Trying to save the oceans, one small grant at a time

by Karen Weintraub

In the vast areas of the planet covered by water, human activity threatens the survival of countless species.

There was a time, for example, when manta rays were tossed back, dead or alive, when they were accidentally trapped in fishermen's nets in places such as Sri Lanka. Now their dried gills are prized in China for treating everything from cancer to measles -without any proof that they are effective - and one of the sea's most majestic creatures is being fished nearly out of existence.

In Pakistan and India, the blind Indus River dolphin, one of the most endangered species, swims a shrinking stretch of water, trapped by development and dams.

And in Chile, fishermen who cannot afford to properly dispose of torn nets simply tip them into the sea, adding to the offshore trash that chokes seabirds and fish.

pollution threaten

Overfishing, habitat loss and pollution threaten species in so many places that research and conservation organisations cannot do all that is needed. So, with the aim of making a dent through small, targeted efforts, the New England Aquarium, which sits on Boston's downtown waterfront, has for 15 years awarded microgrants to projects across the globe.

The aquarium's Marine Conservation Action Fund has paid out $700,000 since 1999, supporting 122 projects in 40 countries on six continents. Elizabeth Stephenson, the fund's manager, calls these projects "stories of hope for the ocean."

The grants are modest. One researcher, Rohan Arthur, used his $6,700 payout from the fund to buy a "secondhand, beat-up compressor" to fill his scuba tanks. But the support allowed him to maintain his critical assessment of coral reefs in the Arabian Sea off the west coast of India.

Arthur, a senior scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation in Karnataka, India, said that in some ways, he preferred the scale of the New England Aquarium gifts.

"There's a lot to be said for large grants," Arthur said, but "often they're fairly limiting in what they allow you to do." Small grants, he said, offer more freedom, but can still be transformative. "They've been change points in the amount we've been able to engage in the ecology of these reefs."

The fund has also created a network of like-minded people. Researchers working on protecting similar species in different places have learned from one another by connecting through the program, Stephenson said. She often helps researchers apply for larger grants elsewhere. When grantees come to the US, she brings them to speak to audiences at the aquarium.

Stephenson says her small grants nourish a huge amount of work from researchers committed to protecting the oceans.

Some of the grantees have stared down bandits on her time. They've been attacked by biting sand flies. They've spent days seeking out old fishermen who hold the only memories of certain species and what precipitated their decline.

Blind dolphin

Gill Braulik, a dolphin expert based in Tanzania, used a $5,000 grant from the aquarium in 2005 to conduct the first assessment of cetaceans in Iran, at a time when few others would sponsor work in the politically isolated nation. "I don't think it would have happened with any other organisation," she said.

Braulik used a second grant in 2011 to teach Pakistani scientists to take over her research on a blind dolphin species that lives only in the Indus River. Scientists knew that the dolphins' numbers had declined since the 1870s, when their range stretched from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, 2,000 miles downstream. Now they are split into six populations by dams and limited to 20 percent of their former habitat, making it tough to keep track of them.

These animals, which can see only light and dark, went blind over the generations because vision was not needed in the river's muddy depths. They have long snouts, pinhole eyes and thin, spiky teeth. Organisers of the Asian Games rejected a request by conservationists to use a similar, now-extinct South Asian river dolphin as its mascot, because the dolphin was so unappealing. Braulik acknowledges that these dolphins look different from the camera-ready ones at SeaWorld. But "they are the coolest creatures," she said.

Braulik had twice led expeditions for Pakistani researchers down the Indus in wooden rowboats to count the dolphins. For a third trip, in 2011, a $6,000 aquarium grant allowed her to train the local researchers in complex survey methods and analysis. Now, two groups of local scientists have led the work. "They really don't need me anymore," she said.

Arthur said he turned to the Marine Conservation Action Fund to fill "funding-shaped holes" in his data. He had a grant to track coral reefs off the west coast of India beginning in 1998, but he missed four years when he could not afford to dive.

Collecting more complete data sets - and the aquarium's vote of confidence - may have helped Arthur win funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is now supporting his efforts to rebuild local knowledge about the reefs. He is documenting the knowledge local fishing communities have about the reefs.

One of the oldest local fishermen showed him how he travels through the archipelago without a compass, navigating from the reflection of the lagoon on the clouds. "If you just look at navigational systems, that in itself is a treasure trove of information," which is lost every time an old fisherman dies, Arthur said.

Even old recipes give a sense of what foods and resources were readily available in the area, Arthur said, but these were being lost with the aging population.

"When local communities are shown the value of these things, they take a lot of local pride," he said, citing one fishing community that imposed a ban on grouper during spawning season after the researchers educated them about the fish's spawning habits. "What lacks is the information."

Daniel Fernando, a marine biologist and associate director of the Manta Trust, a Britain-based charity, has been working to change fisheries management policies in Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines and Malaysia to protect manta rays and their smaller cousins, the mobula.

Fish market

He used an $8,000 grant from the New England Aquarium to conduct an additional year of fish market research - following the rays from sea to customer - to better understand how and why they were being caught and sold. Fernando, also a founder of Blue Resources, a marine research and conservation organisation based in Sri Lanka, hopes to discourage the manta's use in Chinese medicine, and to encourage US consumers to demand that the tuna they eat is fished by hand, rather than by nets that also trap rays. Hand-fishing is more expensive than deploying nets, Fernando concedes, but "you have to make a decision."

He added, "Do you want cheap tuna that's driving a species out of existence?"

Fishermen's nets were also a point of concern for a conservation effort in Chile. In small fishing villages there, a $6,000 aquarium grant helped a non-profit group install collection bins for torn nets that would probably have been thrown into the sea.

The charity, run by the founders of Bureo Skateboards, a California-based company, recycles the nylon nets to produce skateboards shaped like minnows. The villages receive some money back for projects.

The grant was out of the ordinary for the aquarium, because it focused on a novel engineering solution to marine debris rather than on a particular species or habitat.

But "having the structure we do and our willingness to take chances gives us great flexibility," Stephenson said. The project is now self-sustaining.

Ben Kneppers, a Bureo founder, said he hoped the story of the skateboards might inspire the next generation of marine conservationists, by showing young people "that there are solutions to what seem to be overwhelming problems."

- New York Times News Service