Goliath Groupers





Big Fish
If the goliath grouper loses its legal protection, will the 800-pounder sink or swim?
By Jennifer S. Holland
Photograph by David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes

Off the coast of southwest Florida, a hundred feet below the water’s surface, a whump rolls through the sea. Another whump follows, like the boom of distant fireworks. It’s coming from the carcass of a drowned ship. Packed into the cracked-open belly of the wreck are a dozen very big—and very audible—fish.

These are Atlantic goliath groupers. They gather on shipwrecks and reefs to eat and socialize. At up to 800 pounds and nine feet long, they sport jutting jaws and giant palm fronds for fins and are mottled and spotted in earth tones. They announce their presence to encroaching creatures by squeezing their swim bladders, the air sacs that help keep them afloat. Whump. Whump. WHUMP!

Nowadays when it comes to goliaths, people are the noisy ones. Atlantic goliaths used to be numerous and widespread, inhabiting the waters of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil by the tens of thousands. But after years of being speared and hooked by the boatload, their numbers dwindled to an unknown low, perhaps below a thousand. The Florida population is now rebounding, and fishermen, biologists, and local officials are raising their voices over whether the animals have recovered enough to shed their legal protection from people wielding spearguns and fishing lines.

Chris Koenig of Florida State University has been catching goliaths for decades, but not to bring them home as fillets or trophies. With the help of some strong assistants, he hooks goliaths and wrestles them on board a small boat to measure them, remove a cartilaginous fin ray for DNA and age tests, sample the stomach contents for diet studies, and check reproductive organs for signs of spawning. Each fish gets a tag beneath its skin before the scientists slide the animal back into the sea. Tracking his catch-and-release fish, Koenig has been able to pile up information on where and when they show up and how healthy each one is. He and his wife and colleague, Felicia Coleman, who helps manage the slew of data, hope to get a handle on the current status of the species, Epinephelus itajara.

The goliath’s own behavior contributed to its population drop. “Ordinarily these fish don’t move a whit; they are glued to the reef,” where food and shelter are plentiful, Koenig says.

That makes them easy targets. “We used to shoot goliaths all the time,” says 86-year-old Frank Hammett, who spent much of his 20s with speargun in hand. “In Palm Beach you could see them sitting on the bottom in a hundred feet of water. The reefs were covered with them. There might be a hundred in one spot or a wall of them—something you don’t forget! I’d shoot one or two, get eight cents a pound for them. Did that for 15 years or more.”

For a while the grouper’s commercial appeal was regional—in the Florida Keys goliath grouper with black beans and rice was a delicacy—but when other fish stocks waned in the early 1980s, goliaths landed on menus everywhere. They were also a recreational favorite; sportsmen loved overpowering the giants. Many thousands died as trophies. Long-lived and slow to mature, the species simply couldn’t keep up with the slaughter. It teetered on the edge of extinction.

But it didn’t fall. In 1990 the goliath, identified as endangered, received legal protection in the southeastern U.S. The fish have been slowly rebuilding their population ever since—and attracting scuba divers, who delight in swimming with the immense but nonthreatening fish. The biggest recovery—perhaps as many as thousands of fish—has been off southwest Florida where the mangrove forests, the home of the juveniles, remain thick.

As often happens in the world of conservation, there are two distinct sides on the issue of goliaths. Still considered critically endangered in much of their range, goliaths in Florida remain legally off-limits. “The political pendulum has swung so far toward protection that you can’t even touch or look at one,” says Key West City Commissioner Tony Yaniz. “You’re better off getting caught with bales of marijuana than with one of these fish.”

Yet many fishermen insist the animal has returned in droves. And they complain that the big fish interfere with business. “We have goliaths taking legal grouper and snapper right off our lines, over and over,” says commercial fisherman and guide Jim Thomas. “Lobsters too. It’s such a waste.” He is one of many who want to be able to fish for goliaths—even just a few annually—to thin out the alleged thieves. It doesn’t have to be a one-sided benefit, Yaniz adds. Why not have the fishermen contribute to answering the conservation questions by providing data on numbers and sizes of fish? “They’re the ones out there every day, with eyes on the water. They can really help us figure out where the species stands.”

Conservationists think the fishing community is off base. Koenig and other non-fishermen with “eyes on the water” strongly dispute the claim that groupers are sucking up fishermen’s haul. Studies have repeatedly shown that the lumbering goliaths feed almost exclusively on small, slow targets (crabs, not lobsters, make up more than half their diet).

Koenig says that giving permission to fish for goliaths in Florida where numbers are up could hamper overall recovery. These fish mostly stick close to the same shallow reefs, rocky ledges, and wrecked ships. “As homebodies,” he explains, “goliaths are already reluctant to relocate.” So if you thin out the most crowded areas, the remaining goliaths have even less reason to recolonize places where the species has died out. And that means recovery won’t be as widespread as it could be.

Koenig and Coleman have found that the only time goliaths really move far is for spawning. “When it comes time to mate, they will travel great distances to get to spawning sites, nearly 300 miles in some cases,” says Koenig. “They might cover 25 miles a day in a beeline.” Fish from far and wide, maybe from the entire Atlantic seaboard, congregate offshore near shipwrecks and reefs, sidling together in bullet-shaped masses, bumping and nuzzling and sounding off in the dark of night as they send up sperm and eggs to build the next generation.

However successful their mating, a return to historic high numbers may be just a dream for the big fish. Koenig says exposure to mercury is having “an insidious toxic impact” on the animals. “The adults have actual pathologies—lesions in the liver—from the levels of mercury,” he says. Not only might that be partly to blame for the fish’s decline, but also it means we shouldn’t be eating these things. “If you were to catch anything over about four feet long,” says Don DeMaria, a former commercial fisherman who assists with conservation efforts, “you would have to throw it back anyway.” The mercury, he says, “makes it inedible.”

