Demon Fish (30 page)

Financing these conservation efforts—from the patrol boats to the meals laid out at Waigeo’s marine protected area’s field station—takes money. While the Selpele and Salio people may eventually be able to finance these initiatives themselves, Conservation International needs to foot the bill for the immediate future. And the vagaries of the global economy—a stock market crash in one country, the devaluation of another nation’s currency—can have a huge impact on a nonprofit that depends on the largesse of others.

Raising money is central to Conservation International’s mission: for its Bird’s Head Seascape project alone, it has gotten financial commitments from the Packard Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore, and the Walton family (of Walmart fame). These wealthy Americans view Raja Ampat as worthy of their personal attention: Rob Walton, one of Sam Walton’s sons, has toured the area along with other major donors and CI’s president, Peter Seligmann. But Seligmann and his colleagues have realized that they need to explore less traditional ways of raising money if they want to protect the area over the long term, and that’s how they decided to sell the right to name one of Indonesian Papua’s new species to the highest bidder.

Erdmann hatched the idea himself after he saw the enormous press coverage the two walking sharks generated in the fall of 2006. By convention, the people who write the first scientific paper describing a species get to name it, so he and Allen have the power to either dub the walking sharks with the name of their choice or put that right up for sale. As long as it complies with the rules set out by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature—that it’s in Latin and includes the genus name in conjunction with the new species name—it can pass muster. To Erdmann, the act of naming the sharks is a sort of mathematical problem, where the challenge lies in turning “public excitement about the walking shark into conservation dollars.”

The idea of auctioning off a species’ scientific name is not without precedent. In late 2004 the Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Robert Wallace found a foot-tall brown and orange monkey weighing about two pounds in Bolivia’s Madidi National Park. Locals had known about the monkey for years, but researchers suddenly happened upon it and sketched out a few details about its behavior. Wallace wanted the Madidi National Park to benefit from the Internet auction, so he and the other authors writing the academic paper describing the species gave the naming rights to Bolivia’s SERNAP (National Protected Area Service) and FUNDESNAP (Fundación para el Desarrollo del Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas), government and nonprofit groups committed to protecting the area.

The online auction, which took place between February 24 and March 3, 2005, generated a significant degree of Hollywood buzz. The talk show host Ellen DeGeneres declared she wanted to get in on the bidding, urging the viewers of
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
to make nonrefundable donations to “Ellen’s Monkey Naming Pool.” Other celebrities, such as Orlando Bloom and the late Heath Ledger, also donated items for the auction.

In the end DeGeneres and her viewers didn’t emerge victorious: it was
GoldenPalace.com
, an online casino, that plunked down $650,000 for the privilege of buying a small Latin American monkey as its mascot. In a press release following the auction, the Wildlife Conservation Society touted the fact it had raised $650,000 to help protect the park, which includes lowland forests and alpine glaciers in an area the size of New Jersey, but declined to name the winning bidder. Eventually,
GoldenPalace.com
trumpeted its purchase.

Wallace and his colleagues dutifully named the species
Callicebus aureipalatii—aureipalatii
means “golden palace” in Latin; to the casino’s regret, the “.com” could not be Latinized—and the $650,000 park trust fund has added eight guards to deter poaching. The casino’s CEO, Richard Rowe, rejoiced at his company’s purchase, which far exceeded the $28,000 it had paid in 2004 for a ten-year-old, partially eaten cheese sandwich said to include an image of the Virgin Mary. “This species will bear our name for as long as it exists,” he said in the statement. “Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, the
GoldenPalace.com
Monkey will live to carry our name through the ages.” And just so people remember, the casino has set up an official Web site,
www.goldenpalacemonkey.com
, where curiosity seekers can listen to the monkey’s cry as they learn about the species and buy
GoldenPalace.com
Monkey T-shirts, tracksuits, and thongs.

