The leopard that learnt from the cat and other narratives of carnivore–human coexistence in northern India

Exploring uncharted territory: new frontiers in environmental DNA for tropical fisheries management

Tropical ecosystems host a significant share of global fish diversity contributing substantially to the global fisheries sector. Yet their sustainable management is challenging due to their complexity, diverse life history traits of tropical fishes, and varied fishing techniques involved. Traditional monitoring techniques are often costly, labour-intensive, and/or difficult to apply in inaccessible sites. These limitations call for the adoption of innovative, sensitive, and cost-effective monitoring solutions, especially in a scenario of climate change. Environmental DNA (eDNA) emerges as a potential game changer for biodiversity monitoring and conservation, especially in aquatic ecosystems. However, its utility in tropical settings remains underexplored, primarily due to a series of challenges, including the need for a comprehensive barcode reference library, an understanding of eDNA behaviour in tropical aquatic environments, standardized procedures, and supportive biomonitoring policies. Despite these challenges, the potential of eDNA for sensitive species detection across varied habitats is evident, and its global use is accelerating in biodiversity conservation efforts. This review takes an in-depth look at the current state and prospects of eDNA-based monitoring in tropical fisheries management research. Additionally, a SWOT analysis is used to underscore the opportunities and threats, with the aim of bridging the knowledge gaps and guiding the more extensive and effective use of eDNA-based monitoring in tropical fisheries management. Although the discussion applies worldwide, some specific experiences and insights from Indian tropical fisheries are shared to illustrate the practical application and challenges of employing eDNA in a tropical context.

Indigenous insights on human-wildlife coexistence in southern India

As human-wildlife conflicts escalate worldwide, concepts such as tolerance and acceptance of wildlife are becoming increasingly important. Yet, contemporary conservation studies indicate a limited understanding of positive human-wildlife interactions, leading to potentially inaccurate representations of human-animal encounters. Failure to address these limitations contributes to the design and implementation of poor wildlife and landscape management plans and the dismissal of Indigenous ecological knowledge. We examined Indigenous perspectives on human-wildlife coexistence in India by drawing ethnographic evidence from Kattunayakans, a forest-dwelling Adivasi community living in the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala. Through qualitative field study that involved interviews and transect walks inside the forests, we found that Kattunayakans displayed tolerance and acceptance of wild animals characterized as forms of deep coexistence that involves three central ideas: wild animals as rational conversing beings; wild animals as gods, teachers, and equals; and wild animals as relatives with shared origins practicing dharmam. We argue that understanding these adequately will support efforts to bring Kattunayakan perspectives into the management of India's forests and contribute to the resolution of the human-wildlife conflict more broadly.

Diverse Locations and a Long History: Historical Context for Urban Leopards (Panthera pardus) in the Early Anthropocene From Seoul, Korea

While the urban landscapes of the early Anthropocene may appear hostile to large carnivores, humans and leopards (Panthera pardus) are known to co-inhabit major urban centres like Mumbai (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Johannesburg (South Africa). We provide evidence that the presence of leopards in urban landscapes is not, however, a new phenomenon and has occurred repeatedly over the early history of the Anthropocene. Using records of Amur leopards (P. p. orientalis) in Seoul, Korea, at the end of the 19th century, a capital city and major urban centre with a high human population density, we explore socio-cultural, political and ecological factors that may have facilitated human-leopard co-occurrence in an urban landscape and the factors that eventually led to the leopards' extirpation. We suggest that, in the absence of unsustainable levels of persecution by humans, leopards are able to persist in urban landscapes which contain small patches of dense vegetation and have sufficient alternative food supplies. In light of the continued expansion of urban landscapes in the 21st century and increasing conservation focus on the presence of large carnivore populations there, this paper provides historical context to human co-existence with leopards in urban landscapes during the Anthropocene–and what we can learn from it for the future.

Mahakal Blessed My Crop: Community Dynamics and Religious Beliefs Influence Efficacy of a Wildlife Compensation Program

Conservation conflicts or human-wildlife conflicts present one of the foremost challenges to wildlife conservation globally. The challenges of reconciling human safety and food security with the conservation of large-bodied wildlife are further compounded in the developing nations with a high spatial overlap of wildlife with people. Therefore, conservation models are required to offset losses faced by affected communities while at the same time ensuring the long-term conservation of wildlife species in shared spaces. Ex-gratia payment is one such widely used conflict mitigation instrument that aims to reduce losses and increase tolerance toward damage-causing wildlife species. However, the efficacy of such programs is rarely investigated and the complex interplay of local beliefs, traditions, and community dynamics are rarely incorporated in the compensation programs. This paper aimed to study an ex-gratia payment program for crop losses in India using ecological, economic, and social lenses. In this study, we used 119 interview surveys across 30 villages. Linear models and thematic analysis were used to understand the sources of crop losses, the propensity to claim ex-gratia payments, and the reasons for claiming or not claiming. We find that even though wildlife is the major cause of crop loss in the region, especially to elephants, the majority of the respondents (53%) did not claim compensation for the losses. The reasons varied from procedural failures to a negative evaluation of the process or the agency involved but the most recurrent reason for not claiming was a deep religious belief in certain communities on the elephant God, “Mahakal.” Our work indicates that the cultural reverence toward the species is enabling the acceptance of losses. We propose that such complex cultural beliefs and local traditions should be considered when designing schemes that aim to garner conservation support toward damage-causing wildlife species.

