Former hunters work to protect manatees in Colombia – 01/20/2024 – Environment

When fishermen Álvaro Fabra and Enrique Rivas were young, they hunted manatees in the Magdalena River. Today, they are guardians of this species and ask for help via WhatsApp to save it from extinction in Colombia.

The space for these animals to swim is narrowing due to droughts caused by climate change, the expansion of the agricultural frontier and pollution in the country’s longest river, which, over 1,540 km, connects the central region to the Caribbean Sea.

In a flooded area in Barrancabermeja, in the northeast of the country, Álvaro Fabra, 53, sails in search of manatees. Its role is crucial to monitor the behavior of the species and assist environmental organizations in calculating the number of individuals.

Although they can reach 3.5 meters and weigh up to 600 kilos in adulthood, the turbidity of the muddy water there makes it difficult to see them. For this same reason, monitoring and care have become challenging in Colombia, which does not have clear data on the population of these animals.

The fisherman remembers that his ancestors used to kill many manatees in one day. “When I was very young, my grandparents, my father, they killed them. They killed three or four a day,” he says.

But those were different times. Transformed into a defender of the species, he now states that this “culture” needs to be eliminated.

But if hunting is a thing of the past, new threats mean that manatees become stranded when the water level drops. The NGO WCS Colombia estimates that, between 2010 and 2023, there were 40 manatee “stranding” incidents in the Middle Magdalena region, in which 31 of them died.

The same occurs in other regions close to the Caribbean, where these herbivores —which are also present in Brazil, Mexico, Panama and Belize— play a fundamental role in preventing sedimentation.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has included them on the red list of threatened species and estimates that there are only 2,500 adults left in the world.

Out of the water, manatees barely show their heads to feed on vegetation, rarely leaving their front fins visible. But when rivers dry up, they become immobile.

Experts point out that in the Magdalena River they are victims of climate change that dries out flooded areas and the presence of oil palm plantations nearby, which require a large amount of water.

Help via WhatsApp

A distress call on WhatsApp can save these animals’ lives when they become paralyzed. The “stranding network” is a space where the community can contribute to the protection of the species, with the support of WCS, other organizations, experts and fishermen.

Researchers estimate that, by 2023, around a dozen of them had died, in part because residents were unclear about how to act.

“They were found dead, injured, sick”, laments María Antonia Espitia, wildlife coordinator in the Middle Magdalena region of the WCS.

She describes the manatee as an “orphan” animal, as it is “a species that is rarely seen, difficult to find.”

There are puppies that lost their mother and had to move on, and in rehabilitation centers, you can see some surviving on bottle feeding.

“Take care of them, because it is a species that is heading towards extinction. They are no longer found, there are few places where they exist”, implores Enrique Rivas, 50, who has also been a fisherman all his life and considers himself a guardian of the species.

Manatees are essential for navigating the river and finding fish, he says. “They protect the river, as they channel it. Where there are these animals, the river almost never dries up,” he explains.

Nothing is easy for the species. Among its enemies are also the proliferation of buffaloes in a region with a tradition of cattle ranching and changes in habitat due to invasive species — such as the hippos that belonged to drug trafficking boss Pablo Escobar and have bred uncontrollably in the Magdalena since his death in 1993.