• Scientists rush to save manta rays, the 'pandas of the ocean'

    By Rebecca Pilkington-Vincett

    A feeding station popular with manta rays is not far from the Misool Eco Resort and Conservation Center in Raja Ampat, eastern Indonesia.

    By Adrienne Mong, NBC News

    RAJA AMPAT, Indonesia —They’ve been described by one scientist as “pandas of the ocean.”

    “They’re such an iconic species, beloved by divers,” said Andrea Marshall, director of the Marine Megafauna Foundation, who came up with the description during an interview with NBC News. “They’re just amazing.” 

    Unlikely as it might seem, the panda and the manta ray have a lot in common.

    Just as scientists still haven’t been able to confirm the number of pandas in the wild, they also have no idea how many manta rays exist.

    “Globally we don’t know how many manta rays there are,” said Guy Stevens, director of the U.K.-based Manta Trust, whose research is largely based around manta populations in the Maldives.

    But -- again, like the panda -- scientists think it’s a small population.

    “If they’re lucky, (manta rays) have two pups (over several years). That’s a very low reproductive rate, especially compared to your average fish,” said Dr. Heidi Dewar, a biologist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, part of NOAA.

    Anecdotal evidence suggests mantas are under threat, and China may be a major reason for it.

    Manta rays are vulnerable on two fronts: as bycatch — getting caught in industrial fishing nets targeting different types of tuna — and, increasingly, because of traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM. 

    Manta rays are abundant in the waters around Raja Ampat, eastern Indonesia.

    Manta rays are harvested for their gill rakers, which allow the fish to filter food from water.  Some Chinese believe they have healing properties or are good at cleaning out toxins. One Chinese-language website claims gill rakers enhance the immune system, promote blood circulation and aid in the treatment of cancer, skin disease and infertility.

    “It’s just cartilage,” said Dewar, echoing skepticism expressed by many scientists.

    Medicinal fad?
    Conservationists say manta rays aren’t even considered “traditional” medicine and argue no reference to the animal can be found in TCM books dating back a century. But with rising incomes that enable Chinese consumers to readily adopt medicinal fads, the impact on manta rays has accelerated over the past 10 to 15 years. 

    “A lot of it is completely unrecorded,” said Stevens, who worked on a project founded by Shark Savers and WildAid to document the scope of gill-raker harvesting. 

    Understanding the beauty and diversity of Raja Ampat, aka 'Underwater Eden'

    Researchers looked at the location, value and species involved. “It does seem the majority of all of those gills that are being traded are ending up in China,” Stevens said.

    The conclusion, published in a report called Manta Ray of Hope, found that roughly 3,400 manta rays and 94,000 mobulas (related to the manta ray family) are caught each year, but the numbers reflect only reported catches. “Unreported and subsistence fisheries will mean true landings are much higher,” the report said. 

    On patrol with a shark ranger in Indonesia's marine treasure trove

    Visits to random TCM shops in Beijing and Shanghai turned up no gill rakers. In fact, a veteran pharmacist at Tongrentang, a long-established purveyor of traditional Chinese and herbal medicines, said she had never heard of manta rays being used this way.

    But the Manta Ray of Hope report estimates a mature ocean manta could yield up to 15 pounds of dried gills that can bring in as much as $230 a pound in a market in China. 

    Australia moves to ban fishing trawler with 900-foot-long net

    Marshall said she has noticed an uptick in manta fishing. “I’ve been (in Mozambique) in the last decade … and we’ve seen an 87 percent decline in the population because of the fishing.” 

    Unlike many shippers, Chinese merchants who transport cheap products from the mainland for export to Africa “want to fill [their unloaded cargo vessels] with resources wherever they go.  In Africa, they fill it up with wood, fish or shark’s fin,” she said. “They’ll go out to the local fisheries along the coastline and scout for these products.” 

    The scientist has spoken to members of local communities, who say the Chinese offer “new nets, new lines, new hooks. (The Chinese traders) say to them, ‘If you get the sharks or the mantas or the turtles, you get all the meat. You can keep all the meat. You just sell us the things you don’t normally eat.'” 

    Protecting a ‘threatened’ species
    Mantas were listed last year as “threatened” under the international Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species.

    The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has classified the manta ray as “vulnerable” to extinction. 

    PhotoBlog: Raja Ampat archipelago: The world's last paradise

    Chinese scientists have also weighed in. 

    “In the last two years, we have conducted evaluations of the manta ray and submitted a recommendation to the government to list it as a protected species,” said Professor Wang Yanmin from Shandong University’s Marine College.