The future of goliaths is also tied up in those mangrove nurseries, where the fish live around the trees’ tangled roots until they are about five years old. Coastal development, agriculture, and pollutants threaten these shallow-water habitats. The current trajectory suggests 20 percent losses of remaining U.S. mangroves in the next 50 years—devastating for young, developing goliaths, which are already reeling from unusually cold winters that took out thousands of the fish from their juvenile habitat throughout South Florida.

Ultimately fishermen and biologists and even government officials want the same thing: a grouper population big and vigorous enough to keep divers coming and to weather a few hooks in the water without collapsing. While the debate rattles on, the goliaths in question continue booming beneath the waves.

The big fish, too, just want to be heard.

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Beloved African Elephant Killed for Ivory—"Monumental" Loss

Popular with tourists, Satao fell to poachers May 30, 2014, group says.

Satao drinks at a water hole in Tsavo East National Park, Kenya, in 2013, when the magnificent tusker was in his prime.

Photograph by Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, www.markdeeble.wordpress.com

Christine Dell'Amore

Published June 16, 2014

One of Kenya's most adored elephants, who had giant tusks and was known as Satao, has been killed for his ivory—a "monumental" loss, experts say.

Poachers shot the bull elephant with a poisoned arrow in Tsavo East National Park, waited for him to die a painful death, and hacked off his face to remove his ivory, according to the Tsavo Trust, an area nonprofit that works with wildlife and local communities.

Satao was particularly appealing to poachers as a tusker, a type of male elephant with a genetic makeup that produces unusually large tusks. His tusks were more than 6.5 feet (2 meters) long.

"Kenya as a country contains probably the last remaining big tuskers in the world," said Paula Kahumbu, a Kenya-based wildlife conservationist with the nonprofit WildlifeDirect.

"To lose an animal like Satao is a massive loss to Kenya. He was a major tourist attraction to that part of Tsavo," said Kahumbu, who was a 2011 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

The elephant was killed May 30, but members of the trust announced his death on June 13, after verifying the carcass's identity.

"It is with enormous regret that we confirm there is no doubt that Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher's poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far-off countries," the Tsavo Trust said in a statement.

"A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece."

Satao was killed by poachers and his face was hacked off in Tsavo East National Park in May 2014.

Photograph by Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, www.markdeeble.wordpress.com

"Massive and Hostile" Expanse

Satao died despite his high profile, which brought special protection.

"It's also a reflection on the situation in Kenya that even in a place where all efforts are made to protect the elephants, it's still very difficult to protect them," Kahumbu said.

For the past 18 months, the Tsavo Trust and the Kenya Wildlife Service have been monitoring Satao's movements by air and on foot. "When he was alive, his enormous tusks were easily identifiable, even from the air," according to the Tsavo Trust.

Satao generally kept to a predictably small area with four other bull elephants. But in search of food following big rains, he had recently moved into a boundary of the park that's a known poaching hot spot, especially for hunters with poisoned arrows.

Authorities noticed this and protection efforts were stepped up, but the area Satao entered "is a massive and hostile expanse for any single anti-poaching unit to cover, at least one thousand square kilometers [about 390 square miles] in size," according to the Tsavo Trust.

"Understaffed and with inadequate resources given the scale of the challenge, [Kenya Wildlife Service] ground units have a massive uphill struggle to protect wildlife in this area."

 

 

 

The Wells of Memory

One of the first travelers in a century to walk through the Hejaz desert of Saudi Arabia, Paul Salopek encounters a fabled past of caravans and pilgrims, of empires come and gone.

