Romulus Whitaker: The real danger lurking in the water

60,194 views ・ 2010-01-07

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
I want you to put off your preconceptions,
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your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles.
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Because that is the only way I'm going to get my story across to you.
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And by the way, if I come across as a sort of
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rabid, hippie conservationist,
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it's purely a figment of your imagination.
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(Laughter)
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Okay. We are actually the first species on Earth
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to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival.
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And I know we've all seen images enough to make us numb,
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of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet.
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We're kind of like greedy kids, using it all up, aren't we?
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And today is a time for me to talk to you about water.
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It's not only because we like to drink lots of it,
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and its marvelous derivatives, beer, wine, etc.
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And, of course, watch it fall from the sky
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and flow in our wonderful rivers,
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but for several other reasons as well.
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When I was a kid, growing up in New York,
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I was smitten by snakes, the same way most kids are
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smitten by tops, marbles, cars, trains, cricket balls.
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And my mother, brave lady,
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was partly to blame,
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taking me to the New York Natural History Museum,
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buying me books on snakes,
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and then starting this infamous career of mine,
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which has culminated in
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of course, arriving in India 60 years ago,
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brought by my mother, Doris Norden,
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and my stepfather, Rama Chattopadhyaya.
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It's been a roller coaster ride.
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Two animals, two iconic reptiles
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really captivated me very early on.
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One of them was the remarkable gharial.
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This crocodile, which grows to almost 20 feet long
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in the northern rivers,
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and this charismatic snake, the king cobra.
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What my purpose of the talk today really is,
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is to sort of indelibly scar your minds
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with these charismatic and majestic creatures.
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Because this is what you will take away from here,
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a reconnection with nature, I hope.
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The king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons.
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What you're seeing here is very recently shot images
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in a forest nearby here,
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of a female king cobra making her nest.
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Here is a limbless animal, capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves,
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and then laying her eggs inside,
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to withstand 5 to 10 [meters of rainfall],
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in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days,
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and hatch into little baby king cobras.
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So, she protects her eggs,
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and after three months,
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the babies finally do hatch out.
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A majority of them will die, of course. There is very high mortality
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in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long.
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My first experience with king cobras was in '72
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at a magical place called Agumbe,
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in Karnataka, this state.
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And it is a marvelous rain forest.
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This first encounter
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was kind of like the
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Maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior.
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It really changed my life totally.
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And it brought me straight into the conservation fray.
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I ended up starting this research
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and education station in Agumbe,
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which you are all of course invited to visit.
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This is basically a base wherein
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we are trying to gather and learn
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virtually everything about the biodiversity
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of this incredibly complex forest system,
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and try to hang on to what's there,
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make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean,
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and of course, having a good time too.
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You can almost hear the drums
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throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we're there.
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It was very important for us to get through to the people.
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And through the children is usually the way to go.
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They are fascinated with snakes. They haven't got
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that steely thing that you end up
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either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way.
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They are interested.
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And it really works to start with them.
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This gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes.
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This is an average size king cobra, about 12 feet long.
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And it actually crawled into somebody's bathroom,
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and was hanging around there for two or three days.
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The people of this part of India
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worship the king cobra.
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And they didn't kill it. They called us to catch it.
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Now we've caught more than 100 king cobras
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over the last three years,
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and relocated them in nearby forests.
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But in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures
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[it was necessary] for us to actually insert
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a small radio transmitter inside [each] snake.
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Now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets,
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where the babies go after they hatch,
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and remarkable things like this you're about to see.
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This was just a few days ago in Agumbe.
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I had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra
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who had caught a venomous pit viper.
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And it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself.
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And king cobras feed only on snakes.
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This [little snake] was kind of a tid-bit for it,
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what we'd call a "vadai" or a donut or something like that.
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05:23
(Laughter)
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Usually they eat something a bit larger.
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In this case a rather strange and inexplicable
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activity happened over the last breeding season,
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wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra,
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didn't mate with it, actually killed it and swallowed it.
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We're still trying to explain and come to terms with
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what is the evolutionary advantage of this.
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But they do also a lot of other remarkable things.
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This is again, something [we were able to see] by virtue of the fact
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that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes.
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This male snake, 12 feet long, met another male king cobra.
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And they did this incredible ritual combat dance.
