Tony Whitten's blog

It is part of World Bank tradition that, just before retiring, a staff member sends a short email to his/her colleagues to express how much they have enjoyed the challenges of working here, the partnerships they have had in their focus countries, and - most of all - the camaraderie of their committed, dedicated, hard-working co-workers. All this could be perceived as trite, but the feelings are absolutely genuine – as I am now finding.

A few months ago, as part of a Bank-wide initiative to give experienced staff the opportunity to focus on other regions, I was required to shift from the East Asia and Pacific region (where I have spent my whole Bank career). I considered the offer to move to Lusaka, Zambia, but, after 35 years of living in and working on Asia, I concluded that although it would be interesting, my net value in the world of conservation was probably greater in Asia than in a continent about which I know virtually nothing. So, I have resigned.

The author testing to see if this pebble is indeed a fossil bone

One of my most profound biodiversity ‘wow’ moments as a teenager was seeing the arms of the Mongolian Deinocheirus (‘Terrible hands’) dinosaur emerging from a wall of the London Natural History Museum. The arms are basically all that is known of this awesome species but it has been estimated that, were the whole beast to appear from behind the wall, it would be 3.5 m at the hip and weigh 9 tons, dwarfing almost everything else with which it lived. The arms are 2.6 m long from shoulder to claw tip and the three, cruelly-hooked, razor-sharp claws are about 25 cm long. Compare this with the horror beast of Jurassic Park  – Tyrannosaurus rex. Its arms were a puny one meter long with claws barely reaching 10 cm.

Having never seen dinosaur fossils in situ it was a thrill last week to visit the Flaming Cliffs or Bayanzag in South Gobi. This is the site made famous in the mid 1920s by the flamboyant Roy Chapman Andrews who was supposedly the larger-than-life model for the latter-day Indiana Jones movie character. It was at this site that he discovered not just a great many dinosaur and early mammal fossils, but the first incontrovertible evidence of dinosaur eggs in nests and the first fossilized dinosaur embryos.

Retreat: A withdrawal for prayer and study and meditation; the going backward or receding from something hazardous, formidable, or unpleasant; a place affording peace, quiet, privacy, or security. Some of the ‘retreats’ I’ve been to during my time at the World Bank could also be described as ‘very long and tedious meetings in windowless hotel basements’ not far from the office. But thankfully the one which 46 members of the Mongolia Country Team attended recently in Mongolia was very different. 

A baby black gibbon

I did my PhD field research on black gibbons. I mean really black—black skin, black fur everywhere, and even the whites of their eyes seemed black when they were at the top of tall forest trees and I was wandering around on the forest floor. How I longed to be in the position of my peers studying zebras or lions or elephants—they could distinguish dozens of individuals by their markings. I couldn’t even find a candidate for Scarface or Four-Toes or Ripped-Ear. Over time I could tell my group’s adults (whose black nether regions also appeared identical at a distance) apart by their individual mannerisms, but then only when I had a good view, which was rare. The inability to reliably distinguish between them limited the extent to which I could ‘experiment’ with them and thereby collect new levels of information.

The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place. (Photo: RBG Kew)

Where is the most species-rich place on earth? Surely a coruscating coral reef? A dripping tropical rain forest? A boiling oceanic ridge? Wherever it is it must surely be a beautiful and awe-inspiring place. A place to gaze around open-mouthed, to write poetry, to inspire the old and the young, to capture on canvas. But not so. It’s actually a large, gray-colored underground cupboard-like room below what was once a farmer’s field in the pretty countryside of southern England.

This is no museum or herbarium of dead, dried, pickled, staring specimens. The 30,000 plant species accommodated here—10% of the world’s total—are all alive.  But there is not a movement to be seen. Indeed, at minus 20 degrees Centigrade, movement for most organisms would have been halted. Down there in the basement, peering in through the porthole of the freezer, there wasn’t a green plant to be seen. Just shelf upon shelf of jars after jars of tubes after tubes containing...seeds.

View to Ulaanbaatar from a tourist camp on the slopes of Bogd Khan Uul

Okay, so we changed our minds, but we did so for good reasons.