By Paul Salopek

Photograph by John Stanmeyer

There are thousands of wells in the old Hejaz. We walk to them.
Sometimes their water is sweet. More often it is salt. It matters little. These wells, which pock the long-disused caravan trails of Arabia, are monuments to human survival. Each concentrates a fine distillation of the landscape. And the same applies to the people who drink from them. In the Hejaz—the fabled realm of a vanished kingdom of the Hashemites, who once ruled the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia—there are bustling wells and lonesome wells. There are wells whose waters convey the chemistry of sadness or joy. Each represents a cosmos in a bucket. We take our bearings off them.
Wadi Wasit is a well of forgetting.
We reach it on a fiery day in August. We are halfway through a more than 700-mile foot journey, perhaps the first made in generations, from Jeddah to Jordan. We rest in the dendrites of gray shade thrown by the well’s two thorn trees. Here we meet the running man.
He arrives in a pickup truck. Portly, mustachioed, a Bedouin camel herder, he is friendly, curious, talkative, jittery. He mistakes us for treasure seekers. (Why else walk through the scorching desert?) He has come to sell artifacts.
“Look at this!” he says. He displays a tin ring. The iron scabbard of a sword. A well-rubbed coin.
How old are these things?
The running man doesn’t know. “Kadim jidn,” he says: Very old. He shrugs.
The Hejaz—a crossroads where Arabia, Africa, and Asia meet, and long tied by trade to Europe—is one of the most storied corners of the ancient world. It has seen millennia of wanderers. Stone Age people hunted and fished their way north out of Africa through vanished savannas. People from some of humankind’s first civilizations—Assyrians, Egyptians, and Nabataeans—roamed through here, trading slaves for incense and gold. Romans invaded the Hejaz. (Thousands of the legionaries died of disease and thirst.) Islam was born here, in the dark volcanic hills of Mecca and Medina. Pilgrims from Morocco or Constantinople probably drank from the well in Wadi Wasit. Lawrence of Arabia may have gulped its water too. Nobody knows. Kadim jidn.
“Take it!” the running man says. He shoves his orphan finds at us. “Take it for free!” But we decline to buy his curiosities.
Packing our two camels to leave, we spot him once again. He is running now—sprinting around the well. He has removed his white robe. And he is running through the desert in his underwear, circling the well under the ruthless sun. He runs with abandon. Ali al Harbi, my translator, takes a photograph. Awad Omran, our camel handler, guffaws. But I cannot laugh. He is not mad, the running man. Or drugged. Or playing some joke. He is lost, I think. As we all are when we abandon history. We don’t know where to go. There is an abundance of pasts in the Hejaz. But I have never been to a place more memory-less.
A small, bottomless well in the Hejaz: a white porcelain cup.
It holds dark, rich coffee. It sits atop a polished wooden table inside an elegant mansion in the port of Jeddah. Three articulate Hejazi women refill the cup endlessly. They take turns talking, wishing to correct misperceptions about Saudi Arabia: that the kingdom is a homogenized society, a culture flattened by its famously austere brand of Islam, a nation rendered dull by escapist consumerism and by petrodollars. No.
Saudi Arabia, they say, is a rich human mosaic. It enfolds many distinctive regions and cultures: a Shiite east, a Yemeni south, a Levantine north, and a tribal Bedouin stronghold in the center—the puritanical redoubt of the Najdis, home of the ruling dynasty, the House of Saud. The women insist, moreover, that no region in Saudi Arabia remains more independent, more proud, than the realm that has guarded the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since the tenth century—the vanished kingdom of the Hejaz. Fully independent by the end of World War I, the Hejaz was annexed by the Al Saud dynasty only in 1925. It remains a place of contradictions, of complexity, of tensions between religion and geography. On the one hand: a sacred landscape, its holy cities long forbidden to nonbelievers. On the other: the most cosmopolitan and liberal corner of Saudi Arabia, a melting pot, an entrepôt and nexus of migration, brightly checkered with influences from Asia, Africa, the Levant, and a hundred other places—the California of Saudi Arabia.
Laila Abduljawad, a cultural preservationist: “The Hejaz has attracted pilgrims from every corner of the Islamic world. How could this not rub off? Our main dish is Bukhari rice from Central Asia! Our folk textiles are Indian! Our accents are Egyptian! We are more open to the world than the people from the center.”
Salma Alireza, a traditional embroiderer: “The traditional dress for women in the Hejaz was not the abaya”—the severe black robe imposed by the ruling Najdis. “Women here used to wear bright red and blue dresses in public. That was traditional. But life changed in the 1960s. The oil money poured in. We modernized too fast. We lost so much in 50 years!”
Rabya Alfadl, a young marketing consultant: “Is the Hejaz still different? Take a look around.”
And it’s true. The women sit at the table unveiled. They wear casual Western clothing: blouses and trousers. (Such a meeting would be difficult to arrange in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where gender segregation and tribal ways remain so strict that a man will not utter his mother’s name in public.) The house where we chat is sleekly designed, chic, minimalist, global in decor. And outside, in Jeddah’s streets, there are art galleries, cafés, promenades, museums—the cultural hub of Saudi Arabia.
“A sense of cultural identity has persisted in the Hejaz for a thousand years. It developed its own music, its cuisine, its own folktales,” Abduljawad tells me. She turns her cup in her hands. “We are taking our first baby steps to rescue a small part of this.”
These women are daughters of a feminine city. Arab folk tradition holds that the biblical Eve was buried in Jeddah, now a modern, sprawling, industrial port. Eve’s tomb—200 yards long, shaped like a reclining figure—was crowned by an “ancient and lofty dome,” according to the Moorish traveler Ibn Jubayr. It is gone, marked today by a barren concrete cemetery. Wahhabi clerics, who abhor shrines as idolatrous, likely razed it nearly a century ago. But again, no one can remember.
More than 300 miles north of Jeddah, near a dry well called Al Amarah, we stop walking. We look up from our tired feet. A car approaches across a plain of glistening salt. It is a Toyota HiLux, the iron camel of the modern Bedouin.
