The Nicobar megapode is a mostly terrestrial bird. It has a black body and a bright red head. The Nicobar long-tailed macaque has greyish fur and a pinkish-brown face, and a tail that is longer than its height from head to rump. A newly discovered species of frog, Chalcorana chozhai, is yellowish green with blotches of faint brown.
These three sub-species of animals are only found on the Nicobar group of islands – that is, they are endemic to the region. While the megapode and macaque are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the wildlife biologists who discovered the frog have recommended that it be classified as endangered.
Before the Great Nicobar island began making headlines in connection with a massive Rs 72,000-crore development project planned on it, the region was well known for its diverse fauna. Now, ecologists warn that the megaproject could mean disaster for these animals.
The project has gained environment and forest clearances and looks set to receive other mandated permissions. Private companies have submitted expressions of interest to develop the project’s various components – the transshipment port, power plant, township and airport. In response to a Lok Sabha question this November, the union environment minister stated that the decision to go ahead with the project had been taken “after due consideration of potential environmental impacts on island ecology” and “significant strategic, defence and national importance of the developmental projects”.
About 166 sq km of the island’s lush green rainforests are slated to be cut and be replaced by tarmacked roads and coastal infrastructure, like ports and jetties. The environmental impact assessment notes that this could entail work such as dredging, and coral and sand mining for construction. “Coastal marine ecosystems will be lost at alarming rates,” noted a 2021 study by the Zoological Survey of India on the probable impacts of the project on wildlife, conducted as a part of the impact assessment. This loss, experts fear, will pose a colossal threat to the island’s marine and terrestrial animals, and their habitats and food sources.
The environmental impact assessment report notes that construction of port infrastructure “might hinder the entry of the turtles in the area for breeding” and that the project may have “direct or indirect impacts on the habitats” of “iconic species” like the Nicobar megapode, macaque and giant leatherback turtle. It then recommends a set of measures to mitigate these impacts. These include halting construction work at night, relocating species like crocodiles from project sites, and using lights that do not disturb turtles on the coast.
Such measures are insufficient, wildlife experts argued. They represent an “absolute bare minimum”, said Ishika Ramakrishna, a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Wildlife Studies in Bengaluru, who is studying human and primate interactions. Ramakrishna noted that the suggested measures “focus on very marginally reducing the impacts during the construction of the infrastructure. It does not look at reducing the impacts of the project once it is actually standing and operating.”
The threat to macaques
Apart from being classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, the Nicobar long-tailed macaque also has the highest degree of protection under India's Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Great Nicobar is home to the largest population of the animal.
In January 2022, a group of primatologists and wildlife biologists wrote to the Andaman and Nicobar Pollution Control Committee, the coordinating agency for the environmental impact assessment, to provide feedback on the assessment. They expressed concerns grounded in the fact that, as Ramakrishna explained, the long-tailed macaque has adapted to live both on the coasts, where it depends on the pandanus fruit and coconuts for its subsistence, as well as further inland, where it uses the lush rainforests, surviving on fruits and insects. “Since the habitat of coastal groups will be altered completely and the inland groups will also become dependent on plantations for food, there will be more inter-group conflicts due to the limitation of resources following the clearing of forests,” the experts noted.
This, the experts noted, was likely to exacerbate problems that had begun to develop in the years after the 2004 tsunami. A 2016 study that examined the recovery of the island’s macaque population after the disaster found that in Great Nicobar, residents reported increased raiding of coconut and bananas by macaques in the years after it.
The upcoming project could further intensify such interactions, suggested Ramakrishna, who has worked on the long-tailed macaque in Great Nicobar. Last year, Ramakrishna wrote that “the approved construction work is likely to result in 70 per cent of the 36 troops of macaques on the island losing their territories”.
In an interview with Scroll, she noted, “With the sheer number of trees that are marked to be cut down, their habitat is set to directly be impacted and the macaques are likely to spend more time in people’s farms.”
While in many cases, humans and the animals can coexist, such interactions may “not always be positive”, she said. For instance, she noted, the species could be harmed if people begin setting traps on farms to protect their produce.
Ramakrishna also pointed out that the environmental impact assessment report suggests inaccurately that macaques are a species in conflict with humans on the island. “While there are issues, it’s not a species that is in full blown conflict with humans yet,” she said. She explained that the report’s “labelling” of the species as such is also reflected in its failure to “include them properly” in measures to mitigate the project’s harms on the island’s fauna. “It gives a sense of disregarding them, since they are anyway a problem species,” she said.
The biologists’ and primatologists’ letter also raised other problems with mitigation measures that the environmental impact assessment report had suggested for macaques, such as the relocation of animals encountered during construction of roads. The letter stated that studies on relocation of macaques had found such attempts “often unsuccessful as the entire social group is not successfully captured, there are many fatalities (especially of infants) during capture, they experience tremendous trauma during transportation and groups do not always survive after relocation due to unsuitability of habitat”.
Diminishing turtle nesting ground
The beaches of the Great and Little Nicobar islands are crucial for turtle nesting in the region – they are home to 87% of the turtle nesting sites in the Nicobar group of islands, a 2016 study conducted by Dakshin Foundation found. The study identified around 770 nests of giant leatherbacks on Great Nicobar, along with 320 nests for green sea turtles, 470 for olive ridleys and 71 for hawksbill turtles.
