by Cahill, Tim
Dr. Lucas complained that "several giant clam circles, which I understand were established with Dr. Chesher's involvement, resulted in the clams being poached. If there has only been a slight recruitment [increase in baby clams], if any, as a result of the surviving giant clam circle, the net result of Dr. Chesher's efforts so far may be that there are fewer giant clams. . . .
"My concern here is accurate reporting," Lucas wrote, and went on to point out "another misleading aspect" of the Earthwatch article. "The species pictured in the photograph . . . has not been reported from Tonga. It is Tridacna gigas and this species is much larger than the species that occur in Tonga."
I asked a few of the Earthwatch volunteers if the letter wasn't a bit disheartening. They each had shelled out a lot of money to bring these clams back from the brink of extinction, and here was Dr. Lucas, a man who really ought to know, suggesting that they were getting bamboozled by a charlatan, a fraud preying on their demonstrably good hearts.
No one was upset by the letter, and in point of fact Chesher had given it to them along with a stack of scientific reports and general articles on giant clams. The volunteers were convinced that their work was both important and successful.
"We're finding juvenile derasa" one woman said. "Lots of them."
"Okay," I said, "but what about this charge that Chesher's faking pictures?"
There was some general laugher.
"That clam's still here. It's out in the circle at Falevai," someone said. There were, I was shown, a number of easily identifiable differences between T. gigas and T. derasa. See for yourself, the volunteers said.
Which is what I decided to do.
When we first came here," Richard Chesher said, "the Tongan attitude was essentially that God put the creatures there on the reef and that people could go and take what they wanted and God would replace it."
It was an easy way to think of the sea. It was faka tonga.
We were sitting on Chesher's boat, the Moira, a forty-four-foot cutter anchored just off the island of Vava'u. Chesher, an engaging and tireless talker, was talking clams.
As fishermen began to avail themselves of certain technologies — outboard motors, diving equipment, reef-walking shoes—the resources had dwindled. "So the attitude was," Chesher said, "if I don't take it, the next guy will. As a result of this, the giant clams rarely get to a size where they are breeding females."
Chesher, an American, had been sailing around the Pacific since 1969, working on various environmental and scientific programs. The Moira was a research vessel, sure, he said, but that didn't mean he and Frederica Lesne (known as Captain Freddie) couldn't anchor in some private cover and swim naked with the dolphins. And, looking back on it, the time they had to outrun pirates off the Chinese coast made a good story. Chesher's tales— lots of them—involve that kind of rollicking adventure. He seems to be a man who likes a challenge, and some of his campaigns have been political as well as scientific. Several years ago, tor
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instance, he spearheaded a successful effort to end dolphin shows in part of Australia. The media were helpful, and Chesher spoke out on the subject at many public meetings—at which he was often introduced, to his embarrassment, as "the controversial Dr. Chesher."
A Ph.D. marine biologist and a former Harvard professor, Chesher refuses to collect and dissect animals for study. Oh, he dissected his share of marine life on the path to his doctorate. And sure, he learned in the process. But there came a time when he began to see the dissection as a sort of science at odds with his sense of the sea. Freddie helped him out a little on that. Not being a Ph.D. marine biologist, she didn't understand why you had to kill something to study it. Every time Rick tried to explain what he was doing, his words rang hollow. So he simply quit killing animals in order to save them. It was, in a way, a spiritual decision.
Many of the projects Chesher has been involved in have had to do with the conservation of life, the future health of the sea. The more he thought about programs and the waste often involved in aid and funding, the more he realized he needed a formula to evaluate the success of an environmental project. That formula seemed self-evident: "A successful environmental program is one that alters the behavior of the people in such a way that you have measurable improvement in the flora and fauna."
Altering the behavior of the people: not something ordinarily taught in marine biology. Chesher was a scientist, but, especially in developing countries, he saw no way to separate biology and sociology.
In the South Pacific the traditional measure for success of aid programs is a report at the end of a workshop. It's paper. But in Tonga the government had sponsored an environmental-awareness week since 1984. During that week the islands were cleaned up and trees were planted. It met Chesher's definition.
A Tongan official in the Ministry of Lands, Survey, and Natural Resources, however, fretted that while much was being done for the land, nothing was being done for the sea. Did Chesher have any ideas?
Indeed he did. Once, in the Solomon Islands, he had come across a place where villagers kept large concentrations of mature, breeding giant clams. 'They went out to get the clams in calm weather," said Chesher, "then put them near the village. When the wind kicked up, they had these clams as an emergency food supply. But what happened was, over the years, having all these large adults in close proximity to one another, there were so many small ones everywhere that the people never had to touch the big ones."
Something like that, Dr. Chesher suggested, might work in Tonga. No one else thought it would. People believed that big tasty clams placed in close proximity to villages would be promptly eaten. Indeed, in nearby American Samoa, the principal cause of "clam mortality" in a mariculture program was theft. The Tongan official himself was skeptical.
