Collateral damage: animals in a war zone
What happens when human conflict interferes with animals?
When we think of war, we usually think only of human casualties. From 1950 to 2000, 80% of worldwide conflicts have happened over a biodiversity hotspot. What does this mean for the animals and plants that live there?
Manas National Park (MNP) lies within the eastern Himalayan hotspot and is home to many endangered, endemic animals. It is also a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site and is contiguous with Royal Manas National Park (RMNP) in Bhutan. This national park and the land surrounding it was home to an ethnopolitical conflict from 1980 to 2003. During this period of hostility, the already vulnerable Indian Rhinoceros was completely poached out of MNP, leading to a program to repopulate the park of rhinos. Evidence points to other animals also being severely impacted by this conflict. Knowing how animal populations are affected by conflict can help us find out how to help them.
How did they do it?
There isn’t much data on mammal distribution from before the conflict. So, three forests were chosen within MNP to find differences between the rates of capture of different mammals. These forests were Bansbari and Bhuyanpara, which have not faced conflict since 2003, and Panbari, which had experienced conflict until 2016.
Camera traps were set up for the duration of the winter of 2016—2017. The cameras were operational for all 24 hours for around 52 days.
What was the result?
► Twenty-five different mammal species, with 13 of them threatened, were found.
► The cameras did not capture many species of rodents or mammals that live in trees or in the air. Almost all mammals that were supposed to be in the area, however, were captured.
► Ethnopolitical conflict does play a significant role in animal conservation — it was found that there were more prey species in the non-conflict area, which could be because militants in the area were eating them. A higher concentration of predators was found in the conflict zone. During the conflict, these animals might have taken refuge in the neighbouring RMNP and come back to MNP once it was conflict-free.
► This study has confirmed that human conflict will significantly change not only our lives but also those of the wildlife surrounding us. The next question is how it affects predators and prey alike, and whether peacetime conservation efforts are truly making an effect.
Reference
Lahkar, D., M.F. Ahmed, R.H. Begum, S.K. Das, B.P. Lahkar, H.K. Sarma & A. Harihar (2018). Camera-trapping survey to assess diversity, distribution and photographic capture rate of terrestrial mammals in the aftermath of the ethnopolitical conflict in Manas National Park, Assam, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa 10(8): 12008–12017; https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.4039.10.8.12008-1201