Erdmann sees the Wildlife Conservation Society auction as his role model. “Golden casino aside, $650,000 for conservation is a lot of money,” he points out as we’re scaling a ladder leading to the dock off Ammer’s Kri Eco Resort. Then again, Erdmann doesn’t want to name a walking shark after a casino. And some scientists and government officials are even more skeptical, declaring it yet another sign of how much merchandizing has encroached upon scholarly pursuits. In their view, it’s one more assault on academic integrity, like Exxon Mobil’s $100 million donation to help Stanford University study global warming. As environmental groups and individual scientists seek new ways of funding their work in an era of dwindling public resources, some ask whether they’re ignoring the inevitable conflict-of-interest questions that arise from such arrangements. Does it bestow legitimacy on certain corporations, especially those with compromised environmental credentials, if they’re allowed to endow conservation initiatives? Should rich people be allowed to name a species just because they have dollars to donate?

These practices have also raised some alarms among officials at the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the venerable group that has arbitrated disputes over scientific names since 1895. The commission’s former executive secretary, Andrew Polaszek, a chatty wasp specialist who has named more than a hundred species himself, started polling his organization’s twenty-seven commissioners in 2007 to see what they thought of the new trend. Their opinions were all over the map, from praising the idea to decrying it as undermining taxonomy’s scientific credibility, and the commission has yet to take an official position on the matter. For his part, Polaszek sees both sides of the argument.

“If new species start to acquire a commercial value that’s pretty hefty, then there’s suddenly an incentive for people to ‘discover,’ and I use that word in quotes, new species. And the ramifications of that are enormous,” he explains.

On the other hand, Polaszek allowed, there could be advantages to auctioning off species’ names—especially if these auctions were conducted under the auspices of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. “It could be a good thing, depending on how it’s controlled. And we’re just control freaks,” he adds, laughing.

But some scientists are less amused. During dinner one night, a prominent marine biologist and conservationist—after telling me he doesn’t want to be identified—says Conservation International’s strategy should be seen in the context of streetwalking.

“It’s the distinction between a courtesan and a prostitute,” he says. “A courtesan gets a man to fall in love with her, and they enter into a mutually beneficial relationship that has financial benefits for her. A prostitute has a more straightforward ‘rack rate,’ if you will.”

“And in this case, Conservation International is the courtesan?” I ask tentatively.

“In this case,” the marine biologist replies grimly, “Conservation International is the prostitute.”

That assessment is too harsh by any measure. It is the group’s scientific research that drives its fund-raising, rather than the other way around. Moreover, the staff at Conservation International is too smart to be caught in an act of hypocrisy, providing green cover to some environmentally offensive corporation. Rather than placing the Raja Ampat species up for bidding on the Internet, the organization enlisted Prince Albert of Monaco to host the Blue Auction in his country’s world-renowned Oceanographic Museum, with just two hundred invited guests attending the black-tie affair.

As Erdmann sees it, auctioning off a species’ title for conservation purposes is not any different from the old system of patronyms, which dates back to when Linnaeus first invented the modern system of taxonomic classification in the eighteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, explorers would frequently name the flora and fauna they found after whoever funded the trip—usually a king, duke, or other royal. “Now you’re going to name something after people who are paying after the fact, but they are paying for the conservation of those species,” he says. “Same difference.”

In the end, the Blue Auction raised $2,015,000, half a million of which came from a spirited round of bidding over Raja Ampat’s walking shark. (An American named Janie Gale bought it and named it
Hemiscyllium galei
, in honor of her husband, Jeff.) This money has translated into direct benefits for Raja Ampat’s villagers: a vessel called the MV
Monaco
now patrols the area around Wayag twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The region is once again a nursery for baby blacktip reef sharks, and shark finning has disappeared. For Conservation International’s chairman and CEO, Peter Seligmann, the auction proceeds amounted to “an enormous shot in the arm for the community that lives in Raja Ampat” and a testimony to the environmental riches CI’s scientists have identified in the region’s murky waters. “When you go beneath the surface, it’s indescribable,” Seligmann says. “They’re the discoverers.”

