year, an annual loss of 110 km2 and 14 per cent of all seagrass species are at an elevated risk of extinction (Short et al., 2011).

Still, it’s wonderful to know that there might be some hope for dugongs in Velondriake.

In September 2011, Velondriake began producing a bi-monthly radio show in partnership with Blue Ventures, called Feom’Bezo (The Voice of the Vezo), sharing news from across its array of projects.

In episode 7, the radio show gets the community excited for the upcoming Teariake festival in Morombe.

Teariake (Love the Sea) is a new community conservation organisation, based just north of Velondriake, that the Velondriake Association has been helping to train during its beginning stages. Its new locally-managed marine reserve is in place, and the community is ready to celebrate!

Plus Joeline talks about the recent Saturday Schools activities, where the kids have been making art from beach rubbish, and Hery talks about what it means to be a new Junior Reporter, using film to inspire other youth to get involved in conservation.

Listen to or download the radio show podcasts here

Finally, Valerio, a young local musician and president of the Aloalo youth environmental club, talks about what motivates him and the other students in his music group to write songs about protecting the environment.

BV Scholar Profile – Valerio

Does anyone remember the cartoon movie Ferngully: the Last Rainforest?  I’ll never forget watching it as a child, and starting to think about the disappearing forests on the other side of the American continent and its effects on our entire human community.  I remember hearing the song Men in Helicopters (by Adrien Belew – thanks daddy!) for the first time, a song that got me thinking about human overexploitation, disrespect and destruction of our natural resources.  And did anybody else watch Captain Planet every Saturday morning in the late 90s?  These are just some of the audiovisual influences that have helped guide me toward conservation and sustainable development in my personal philosophy and professional life, partly because they made it “cool” to my young mind.  Thank goodness for forward-thinking music and television producers, or my brain might have been totally fried by Animaniacs and Gem and the Holograms.

With the right images, sounds, and words, important messages stay with us forever.  Advertising and marketing execs know this all too well, and they invest billions of dollars in finding the colors, fonts, jingles, and slogans that will get us to buy their products.  Thankfully the ideas behind corporate marketing can be leveraged in “social marketing” as well – “selling” positive ideas to communities in order to help improve their lives and livelihoods.  And of course, the younger these ideas are adopted, the greater the impact.

Here in Velondriake, a community-managed marine conservation zone off the remote south coast of Madagascar, Blue Ventures has partnered with UNICEF in a new social marketing and educational outreach endeavor: engaging the region’s young people to promote conservation through different audiovisual technologies.  UNICEF has helped BV to establish a new Junior Reporters Club here in Velondriake, whose members are learning to use Flip Cams to document local conservation issues and activities, and sharing them with the wider youth community in inspirational ways.  In another complementary activity, known as Connecting Classrooms, students from around Velondriake’s 24 villages are engaging directly in issues facing their local marine environment, and learning to share stories of their environment and their community via the internet, even learning to create their own wiki pages on the UNICEF-moderated CC portal, www.connectingclassrooms.net, complete with photos, films, and sound bites from their environmental education activities.

We’re actively pairing our environmental education (EE) activities with opportunities to exhibit artistic and musical talent, most notably through the environmental song and poetry contest we held last month to launch this exciting partnership with UNICEF.

The winners of the song contest got to make their song, a catchy, hip tune called “Respect the Environment” (Hajao ty Tontolo Iaina), into a music video.  These kids – among them the leader of the local environmental youth club, members of Connecting Classrooms, and students sponsored by Blue Ventures through our schools scholarship program – are the future of conservation in Velondriake, and they know it.  They love it.  They are up to the challenge of engaging in sustainable natural resource management and all of the related issues – ensuring access to quality education, to health services, to family planning options, and the other elements of sustainable, healthy communities and ecosystems.  And with songs like “Respect the Environment”, they are helping to inspire the rest of the youth of Velondriake to do the same.

