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Indianapolis Prize finalists devote lives to wildlife

Shari Rudavsky
IndyStar

They go weeks without bathing. Subsist for months on rice and potatoes. Travel to the ends of the Earth — all with an eye toward helping save the Earth for future generations.

All six finalists for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize have devoted their lives to studying how to help conserve animal species, whether they have fur, feathers or fins. Consider the seahorse, which has been linked to promoting sexual vigor for men. A booming trade threatens its future. Other animals face a different threat: climate change. The favorite nesting areas of Galapagos penguins have been destroyed by the encroaching ocean. Musk oxen have become victims to a new predator — the polar bear, who is now increasingly land-locked.

“What we’re doing is out of passion,” finalist Amanda Vincent said.

The $250,000 biennial award from the Indianapolis Zoo does more than recognize study of the animals; it also aims to reward researchers whose work will sustain species for generations to come.

Finalists must be individuals, not organizations, and “must have demonstrated a significant accomplishment or accomplishments in improving the sustainability of a species or group of species,” said Michael Crowther, president and chief executive officer of the Indianapolis Zoo. “You couldn’t pick the winner of the Indianapolis Prize with a computer. It requires wisdom, experience, insight.”

Last August 28 scientists around the world were nominated for the prize. A committee of professional conservationists and zoo and community representatives winnowed that down to these six finalists, each of whom will receive $10,000. Another committee chooses the winner.

The winner will be announced in May and awarded the prize at a gala in October.

Other grants for conservation exist, but none is comparable to the Indianapolis Prize, which Crowther said has become regarded as the Nobel Prize of conservation.

“The Indianapolis Prize has become critically important to the conservation world because it acts as a lever,” he said. “What the Indianapolis Prize does is generate awareness which changes behavior, which creates more funding, which creates more scientists. All of this works together to move the needle, and if we can just change our path by a couple of degrees, we can end up with an entirely more sustainable future. And that’s what our real goal is.”

Here are this year's finalists:

Joel Berger, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

JOEL BERGER

When Joel Berger was named a finalist for the Indianapolis Prize two years ago, he was just about to embark on a research trip to the Russian Arctic. His trip to Wrangel Island, a Russian World Heritage site, revealed something disturbing: As climate change has rendered polar bears more landlocked, they’ve discovered a new food source: musk oxen.

“Maybe that’s good for polar bears, but it’s not good for musk oxen,” said Berger, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It demonstrates how all these pieces fit together and intersect.”

Berger, 63, has devoted his life’s career to studying the world’s large carnivores, such as lions, tigers and bears, with an eye to what would happen if they were to go extinct. His research helped persuade the United States government to create the Path of the Pronghorn in Wyoming, which marked the first time this government has protected a migration corridor.

More recently, he has turned his attention to  cashmere economics. As the wool has grown more popular, herders in China and Mongolia have increased the size of their herds, pushing out native goat species. Now, Berger is looking into how to blend “human rights and cultural inertia” while still striving to preserve endangered species.

Although Berger, who now teaches at Colorado State University, did not start doing international work until he was 39, he sees himself continuing to work in remote places such as Russia to keep track of what impact global climate changes have had on that region.

The work is not always easy. The cold is “sobering,” Berger said, and helicopter crashes are always a possibility. In a 2014 interview, Berger shared that he has gone as long as one month without showering, either in the polar deserts of the Arctic, where it’s too cold, or in the African desert, where researchers have no water to share on niceties like personal hygiene.

Still, Berger said he has no second thoughts about what he does.

“If we all stay in our comfort zones, then how do we make a difference?” he asked.

Dee Boersma, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

DEE BOERSMA

The first time Dee Boersma encountered a penguin in the wilds of the Galapagos, she didn’t see the bird but heard its call, which sounded like a donkey braying. When she started working on the Galapagos as a doctoral student in zoology at Ohio State University more than 45 years ago, only two nests had ever been found.

She went on to discover many more and to devote her life to ensuring penguins would exist there and in their other natural habitats for future generations.

“They are really incredible ocean sentinels, and they tell us a lot about the environment,” said Boersma, who has taught at the University of Washington since 1974.