This is an event. Traversing western Saudi Arabia on foot today is lonelier than it was one or two generations ago when the black tents of Bedouin were still pegged to the brittle hide of the desert. The famous nomads of the Hejaz—the Balawi, the Harb, the Juhayna—have resettled in towns, in suburbs, in offices, in army barracks. Modern Saudi Arabia is heavily urbanized (matching the United States in this respect).
Yet a few diehards remain.
One steps from the truck. He is a graybeard in a stained gray thobe, the classic robe of Saudi men. He brings us a gift. “It is our way,” says the old man, who calls himself Abu Saleh. He sweeps a callused hand at the surrounding desert. “We welcome all travelers.”
No other soul is visible on the horizon. Abu Saleh leaves us with a simple goodbye. His gift: a small well of kindness—a dented steel bowl full of camel’s milk.
Built of necessity, the wells in the old Hejaz have faded, softened, eroded into objects of beauty and contemplation.
The earliest of these watering stations were established, precisely one day’s walk apart, by the Caliph Umar in a.d. 638. “A traveler is the person worthiest of receiving protection,” he declared, before pioneering the most sophisticated rest-stop system in the ancient world: waypoints on the pilgrims’ trails to Mecca serviced by forts, cisterns, guesthouses, date groves, hospitals, canals, even distance markers.
We trudge the same trails—ribbons of desert burnished by countless shuffling camels, by numberless sandaled feet. Scholars from Timbuktu drank from these wells. So did merchants from Spain seeking frankincense. So did sun-boiled 19th-century European explorers who rambled the Hejaz disguised as pilgrims. One who didn’t pose was a blustery Englishman named Charles M. Doughty. He announced himself to everyone as a Christian, an infidel, and walked with a knife up his sleeve. (Of one caravan swollen with 10,000 animals and 6,000 people, he wrote: “The length of the slow-footed multitude of men and cattle is near two miles, and the width some hundred yards in the open plains.”)
North of the city of Al Wajh we unpack our two camels at a well, utterly ignored by the speeding traffic of a superhighway. This well, called Al Antar, was rendered obsolete a century ago by steamships. It is made absurd today by the pilgrims hurtling overhead in Boeing 777s. I bend over the well’s lip. A damp air breathes up from its darkness, cooling my cheeks. I hear from somewhere far below the calls of startled songbirds. I think: Arabia is like the American West. It is a landscape of terrible absences.
If the Hejaz still inspires romance in the non-Muslim world, it is due to its long caravan of foreign chroniclers.
There is the 19th-century Swiss polymath Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who traveled to the religious core of Islam as a pauper—a “reduced Egyptian gentleman”—and never made it home. (He died of dysentery and was buried with Muslim rites in Cairo.) There is the brilliant and pompous Englishman Richard Francis Burton, who, if he can be believed, actually touched the Kaaba, the holiest of holies—a massive cube of volcanic stone in Mecca toward which all Muslims must pray. These Europeans witnessed a world locked in time. They found Red Sea towns built of shining white coral blocks, their arched doors and window shutters painted sea green and dazzling nomad blue. They passed through walled cities whose tall gates creaked shut at dusk. They galloped camels between fortified oases with wild-haired men, the Bedouin, whom they found harshly admirable. (Burton: “We had another fight before we got to Mecca, and a splendid camel in front of me was shot through the heart.”) This literary Hejaz, if it ever truly existed, has long since disappeared under American-style suburbs and strip malls. Yet outside the old pilgrim’s port of Al Wajh, we stumble upon the ghost of one of the most famous of these Orientalists.
Workmen are cleaning out a well.
The well lies within the high rock walls of Al Zurayb fortress, built 400 years ago by the Ottomans. The laborers haul up old explosives: cannon shells that look like rusted pineapples. The ordnance was chucked down the well in panic, probably in January 1917. At that time a camelback Arab army was approaching fast. The tribes of the Hejaz had risen against their German-allied Ottoman overlords. And the foreigner who had stoked the revolt—he was barely five feet five inches tall but possessed a masochistic hardness—whooped along with the attackers. Of the Arab cavalry he wrote: “They wore rusty-red tunics henna-dyed, under black cloaks, and carried swords. Each had a slave crouched behind him on the crupper [of the camel] to help him with rifle and dagger in the fight, and to watch his camel and cook for him on the road.”
Thomas Edward Lawrence, more famous as Lawrence of Arabia, is one of our first postmodern heroes: a compromised superman. The young British intelligence officer and Oxford medievalist yearned, subversively, to bring liberty to an Arab world that was then staggering under the corrupt yoke of the Ottoman Turks. Yet he was tormented by the knowledge that the Hejazis who fought alongside him would be betrayed by the European colonial powers that carved up the Middle East after World War I.
“Lorens al Arab,” I tell the workmen at the fort. I point to the live shells.
The name means nothing to them. Lawrence is virtually forgotten in Saudi Arabia. He backed the wrong dynasty after the war. His champion, Faisal, the moderate Hashemite prince of the Hejaz, lost a power struggle to the fierce tribes of the interior led by the peninsula’s future king, Ibn Saud.
“They were a people of spasms, of upheavals, of ideas, the race of the individual genius,” Lawrence wrote of his comrades in the Hejaz. “The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.”
This is what happens when you peer down wells in the Hejaz. You glimpse your own reflection. Lawrence, an ascetic of empire, was describing himself.
Wells of piety: plastic cups of water arranged by the thousands across a stone courtyard in Medina.
It is Ramadan, the fasting month. The holiest month of the Muslim lunar calendar. Just outside Al Masjid al Nabawi, the burial mosque of the Prophet Muhammad, the second holiest site in Islam, at least 60,000 faithful are gathered at sunset to break the day’s hunger.
They come from all quadrants of the Earth. I see Indians and Africans. I hear French. I am not Muslim. But I have been fasting all month out of respect. Across from me a big pilgrim from Afghanistan—a red-haired Nuristani—kneels in front of one of the prepackaged meals distributed daily at the site. He hands me his orange. I give him mine. We exchange our food like this several times, laughing. On the loudspeakers an imam sings the crowd into prayer. They pray. And beneath a fading yellow sky, we eat in tender silence.
Strange new wells on the roads of the Hejaz: machines humming in the desert.
