Issue #16: Jungles Made Man
Part II of II: A brief (4 billion year) history of Jungles
Hello, everyone.
This week, I’m trying something new - I’ve sifted through the vast amounts of information I usually bombard you, dear readers, with, and split the research down the centre so that the Reader remains as accessible as possible for light reading (as light as can be, so still kind of heavy), while a secondary post associated with each issue is linked to the Reader, chockful of all the dry and solemn articles, papers and research that pertain to the topics covered by each theme. This secondary post is not going to be sent to your inbox, but will be accessible through links in the main Reader. So, without further ado:
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The Ramsar Convention and Worldwide Wetland Conservation
Wetlands (a blanket ecological term used to describe freshwater, brackish and marine ecosystems formed around a water body) are some of the most crucial habitats globally, hosting a plethora of wildlife and flora that are adapted to life in fluctuating environments. Each wetland system is unique - coastal mangrove forests and salt pans are formed in brackish or seawater; freshwater systems can include lakes, freshwater marshlands, or meltwater lakes and rivers; estuaries, creeks, and deltas are a combination of freshwater and brackish ecosystems. In particular, wetland ecology also considers riparian (partially submerged) habitats and landscapes that undergo seasonal flooding - transitioning between wet and dry ecosystems depending on the water levels in the region.
India, with about 7500 kilometers of tropical coastline and is at the core of the South Asian monsoon system, has myriad hydrological ecosystems within it, and globally, the 3rd highest number of Ramsar designated sites - although the number of sites is more of an indicator of the ability of a country to participate in the process of notifying a wetland as a Ramsar site. The United Kingdom, for example, has 175 Ramsar sites (the highest number of Ramsar sites of any country), whereas the United States, with far more diversity in wetland ecosystems and a much larger area, has 41 sites.
The Ramsar Convention focuses on several factors when considering wetlands for their certification processes - these include the importance of the water bodies for human and non-human use, the ecosystem services provided by the wetland and the biodiversity of the flora and fauna (particularly, unique habitats that are found exclusively in the designated sites). These ecosystems might coincide with urban areas, where the ecosystem services are also a part of the urban systems of the cities.
In 2022, Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary (the associated with the eastern coast of Mumbai, draining into Back Bay) was designated as a Ramsar Site through a proposal put forward by the Mangrove Cell of Maharashtra. The proposal included metrics such as bird counts, documentation of the flora and fauna of the site, and research or studies showing the importance of the site in the context of migratory birds and hydrological functions - Thane Creek is located in the Central Asian Flyway (used by migratory birds flying from the arctic to the tropics).
While the Ramsar Convention’s designation of wetland habitats as sites of international importance does not necessarily guarantee permanent protection of the sites, each site is required to have a decade-long management plan detailing various approaches to ensuring the integrity of the habitat and biodiversity remains as is of grows over the course of the management timeline. Studies done to establish the importance of a particular habitat are also important baselines for us to begin recording the decline (or growth) of biodiversity in areas with rapidly shifting baselines.
If you live in Mumbai or nearby areas, you can visit the newly designated Ramsar site by following the location below:
More data and Research is Available on the Link Below:
Climate Catalogue Resource 1 - Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary
Views from the Bhandup Birdwatching Area in the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary on the outskirts of Mumbai. A species of Sandpiper (a kind of wader bird) in the foreground picks food out of the shallow water at the edge of the pool. During December through March, this pool is frequented by Flamingoes and large migratory birds travelling South along the CAF for the winter.
Continuing on from Issue #15, this newsletter attempts to detail out the origins of rainforest ecosystems (jungles, in particular) and the co-evolution of various keystone species over hundreds of millions of years with the ecosystems. Rainforest ecosystems the world over host a plethora of biodiversity, all of which has evolved in lock-step with the entire ecosystem for about 50 million years, with species occupying every every ecological niche these kinds of jungles have to offer (quantitatively, several times more than temperate or boreal forests of equal magnitude).