Originally Boersma, who loved butterflies and moths as a child, wanted to study insects. But during college all the courses she took in that field viewed insects as pests and centered on how to kill them. Instead, Boersma, now 69, decided to devote her career to the penguins in the Galapagos.

“I thought it was so bizarre that a penguin could live on the Equator. Don’t you think a penguin usually is with ice?” she said.

Unlike the 16 other penguin species Galapagos penguins will lay eggs up to three times a year if conditions are right. But unlike other penguins, if conditions turn poor, they will desert their eggs or chicks at any time.

And with El Nino, conditions have not been good in recent years.

Fewer than half the number of penguins exist today than there were in the 1970s. Galapagos penguins and other species on the Ecuadorean islands rely on periodic upswells of cold ocean water to provide them with abundant food in the form of small, schooling fish.

Climate changes have led the sea level in the Galapagos to rise, eroding the penguins’ favorite shaded nesting sites inside lava crevices near the water.

In an effort to increase the Galapagos penguin population, Boersma has traveled there every year since 2010. She and her colleagues have been taking a crowbar and hollowing out 120 nesting sites to encourage penguin pairs to move in and breed.

Changing the natural habitat might seem drastic, but such measures are needed, she said.

“We have over 7.2 billion people in the world, and we’re so out of balance with nature that if we want to be able to have many of these species, we have to change how we do business," said Boersma, also a conservation fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society. "We have to understand what these species need, and we have to be willing to modify our behavior.”

Rodney Jackson, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

RODNEY JACKSON

Rodney Jackson grew up thinking he would work in Southern Africa, where he spent his early years. As a child he devoured books about big game hunters; he wanted to track animals, too, but to study them, not kill them.

Then, more than 30 years ago, he saw a photograph that George Schaller, 2008 winner of the Indianapolis Prize, shot of a snow leopard. Instead of going back to Africa, Jackson traveled to a region of Nepal so remote he had to walk for a week to reach it. When he arrived, he found the local villagers hunting the animals he hoped to capture on film.

That initial experience convinced him and his wife, Darla Hillard, to devote their lives to the snow leopard. The two became the first to radio collar and track the cats, learning about their movements, habitat, and home range. They spend nine to 10 months a year in the field, only leaving during monsoon season to raise money for their work.

The more Jackson worked on preserving this endangered species, the more he realized he had to partner with the humans who share its remote habitat.

Snow leopards would sneak into sheep and goat corrals and decimate entire herds. Jackson taught the shepherds to predator-proof their barns and worked to boost wild prey in the area to make domestic animals less enticing to the big cats.

Others argued that the best way to dissuade snow leopard poachers would be fines or jail. Jackson realized that the local people hunted the animals because of the money a pelt could bring. So he helped establish an ecotourism industry from which the local people could profit by offering foreigners the chance to stay in their homes for money.

“Instead of the snow leopard being seen as a pest to be trapped and killed, it’s seen as an asset,” said Jackson, a Prize finalist for the fourth time. “People are no longer harassing the cats, and the cat has more confidence. Before they would throw rocks; now they just let the cat be.”

In 2000 Jackson started the California-based Snow Leopard Conservancy, with an eye toward supporting not just research into the snow leopard but also conservation efforts.

Originally Jackson spotted one or two snow leopards a year. The closest he could get to a snow leopard was about 200 yards. In recent years, he has spent hours only about 50 yards away from one the cats on at least four occasions.

Because of the rigor of their research, Jackson and his wife never had children. They had to carry all their food into the field, eating rice and potatoes three times a day. Once a snow leopard bit Jackson while he was trying to replace its radio collar. None of this deterred him.

At age 72, Jackson knows exactly what he would do with the prize should he win: Put it toward training the next generation of snow leopard conservationists.

Carl Jones, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

CARL JONES

As a child, Carl Jones bred birds in his family’s gardens in Wales. So when he heard about an endangered species on the distant island of Mauritius, his first thought was to save them, he said in a 2014 IndyStar interview, when he was a finalist for the 2014 Prize.

Jones, who could not be reached for comment for this article,  moved to Mauritius, where he worked to revitalize ecosystems at risk. Not only did he help to save endangered kestrels, he also saved two other species in the area: pink pigeons and echo parakeets.

In 1974 there were four known birds remaining in the Mauritius kestrel species. Over time Jones, scientific director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, worked to increase the population to several hundred birds.