Having waters teeming with sharks, however, is not an economic asset if they’re the sort that can launch deadly attacks. Gregg Oelofse, head of environmental policy and strategy for Cape Town, didn’t see sharks as a major part of his portfolio when he started his job in 1999. But Oelofse is an ardent surfer, and he and one of his colleagues at work started picking up word through their surfing and social circles that more great whites were showing up just off the city’s shores. One day while he was surfing with three friends in 2001, Oelofse saw it for himself. The group was surfing at a break called the Wedge off the city’s harbor wall. A white shark appeared out of nowhere next to one of his friends and then swam at the surface around Oelofse and three friends, about forty-five feet away. As they scrambled to paddle back to the beach, the shark came in front of them, then circled around back before disappearing. “It was really not pleasant,” Oelofse says now, in a dry voice.

On November 15, 2004, Oelofse assigned an intern in his office to stand up on the mountain above Muizenberg Beach, in order to do an assessment of how many sharks were in the water. That same day a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother, Tyna Webb, was killed by a great white off a nearby beach, Fish Hoek. All that was left of Webb—who had swum daily at dawn there for nearly two decades—was her red swimming cap, and people began to panic. The incident was one of four fatal attacks in less than two years, and one of fifteen attacks that took place off Cape Town’s beaches in the space of four years. Suddenly Oelofse needed to come up with a shark policy.

He convened a task force of experts to examine every possible shark control measure the city could adopt. South Africa has been the world’s pioneer in shark nets, first erecting this type of barrier in 1904 around a beach in Durban. Cape Town officials looked at establishing the kinds of mesh nets that ring much of the KwaZulu-Natal coastline to the north, which have protected the area’s beaches since a spate of attacks between late 1957 and 1958 that became known as Black December. The KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board—originally dubbed the Natal Anti-shark Measures Board—is charged with reducing the number of attacks on visitors to the area’s popular beaches, and netting has helped achieve its goal. Between 1978 and 2008 these barriers caught close to 33,700 sharks, and the number of incidents involving sharks dropped by 91 percent since the nets were first installed in the 1950s. But this indiscriminate sweeping up of sea life comes at an environmental cost: only 12.5 percent of those nearly 33,700 sharks were released alive, and a number of more beloved marine animals have become entangled and perished in the nets. Every year since 2004, according to the board’s chief scientist, Sheldon Dudley, the nets have caught an average of 237 rays, 58 turtles, 53 dolphins, and 5 whales. (It’s also worth noting that about a third of the sharks caught in the nets are actually trapped as they’re heading out to sea—in other words, the barriers don’t prevent every shark from entering the swimming and surfing area.)

For years, the men and women who maintain and manage the nets have tried to fulfill the board’s legal obligations while minimizing the nets’ environmental impacts. They have been swapping out some of the nets for drum lines, where baited hooks are strung along lines attached to drums that rest on the seafloor, and have explored other forms of deterrence. This approach dramatically reduces the number of animals that are accidentally caught: drum lines replaced half of the nets along the Hibiscus Coast in February 2007, and in the space of two years nonshark bycatch fell by 50 percent. The board also removes the nets during the annual sardine run and warns swimmers and surfers that they face a heightened risk during that time. Still, Dudley knows there’s no chance of radically changing the region’s shark control policy. Given the board’s mission, he says, “there would be resistance to removal of all forms of protection.”

Even if Cape Town officials wanted to set netting or drum lines, however, the area’s rough seas and the fact that white sharks don’t spend all year close to shore make it a less than ideal location for such measures. The 2005 task force rejected outright culling of the area’s shark population as well, on the grounds it was inhumane and ineffective and would violate the white shark’s protected status under South African law. This is one of the most startling aspects of Cape Town’s shark control policy: it is based on the idea that the white sharks have as much of a right to live in the region as people do. “What we were trying to say up front to people is we don’t consider it as a problem animal. We don’t even want to use that word,” Oelofse says. “We see white sharks as an asset and a value.”