"Our goal," Chesher said, "was to change the cultural behavior of the people and leave. Walk away. Leave a big population of giant clams sitting in shallow water protected by the will of the community."
"Community" is the operative word. The government couldn't do it; individuals couldn't do it. The clams could be protected only by the will of the community.
It was decided that there would be a contest in the Vava'u island group. Divers from each island would go out and get clams, and local businesses would pay market value for them, plus small cash prizes for the fishermen who brought back the most T. derasa. "That meant," Chesher said, "that when they came in, the whole community bought the clams, and they belonged to everyone."
There were so few clams near the populated islands that the fishermen had to travel hours to scour far outlying reefs. Meanwhile, Chesher and several groups of Earthwatch volunteers were doing baseline studies, counting the number of clams to be found in waters around the near islands. Only four adult T. derasa were found in seven months of surveys. And not a single juvenile.
In January 1988 some fifty big T. derasa were arranged in the first community circles, just off the shores of Falevai. Twenty
more adult clams were added later. Chesher, with help from the Tongan government, launched a cultural offensive. There were newspaper articles about the importance of clam brood stock. There were town meetings. One problem was that the Tongan language has no polite word for sperm. Every time the substance was mentioned, there were guffaws to the degree that people lost the thread of the argument.
Then Chesher hit on the idea of a professionally produced videotape. About 30 percent of Tongan homes have VCRs, and one estimate has it that there is one video rental store for every twenty-five hundred Tongans. A video, Chesher reasoned, could put across complex biological ideas with pictures.
The video was an immediate success. There were no Hollywood stars in this production, no palangi at all, only Tongans explaining reproductive biology. His Majesty, the king, appeared at the end of the video and said, in his great resonant voice, that with a project like clam sanctuaries, "everybody wins." It was all so easy, so faka tonga.
; The tape was played in schools, in villages, and it was rented with astounding regularity. People wanted to see their friends. They wanted to see a professional video that had to do with them, with Tonga. They especially enjoyed seeing the king chuckle in the middle of one comment. That section was rolled back and replayed constantly. Most people see the king only at ceremonial events, at which tradition requires that he be appropriately solemn. But here he was endorsing the community clam-circle idea, admonishing people to protect the brood stock, and laughing at the same time.
In October 1988, ten months after installing the sanctuary at Falevai, Earthwatch volunteers found the first juvenile T. derasa they'd ever seen in the inner waters. It was within thirty feet of the giant-clam circles, but there was no definite connection between the juvenile and the circles. The clams, remember, can swim for the first week of life, which meant that this one might have started miles away.
A year later, Chesher's Earthwatch teams, returning for another survey, found sixteen juvenile T. derasa right smack in
front of Falevai. "They were all of a certain size that indicated they'd come from the first spawning," Chesher said. "Clams grow at about five millimeters a month, and these were all between eighty and one hundred millimeters long. They had to come from the first spawning in January of 1988. Right number of months, right size."
I asked Chesher about Dr. Lucas's charge that there was "no evidence" that the clams were "breeding like crazy."
"Well," Chesher said, " 'breeding like crazy' is not how I'd put it. But there is evidence that they're breeding."
I asked to see that evidence, the raw data, in his field notes. Chesher handed me eleven notebooks of the kind sold in Tongan bookstores: "Friendly Islands School Exercise Book." One was labeled "Finders, '90." The raw data was entered in several different colors of ink, and a few notes were penciled in. On July 13 Earthwatch volunteers had found a 78.5-millimeter T. derasa at Port Maurelle. I flipped through the pages: On August 23, at South Mala, near Falevai, ten T. derasa juveniles, ranging in size from 48 millimeters to 115 millimeters, were found. At least two different spawning periods were represented in that batch. In all, seventy-four juvenile T. derasa were found in 1990, where none had been discovered in the baseline surveys conducted in 1987.
I gave the notebooks back to Chesher and asked him about the letter Lucas sent to Earthwatch. From that followed a long, convoluted tale of what Rick Chesher saw as a case of scientific sabotage in the South Seas.
"But," he said after several hours, "you can ask Dr. Lucas about all that."
"I will," I said. "I also want to see the clam in question, the one Dr. Lucas said is not from Tonga."
"Tomorrow," Rick Chesher said. He was all smiles.
The night before my visit to the clams of Falevai, I sat in on a kava circle. Kava is completely legal in Tonga, and there is sometimes a full cup of the stuff sitting in official offices, there for the visitor afflicted with a palangfs unseemly swiftness of manner. The kava club was a single-story cement building; in it were a
dozen men sitting in a circle on the floor. I recognized a shopkeeper and a cabdriver I had met. The men accepted me immediately and passed a wooden bowl containing a light gray liquid that tasted a bit like dirty dishwater and set my lips buzzing. Other than that, it had no effect on me whatsoever.
What did I think of Tonga?
Loved it.
The women?
Beautiful.
No trouble?