    “There is no regulation for protecting the manta ray so sales of mantas are not illegal,” said Feng Yongfeng, founder of Green Beagle, a group that promotes environmental protection.

    Groups like Manta Trust are focusing on getting manta rays listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). But scientists have their work cut out for them. 

    “It’s very difficult to get listed on CITES.  They ask for a lot of detail that is difficult to pin down,” said Marshall.  “Maybe in the terrestrial world, biologists can provide those kinds of details.  When you’re talking about the megafauna [or large marine species] world, it’s very difficult.” 

    Marshall – who discovered a second type of manta ray in 2008 and is in the process of identifying a third -- acknowledges little is known about them.

    AFP - Getty Images file

    A huge manta ray weighing more than 2,200 pounds and measuring nearly 9 yards in length was caught off the eastern coast of China this past September.

    Manta births a mystery 
    Vexing questions include the manta’s life span, details of their reproductive ecology and migratory patterns. 

    “I could wrap my life up in 20 minutes if I could talk to them,” she joked.  “It has been driving me insane for the last ten years because I haven’t been able to figure out where they give birth.  It’s 2012 and nobody has ever seen a manta give birth in the wild.” 

    And research is painstaking. For one, concentrations of the animal tend to be around far-flung islands. Stevens of Manta Trust cited the costs of tracking mantas and the difficulty in locating and knowing how to study them. 

    With technological improvements, however, scientists are gaining some ground. Satellite tags are one way to help the research. “What do they do when we can’t observe them? I’d love to follow an animal to find out how they spend their time,” said Stevens. “The tagging gives you small glimpses of them.” 

    Two dive instructors at the Misool Eco Resort and Conservation Center in Raja Ampat have uncovered a revenue stream to offset research costs: tourism.

    “One manta ray can raise $1 million (U.S. dollars) in tourism income over its lifetime,” said Rebecca Pilkington-Vincett, citing a figure contained in the Manta Ray of Hope report.

    PhotoBlog: Raja Ampat archipelago: The world's last paradise

    With the blessing of the resort, Pilkington-Vincett and Calvin Beale launched a research project off the surrounding reefs.  

    Last season, the duo raised $32,000 from donations by recreational divers who accompanied them on dives to gather DNA samples and tag the mantas. 

    With the money, they have bought three satellite tags and collected numerous DNA samples.  They are sending off the data to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for analysis by a graduate student. 

    With online databases such as the Manta Research Project, where some of Pilkington-Vincett and Beale’s data are logged, or the Manta Matcher, developed by Marshall and operating much “like the FBI fingerprint online database,” research on the manta ray has become rooted in a global exchange among scientists and amateurs alike. 

    Until its secrets are fully revealed, the manta’s mystique seems guaranteed. 

    “I think it’s fascinating,” said Dewar of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, “that there is such a large and amazing creature that has so many mysteries attached to it.” 

    Additional research by Le Li, Johanna Armstrong and Yanzhou Liu.

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  • Counting China's wild pandas

    By Adrienne Mong

    YINGJING, SICHUAN—The panda was always one of my favorite animals.

    Until I found myself slipping and sliding down a steep muddy mountain slope in southwestern Sichuan, looking for panda poop.

    To be precise, someone else was searching. 

    My colleagues and I were just attempting to keep up with him on what was easily one of the more physically grueling NBC News assignments we’d all been on in years.

    Li Guiren, a fleet-footed 36-year old Sichuan native who works at the Chinese Forestry Department, was hiking through the mud, following coordinates on his bright yellow GPS device.  He’s one of 70 “trackers” working in Sichuan to count pandas in the wild—which they do by collecting panda droppings.  (More on that in a moment.)

    China kicked off its panda census last month.  It’s the fourth one since the 1970s, when they instituted the practice to keep tabs on the worldwide panda bear count every 10 years.

    The wild panda is only found in China, across parts of three provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi, covering 5,400 square miles.  Or the size of Connecticut.

    The bears like being high up, usually somewhere between 4,000 and 11,500 square feet above sea level in mountain forests with a damp climate.

    The last census revealed only 1,596 wild pandas existed with 290 pandas in captivity around the world.

    Adrienne Mong / NBC News

    Li Guiren takes notes on the geography on a Sichuan mountain.

    “About 70 to 80 percent [of all the pandas in the world] live in Sichuan,” said Huang Zhi of the Bifengxia Panda Breeding Center in Ya’an, Sichuan.  “Sichuan also has the highest number of wild pandas.”