This issue presents a book and a long-form documentary, both of which focus on the species diversity and interdependencies in jungle ecosystems, either with our species in particular, or with entire trophic systems.
[A book]
Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped World History - And Us
a book by Patrick Roberts, published by Penguin in 2021
This book is an 11 HOUR read.
Told from the perspective of an anthropologist and archaeologist, this author takes the reader through deep time to understand the origins of the Jungle ecosystems that exist on the earth today, and their importance in each geological epoch since the first recognised “jungles”, during the Carboniferous period. Through this journey, he also talks about the myriad co-evolutionary species of tropical forests, from arthropods to dinosaurs and our own species, Homo sapiens, and their relationship with the jungles of their epoch.
Although jungles today (jungles found around the amazon, for example) are seen as low-human-density ecosystems which thrive because of their impenetrability by our species, that may not be entirely true through prehistory and pre-colonial history. Civilizations with settlements of enormous magnitude have thrived in jungle ecosystems throughout the world, including the Mayan, Aztec and Inca civilizations on the Americas, and the Khmer Empire of South-East Asia. Co-existence of large populations of Homo sapiens with a rainforest’s high biodiversity was not only practiced, but relationships with the complex ecosystem might have been the source of these civilizations’ success.
Today, however, the discourse on human settlements in rainforests is at two extremes; either the forests should be clear cut and developed as areas for human habitation and economic growth (an ideology frowned upon, largely), or rainforests should remain “pristine” and untouched by the scourge of human civilization. The author argues that our species co-evolved with current jungle ecosystems, and large civilizations could prosper in these, seen particularly during the Holocene epoch.
Rainforests, however, were not always the dominion of humankind; combing through various fossil records, Roberts tells a story of rainforests evolving through hundreds of millions of years, beginning with early jungles during the Carboniferous. This geological period was hot and humid for about 60 million years, a time during which trees grew to gargantuan proportions and arthropods (precursors to modern arthropods and insects) dominated the terrestrial ecosystems. These forests covered large swathes of the supercontinent Pangea, thriving in the constant humidity. However, as the supercontinent broke apart into individual land masses, the hot and humid climate gave way to drier and colder climates, shrinking the expanses of tropical rainforests to a certain extent.
The author goes on to recount the evolution and characteristics of jungles through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretacious periods, and their relationships with the then-dominant dinosaurs, drawing on evidence from fossils of these periods, and behaviors of modern-day dinosaurs (birds) which reside within rainforests globally. The proliferation of dinosaurs globally would have meant that several species of dinosaurs evolved to live in tropical jungle ecosystems, much like birds have today.
The evolution and proliferation of flowering land plants during the Cretaceous period brought the jungles closer to those that we recognize today. However, the megafaunal (gigafaunal?) activities of dinosaurs as ecosystem engineers would still have a profound effect on the jungle ecologies of that geological period. Sauropods creating large gaps in the canopy through their herbivory, for example, would have changed the characteristic of the understory and sub-canopy growth. After the Chicxulub asteroid impact some 66 million years ago, however, dinosaurs were driven extinct and a large part of the rainforest diversity was lost. When the diversity bounced back, however, ten million years later, the jungles would have been facsimiles of the tropical jungles that exist today, with high mycorrhizal interconnectivity, a higher diversity of angiosperms (flowering plants) and a closed canopy that lets little sunlight reach the understory layers of the forest.
Mammals evolved and diversified largely in tropical rainforest ecosystems as well; everything from the tree shrew to primates and finally prehistoric Homo species have evolutionary roots in rainforests. The closest genetic relative primate to human beings still live in jungles in South-East Asia; although Homo sapiens might have moved into the savannah of 2 million years ago, their foraging and gathering behaviors would have required them to remain close to the fringes of highly biodiverse tropical forests.
