All morning, and later that afternoon, groups of dolphins surrounded our boat, rushing to us as if to embrace, and then swam and dove and returned again—a flirting game of hide-and-seek. Of course, we lost every time. Dianne never got a photo; I never got a “hit” on the telemetry. Yet we felt as if the waters had opened to us—and then swallowed us whole.
One of the dolphins, a dark gray one, surfaced so close to our boat I could have touched her. She opened the top of her head to us. I stared down her blowhole, an intimate, mysterious abyss of life, and inhaled her moist breath.
We were supposed to meet up with Miriam and Andrea at 11 A.M. at Boca the next day. The morning of the meeting, we searched again with the telemetry; again, though we found many dolphins, none answered my questing antenna with its electronic kiss.
Now we waited at Joaquim’s floating house, but at 1 P.M. there was still no sign of Miriam and Andrea. Had we mixed up the time or place of the meeting? Had our friends met with trouble? Had they forgotten us? Of course, there was no way for us to know. We waited, afloat in the middle of nowhere, feeling isolated and cut off.
At 1:40, a speedboat arrived. It was Ronis. “You know Princess Diana?” he asked. “She die,” he announced. “Have cigarette?”
Dianne gave him a Newport in exchange for this news, and, his English momentarily exhausted, he departed.
Miriam and Andrea arrived on the big houseboat, the Uakari, sometime after two. They had a list of errands to accomplish before we could head north to Jarauá: they had to deliver a new gas-powered refrigerator to Ronis and Barbara; they had to rescue a floating telemetry tower, which had run aground. On the way, Dianne and Andrea, Miriam and I sat on the bright yellow roof of the Uakari. Miriam and I swapped the telemetry equipment, monitoring the channels for dolphins and manatees.
“We used to think the pink dolphins migrated, and the manatees didn’t,” Miriam told us as I held the antenna aloft on a pole, to increase its range. “But the manatees are the migrants, and the travel they do turns out to be pretty impressive.”
As Dianne and I scanned for dolphins, Miriam told us about her manatees. She’d begun her telemetry project in 1994, and by now had attached radio transmitters to six of them, by means of a belt around their paddle-shaped tails. She discovered that Mamirauá’s manatees migrate more than sixty miles out of the reserve. They begin to leave the area as the dry season begins—they were moving now. But they don’t leave en masse. Manatees are basically solitary animals, and when they migrate, they leave alone, at different times, choosing different routes to different places. An individual may even take a different route each season; one of her study animals, a male named Zé Taboca, spent one dry season in the Solimões, and stayed another dry season at Lake Mamirauá. “It’s intriguing,” Miriam said. “They spend six months at the headwaters of the Solimões, and then two months in the busy part of the river, with all those fishermen and the dangerous boat traffic, and they are generally thought to be very shy.” How they know when to leave, how they decide where to go, and what they do when they get there, no one yet knows. But they have their reasons, and they must be good ones. “Two weeks ago, when we were tracking them, the water was going down, and then suddenly, the water went up —and the manatees moved. The manatees knew before the people knew,” Miriam said.
Yet people generally don’t consider manatees very bright. “People say they are cretinoso ,” Miriam told us, shaking her head, “just because they are slow.”
Researchers who have examined the brains of manatees long ago decided the big, gentle animals were dumb. The brain is relatively small for its body size, and the surface is very smooth. Large, wrinkled brains are associated with thought—although no one actually claims to know why this should be, since, as we know from electronics, anything can be miniaturized. “Scientists tend to find what they expect,” Miriam said. But she knew a University of Florida researcher, Robert Keep, who looked at manatee brains a different way: he notes that the percentage of the manatee’s brain devoted to cerebral cortex—the portion that, in humans, is associated with thinking—is relatively high. It’s comparable, in fact, to the brains of primates, and a markedly greater proportion of the manatee’s brain is devoted to cerebral cortex than in animals like bats.
