(Lightly edited for readability)
Speakers: Abi Tamim Vanak, Subhra Priyadarshini
00:01 Sponsor announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.
00:27 Subhra Priyadarshini: Have you ever wondered where exactly animals wander about in their habitats? Which is the most intelligent of all animals, and why it may be inappropriate to feed stray dogs? Yes, I said it but dog lovers, don't hate me for it, you'll soon know why.
As humans, we don't know much about the other inhabitants of our magnificent planet. Every animal species on Earth uses or changes its environment to meet its life's needs, interacting with resources in ways that support its own survival and reproduction. In this episode of the Nature India podcast series called “I am a scientist and this is where I work”, join me your host Subhra Priyadarshini, as I take you through forests and grasslands, trace animals in their natural environments, revealing so to say, a set of guiding principles that apply to what is essentially their kingdom.
I'm joined today by Abi Tamim Vanak, an animal ecologist and conservation biologist sharing with us his research on what happens when species interact with each other in such settings. He studies the interface of humans, domestic animals, and wildlife in semi-arid savannas and agro-ecosystems.
Abi, welcome to the Nature India podcast. You have a bunch of really interesting research experiences up your sleeve, starting as a wildlife scientist to then also studying the public health impacts of different species on humans.
02:19 Abi Vanak: I'm trained as a wildlife scientist and I have worked on fruit bats, I have worked on tigers, lions. I did my PhD on Indian foxes and then I went to South Africa for a postdoc, but I've worked on large African carnivores such as charismatic species, leopards, lions, cheetahs as well as a lot of work on elephants in Kruger (National Park, South Africa). Primarily, my PhD research was based in India and I worked on a species that is very little known. This is the Indian fox, and it occurs in a habitat that's also very little known – the Indian savanna. And I expanded that to include how domestic dogs can have negative impacts on native species, such as foxes, but also have massive public health impacts because they are the main carriers of diseases like rabies.
03:11 Subhra Priyadarshini: Great, so your research spans more than two decades. I'd like to understand what the most interesting findings have been for you.
03:22 Abi Vanak: So we found that animals are very resilient. So it's not necessarily that wildlife only occurs in forests or in wildlife, or national parks and sanctuaries, you can have large animals living in your backyard. And we found that these animals use lots of different ways of trying to avoid being disturbed by humans and try to avoid being seen by humans. What we've also found is there are some species that are habitat generous, so that they don't mind changes to the habitat that humans are making. They actually thrive with agriculture field ecosystems. Jackals and jungle cats, for instance, use sugarcane fields. And, you know, the jackals eat sugarcane as well. And the jungle cats roam around in sugarcane fields catching rodents whereas the Indian foxes that I studied are grassland specialists. So they are mostly found in the adjoining savanna grassland habitats. They don't mind some human presence but they need to have denning sites that are free of disturbance for them to be able to live in that landscape. For me a really surprising finding, a really interesting finding was that we found the jungle cats were even using the towns, they were walking around the roads at night. And we find this with lots of other species as well.
04:41 Subhra Priyadarshini: Okay, that's when animals visit us in our habitat. How about when you go to look for in your field projects? So let's understand from you the kind of planning that goes into preparing for one of these really exotic sounding research trips.
04:59 Abi Vanak: As a wildlife scientist, a lot of work obviously requires traveling to fairly remote places, capturing animals and putting GPS tags to them. And this requires quite a bit of setup. Most of my work is done outside. My aim is to try and understand how wildlife continues to thrive in human dominated landscapes, especially in the semi arid savanna landscapes of India. Most of my field stations have been set up in villages, for instance. Generally I have either stayed in a forest department house or, or you know, the guest house, or just rented a place from a local villager. So most of the field stations are well equipped. The equipment we have consists of equipment to catch animals, they could be traps, iron foothold traps or cage straps. We have the telemetry gear that we deploy on the animals, we have antennas, and the collars themselves, and various other specialist devices including your GPS, navigation equipment, and obviously, computers and software for mapping. We also have a freezer and a refrigerator for storing samples, and storing chemicals and veterinary drugs and so on.
