Sometime towards the end of 2000, I was approached by a colleague. He had set up a research base in the Andamans, and asked if I would be interested in working there. There was nothing wildly exciting in my life then, so why not? I was to spend the next two and a half years there.
The Andamans, together with Northeast India, were the last real frontier for the wildlife biologist in India. They are, even to this day, very largely unexplored in terms of their flora and fauna. That holy grail of biology, discovering a new species, is still possible in these places. Access and logistical problems make it not very easy to work there. A certain macho element creeps in also: how many days one spent with malaria, how one’s boat almost sank, how one encountered armed and unfriendly poachers, how one got mistaken for a spy…The organization I was involved with turned out to be the classic NGO gone wrong. All the boss’s latent insecurities were aroused by having scientists present, and this manifested itself in various antisocial behaviour patterns, making work there difficult. Students were hired for qualities other than academic, and fired at whim. However, the less said the better.
Early on, I visited Great Nicobar again. Nothing much seemed to have changed, and again there was the sensation of going back a few centuries. This time it was on a big ship — the MV Nicobar — going to Chennai, which touched Car Nicobar briefly. The harbour in Car Nicobar had changed from Malacca on the east side to Tee Top on the west side now; it was to change again within a year to Mus, on the northernmost tip of the island, with the breakwater being built there for the harbour causing the most horrendous erosion.
The next port of call was Nancowry. There were incredibly choppy seas, and a swell that was higher than a metre. Unloading onto pontoons happened without mishap, in spite of the rapidly failing light. I was reminded of getting onto a pontoon at a jetty near Mumbai, where a 20 cm swell caused panic and consternation among the disembarking passengers! One of the passengers who got on turned out to be Rasheed Yusuf, who was the captain of Champin, a Nicobari village in the Nancowry group. He brought us up to date on the various shenanigans going on in the Nicobars. Illegal settlers had usurped businesses there, and middlemen were squeezing them on copra prices. Copra was the main export from the Nicobars, and in theory there was both a minimum support price and a tribal cooperative to buy copra. In practice, though, the middlemen ruled.
Great Nicobar turned out to be another horrific landing, disembarking on a pontoon way out at sea. Later in the day, the assistant we had with us, Agu, moved to ‘41’ or Galathea beach, 41 kilometres by road south of Campbell Bay. This is where leatherback sea turtles came to nest, and this was probably the only large site for nesting leatherbacks left within Indian territory. Agu was in the news a few years later: after the December 2004 tsunami he went missing for fifteen days before reaching the nearest village, with multiple fractures. He was accompanied by Shreyas Krishnan, another Pondicherry University graduate. Shreyas was to spend the next several months—from mid-October 2000 to end of April 2001— marking sea turtles, in order to study their nesting patterns, and in the process create a new record for the maximum length of stay by a biologist in the Nicobars.
Leatherbacks are an astonishing sight, and my first encounter with them on this beach gave me goosepimples. They are over 2 metres long, and haul themselves slowly and painfully out of the sea to lay eggs above the high tide line. This involves digging a deep pit, laying dozens of eggs in it, covering up the eggs with sand, and then making their way back to the sea, even more slowly and painfully. During this process, military officers found it hilarious to ride them. Nowadays this practice is frowned upon. Feral dogs also try to bite off their flippers, and this practice continues in the absence of any control of these dogs.
During the egg-laying process, the turtle goes into a trance, allowing measurements to be taken of its length and width. A tiny needle with a barcode on it is injected into a flipper. The next time the turtle is encountered by a biologist, the barcode can be read with a barcode reader, and this constitutes an individual identification for the turtle. This simple device has enabled us to learn a lot about the biology of these animals.
They lay up to seven times a season. They then disappear to sea, for four years at a time, before they reappear to lay eggs. The eggs and young ones do not have an easy life. Feral dogs and monitor lizards enjoy digging up the eggs and eating them. If they survive and hatch, the journey to the ocean is a perilous one, with every predator, and even supposed non-predators like the crab-eating macaque, preying on the hatchlings. For every thousand eggs laid, it’s estimated that one hatchling reaches the sea.
The odds have improved now because the forest department digs up the eggs as soon as they are laid, and transfers them to a nursery, which ensures protection from dogs and other predators. They are then guarded on their way to the sea. In practice, while this might seem a wonderful idea, it has been found that the sex of the turtles is determined by the temperature of the sand the egg is buried in. We don’t know too much about this, and might be protecting and producing thousands of male turtles. Obviously more research is needed, but in the meantime there’s no option but to protect the eggs as much as possible.
Galathea had two mammals in abundance, both endemic to the Nicobars. One was the crab-eating macaque. The earlier study had never been completed, and a new census had just been done. While this census didn’t do much more than look at groups of monkeys along the two roads on Great Nicobar, it became obvious that the monkeys were not particularly rare. They had become a problem with the settlers north of Galathea, since they ate coconuts. The introduction of coconut plantations had probably even led to an increase in the monkey population, because of the rich new food source that was created. Their main food source was the fruit of the Pandanus trees that lined the coast. The Pandanus was also a major food staple for the Shompen tribals in Great Nicobar, and the settlements along the coast by people from the mainland had largely cleared the coastal forests in which Pandanus was found. The tree was wiped out in large areas after the tsunami and I don’t know how well it has regenerated now.
The other animal looked like a rat. It was actually a tree shrew, which was until recently considered a primate and closely related to us. What it’s considered related to now, I don’t know, because taxonomists are prone to change their minds without notice. Tree shrews would follow me around in the forest, alarm calling all the time.
There was also a very peculiar bird. These were called megapodes. They were related to chickens and also looked like them. Female megapodes create great mounds of rotting vegetation by scratching leaves together. These mounds are sometimes several metres in diameter. They lay their eggs on this mound, and cover them with leaves. They periodically check the eggs. Having a temperature sensitive beak, they probe the vegetation near the eggs. If this is too warm, they remove leaves; if too cold they add leaves. They are thus spared the duties of incubation.
My first encounter with a megapode was the sight of what looked like a chicken flying away from me, cackling hysterically. It then sat on a branch of a tree, facing away from me. It peered around the trunk of the tree at me. Any idea it might have had of hiding was foiled because it kept cackling continuously.
These birds had no serious predators until humans came here. They evolved to be extremely trusting. They come towards you when you imitate their cackle. The Nicobari tribals have realized this, and hunt them with air rifles. As per records, up to twenty birds have been hunted by one individual in an evening.
Excerpted with permission from Running Away From Elephants by Rauf Ali, published by Speaking Tiger, 2018. Pages: 224. Price: Rs 499.
About the contributor