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It's very much like the rutting of mammals, including humans,
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you know, sorting out our differences, but gentler, no biting allowed.
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It's just a wresting match,
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but a remarkable activity.
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Now, what are we doing with all this information?
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What's the point of all this?
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Well, the king cobra is literally
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a keystone species in these rainforests.
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And our job is to convince the authorities
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that these forests have to be protected.
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And this is one of the ways we do it,
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by learning as much as we can
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about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there,
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in order to help protect trees, animals
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and of course the water sources.
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You've all heard, perhaps, of Project Tiger
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which started back in the early '70s,
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which was, in fact, a very dynamic time for conservation.
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We were piloted, I could say,
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by a highly autocratic stateswoman,
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but who also had an incredible passion for environment.
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And this is the time when Project Tiger emerged.
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And, just like Project Tiger,
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our activities with the king cobra
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is to look at a species of animal
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so that we protect its habitat and everything within it.
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So, the tiger is the icon.
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And now the king cobra is a new one.
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All the major rivers in south India
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are sourced in the Western Ghats,
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the chain of hills running along the west coast of India.
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It pours out millions of gallons every hour,
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and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people,
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and washes many, many babies,
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and of course feeds many, many animals,
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both domestic and wild,
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produces thousands of tons of rice.
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And what do we do? How do we respond to this?
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Well, basically, we dam it, we pollute it,
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we pour in pesticides, weedicides, fungicides.
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You drink it in peril of your life.
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And the thing is, it's not just big industry.
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It's not misguided river engineers
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who are doing all this; it's us.
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It seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage
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are in water sources.
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Okay. Now we're going north, very far north.
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North central India, the Chambal River
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is where we have our base.
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This is the home of the gharial, this incredible crocodile.
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It is an animal which has been on the Earth
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for just about 100 million years.
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It survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off.
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It has remarkable features.
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Even though it grows to 20 feet long,
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since it eats only fish it's not dangerous to human beings.
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It does have big teeth, however,
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and it's kind of hard to convince people
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if an animal has big teeth, that it's a harmless creature.
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But we, actually, back in the early '70s,
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did surveys,
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and found that gharial were extremely rare.
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In fact, if you see the map,
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the range of their original habitat
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was all the way from the Indus in Pakistan
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to the Irrawaddy in Burma.
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And now it's just limited to a couple of spots
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in Nepal and India.
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So, in fact at this point
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there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild.
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So, starting in the mid-'70s
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when conservation was at the fore,
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we were actually able to start projects which were
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basically government supported
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to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests
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and release 5,000 baby gharial
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back to the wild.
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And pretty soon we were seeing sights like this.
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I mean, just incredible to see bunches of gharial
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basking on the river again.
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But complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt.
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And, sure enough, with all the other pressures on the river,
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like sand mining, for example,
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very, very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river's edge,
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not allowing the animals to breed anymore,
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we're looking at
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even more problems building up for the gharial,
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despite the early good intentions.
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Their nests hatching along the riverside
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producing hundreds of hatchlings. It's just an amazing sight.
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This was actually just taken last year.
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But then the monsoon arrives,
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and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or
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there is always a barrage,
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and, shoop, they get washed down to their doom.
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Luckily there is still a lot of interest.
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My pals in the Crocodile Specialist Group of the IUCN,
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the [Madras Crocodile Bank], an NGO,
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the World Wildlife Fund,
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the Wildlife Institute of India, State Forest Departments,
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and the Ministry of Environment, we all work together on stuff.
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But it's possibly, and definitely not enough.
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For example, in the winter of 2007 and 2008,
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there was this incredible die-off of gharial, in the Chambal River.
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Suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river, dead.
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Why? How could it happen?
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This is a relatively clean river.
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The Chambal, if you look at it, has clear water.
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People scoop water out of the Chambal and drink it,
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something you wouldn't do in most north Indian rivers.
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So, in order to try to find out the answer to this,
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we got veterinarians from all over the world
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working with Indian vets to try to figure out what was happening.
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I was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside.
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And we actually looked through
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all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on.
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And it came down to something called gout,
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which, as a result of kidney breakdown
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is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body,
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and worse in the joints,
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which made the gharial unable to swim.
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And it's a horribly painful death.