06:12 Subhra Priyadarshini: In movement ecology (that's what it is called, right?), figuring out locations of where the animals are, is important. Tell us about the process of how you reach these animals.
06:26 Abi Vanak: Most of these animals that I study are fairly illusive, you know, things like foxes, jungle cats, jackals, hyenas, you rarely see them. So then if you want a really good idea of where they are, you must let the animal inform you. And the way to do that is to give them a necklace or a collar. So we put a GPS device on these animals. And these will collect a position, you know, at some predetermined intervals. It could be 15 minutes or could be one hour, those data are remotely downloaded using a handheld receiver, so that you don't have to physically capture the animal. A radio link, it just sends the data back to you. I also do a lot of work on health trying to do disease investigations of these animals. So then, obviously, you've got to capture these animals, either it's dogs or these wild carnivores. We collect blood samples, we collect hair samples, saliva samples to investigate for diseases, the pathogens that these animals may harbour.
07:27 Subhra Priyadarshini: Again, not many might know about the mesocarnivores and their adaptation to human dominated landscapes that you research. Tell us a little about these mesocarnivores.
07:40 Abi Vanak: We study small carnivores or mesocarnivores. These are mid sized animals between between two to about 15 or 20 kilos. And many of these animals are pretty wary of human presence. So we have to use a variety of techniques to capture them. But first we need to find out where they are. And we will set up what's called track plots. This is just a bit of dust, fine dust scattered on the grounds, so that we can see their footprints. So using this, we know that the animals are out there so that we put up camera traps to know what time they come in to that location. And then we start baiting in that area for a few days. And then once we're ready, we know these animals are coming and what time they come in there, we set up traps accordingly to capture them that evening or that night.
08:25 Subhra Priyadarshini: Wow. So these traps basically store much of your learnings. Fieldwork is always so exciting in its unpredictability. You'd like to share some such moments from your research trips?
08:39 Abi Vanak: Yeah, sure. A moment that was really eye opening for me was when I was doing my PhD work. I was testing dogs at that time, taking blood samples. I used to go from village to village and people would bring their dogs to vaccinate them for rabies. And people will bring them, we'd take a blood sample but also take a saliva sample. And then you test that saliva sample for rabies using a rapid kit. In general, the saliva samples are not very sensitive, or they're not very reliable. But on one occasion we have had a couple of kids bring along their dog, that dog tested positive for rabies and that was a real eye opener, because it seemed completely fine otherwise, normally. And then this sort of got me started on this question of rabies as a public health threat as well.
And there was a really interesting learning moment when I was trying to capture Jackals for the first time. And I found that they are really, really clever, so it's not the foxes that are clever. Foxes catch up pretty easily, but the jackals would find ways of avoiding the traps, they will know where the traps are. And but it was an interesting learning experience. And again, showed, you know, how animals in these human dominated landscapes are pretty weary of human presence and, and they go out of their way to avoid anything that looks new or novel.
10:01 Subhra Priyadarshini: Wonderful. So what research questions are you working on right now?
10:07 Abi Vanak: The sort of principal interest for me is to try and understand what are the outcomes of interactions between humans, domestic animals and wildlife. Now, these outcomes can go from a spectrum of coexistence, to conflict, to disease spread, and also a broader question of persistence and conservation. So, you know, in a country like India, obviously there are people everywhere. We still have done a pretty remarkable job of having wild animals around. In other places, countries in the Global North decimated their wildlife, and only much later adopted this conservation ethos and tried to recover endangered species. But India, despite having 1.4 billion people still has a stronghold for tigers and leopards and elephants, and is still the only place in the world where you can find the Asiatic lions. Wildlife in India does have a very good chance, everybody's now very keen, or very aware of the risk of disease spread from wild animals to humans. And domestic animals are often a key link for that jump for the transmission pathway. Also interested in using this One Health approach to understand the risk of emergence of diseases to humans, and vice versa. 11:27 Subhra Priyadarshini: Your research work with wildlife and human dominated systems also explains your workplace in human direct landscapes. Give us a feel of your workplace and what one would mostly hear in these areas.