    Trackers in the field
    Sichuan is also where the two-year panda census project has launched.  Smaller teams in Gansu and Shaanxi will begin working in the field next year.

    Early in the morning, a group of twenty men suited up in wet-weather clothes and thin boots.  They reviewed their cartographic materials and compared notes one last time before setting off.  Each one carried the same bright yellow GPS device Li was toting.

    Li, who took part in the last panda census, said new technology has had a huge impact on their work.  “We can get a lot more done more quickly,” he said, with the GPS device shaving the amount of time in the field down by about 30 percent.

    Each tracker is assigned a near-vertical tract of land to explore.  On average, they cover 1.2 to 1.5 square miles a day, looking for panda droppings.  (A typical male panda roams in a territory about 3.3 square miles whereas a female confines herself to 1.8 square miles.)  Li found a pile that looked like it had been produced within the past three days, which he bagged and brought back to base camp for analysis.

    “We take a sample for DNA testing,” he said as he prepared the panda waste.  “The DNA test demands fresh feces not more than four days old.  This is very fresh.”

    But DNA testing isn’t foolproof so Li and his colleagues also measured the undigested bamboo scraps to help identify the pandas individually.  “We measure the width of the teeth marks,” he explained.  Each bear has an individual bite with differing teeth sizes.

    Habitat challenges
    While in the panda’s natural habitat, the research teams also take detailed notes of the conditions and its geology. 

    “What people normally care about is the number of the pandas,” said Gu Xiaodong, a scientist with the Sichuan branch of the Wildlife Survey Conservation and Management in the Forestry Department.  “We care more about the quality of their habitat.”

    With the data the trackers are collecting, the scientists will be able to analyze changes to the habitat and "draw up more effective conservation policies," continued Gu.  “For example, last time we found pandas in locations between the reserves we had established,” he said.  “So we had to set up more reserves to protect these pandas.”

    Adrienne Mong

    Li Guiren and other researchers measure undigested bamboo in the panda droppings to help identify each animal.

    Researchers also hope to have more detailed information about the impact of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which measured 7.9 (by the U.S. Geological Survey) and devastated the famed Wolong Giant Panda Reserve Center, one of the earliest research bases set up by the Chinese government in the early 1980s. 

    But humans remain the biggest threat to the survival of wild pandas.

    With more than 80 million people, Sichuan is one of China’s more densely populated provinces.  In recent years, it has seen large inflows of government investment and is rapidly urbanizing.  Scientists have cited roads and high-speed railways as a major hazard encroaching on the panda’s natural habitat in the mountains.

    But mining is also a problem.  The day we trudged up the mountain with Li and Gu, we passed a couple of mines—one of them lead, whose run-off cast an unhealthy gray tinge to the river.  Loud explosions went off even during our hike, unsettling us as much as the pandas.

    “The place where we are doing research now, it’s always been a traffic-intensive area with a lot of human activity,” said Gu.  “The pandas here probably choose to go higher.”

    But they still sometimes descend into human territory, especially if it means getting something to eat other than bamboo plants. While the giant panda's diet consists mostly of bamboo, they do have the digestive system of carnivores. 

    Gu confirmed that local farmers have regularly complained about pandas raiding their livestock.  “One farmer has his goats eaten by pandas every year,” recalled Gu, who said the Forestry Department offers compensation in such instances.

    Mating challenges
    Mating habits are also a challenge, particularly for pandas in captivity.

    Female pandas are only in heat for three days a year.  The window for conceiving is very narrow—from 12 to 24 hours during those 72 hours.

    Adrienne Mong / NBC News

    The panda's natural habitat is a rugged landscape, but it's also being encroached by China's westward development.

    Pandas in the wild don’t generally have a problem reproducing, said Huang from the breeding center.  But those in captivity usually need a bit of help—whether through artificial insemination or even the famed panda porn method.

    Despite the success in breeding the cuddly animals in captivity, there’s been none so far in re-introducing fully domesticated pandas into the wild.

    Nonetheless, researchers say they think breeding programs and conservation efforts have worked to keep the panda from advancing any closer to extinction.

    “We really hope once the census is done, we’ll find more pandas than we found in the last census,” said Li.  “That will mean what we’ve been doing has made progress.”

    And if the scientists are right, that will make at least one civilian very happy.

    A man by the name of An Yanshi in Sichuan is collecting panda poop by the bucket-loads to make tea—with curative properties.

    “Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about 30 percent of everything they eat,” An has been quoted as saying.  “That means their excrement is rich in fibres and nutrients.”

    He plans to market the tea as the world’s most expensive—at $36,000 a poop.  A pop.  A pound.