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Just downriver from the Chambal is the
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filthy Yamuna river, the sacred Yamuna river.
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And I hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it
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but it's the truth. It's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine.
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It flows down through Delhi, Mathura, Agra,
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and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine.
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So, it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial
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was something in the food chain,
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something in the fish they were eating.
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And, you know, once a toxin is in the food chain
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everything is affected, including us.
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Because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course.
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In order to try to answer some of these questions,
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we again turn to technology,
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to biological technology, in this case,
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again, telemetry, putting radios on 10 gharial,
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and actually following their movements. They're being watched
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everyday as we speak, to try to find out
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what this mysterious toxin is.
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The Chambal river is an absolutely incredible place.
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It's a place that's famous to a lot of you who know
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about the bandits, the dacoits
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who used to work up there. And there still are quite a few around.
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But Poolan Devi was one [of them]. Which actually Shekhar Kapur
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made an incredible movie, "The Bandit Queen," which I urge you to see.
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You'll get to see the incredible [Chambal] landscape as well.
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But, again, heavy fishing pressures.
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This is one of the last repositories of the
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Ganges river dolphin,
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various species of turtles,
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thousands of migratory birds,
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and fishing is causing problems like this.
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And now [these] new elements of human intolerance
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for river creatures like the gharial
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means that if they don't drown in the net,
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then they simply cut their beaks off.
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Animals like the Ganges river dolphin
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which is just down to a few left,
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and it is also critically endangered.
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So, who is next? Us?
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Because we are all dependent on these water sources.
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So, we all know about the Narmada river,
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the tragedies of dams, the tragedies of huge projects
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which displace people and wreck river systems
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without providing livelihoods.
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And development just basically going berserk,
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for a double figure growth index, basically.
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So, we're not sure where this story is going to end,
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whether it's got a happy or sad ending.
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And climate change is certainly going
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to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads.
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We're still working hard at it.
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We've got a lot of a good team of people working up there.
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And the thing is, you know, the decision makers,
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the folks in power,
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they're up in their bungalows and so on in Delhi,
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in the city capitals. They are all supplied with plenty of water. It's cool.
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But out on the rivers there are still millions of people
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who are in really bad shape.
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And it's a bleak future for them.
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So, we have our Ganges and Yamuna cleanup project.
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We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it,
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and nothing to show for it. Incredible.
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So, people talk about political will.
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During the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action.
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Government cut through all the red tape,
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we got foreign vets on it. It was great.
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So, we can do it.
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But if you stroll down to the Yamuna
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or to the Gomati in Lucknow,
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or to the Adyar river in Chennai,
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or the Mula-Mutha river in Pune,
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just see what we're capable of doing to a river. It's sad.
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But I think the final note really is
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that we can do it.
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The corporates, the artists, the wildlife nuts,
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the good old everyday folks
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can actually bring these rivers back.
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And the final word is
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that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders.
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And there is a gharial looking at us from the river.
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And these are powerful water totems.
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And they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing.
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Namaste.
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(Applause)
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Chris Anderson: Thanks, Rom. Thanks a lot.
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You know, most people are terrified of snakes.
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And there might be quite a few people here who would be
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very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust.
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Do you have those conversations with people?
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How do you really get them to care?
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Romulus Whitaker: I take the sort of humble approach,
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I guess you could say. I don't say that snakes are huggable exactly.
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It's not like the teddy bear.
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But I sort of -- there is an innocence in these animals.
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And when the average person looks at a cobra
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going "Ssssss!" like that, they say, "My god,
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look at that angry, dangerous creature."
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I look at it as a creature who is totally frightened
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of something so dangerous as a human being.
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And that is the truth. And that's what I try to get out.
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(Applause)
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CA: Now, incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed.
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You were saying that that hasn't been filmed before.
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RW: Yes, this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it, for one thing.
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As I said, it's just like a little snack for him, you know?
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Usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes,
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or even cobras.
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But this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle.
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Whereas other king cobras
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very often come into the human interface,
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you know, the plantations, to find big rat snakes and stuff.
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This guy specializes in pit vipers.
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And the guy who is working there with them,
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he's from Maharashtra, he said, "I think he's after the nusha."
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(Laughter)
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Now, the nusha means the high.
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Whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush.
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(Laughter)
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CA: Thanks Rom. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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