Their fitted aluminum surfaces shine under the sun. Hallucinations of metal. Of rubber and plastic. They are outdoor electric coolers. They dispense water so icy it numbs the mouth. We encounter hundreds of these mechanical shrines, called asbila: public water fountains commissioned by the pious to earn virtue in the eyes of Allah. One day their rusted parts, jutting from the shifting dunes, will puzzle archaeologists. How can any society afford to chill a cup of water in a barrens as gigantic and remote as the Hejaz? It seems impossible. Mystifying. Yet the asbila from which we gratefully fill our canteens exist because of other wells—ones drilled in the distant oil fields of eastern Saudi Arabia.
“We’ve traded away our past for wealth,” laments Ibrahim, a water engineer in the port of Al Wajh. “My grandfather’s 200-year-old coral-block home? Bulldozed. The docks where dhows from Eritrea brought in camels? Gone. Our city’s stone lighthouse that used to be seen from 20 kilometers at sea? Rubble. Nobody cares. It’s all old stuff. It has no economic value.”
Some Hejazis blame Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative version of Islam for much of the erasure of their past. In recent years, for example, urban historians have decried the demolition of the old quarters of Mecca and Medina, including the flattening of ancient structures associated with Muhammad himself. Officially this was done to provide services for the two million or more pilgrims who swell the cities on hajj. But religious authorities have frequently blessed the destruction of cultural sites. Wahhabis emphasize that all the past before Islam is jahiliyya: a time of ignorance. And they fear that even the preservation of Islamic sites may lead to the worship of objects, and not God—thus promoting idolatry, or shirk.
It is worth noting that the loudest laments for the disappearing heritage of the old Hejaz come from Muslims outside Saudi Arabia. “It is difficult to get young Saudis involved in their own history,” says Malak Mohammed Mehmoud Baissa, the mayor of Jeddah’s remnant old town. “It isn’t taught seriously in schools.”
Breakneck economic change. Modernization. From tents to Twitter and glass skyscrapers in barely three generations. Europe must have been this way during the industrial revolution. It is miraculous that Paris survived.
Meanwhile, in the fishing towns along the shore of the Hejaz, the last local fishermen strain to sing sea shanties into my digital recorder. Songs from the age of wooden dhows. Songs of warm Red Sea winds. Of beauties waiting in ports. These Hejazi fishermen, most of whom have hired out their boats to migrant Bangladeshis, have earned their own anthropologists. “It is important,” say researchers from the University of Exeter in England, “to capture the last true remnants of the songs of the sea before they become mere pastiches.”
We inch northward toward Jordan. We guzzle a gallon of water a day. We seek out wells of memory.
In Jeddah a female artist honors a lost world, displaying on the old city’s walls images of her grandfather sitting with his vanished majlis, a traditional council once common in the homes of Hejaz aristocrats. (The art—titled “Where Is My Majlis?”—is mysteriously removed after a week.)
In Medina a museum director spends seven years of his life constructing a meticulous, 50-foot-square diorama of the holy city’s heart, with its mazy alleys and lemon trees. These timeless features were scraped away in the 1980s to make way for high-rise hotels. (“Old residents come here to cry.”)
The past is fraught territory in every country. Until barely a generation ago U.S. textbooks rarely acknowledged the complex universe inhabited by Native Americans. Israel points to biblical archaeology to cement its right of existence. Yet in Saudi Arabia this blinkered view is changing.
Riyadh has spent nearly a million dollars on a museum devoted to the Hejaz Railway—the storied Arabian version of the Orient Express—terminating in Medina. Jeddah’s antique quarter is also up for review as a UNESCO World Heritage site. (One such global treasure already exists in the Hejaz: Madain Salih, a colossal necropolis of the Nabataean empire.) Most extraordinary of all, an entire Hejazi caravan town of some 800 homes, abandoned and crumbling for 40 years, has been bought by the government for renovation.
“This is our greatest experiment,” says Mutlaq Suleiman Almutlaq, an archaeologist with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, and the curator of the ancient caravansary town of Al Ula. “We are looking back more. This is good.”
Almutlaq is an earnest, friendly man. He scrambles ahead of me in his white thobe through the walled ghost town located south of Madain Salih. He vaults broken archways and pokes through covered medieval streets. He shows me courtyards where traders hawked incense, lapis, and silk for eight centuries. Kerosene lanterns manufactured in Germany rust on the floors of the empty homes. The legendary Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta passed through in the 14th century, praising the honesty of Al Ula’s populace: Pilgrims stored their luggage here en route to Mecca. Almutlaq takes pride in this fact. He lived and worked in Al Ula as a youth. The site’s residents were trucked, en masse, to modern apartments in the 1970s.
“I remember,” he says, smiling. And he talks of traveling merchants loading bales of Egyptian textiles. Of farmers stalking in at dusk from the fields. Of women talking to each other from windows latticed for modesty.
Twin wells of memory: Almutlaq’s glasses, flashing excitedly amid the dim archaeology of his childhood.
We are all pilgrims in the Hejaz. Wanderers through time. We stop at its wells, or we pass them by. It matters little. Used or not, the wells remain. In their basements shine disks of pale sky—the unblinking eyes of memory.
After six months of walking, I say goodbye to my guides Ali and Awad. I cross the Haql border from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. I carry little. A shoulder bag of notebooks bound with rubber bands. Seven hundred miles of words. Pages crazed with jottings about devastating heat. Inked maps of pilgrim roads. Divinations of Bedouin fire doctors. Bearings for remote wells.
I reach a modern tourist resort. No one pays me any mind. There is the novelty of women driving cars. I watch couples strolling beaches in sarongs. I stop at a mini-mart and buy a bottle of filtered water: a small plastic well, an artifact from the main channel of history. I peer south, beyond the Gulf of Aqaba—toward the Hejaz. A cloaked place. The lips of its ancient wells are grooved by ropes turned to dust. Dust long since blown away. I sip my water. It tastes utterly ordinary.
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Poachers kill beloved Kenyan elephant known for giant tusks