The “Respect the Environment” music video is now a part of Blue Ventures’ community EE outreach activities, especially our “Village Outreach Tour”, an EE roadshow that hosts EE films and lessons in 10 villages around Velondriake, on a monthly basis.  The song has made the youth of Velondriake the inspiration and envy of kids (and adults!) in Morombe, the center of the district, where our Velondriake management committee recently used the music video as part of their community outreach activities with their partner organization in Morombe.  And the music group has just written two more songs, to be recorded over the holidays!

We’re planning many more activities to showcase young talent in the name of conservation, through music, film, radio, and the internet – and focusing especially on how to share their dedication to conservation with the wider youth community, in southwest Madagascar and across the western Indian Ocean region.  Stay on the lookout for our LiveWithTheSea.org website, an exciting new online forum for youth-to-youth and community-to-community environmental education and conservation exchange!

And as an organisation, Blue Ventures and Velondriake are building our own capacity to produce high-quality, scalable, audio-visual materials in the region, and limit the need to outsource this work to the regional capital (a grueling 8 hour offroad car ride from Velondriake).  Radio shows, music videos, interactive educational audio…  these are all key ways to rapidly spread important conservation messages to target zones and populations, especially the youth.

Stay tuned for other exciting new videos & radio shows from Blue Ventures and Velondriake!

I didn’t know that clown fish could be so cocky, at least not outside their protective sea anemone. If I were a clown fish, I would be cocky only when snuggly tucked in among colourful, poisonous appendages. Are clown fish themselves poisonous? That would explain it, but I doubt it. And yet as I swim around this aquarium like reef, the ‘Nemo’ fish repeatedly accosts me – I swear one even tried to bite me.

I’m not complaining of course, it’s a great thrill to be in a place like this. I’ve worked in marine conservation for 5 years and never seen such underwater spectacles. Admittedly, however, I don’t spend much time in the water, especially not with my desk job in Toliara, which is miles from any good snorkelling opportunities. Regardless, this reef in Southern Kenya is different. It’s called the Kiruwito Marine Park; it’s a small near-shore lagoon four kilometres wide and maybe half a kilometre from shore to reef. The area has been protected by the local fishing communities for more than 6 years.

The guide tells us a story almost too good to be true. He says that 6 years ago, at this very spot, the reef was totally dead. Urchins ruled the area and sea cucumbers, indicator species of overfishing pressure, were nowhere to be seen. As Conservation Coordinator for Blue Ventures, this is exactly the kind of success story I want to hear and see. This is what gets me out of bed every morning – imagining that we’ll get to a point where the trend of habitat degradation not just stabilises, but turns around and bounces back. Despite my excitement, I couldn’t shake a bit of cynicism. “Really?” I said. “Listen, I work in marine conservation, I know how challenging these things can be. Are you sure this wasn’t a good site before it was protected? Wasn’t that why you chose it?”

“No, we chose this site because it was unproductive. We didn’t think we were giving up much. Trust me, I’ve been snorkelling here for years, this place is getting better and better.” The guide replied.

“Have the clown fish always been so aggressive?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind…”

Clownfish, too big for their boots?

Probing a bit further about their challenges and experiences, our guide and later the president of the Kiruwito association told me that some fisherman aren’t happy about keeping the area closed. Now that it’s full of fish, they want to open it back up. Right now they are in the minority but our guide worries that if hard times return, like the crisis surrounding the elections in 2010, that these fishers might win a majority or they might simply start poaching. Livelihoods diversification programmes are something that the community has been hoping for, for a long time but nothing substantial has yet to really materialise. Other challenges that they face are more of the garden-variety, developing state type where the government gives only sporadic support and the legal structure of the association& protected area is not totally clear.

After such a great experience at Kiruwito, I decided to visit another Kenyan Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA). I travelled south from Mombasa by bus for a few hours to Wasini Island, site of another long-standing community managed marine park. The president of Wasini’s Fisherman Association met me at the docks and took us on his friend’s small boat over to the community reserve. On my tiny handheld video camera I recorded as he spilled his guts about the years of struggle with local hotel owners, government officials, & migrant fishermen who use destructive fishing practices. It seems that either Kiruwito has had an especially easy experience, or perhaps my new guide was a bit more frank about the problems.