Jones also has worked to help restore the giant tortoise population on Round Island, a small island off Mauritius, which is off the southeast coast of Africa.

In the  2014 IndyStar interview, he encouraged people to reach out more to understand the natural world around them.

“Wildlife is not something ‘out there,’” he said. “It needs to become a more important part of our lives. The distancing of modern man from the natural world, so that we only know it on out screens, in a museum or zoo, is a major weakness in our society. Having a sense of wonder about the natural world, whether it is a blue whale or a pink pigeon, is a first step.”

Carl Safina, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

CARL SAFINA

Carl Safina first encountered Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” when he was 14, about eight years after the seminal conservation tract was published. He read the first 25 or 340 pages and could not go on. “It made me physically nauseous and was so upsetting,” he said. “It seemed overwhelmingly horrific.”

It would be another six years before he finished the book. By then he already had decided to devote his life to slowing the destruction of animal species. Years later he would help lead a campaign to overhaul the U.S. Fisheries Law that helped save not just aquatic species but also fishermen’s jobs.

Safina founded the Blue Ocean Institute, now the Safina Center, which aims to instill an appreciation for the role the ocean plays in supporting life on the planet. He has written numerous books and hosted a PBS show, “Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina.”

A three time finalist for the Prize, Safina, 60, spent the past two years writing his latest book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” By revealing how animals live their lives, protect their babies and strive for their survival, he hopes to spark a sense of empathy in readers instead of just throwing information at them.

“I wanted to just show things instead of telling people and to try to move them emotionally and see where that fits on their value scale,” he said. “We have invested heavily in an information-only strategy, and we have not tried to convey why certain things are right and wrong, and so I have just tried to focus a little bit on the latter.”

An endowed professor at Stony Brook University on the North shore of New York's Long Island, Safina has a three-pronged approach when teaching students in the ecology school how to be effective in the real world of conservation. The three R’s of the field, he says, are reading, writing, and raising money.

When it comes to the next generation down, Safina, who considers himself a “pragmatic idealist,” has little desire to lecture to young children about the dangers of overfishing. Instead, he says, those youngsters should just head to the beach where they can marvel at the waves, giving them a much deeper appreciation for the value of preserving the ocean.

“The message needs to be constructed a lot less along the lines of here’s what you need to know,” he said. “It’s here what you value.”

Amanda Vincent, a finalist for the 2016 Indianapolis Prize.

AMANDA VINCENT

Originally seahorses were a theoretical fascination for Amanda Vincent, who devoted her doctoral dissertation to studying why pregnancy occurs in males in these species. Then Vincent saw a billboard in Germany, touting the value of seahorses for helping men with “weak tails."

Curiosity piqued, Vincent traveled to the Philippines on assignment for National Geographic and to her surprise discovered a massive trade in seahorses that threatened their existence. From then on she devoted herself to both studying and working to help preserve these unique fish.

Once Vincent describes what she does, she has little difficulty persuading others to care.

“First of all, they have to get over their incredulity that seahorses really exist,” she said, “and then it’s like exterminating unicorns — you just don’t do it.”

In 1996 Vincent co-founded Project Seahorse, an organization that both studies and protects the 47 species of seahorses. The organization has worked with multiple countries to establish 35 marine protected areas to help save not just the seahorses but also their marine brethren. Vincent also successfully lobbied to ensure that countries that export seahorses follow sustainable practices.

Project Seahorse’s ISeahorse initiative encourages “citizens” from around the world to join the effort to help monitor wild seahorse populations. Anyone can go online to report a sighting.

A 2010 Indianapolis Prize finalist, Vincent offers several things we all can do to help protect seahorses and other marine life. Avoid shrimp and other fish caught with bottom trawling. Don’t use plastic items that can wind up in the oceans.

“It’s a mixture of knowing about the animals and then engaging as many people as possible to insist we make a change,” she said.

Her own life has been a juggling act. Vincent holds a full-time job as a professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia, where she has been since 2002. Plus, she is a single mother of a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old, who go into the field with her.

Her personal goal remains clear: “I started working on the seahorses because of their evolutionary importance, but I always knew I wanted to somehow get to saving the world.”

Call Star reporter Shari Rudavsky at (317) 444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky. 

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