“To find all those lakes and creeks,” Miriam said as we scanned for our study animals, “to know when the water level will go down and they will have to leave, manatees must be far more intelligent than people think.” At Mamirauá, she said, the manatees are wary. “It’s hard to catch them. The fishermen tell me, you can’t blink, you can’t breathe—they slink away.” Miriam is convinced they have learned to avoid people, becoming increasingly nocturnal, just as some researchers believe beavers have done in America during this century, in response to hunters. No one would have expected that of manatees—but in Mamirauá, a lens into the Amazon itself, reality seldom conforms to expectation.
“The theories we have for many subjects are not completely true,” Andrea added thoughtfully, continuing the conversation as we handed over the telemetry to Miriam. Last year, for instance, during the dry season, Andrea had witnessed an event undescribed in the scientific literature, which nobody would have believed.
Andrea, too, was a maverick. A sturdy woman of thirty with long black hair and pillowy lips, to the dismay of her family she saw forestry as her calling, and chose the fantastically complex mechanics of seed dispersal in the flooded forest as the subject of her master’s thesis. The project required that she sit motionless beneath fruit trees for ten hours a day, ten to fifteen days at a stretch, observing who eats the ripe fruits as they fall into the water. One day, she was watching a group of brown capuchin monkeys at the side of a river at Jarauá. To her great surprise, she saw they were grabbing fish out of the water with their hands! Most primatologists believe New World monkeys don’t eat fish, except for an occasional scavenged meal. No one had recorded monkeys actively fishing for them.
“That, I think, is why Mamirauá is special,” Andrea continued earnestly. “Here we are always discovering things that we thought cannot happen—but here it can happen.”
What were some other examples? I was surprised by Andrea’s answer: “In the past,” she said, “we thought that in a reserve you cannot have people living in it. But even we don’t know that it’s possible even now. The challenge is to discover this.”
Here, where so many impossibilities come true, she and Miriam, Márcio and Ronis, are hoping for a new miracle: that today, people can rediscover how to live in a flooded forest without destroying it. And beyond that, they are hoping that these people will actively protect it.
As we traveled, scanning for botos and manatees, we passed their settlements. As at Tamshiyacu, the people, here called caboclos, come from mixed ancestry, with both Indian and Portuguese blood. They live simply. Most houses are wooden, with tin roofs, and only three rooms, lit by kerosene. Some families live on floating houses, but most homes are built on stilts. If the waters rise too high, the family simply raises the floor. Those who have cattle or pigs build for them floating pens called marimbas, or else they bring the animals inside the house with them. Usually, the entire family—including, on average, five children—sleeps in one bedroom. The average family income here is $900 a year, which people use mainly to buy salt, sugar, cooking oil, powdered milk, and soap. But not a few now have televisions, powered sporadically by village generators or by solar panels, bringing them the news of slain princesses, of foreign wars, of fancy clothes and shiny new appliances.
These are the people traditional conservationists consider the problem. The first step in establishing a new reserve is usually to move the people out, at least into border or buffer zones. But again, Mamirauá defies convention. The reserve’s founders hope instead that these people will serve as the forest’s guardians.
Yet, despite federal laws prohibiting it, the people hunt manatees here. They hunt and eat endangered turtles. They fish in the reserve’s water
ways. They cut its timber. All of these activities are allowed under Mamirauá’s management plan. For, the reasoning goes, if the people understand Mamirauá’s riches are their own, they can protect this vast ocean of forest—its manatees, its dolphins, its fish, turtles, and timber—better than federal guards.
The Brazilian government had stationed two rangers to patrol Mamirauá’s vast waterways—better coverage than in most Brazilian parks, Miriam told us, which average one ranger per 1,415 square miles. But the guards were powerless to stop the commercial fishing fleets that streamed in from as far away as Manaus and even Colombia. In a single season, outside fishermen had stripped one of the lakes of eighty tons of fish—and threw away all the catch but the tambaqui, wasting enough fish to have fed one-third of Mamirauá’s residents for a year.