Early modern civilizations such as those of the Incas and Aztecs built cities of epic proportions within rainforests, managing the biodiversity of rainforests and using their agency as ecosystems engineers after to cultivate plants which provided sustenance, and learning how to use various elements of the jungle ecosystem to feed, build, clothe and treat diseases. Their understanding of complex rainforest systems and inter-dependencies helped them fend off colonizers for a long period; they crumbled in part because of the transmittance of diseases from Europe that the colonizers brought with them.
The imposition of colonial systems of knowledge and economics (based largely on principles of extraction from nature) saw colonizers turn the tables on the wealth of tropical civilizations. An understanding honed in a largely temperate climate saw the relationships between human and forests reduced to ideas of extraction (old growth trees as a source for timber) or agricultural production (razing tracts rainforest and replacing them with “productive” agricultural landscapes). Throughout the world, tropical plants were (and are currently) grown as commodities for trade, rather than as part of an ecosystem, seeing the rise of unsustainable agriculture in tropical colonies the world over.
Today, we depend on specifically bred, evolved or genetically modified tropical plants for a variety of our daily staples; including coffee, chocolate, rubber, sugar, tea, bananas and palms (for oil and coconuts). These tropical plants were often transplanted from their original evolutionary niches into colonies with similar climates across the world, where they were (and still are) grown in monoculture plantations with a fraction of the biodiversity of old-growth jungle ecosystems - often displacing the latter. These plantations are designed for higher yields and more efficient mechanical harvesting of the “useful” parts of the crop, rather than creating ecosystems that are diverse and resilient in the face of large-scale climatic shifts. While the “management” of these jungle resources had a significantly lower yield, the monoculture plantations have nearly no ecosystem functions and are not resilient in cases of disease or sudden shifts in temperature or the availability of water - the same plants would be far more resilient as part of their original jungle ecosystem. Although for those who live in urban areas or non-tropical climates look at jungle ecosystems as alien landscapes which serve some global atmospheric and climatological function, the author re-iterates that much of our daily lives is impacted by products that originate from or have been derived indirectly from tropical rainforest, which is why we need to learn how to live with the jungles of the world, rather than extract resources from them.
This book is beautifully written as part anthropological, part paleontological, part ecological narratives on jungles, where the author seamlessly integrates deep time and ecological understandings of these rainforests with modern history and global economics of today to present a holistic idea of forests.
See Patrick Roberts’ biography on his website
More Data and Research is Available Below:
Climate Catalogue Resource 1 - Jungles
[A Video]
Uncharted: The Beautiful World of the Amazon
a documentary film on the Free Documentary - Nature channel on Youtube, 2021
This video is 1 HOUR long.
This documentary, set in tracts of Amazon jungle along the Las Piedras river in the Peruvian Amazon, describes various complex chains of relationships within the dense forest. It presents both flora and fauna, and the remarkably intricate symbioses that has evolved in the rainforest over millions of years.
Relationships may include a direct relationship between different species of mammals (such as spider monkeys discarding half-eaten fruit which is consumed by peccaries on the the forest floor), or relationships between animals and their environment (peccaries deriving necessary salts from the mud in salt licks). Through the documentary, we can see an extended chain of interdependencies formed in the rainforest based on the food (predator-prey) relationships and “altruistic” symbioses (warning signals alerting various prey in the jungle about the presence of predators). These relationships have evolved and been perfected by the species in the rainforest over several hundreds or thousands of generations of natural selection, making the biodiversity in the Amazon a densely interconnected web. It’s apparent that changes to a small facet of the rainforest (the drying up and degradation of salt licks, for example) would have a rolling adverse effect on species far down the chain of interdependencies.
Although a longer film than is usually presented in this section, this documentary is a well-stitched series of moments within the Amazon Jungle that displays a fraction of the complexity that exists under the dense canopy of the forest.
More Data and Research is Available Below:
Climate Catalogue Resource 1 - The Amazon Jungle
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