According to the study, Galathea Bay, in the south of Great Nicobar, is among the Nicobar group’s three “most important” nesting sites of the giant leatherback turtle. A “rapid assessment” by the Wildlife Institute of India in 2021, which was also a part of the environmental impact assessment report, noted that the finer soils and gentle slope of three bays on the island, including Galathea, were probably “helping” the leatherbacks “reach shore and lay eggs here conveniently”.
“Galathea is an important site because it also has historical value from a research perspective,” said Kartik Shanker, professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He explained that since Galathea Bay has been monitored since the 1990s, it offers baseline data of the population of the leatherback turtles and their nesting, allowing for further studies and population monitoring. “There are other beaches on the western coast of Great Nicobar and in the Little Nicobar where nesting occurs, but we have not monitored those beaches in the past.”
Galathea Bay has been selected for the construction of the international transshipment port – once operational, the coastal landscape will be replaced by shipping berths bustling with activities of ship docking, loading and unloading.
But Shanker is optimistic that leatherbacks will be able to find other nesting sites on the island, because they are well known to nest at different beaches. “They would not have survived for millions of years if they were completely rigid about their nesting beach,” he said. He added that his team had “tagged leatherback turtles in Little Andaman and found that they forage as far as western Australia in the east and Mozambique and Madagascar in the west”. But their studies showed that the animals migrated to these particular nesting grounds only every few years. Further, he cautioned that if development work reached the western coast of the island too, it could be a threat to the animal, since the only other known nesting sites on the island are situated there.
In an August 2020 webinar organised by the NGO Deccan Birders, Dr K Sivakmar, who led the Wildlife Institute of India’s rapid study, said that in an earlier interaction he had had with the NITI Aayog about the transshipment port, he had “begged” the chairman to consider the impact on the island’s leatherback turtles. He said that the chairman assured him that the beaches would not be touched for the project. But, “The government went ahead with the project,” Sivakumar said at the session. “I couldn’t convince, I am sorry for that.”
Several of the mitigation measures that the environmental impact assessment report suggests to offset the harm that could come to wildlife on the island are focused on turtles. These include halting construction activities “to the possible extent” during nights, as well as between November and February, which coincides with the nesting period of leatherback turtles.
“The port is expected to come up very close to the nesting beach, so it is hard to say if these measures, even though they should be taken, would really work for them to continue using this site for nesting,” Shanker said.
Megapodes and other birds
Apart from the megapode, which primarily inhabits the island’s coast, the development work is also likely to threaten other species of birds, such as the Nicobar pigeon and Nicobar jungle flycatcher, both classified as near threatened.
“Approximately 150 bird species, including endemic, resident, and migratory ones, have been recorded in the region,” said a local naturalist, who requested anonymity. “Among them is the Nicobar pigeon, a remarkable resident bird whose ancestors are traced back to the extinct dodo. Many of these species are endemic at the subspecies level, based on morphological differences, and require further scientific study.”
The population of megapodes has dropped steeply over the years – the zoological society report notes that in 1994, the island had between 1,100 and 1,800 breeding pairs, but that research conducted between 2015 and 2018 found only between 97 and 104 such pairs.
In the webinar, Sivakumar noted that the population had undergone a “steep decline” and that the bird’s “habitat is under a lot of pressure”.
Megapodes have fascinated birders and wildlife biologists, in large part owing to their distinctive behaviour of building mounds on the ground to use as nests. They collect sand, loam, coral bits and vegetation to build these mounds, which can range in height from about 10 cm to two metres. Instead of using body heat to incubate their eggs, megapodes incubate them in these mounds.
The birds prefer coastal landscapes as the sites of these mounds, which makes them vulnerable to any changes on the coasts. A 1995 study by ornithologist R Sankaran, found that more than 90% of the mounds were built within 30 metres from the shore, some as close as five metres from it. “Typically, megapodes build their mounds in coastal forest areas where many deciduous trees shed their leaves yearly,” the naturalist said. “This leaf litter mixes with sandy loam soil, aiding megapodes in mound construction.”
Citing a 2000 research paper, the zoological society report described the plan to make Great Nicobar a “free port”, and to create a dock and refuelling base for international shipping on the mouth of Galathea River, as “the prime hazard hanging over the megapode population of the Nicobar”. The same report also highlighted an ongoing road construction project through Galathea, up to Indira Point, which it noted could lead to a loss of both micro and macro habitats in the area, and thus affect the micro climatic condition needed for the mounds.
Such effects have been observed earlier, even with less dramatic changes to the coast – a 1995 study found that a large number of abandoned mounds were found wherever primary forests along the coasts were converted into coconut plantations. The study observed that the birds needed sufficient ground cover as well as “middle-storey vegetation cover” for their mounds, and thus tended not to breed in forests that were changed to coconut plantations.
According to estimates of an expert appraisal committee, there are more than 50 active megapode nests in the area of the proposed megaproject, of which 30 will be permanently destroyed on account of construction activities.
To mitigate the harms to these birds, the environmental impact assessment report suggests “well organised plans” based on “internationally accepted mitigation measures for minimal impact”, but does not lay down any details. “The resident birds have evolved on these islands for thousands of years and migrate within the islands, and depend on availability of food,” the naturalist said. “An additional 12 to 20 hectares of mangroves are also set to be bulldozed, apart from the million trees cleared. How will the birds survive if their homes are destroyed?”
Research in the Great Nicobar is recent, and wildlife biologists have noted that there are likely many more species endemic to these islands than currently known. “Science takes time,” Ramakrishna said. “But the rapidity with which the project is moving forward also means that we are running out of time to understand species on the island better, and the impact that this project is costing them.”
