Written by
Hannah Freeman, FCCT India
In the mangroves across South and SouthEast Asia lives a small, secretive felid. It emerges just as the sun goes down, and begins its nightly hunting expedition. This cat is so rare, many people living alongside it don’t even realise it is there. There are so few recorded sightings of this cat in the wild we don’t even know just how many there are. Best estimates put this mangrove cat as being even more endangered than the tiger, yet before today I bet most of you reading this have never have heard of it before. This is the story of the fishing cat and the people who are trying to save it.
If you are lucky enough to be in an area with fishing cats you will need an expert to help you spot one. They are masters of camouflage and blend in perfectly with the mangroves. They have an olive-grey coat covered in dark brown spots to break up their outline, making them very difficult to spot. These little cats are perfectly adapted to mangrove life, and they even have partially webbed feet to help them swim! Like most cats, fishing cats love to eat fish but they will eat just about anything they can get their paws on, such as crustaceans and even small mammals like rodents. When they hunt they stay really still and quiet, lying in wait at the water’s edge to see a ripple in the water. As soon as they see a fish coming up for air they pounce on it, ambushing their prey before they know what hit them. As fishing cats are about twice as big as a house cat, they have to catch many fish every night to sustain themselves.
Unfortunately, these little cats are in big danger. Their biggest threat actually lies on your supermarket shelf, and you may be surprised to learn just what it is. Next time you go shopping I want you to go down the seafood aisle and take a look at a packet of prawns. Most of them will say “product of Thailand” or “India” or somewhere else in Asia. Now what they don’t tell you on the packet is how those prawns got there. So let me tell you. These prawns come from what’s called a ‘shrimp farm’ as you can see in the picture below.
These aquaculture farms are made by digging a big hole in a field close to the sea. These fields used to be mangrove forests, where the fishing cat and lots of other wildlife live. Now they are full of artificially pumped water from the rivers along with with some very nasty chemicals like pesticides and antibiotics, as the prawns get sick very easily in the stagnant water with very little space to swim. These chemicals all end up inside the prawns, so when you eat them you have no idea what you are actually putting in your body. As you can see in the picture to the right, this water is not clean at all! This type of farming is also really bad for the farmers, as each year all the water has to be pumped out of the pond, the bottom has to be cleaned and then it has to be filled with water again. If this wasn’t expensive enough, all of the chemicals needed to stop the shrimps from dying costs a lot of money, and as time goes on each pond needs more and more chemicals to keep it functional, putting a lot of the farmers in serious debt that they can never hope to repay.
As well as being really bad for you and the local people, shrimp farming is actually killing the fishing cats. More and more of the cat’s habitat is being cleared for shrimp farming, cutting down more mangrove forests and destroying the fishing cats habitat. What is left of the remaining fishing cat population lives in small mangrove patches, which are isolated from each other so the fishing cats are not able to breed or move between fragments. They are on the road to extinction unless we help them now!
At the Fishing Cat Conservancy Trust (FCCT) we are trying to save the fishing cats all across Asia. We are restoring old and unused shrimp ponds back into natural mangrove forests, and not by planting trees. What we are doing is very different from what you may have seen on the news, with people setting world records by planting as many trees as they can. Because if you were to go back to these places a year later you would find nearly all of the trees have died, or are what’s called ‘shunted growth’ meaning the trees can’t grow much taller than waist height. The trees that do manage to grow are planted in lines and form what’s called a monoculture plantation, meaning there are only one or two species of trees in the forest. This is no good for the wildlife at all, as most animals need lots of different species of plants to be able to survive. Instead of planting, what we are doing is creating the right conditions for the mangroves to be able to grow back naturally.
It’s quite an easy process, the main thing we have to do is to make holes in the walls around the ponds where the old river used to flow, and then dig out the river channel inside the ponds so the river can run back through it. Over time the river will deposit sediments like mud and sand so that the land in the pond can be at the same level as the surrounding forests. In order to make the pond, the farmers dig the sediment out of the pond so they can fill the hole up with water. If we tried to plant any mangroves here before we restored it they would be too low down and they would drown because their roots need to be able to breathe at low tides. So when all the sediment has come back to the pond the plants can start to grow. We don’t need to plant any trees or put any seeds into the water because the other mangroves from the forest next door release seeds into the water, so when the sediment is deposited into the ponds, the seeds are too. When the conditions are right, the seeds will grow themselves, all in the right places which avoids the problem of many trees dying because you have tried to plant them in the wrong place. And because there are lots of species of seeds, there will be many species of plants which grow in the ponds as well, avoiding the problem of monoculture as we talked about before. Over time the mangrove forest will grow back on its own, without any help from us. Over time, animals like the fishing cat can move back into the restored area, and fragmented populations can be re-joined using these new forests as corridors!
We are also working closely with local people to help them benefit from these new forests. There are many different sustainable livelihood options we are developing with their help, such as farming for mangrove honey, mangrove crabs and mangrove prawns without all of the nasty artificial chemicals in them. We are also educating the locals about the importance of fishing cats, and how to protect them, so they can look after them for us when we are gone. What we think is one of the most important priorities for conservation is helping these local people live a happier and sustainable life without intensive shrimp farming. And helping them to value the mangrove ecosystem, services and wildlife so they want to protect it and the same problems they are facing at the moment shouldn’t return in the future. And of course, to give the fishing cats the best chance of survival we can give them!