Beasts in the Garden: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in India's Past and Present

Human-wildlife encounters are characterized by a diverse array of engagements located on the continuum between the negative and the positive. In India, protracted conflict with wildlife is reflected in violence across a range of rural and urban ecologies, but is only one aspect of the multiple facets of ongoing human-non-human encounter. Within these shared spaces, there are often equally significant elements of acceptance, tolerance and reverence. Together, these are dependent on context, and can be explored via lived experiences and worldviews, and a moral economy of human-wildlife and human-human relationships. Historically, though hardly static, such relationships have been mediated by the ontological positioning of traditional societies and their embedded rules and practises. In recent years, these tenuous equilibria have been disrupted by top-down catalysts, including universalist conservation agendas percolating from the state and the global arena. This study aims to explore the changing nature of coexistence by using several historical and contemporary vignettes in relation to key species that routinely “transgress” from their primary natural habitats into the “garden” spaces of human cultivation and habitation. The study will argue that insights at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology and anthropology can improve our understanding of human-wildlife coexistence in India as well as across the world.

Sharing Spaces and Entanglements With Big Cats: The Warli and Their Waghoba in Maharashtra, India

Long histories of sharing space and resources have built complex, robust, and enduring relationships between humans and wildlife in many communities across the world. In order to understand what makes it possible for humans and wildlife to share space, we have to look beyond the ecological and socio-economic study of damages caused by human-wildlife conflict and explore the cultural and societal context within which co-existence is embedded. We conducted an exploratory study on the institution of Waghoba, a big cat deity worshiped by the Indigenous Warli community in Maharashtra, India. Through our research, we found that the worship of Waghoba is highly prevalent, with 150 shrines dedicated to this deity across our study site. We also learnt that the Warlis believe in a reciprocal relationship, where Waghoba will protect them from the negative impacts of sharing spaces with big cats if the people worship the deity and conduct the required rituals, especially the annual festival of Waghbaras. We propose that such relationships facilitate the sharing spaces between humans and leopards that live in the landscape. The study also revealed the ways in which the range of institutions and stakeholders in the landscape shape the institution of Waghoba and thereby contribute to the human-leopard relationship in the landscape. This is relevant for present-day wildlife conservation because such traditional institutions are likely to act as tolerance-building mechanisms embedded within the local cosmology. Further, it is vital that the dominant stakeholders outside of the Warli community (such as the Forest Department, conservation biologists, and other non-Warli residents who interact with leopards) are informed about and sensitive to these cultural representations because it is not just the biological animal that the Warlis predominantly deal with.

Assessing spatio-temporal patterns of human-leopard interactions based on media reports in northwestern India

Large carnivores in human-use areas make for sensational print media content.  We used media reports to examine human-leopard interactions in Rajasthan, India.  We extracted news reports on leopard-related incidents from January 2016 to December 2018.  Incidents (n= 338) were categorized, mapped, and analysed to understand their nature and extent.  We found leopard-related news from 26 of 33 districts; a majority of these were in the eastern region of the State.  Most of the reported interactions appeared to be non-negative, despite losses to both leopards and people.  Our results provide a synthesis of spatio-temporal patterns of leopard-related incidents, which could help wildlife managers in better addressing negative interactions.  The study also demonstrates how news reports could be useful for examining human-wildlife interactions across large spatial scales.

Beauty or beast? Farmers' dualistic views and the influence of aesthetic appreciation on tolerance towards black-backed jackal and caracal

Various species of wild, adaptable, medium-sized carnivores occur outside of protected areas, often coming into contact with people and their domestic animals. Negative human-carnivore interactions can lead to antagonistic attitudes and behavior directed at such species. In the South African Karoo, a semi-arid rangeland, the predation of small-livestock by mesopredators is common and farmers typically use a combination of non-lethal and lethal methods to try and prevent livestock losses. We used ethnographic field observations and semi-structured interviews as part of a mixed methods approach, including the quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers' narratives to illustrate the nuanced ways in which sheep farmers relate to the two mesopredators that consume the most livestock on their farms; black-backed jackal and caracal. Overall, farmers attributed negative characteristics to jackal and caracal but farmers' narratives provided evidence of complex perceptions in that the animals were admired as well as disliked. Both species were seen as charismatic due to traits such as their physical appearance, their "cunning" nature and their remarkable adaptability to human activities, including lethal control. Aesthetic appreciation was an important predictor of tolerance towards both species whereas negative attitudes were associated with the perception that mesopredators should only occur within protected areas. Attitudes towards jackals also appeared to have been affected by cultural representations of them as "thieves". We showed that perceiving mesopredators as beautiful increased the average marginal probability of a farmer tolerating them, and that this strong relationship held when controlling for other covariates such as livestock predation. We advocate the importance of understanding the cultural and aesthetic aspects of predators and considering existing positive dimensions of human-wildlife relationships that may encourage increased farmers' tolerance, which might promote coexistence.