By Faith Karimi, CNN

June 15, 2014 -- Updated 0704 GMT (1504 HKT)

Kenya's mighty Tsavo elephant Satao, who was killed by poachers with poisoned arrows on May 30.

(CNN) -- Poachers killed one of Kenya's most beloved elephants -- a behemoth animal with tusks so large, they touched the ground.

Satao was shot with poisoned arrows in the sprawling Tsavo National Park in the country's southeast.

Wildlife officials found his carcass with two massive holes where his tusks once stood. His face was so badly mutilated, authorities used other ways to identify him, including his ears and the pattern of mud caked on his body.

Ivory's tragic price

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Chad's bloody ivory trade

 

"Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher's poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far off countries. A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantlepiece," Tsavo Trust said in statement late Friday. "Rest in peace, old friend, you will be missed."

Satao was about 45 years old, and a hit among visitors at the national park, where understaffed conservationists monitored him regularly to protect him from poachers.

"When he was alive, his enormous tusks were easily identifiable, even from the air," said Tsavo Trust, a non-profit that protects wildlife.

Though he mostly roamed within a limited part of the park, he recently started venturing to an area considered a hotbed of poaching activity.

The area he moved to in search of fresh water is hard to access due to its thick vegetation and scarce roads.

"With today's mounting poaching pressures and anti-poaching resources stretched to the limit, it proved impossible to prevent the poachers getting through the net," Tsavo Trust said.

His carcass was found earlier this month, but authorities verified his identity Friday.

"We are left with no choice but to acknowledge that the great Satao is no more," the trust said in a statement.

South Africa marks worst year in rhino killings

Satao is a victim of an illegal ivory trade that has doubled worldwide since 2007, with the United States the second-largest retail market for illegally acquired tusks. China is the largest market.

Conservation groups say the recent surge in the illicit ivory trade has resulted in the killing of 30,000 African elephants annually in recent years. The tusks are sold for thousands of dollars a kilogram, making it a lucrative trade and endangering already fragile populations in Africa..

"The surge in the killing of elephants in Africa and the illegal taking of other listed species globally threatens not only wildlife populations but the livelihoods of millions who depend on tourism for a living and the lives of those wardens and wildlife staff who are attempting to stem the illegal tide," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. environment program.

Armed groups are capitalizing on the increasing value of ivory by killing elephants and trading their tusks for arms and ammunition.

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With Millions of Tons of Plastic in Oceans, More Scientists Studying Impact

A surprising amount of our garbage ends up in the sea. Can it ever be cleaned up?

Fishermen set out amid floating garbage off the shore of Manila Bay in the Philippines on June 8, 2013.

Photograph by Erik De Castro, Reuters

Laura Parker

Published June 13, 2014

Consider this: The amount of global trash is expected to rise every year for the rest of the century. With no intervention, the growing garbage heap won't even peak by 2021.
Since most marine debris originates on land, that grim prognosis, say researchers at the University of Georgia, could spell disaster for the oceans, creating an environmental hazard often compared in scope with climate change.
"We estimate we're going to have millions of tons of plastic going into the ocean with, so far, unknown consequences," says Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the university, who is among a group of scientists pursuing a new phase of research on ocean trash and measuring its impact on the environment and marine life. The University of Georgia group works as part of the University of California at Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
But while climate change is still mired in politics and is a target of naysayers, the trouble in the oceans is an easier issue to address because it is so visible. "The one thing this issue has going for it over climate change is that you can see the garbage," Jambeck says.
Ocean debris grabbed the international spotlight this spring during the search for the missing Malaysian jet, when multiple satellite images of floating debris repeatedly turned out to be garbage instead of pieces of the Boeing 777. (See "Plane Search Shows World's Oceans Are Full of Trash.")

Secretary of State John Kerry hopes to highlight the issue again next week by making marine trash one of the main topics at a two-day oceans conference that begins Monday. Kerry hopes to frame the challenges that lie ahead, including climate change-related ocean acidification and the threat of overfishing.
But the dilemma caused by the growing tonnage of mostly plastic debris is so complex, it has created a new interdisciplinary field of study. Scientists like Jambeck are examining a litany of new issues that range from the toxicity of plastics ingested by marine animals to the politics and economics of solid waste management in developing nations.

New Questions for an Old Problem
Seafarers have known for decades that the oceans are trash dumps, the ultimate sinkholes for all global garbage. So far, 136 species of marine animals have been found entangled in debris. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first such discovery was made in 1944, when northern fur seals turned up trapped in rubber "collars" that were the remains of Japanese food-drop bags from the Aleutian campaign in World War II.
But scientific research into marine garbage is only a decade or so old. NOAA, for example, launched its Marine Debris Program only in 2006, after Congress passed the Marine Debris Act at the urging of Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).
The defining moment of ocean debris research, says Jambeck, was when scientists discovered that ocean debris was no longer an assemblage of cloth, wood, and ceramics, but was composed almost entirely of plastic. Most of that is micro-plastic, meaning it has decayed and broken down into microscopic pieces that float in the water column. Richard Thompson, a British scientist scheduled to speak at Kerry's conference, first highlighted the problem in 2004 in a paper titled "Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?"
"Once micro-plastics entered the picture and it was being ingested by marine life, it was a whole new ballgame," Jambeck says. "That's when the alarms started going off."
Jambeck and her team's research, to be published later this year, will provide new estimates of how much garbage is produced globally every year, how much garbage comes from developing countries lacking garbage collection systems, and how much litter is produced by developed countries. All trash has the potential to reach the oceans.
Yet despite the new burst of scientific study, solving the problem in the face of an increasing volume of ocean trash seems an almost insurmountable task.

A boy collects debris on a beach near Durres on Albania's Adriatic Coast on April 9, 2010.