Some 15 months ago I posted a blog about the difficult decisions which led to our dropping Bogd Khan Uul Strictly Protected Area—the world’s oldest nature reserve—from the forest landscapes project we were preparing in Mongolia. In addition I mentioned that the money that was going to be used for the community forestry parts of the project was going to be shifted to give additional support to a $40 million Development Policy Credit to help Mongolia weather the impacts of the global financial crisis. There was a chance that our forest landscapes project might be resurrected in mid-2011 but that would have been too late for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding of the conservation activities planned. So, the forest landscapes project was cancelled.

The GEF money was, however, still available for a good conservation project in Mongolia but there was absolutely no thought that Bogd Khan Uul with all its allegedly illegal apartment blocks and houses would be part of any new project.

Despite the careless mistake, this letter represents to me individual concern translated into action. (Click for a larger view)

Like many offices, mine has a variety of items pinned or stuck to the walls and cabinets. They include a photo of my wonderful kids, photos of some animals important to me, interesting seeds and other plant parts, the name card of the Director of the Earwig Research Centre, a favorite quote of the taxonomically-inclined – Nomina si nesci, periit cognito rerum or If things are not known by names the knowledge of them is lost—by Linnaeus, a paraphrase of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s admonition We will not fight to save what we do not love, and we cannot love what we do not know, and a letter with its final sentence highlighted—A hectare is the size of Minnesota. 

Notice any likeness? That's me to the left, and Thopeutica whitteni to the right.

In the last 10 days I’ve been told that two beetles have been named after me, something I find very flattering.  They join a rather bizarre eponymous bestiary of Whitten curiosities. The formal descriptions of these two species have not yet been published so I can’t say too much, but suffice it to say that one is a blind, long-legged cave-restricted beetle, and the other is a dung beetle. But before you scoff too loudly, remember that in Ancient Egypt the dung beetles or scarabs were objects of worship, capable of rolling the sun across the sky the same way they roll balls of dung for their larvae to eat.

Two of ‘my’ species would not exactly trip you up, and would more likely be crushed inadvertently. Both about 2 mm long, one is a blind, pale and pasty springtail found in a cave in Guangxi, and the other is a freshwater snail found in the northern part of Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi.

An infra-red night shot of an Indochinese Tiger (© WCS Lao/NEPL NPA). See more nightshots of wildlife here.

A high point of last week was getting notice from the CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) that she had approved the initial project document for an exciting conservation project in NE Lao PDR worth $1 million.  This had been long awaited and the team was coming to terms with the idea that it was unlikely to survive. That made getting the approval to fully prepare the project all the sweeter. Given that this week was the start of the Year of the Tiger, it is significant that this project focuses on Nam Et-Phou Loei (NEPL) National Protected Area, the most important tiger site in Lao PDR, and a site acknowledged as a global priority for tiger conservation (pdf).

We’re hoping the project will be able to demonstrate replicable innovations in protected area management that will increase the sustainability and effectiveness of the entire national protected area system. This currently suffers from gaps in staff capacity and inadequate financial resources. To help with this we intend that the project will put in place - for the first time in Laos – both working models of effective zoning that incorporate sustainable wildlife use for community subsistence, and control of illegal hunting for trade.

A YouTube map that shows where people are when they view the videos. That the video might be of interest to a dry country like Niger – where herding of goats and other livestock is so important – is not so surprising.

A colleague of mine recently sent a link to a group of us showing some photos taken in Inner Mongolia, China, showing the land degradation being suffered there and its impacts.  One of the photos (#16) shows a twisted and broken tree trunk surrounded by sand on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The caption says that the trees were “killed by the moving sands.” I have a different take on it.

The picture shows what is probably a Euphrates Poplar, and I would suggest that the trees were probably killed by its surface roots becoming roasted after herds of goats and other livestock ate the trees' fallen leaves. These leaves would normally act as a natural insulation layer and mulch, and over time quite a number of plants grow in the shade and protection.  With the trees steadily roasted, so the whole area degrades and the sand blows in.  You can see one of the World Bank’s senior agriculturalists, Rick Chisholm, explaining this in the first of my two YouTube videos on Lake Aibi in northwest, Xinjiang, China.  (Go straight to 8m 30s on the time line to see the specific segment).