11:45 Abi Vanak: People who are not in this field, sort of, are always envious about that I get to go to really beautiful places, I get to hang out outdoors all the time. You know, I don't want to burst that bubble, but it's also a lot of hard work because we are in a very difficult terrain or very difficult place. We are working often in very, very hot conditions. So the places that I work in, typically in summers, the temperature goes up to 46, 47 or 48 degrees, and often without electricity. So it is challenging, but I wouldn't change a thing about it because it's really exciting. In terms of the sounds, you know, like I said, I work in human dominated landscapes. So I'm always surrounded by sounds that come from humans going about their daily activity. It could be a temple playing songs, or the traffic, or livestock going out on their daily outing. But the sounds that we look out for are the calls of animals. So it could be the breeding season and the foxes are out there with their typical coughing sound, or at night Jackals calling in unison when they are getting ready to go about their day. Or wolves might call every once in a while. When I was studying tigers for my masters, listening to a tiger roar from very close quarters was quite an intense experience because that sound reverberates through your body. So it's still very memorable for me.
13:19 Subhra Priyadarshini: Young researchers coming into the field, how should they approach ecological studies?
13:25 Abi Vanak: A prerequisite, almost, for doing field ecology at least is to have a love of the outdoors, being animal lovers so to speak. I love spending time with animals. Biologists tend to not like maths and that's unfortunate. But being good at maths is also really good, really important for ecology because ecology is also a theoretical field. Your data, you do need to be able to either model or to understand systems work or be good at statistics to make sense of those data that you've collected. But also have innate curiosity for how the world functions around you. Having a keen sense of observation. I think those are pretty useful for any budding scientists in general, but certainly for a budding ecologist.
14:13 Subhra Priyadarshini: Right. Now, there's this kind of controversial, counterintuitive statement that you're often heard making about not planting trees, or not feeding stray dogs. Would you care to tell our listeners the rationale behind these thoughts?
14:32 Abi Vanak: Well, basically what I tell people is don't feed dogs and don't plant trees. But the work that I've been doing for the past 20 years, has sort of brought me to this conclusion -- animals are resilient. A lot of animals do have individual personalities. We tend to think of animals, as sort of this monolithic block, you know. Or the poor, voiceless or the innocent animals. No, we don't need to ascribe those kinds of human moralities to those animals. And what we should definitely, definitely not is never try and feed wild animals. Certainly don't try and feed domestic dogs that are not yours as well, because they can be a huge problem for wildlife. The other thing I talked about, remember, was I said don't plant trees. And that's also counterintuitive. But that's because most people try and plant trees on grass. You want to create a forest in the African savanna. So why would you want to do that in the Indian savanna, the grass is also green, it is not just about planting trees. It's not just about showing, if you want to show compassion to animals, often, trying to look at our own lifestyles, is a better way of showing compassion than feeding them for instance, or trying to rescue animals. Don't, don't try and rescue a wild animal unless you're a professional, stronger.
15:46 Subhra Priyadarshini: So there you heard what he has to say. Humans often have negative interactions with wildlife when either of us has a conflicting need that we're looking to fulfill. Animal ecologists like Obi Wan UK, are trying to create that bridge that balance, which could help us understand their world better. If you liked what you heard, be sure to share this episode of the nature India podcast with friends and colleagues and check out our archives for more in both English and Hindi. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host Subhra Priyadarshini and this is your go to podcast for all things science in India, the Nature India podcast.
16:51 Sponsor announcement: This episode was produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.
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