Photograph by Arben Celi, Reuters

 

Options Are Few: Cleanup or Prevention
An alliance of 48 plastic manufacturers from 25 countries—all members of the Global Plastics Associations for Solutions on Marine Litter—has pledged to help prevent marine debris and encourage recycling. Several manufacturers are now marketing products made partly from recycled ocean plastics and abandoned fishing gear.
But the consensus among many scientists, including NOAA's, is that cleaning up the oceans can potentially cause more harm than good. Cleaning up micro-plastics could also inadvertently sweep up plankton, which provides the basis for the marine food chain and half of the photosynthesis on Earth.
Ocean trash is driven by currents into loosely formed garbage "patches" that Dianna Parker, a NOAA spokesperson, says are more accurately described as "peppery soup" filled with grain-size plastic bits. The word "patch" suggests a defined size and location, when in fact floating debris is constantly moving, shifting with seasonal weather, and changing in shape and size.
Cleaning up even one of these areas seems impossible. Not surprisingly, the largest patch is in the largest ocean—the Pacific, which covers a third of the planet. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it is known, is often said to be twice the size of Texas. It actually extends, at times, from Japan to San Francisco, and varies in shape and density. According to NOAA, cleaning up less than one percent of the North Pacific would take 68 ships working 10 hours a day for a year.
Beach cleanups help, but are costly and ineffective. The Ocean Conservancy, the international leader in coastal cleanups, has collected some 180 million tons in three decades of work. "We have now created the world's best database for what actually happens on our beaches," says Andreas Merkl, the group's CEO. "We are the largest end-of-the-pipe, ocean-specific trash entity."

San Francisco spends $6 million a year cleaning up cigarette butts alone, according to NOAA figures in a report called the "The Honolulu Strategy: A Global Framework for Prevention and Management of Marine Debris." The Honolulu Strategy, developed at a NOAA conference in 2011, notes that a more effective solution is to prevent debris from being swept into the oceans in the first place.

But as long as some countries lack the ability to efficiently collect garbage from its citizens, that garbage will continue to end up in the ocean.

Plastic-Making Technology Spreads

Ted Siegler, a partner at DSM Environmental Services, a waste management firm in Windsor, Vermont, has spent a career helping developing countries set up garbage collection systems.
"In many ways, this is really simple. This is putting trucks on the road and picking up the garbage and bringing it to a proper place," he says. "But none of that is occurring in almost all of the places that I've been working in the last 20 years."

The complication, Siegler says, is the speed with which plastic manufacturing technology has spread globally.

"I could walk into a guy's garage in Jordan and he would be blowing film to create plastic bags. Or walk into an industrial shop in Vietnam and a guy would have a brand-new Chinese knockoff of a Frito-Lay packaging machine," he says.

"There is no end in sight to how much plastic we are going to be producing and how much we are going to be using, and that's the scary part. If it's important now, it's going to be much more important ten years from now."

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America's Allies Are Funding ISIS

By Josh Rogin 2 hours ago The Daily Beast

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America's Allies Are Funding ISIS

The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.

It’s an ironic twist, especially for donors in Kuwait (who, to be fair, back a wide variety of militias). ISIS has aligned itself with remnants of the Baathist regime once led by Saddam Hussein. Back in 1990, the U.S. attacked Iraq in order to liberate Kuwait from Hussein’s clutches. Now Kuwait is helping the rise of his successors.

 As ISIS takes over town after town in Iraq, they are acquiring money and supplies including American made vehicles, arms, and ammunition. The group reportedly scored $430 million this week when they looted the main bank in Mosul. They reportedly now have a stream of steady income sources, including from selling oil in the Northern Syrian regions they control, sometimes directly to the Assad regime.

But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.

“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
Iraqi Prime Minister has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.

Gulf donors support ISIS, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda called the al Nusrah Front, and other Islamic groups fighting on the ground in Syria because they feel an obligation to protect Sunnis suffering under the atrocities of the Assad regime. Many of these backers don’t trust or like the American backed moderate opposition, which the West has refused to provide significant arms to.
Under significant U.S. pressure, the Arab Gulf governments have belatedly been cracking down on funding to Sunni extremist groups, but Gulf regimes are also under domestic pressure to fight in what many Sunnis see as an unavoidable Shiite-Sunni regional war that is only getting worse by the day.

“ISIS is part of the Sunni forces that are fighting Shia forces in this regional sectarian conflict. They are in an existential battle with both the (Iranian aligned) Maliki government and the Assad regime,” said Tabler. “The U.S. has made the case as strongly as they can to regional countries, including Kuwait. But ultimately when you take a hands off, leading from behind approach to things, people don’t take you seriously and they take matters into their own hands.”

Donors in Kuwait, the Sunni majority Kingdom on Iraq’s border, have taken advantage of Kuwait’s weak financial rules to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of Syrian rebel brigades, according to a December 2013 report by The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank that receives some funding from the Qatari government.

“Over the last two and a half years, Kuwait has emerged as a financing and organizational hub
for charities and individuals supporting Syria’s myriad rebel groups,” the report said. “Today, there is evidence that Kuwaiti donors have backed rebels who have committed atrocities and who are either directly linked to al-Qa’ida or cooperate with its affiliated brigades on the ground.”

Kuwaiti donors collect funds from donors in other Arab Gulf countries and the money often travels through Turkey or Jordan before reaching its Syrian destination, the report said. The governments of Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have passed laws to curb the flow of illicit funds, but many donors still operate out in the open. The Brookings paper argues the U.S. government needs to do more.

“The U.S. Treasury is aware of this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing. But Western diplomats’ and officials’ general response has been a collective shrug,” the report states.