Enraged local residents, with the help of Mamirauá planners, created community patrols to evict the trespassers. In the first year of community surveillance, 1993, the amount of fish sold in Tefé taken from the reserve was cut in half. According to a 1996 report by the Overseas Development Administration, which helped fund the Project, “the invasion of lakes by fishermen from Manaus and Manacapuru, before very extensive, practically disappeared. The surveillance of these lakes, under the responsibility of the communities, has already proven to be effective.”
Next, General Assemblies, in which representatives of all fifty-three of Mamirauá’s settlements convened, developed a zoning scheme for Mamirauá’s lakes. Some are assigned strict protection; others are reserved for subsistence fishing; and still others allow commercial fishing by community members. Logging is similarly restricted. No tree-cutting is allowed along the elongated levee banks known as restingas, which support the tallest trees. No logging is allowed except during the wet season, when the trees can be more easily taken out, lifted by the water, leaving fewer scars on the land. Lumbering areas are divided into sectors, where cutting is permitted only every thirty years. The people are working on an agroforestry program, similar to the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve’s.
But what the community agrees to do and what actually happens are not always the same. That was why we were traveling to Jarauá: Andrea needed to talk with the woodcutters there, to confirm that she had counted every log cut, catalogued every species. It is extremely important that researchers be able to accurately document what is really happening, Andrea stressed—and this demands that people trust her. “In 1993, when we were beginning the research, they were very afraid to talk with us,” she explained. “They thought it was a vigilance.” Rumors were rampant: some people suspected the researchers were secret police financed by the government to spy upon and punish them; others believed the scientists were conniving to sell all the fishes to Great Britain. Many feared, not unreasonably, that the researchers would use their data to outlaw all logging in the reserve. And many of Mamirauá’s residents could not survive without it, which Andrea both understands and respects.
“There is a period of the year—May, June, July—that all the land is flooded so they can’t plant,” she explained. “Fishing is difficult because the fish are distributed into the forest. Logging is an important economic activity. So we are looking to find a way to let them continue this important activity.”
The loggers cut with axes—chainsaws are only for the richest villagers. “The villagers dream with chainsaws,” she said. To cut a tree with a chainsaw, and not an ax, would be, for most of the people here, an unimaginable luxury. But axes alone still kill forests. They felled New England’s, after all. Here in Mamirauá, the large kapok tree was once highly sought-after for plywood, since it grows so big—“a huge tree, one of the biggest,” Andrea told us. “But now, each year it’s harder to find.
“When you talk with older people, they tell stories of big turtles and big pirarucu they used to see, and don’t see anymore. They are worried about that, too, as we are. But it’s not easy . . .”
The Project has attracted international interest and generous funding. New York’s Wildlife Conservation Society funded the reserve’s establishment with $4.3 million in 1980; it is now also supported by respected organizations including Conservation International; World Wide Fund for Nature; the Rainforest Alliance; Friends of the Earth. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge send some of their finest scientists here. Mamirauá was proposed as a biosphere reserve under UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program (and listed as such in 2002). And as the first sustainable development reserve in Brazil, Mamirauá provides the legal framework for the creation of similar reserves throughout the Amazon. “Other people are watching us,” Miriam had told a visiting reporter for Science in 1994. “If it works, some of these techniques will be copied.”
But still, many are skeptical. Michael Goulding spoke to the same Science reporter as did Miriam. He regretfully predicted that local people would eventually overfish and overlog, just as the outsiders did. For human greed does not always lust after oil and gold and diamonds; sometimes greed merely whines for a chainsaw. Sometimes it only wants a television, or a motor for the canoe, or a little extra meat to flavor the manioc. Greed urges good people to take just one more manatee out of season, or just a few more logs than the neighbors have harvested. And for us, with the produce of the globe in our markets and the splendor of the nations beamed to our computer screens, it seems monstrously arrogant to blame them.
“When we see a manatee, and think how long it spends to become an adult, we wonder how can they kill something so beautiful?” Andrea said. “But when you live here and spend days and days eating just one kind of food, you begin to understand.