No, no, not a bit. Faka tonga all the way. Well, except for the airport. There had been some problem with my reading material. The officers, I informed the men of the kava circle, were talking about ratbags.
And the word sailed around the room in ever-decreasing circles so that, in the kava-colored silence, I asked, as politely as I knew how, if someone would please tell me what the hell a ratbag was.
My mouth was now tingling in the frozen manner I associate with the dentist's office. We had been drinking kava, which didn't affect me at all, for hours. I wanted to say something else, but it suddenly occurred to me that my tongue was a huge fat flap of flesh that occupied my entire mouth. I couldn't seem to get any words out around the great globular thing. The effort made me drowsy.
The men of the kava circle, I realized simultaneously, were the very finest men who had ever lived. They were talking to me about ratbags, and I heard them through a somewhat distant echo chamber. They spoke of a number of young men from New Zealand who had been members of some strange religious organization. They had worn beards and carried backpacks. They had known something of the government of Tonga and had gone about spreading rumors that there would be a coup. Which was ridiculous, for people revered and even loved the king. Tevita Helu, my bookstore friend, had said that while other island nations were changing rapidly, often not for the better, Tonga had retained much of its traditional culture—the weaving, the singing, the dancing, the feasting—because all these traditions were incor-
porated into royal rituals. Tongans, Mr. Helu had said, liked that.
The kava men agreed that the king was cherished and said that this reverence was why the rumors of a coup had upset people and why the bearded backpackers had been asked to leave the country. Someone mentioned that it was the men themselves who had referred to their rumor-mongering as ratbagging. A ratbag, the extremely wonderful gentlemen of the kava circle explained through the echo chamber, was in their opinion someone whose methods were aggressive, disruptive, and altogether something less than faka tonga.
It was raining hard, and I was hunched over in an open boat on my way to Falevai to interview the clam in question. From a distance the island of Kapa was an undulating delight of shimmering green hillsides, with limestone cliffs at the waterline. The village was set on a narrow sandy beach with the jungle rising up behind it. About two hundred people lived in Falevai.
The man who had taken charge of the clam circles was a former district officer named Vanisi Fakatulolo. He was a large, intimidating man with a sweet smile and biceps the size of my thighs. Inside his cement house he brewed me up a cup of tea on a kerosene stove. There were chickens clucking and muttering in a back room with a mud floor. Shiny paper stars and crosses hung from the wall, giving the house a festive, Christmasy look. Somewhere, in a back room, a baby fussed.
Mr. Fakatulolo said that, for the first time in his life, there were baby giant clams all over the reef in front of his house.
How many?
"Plenty, plenty."
He said that a year ago a few men from the village had gotten swacked on kava and had poached five giant clams from the sanctuary. Fakatulolo had gotten angry and had "raised a big force." He was a lay preacher at the church and had excoriated the men from the pulpit. For a time these men had lived in shame, a powerfully corrosive emotion in a small Tongan village: People accused in such a way sometimes actually commit suicide.
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Since then there had been no other thefts, but it was because of the poached clams, five out of seventy-two, that Dr. Lucas of Australia had written Earthwatch and suggested that Chesher's project might be hastening the demise of the giant clams.
Not long after the poaching, Fakatulolo said, a man from Australia had come and asked to inspect the clam circles. The man dived for less than thirty minutes. (This man, I gathered, was Dr. Rick Braley, who, according to Lucas, had found no evidence that T. derasa were "breeding like crazy.")
Braley told Fakatulolo that "maybe the baby clams he see come from the rock." Fakatulolo did not speak good English: By "rock" he meant "reef." Dr. Braley was probably telling him that the new baby clams might have swum over from elsewhere on the reef, from other adult clams not in the circle. (Braley, I later learned, had not seen the baseline studies indicating that there were virtually no other adult clams nearby.)
Fakatulolo got the idea that Braley was telling him the reef had spit up the clams by some sort of spontaneous generation. This irritated him, and he
put the Ph.D. straight in no uncertain terms. "The man," Fakatulolo said, "he borned the man. The fish, he borned the fish. The clam, he borned the clam. The rock, he no borned the clam."
Rick Chesher was still furious about the visit. "This goes beyond academic bickering," he fumed. "When you go to the villagers who are involved in this awareness project and tell them it's not working, what happens? What can you expect will happen? People will simply go take the big clams. Luckily, Vanisi knew better."
Indeed, Fakatulolo had noticed over the past few years that fishing was getting better and better in front of the village. In his opinion it had to do with the clam circles. There was no reason people couldn't fish with a net over the circles—that was acceptable—but no one did. "They think," Fakatulolo explained, "that if someone sees them there in the day, and then later maybe someone takes the clams at night, they will get blamed." So the people of Falevai had created, almost accidently, a small marine reserve. And now they were catching more fish, closer to the village. The "conservation ethic" was paying off.
"We used to break the rock," Mr. Fakatulolo said. People had used iron bars, he explained, to break the reef structures and drive fish into nets. "I think now, if you break my house down, I do not come back here to live. Same with fishes."