When confronted with the problem, Gulf leaders often justify allowing their Salafi constituents to fund Syrian extremist groups by pointing back to what they see as a failed U.S. policy in Syria and a loss of credibility after President Obama reneged on his pledge to strike Assad if the regime used chemical weapons.
That’s what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in Washington, reportedly told Secretary of State John Kerry when Kerry pressed him on Saudi financing of extremist groups earlier this year. Saudi Arabia has retaken a leadership role in past months guiding help to the Syrian armed rebels, displacing Qatar, which was seen as supporting some of the worst of the worst organizations on the ground.

The rise of ISIS, a group that officially broke with al Qaeda core last year, is devastating for the moderate Syrian opposition, which is now fighting a war on two fronts, severely outmanned and outgunned by both extremist groups and the regime. There is increasing evidence that Assad is working with ISIS to squash the Free Syrian Army.

But the Syrian moderate opposition is also wary of confronting the Arab Gulf states about their support for extremist groups. The rebels are still competing for those governments’ favor and they are dependent on other types of support from Arab Gulf countries. So instead, they blame others—the regimes in Tehran and Damascus, for examples—for ISIS’ rise.

“The Iraqi State of Iraq and the [Sham] received support from Iran and the Syrian intelligence,” said Hassan Hachimi, Head of Political Affairs for the United States and Canada for Syrian National Coalition, at the Brookings U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha this week.
“There are private individuals in the Gulf that do support extremist groups there,” along with other funding sources, countered Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Syrian-American organization that supports the opposition “[The extremist groups] are the most well-resourced on the ground… If the United States and the international community better resourced [moderate] battalions… then many of the people will take that option instead of the other one.”

The elephants’ graveyard: Protecting Kenya’s wildlife

By Natasha Breed Kenya

A rise in the demand for ivory has led to poachers illegally killing thousands of elephants every year - and despite the use of GPS tracking systems, rangers are finding it increasingly difficult to protect the animals.

Years ago, while walking with a camel train in northern Kenya, I remember coming across the bleached white dome of an elephant's skull.
Within the smooth hollows of both its eye sockets were bunches of dried grass, fluffy with seed, arranged with evident care. A camel herder told me it was customary, among his people, on passing the skull of an elephant, to pay respect to the fallen giant in this way.
In those days, you rarely saw the skull or bones of an elephant.
There's a legend that elephants have graveyards where they go to die, but science has never proved this.
It's true they will - on finding the skeleton of an elephant - stop and examine it, touch it, sometimes even pick up a bone or a tusk and carry it off.
I once sat and watched with tears in my eyes, as a family of elephants returned to where they'd had to abandon a calf, which had been too weak to stand or follow them.

It had since died, and the tenderness and sorrow that emanated from that desolate little huddle of elephants as they gently explored the lifeless grey body with their sensitive trunks, was one of the most moving scenes I've ever witnessed.

Nowadays, it seems northern Kenya is littered with the carcasses of elephants. Poaching and the relentless ivory trade is laying waste to Africa's elephant populations.
Kimeli Maripet is an elephant researcher monitoring their movements across Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, the Ngare Ndare Forest and Mount Kenya, where - for centuries - elephants have followed the same migratory patterns.

A network of conservation organisations working alongside the Kenya Wildlife Service equip foot and vehicle patrols to monitor the vast expanse of northern Kenya.
State of the art GPS telemetry keeps track of certain radio-collared individuals as they follow time-worn routes pioneered by generations of elephants whose own bones have long since turned to dust.

It was Maripet who was detailed to go looking for Mountain Bull.

 

 Mountain Bull was caught on a CCTV camera earlier this year

 

Mountain Bull wore one of the broad leather collars and satellite transmitters - his daily movements monitored on the researchers' computer screens.
He had earned his name from being one of the most determined elephant bulls in the area, when it came to overcoming obstacles in the way of his chosen path, following his ancestors' footsteps to Mount Kenya. Even electric fences didn't deter these bulls.
They showed great persistence in finding a way up to the forests and moorland, bulldozing the odd farm fence along the way and they crop-raided with impunity as they went. This eventually led to the construction of a purpose-built elephant corridor that crosses beneath a major road with heavy traffic, allowing the elephants to take a safe route, away from farmland, up to their mountain refuge.
But for several days the signal emitted by Mountain Bull's collar hadn't moved. It happens sometimes.

Only a week before, another elephant's signal had remained static for a few days on computer screens, and a search party was mounted.
That collar was found - torn and lying on the ground, still sending its signal up to space and the elephant was soon spotted nearby, unharmed.
That's what you always hope is the case, says Maripet. Collars do sometimes break and drop off, necessitating the elephant being tranquilised again to have a new one fitted.
So, armed with a satellite receiver and coordinates of Mountain Bull's GPS signal, Maripet and a scout from the Mount Kenya Trust set off to look for him.
After two days, they came across the tracks of an elephant which appeared to have stood still for a long while, before heading - falteringly - into a thicket of bamboo.
Mountain Bull was lying on his side with a deep spear wound in his back.
Triggered by his weight on some sort of trip wire, a spear, strategically positioned in an overhead branch, must have dropped and lodged in the elephant's spine. He was dead. And his tusks had been hacked from his face.

It was heartbreaking hearing Maripet's account of how the elephant had met his fate.
No doubt the poachers had waited nearby, and - once the bull toppled onto his side - wasted no time in drawing out their machetes and hacking out his beautiful creamy tusks.
Had the elephant even drawn his last breath, I wondered?
I recall the grasses in the skull of that elephant, years ago, and ask Maripet if he knew of the custom.
"Oh yes," he says. "It's our way of saying, sleep tight, comrade."

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