I jumped into the water expecting a marine reserve that had gone through a bit more wear and tear over the years than Kiruwito. My expectations were correct as this site showed more coral damage quite a few scraps of fishing lines and nets. Overall however, coral cover was good and probably due to the deeper depth of the site (10–15m compared to Kiruwito’s 1-4m) there were some much larger coral structures. The most interesting spot was the cement pile-ons of an old pier that sticks out over the reserve. These pile-ons were covered top to bottom with a variety of corals, with large fish circling around the base and smaller fish circling around in schools at the higher levels.

Unlike Kiruwito, this protected area had already been in good condition before it was protected. However, the president was quick to assure me that in the last few years, he had seen more and more large fish at the site. Something that he said was corroborated by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society who have been routinely monitoring the site with underwater surveys. Outside the reserve fish catches seem to be stabilising as well, although this can’t be directly attributed to the LMMA because on the other side of the island is a very large, government managed Marine Protected Area (MPA) which has also been closed for some time.

Returning to Madagascar, I’m encouraged by the LMMAs I visited in Kenya. I know that the two sites I went to were some of the best in Kenya – indeed that’s why I picked them. Therefore, the experiences I had there can’t be generalised to the state of the entire Kenyan coast, where most fishing communities do not, at present, actively manage their own resources. However, it is nice to get a taste of what things can look like further down the road.

In the communities where we work in Madagascar, it wasn’t feasible to set up permanent no-take-zones from the start. Resource dependence among the Vezo fisherman of the south-west is more pronounced and unlike Kenyan fisherman, no Vezo have motorized boats which would allow them to fish outside the lagoons. Instead, our first efforts went into environmental education and temporary no-take-zones for octopus. These worked very well and starting in 2009, communities started creating permanent no-take-zones. The results of these zones are just beginning to be seen. I’m very much looking forward to when in a few years time, these areas get even better. Even if they do start to fill up with angry clown fish!

Three years ago, on my first trip to Madagascar, I settled in for an exceptional adventure as I embarked on a pirogue (dugout outrigger canoe with a large square sail rig) to cruise up the west coast of the island from Andavadoaka to Morondava. My aim was to visit the fishing villages up the barrier reef that caught shark. I had seen a large shark being butchered amongst the huts of the community where I had been staying and was intrigued as to how they caught such a huge beast in their precarious looking vessels. More than that, I wanted to see the infrastructure of Blue Ventures’ shark monitoring program – that had only recently been initiated. Here, as in so many places around the globe, sharks are badly overfished as their fins are the most lucrative catch that a Vezo fisherman can make.

Shark Fins - the cash crop for Vezo fishermen

On that trip I saw how locally employed monitors were keeping track of the sharks pulled in on nets set a great distance offshore. Keeping track of what was out there and what was pulled in was a first step to figuring out the shark population and how it was being affected by this intense fishing pressure.

Now I’m returning and I can again delve into the practice and see how the studies of this part of the fishing industry are progressing. Whether shark have a future in these waters and whether it depends on the Vezo again taking the initiative as a community to sustain their resources in developing a strategy to keep the sharks in their sea healthy.

Living in close quarters aboard Nofy Be!

About Jon
Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, and son of an esteemed Marine Biologist, I got the ocean bug early. This passion has remained with me through a number of career diversions and finally surfaced into a career of its own when I left my last mainstream job in 2008. Since then I have been travelling the world filming beneath the waves trying to capture its beauty and magnificence as well as the issues and efforts that are under way to keep it this way.

This is my third trip to the west coast of Madagascar to see the great progress being made by the communities towards sustaining their marine resources. It is two and a half years since I was last in the area so I am excited to see what developments have occurred after my previous visit. I also look forward to being on this voyage to the Barren Islands of Maintirano at the edge of Vezo influence to see how the fringes of the community live and how they face the challenges that these remote, Barren Isles present them. It will be interesting, exciting and no doubt a beautiful and memorable journey and I am excited to be part of the team capturing and documenting this for the future.