“The people here, they like to live here. But in their minds, all the world is like this, you see.”
We arrived at Jarauá the following day at noon. Jarauá is a little village of floating houses with potted gardens and stilt-legged shacks. In one of them, a green mealy parrot perched in a window and a satellite dish squatted on the roof. Gooselike horned screamers, who issue their unearthly calls all day, hoisted their corpulent bodies from the water and flew ponderously to the tops of trees, gulping “Hoop! Hoop! Yoik-Yoik- Yoik!” A shimmer of parakeets twinkled across the sky, and the sun beat down like a hammer on a sheet of gold.
Only a half day remained until I would have to give the telemetry back to Miriam. We had seen many dolphins in the past two days, but none bore radio tags. Above a town called Pirarará, near a grassy area where Miriam often sees manatees, we had stopped to watch two botos fishing together, and also saw six tucuxis. Three botos had come to watch us as we’d stopped to tow an errant floating tower back to the middle of the river, and one had come to observe us delivering Ronis’s refrigerator, spy-hopping at a distance of about thirty yards. At a crossroads of rivers, where small fish skimmed the surface, we had seen five botos together. Most of the sightings, though, were single botos spotted in shallower waters; the tucuxis preferred the deeper channels. Traveling at the Uakari ’s stately six miles per hour, we had counted what we thought may have been thirty different botos since we’d left Boca. In the silence of the telemetry, though, I read a lesson: in the Amazon, you never get the answer you expect.
Andrea and Dianne took the speedboat downriver to talk with villagers. Miriam and I debarked to visit the turtle researcher Augusto Teran in his dockside lab. A small, passionate Peruvian, he was studying the freshwater turtles here for his doctoral thesis. Miriam translated as he told us in Portuguese that he had captured and marked fifty-two turtles the night before in his nets. He sets the nets across the channel, at the deepest point, so they don’t catch caimans. For the turtles’ safety, he checks his nets every four hours—the reptiles can go without oxygen for six hours, but the main danger is piranhas. Enthusiastically, his dark eyes aglow, he showed us the shells of the six species found here: the largest are the three Podocnemis species, who tuck the neck sideways beneath the shell, like the one Gary and I had bought from Don Jorge.
The biggest shell was, for a freshwater turtle, enormous
: the largest species, Podocnemis expansa, known here as tartaruga da Amazônia, can grow a shell thirty-five inches long. They eat leaves, fruit, and seeds, hunt fish, shrimp, and crabs, and scavenge dead fish, Augusto explained. Augusto showed us the shells of the two smaller species, Podocnemis unifilis, known locally as tracajá, and Podocnemis sextuberculata, or iaçá. There are also three other kinds of turtles: the land tortoise known as jabuti, the freshwater perema, and the weird, side-necked matamatá, which hunts underwater motionless with open jaws, waving a fleshy protuberance on the tongue to lure fish. But Augusto’s primary focus is the Podocnemis species.
He explained his work: Once Augusto captures a new turtle, he measures it, bores a hole in the back of the shell, and affixes a small yellow plastic tag with a number. The tiniest turtles are too small for tags, so he inserts a minute electronic marker under the tail. From this research he has been able to determine the rate at which they grow: one he caught in January then weighed 10.5 ounces, and by September it had grown to weigh 15.5 ounces. When locals catch his tagged turtles, they bring them to him so he can record their growth; and then, of course, he must let the fishermen take the turtles back home, where they will be cooked and eaten. Otherwise, the people would never bring them in.
This had been the fate of all the animals whose empty shells we now beheld—a fate that now threatened their existence. The biggest Podocnemis, the tartaruga da Amazônia, has been nearly hunted to extinction in Mamirauá, Augusto told me. “So the people turned to the next-largest species,” he said, the tracajá. Now that species has been decimated to the point that people are hunting the little iaçá—and now they are mainly catching only the juveniles. “The people are wild for turtle meat,” he said.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 21