National Geographic UK April 2022

Insect Aromatic Tentacles Altitude adjustments BELLWETHERS OF CHANGE Downward- nectar grasp prey pointing hairs As elevation increases, A warming climate and decreasing Summit soils are Sundew temperatures cool and precipitation threaten endemic frogs trap prey nutrient-poor; several rainfall increases—to some and toads living on top of tepuis and in plants are carnivorous, 13 feet each year. the rainforests far below. Many species Pitcher plant luring insects with are narrowly adapted to climate zones. nectar and vivid colors. 54°F 40°F FROGS SHOWN ACTUAL SIZE CERRO CUQUENÁN SUMMIT AVERAGE TEMPERATURE Roraima thern labyrinth Diverse zones SUMMIT pebble toad Oreophrynella quelchii uses its oppos- Headwaters of the On the summit, shrubs, brome- CLIFF able back toes to grip and climb over Paikwa River liads, and carnivorous plants rocks and plants. It escapes predators sprout up around pools of TALUS by balling up and rolling away. ains from water or in rock crevices. via waterfalls, Roraima low to some of Lake rocket frog America’s larg- Gladys rs, including Found in high meadows, Anomaloglos- azon. Here, moss- and epiphyte- sus roraima tadpoles develop in water covered trees are surrounded that gets trapped between the leaves by shrubs, bromeliads, and herbs of bucket-like bromeliad plants. rooted in a thick layer of peat. Weiassipu These lower slopes feature thick pebble toad tropical forests of evergreens, some up to a hundred feet tall, Oreophrynella weiassipuensis hatches rising over dense undergrowth. fully formed from its soft egg. It spends its days in wet moss and its nights resting on leaves. LOWER SLOPE FOREST HEIGHT COMPARISON Route of expedit N 100 feet ion Pancake frog Summit Talus Lower slope 75°F 63°F Otophryne robusta mimics the leaf litter of the forest floor to blend into SLOPE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE its environment. Its tadpoles burrow in sandy stream bottoms. MANUEL CANALES, PATRICIA HEALY, TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO, MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF. ART: ANTOINE COLLIGNON, GAËLLE SELLIGNON. SOURCES: ROMAN AUBRECHT, COMENIUS UNIVERSITY; MAREK AUDY; PAUL E. BERRY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; TOMÁŠ DERKA, COMENIUS UNIVERSITY; BRUCE MEANS, FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY; ANDREJ PAVLOVIČ, PALACKY UNIVERSITY; FEDERICO PISANI; FRANCESCO SAURO, UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA

DWINDLING PLATEAU Honnold, who famously climbed Yosemite’s Tepuis are carved from a seabed formed about 1.7 billion years ago. The El Capitan without movement of continental plates transformed the seabed, leaving a large ropes, joined the expe- plateau that eventually eroded into roughly a hundred individual summits. dition to help the team scale Weiassipu’s 1.6 -1.8 BILLION STONE ORIGINS quartzite face. “Some YEARS AGO of the best rock I’ve ever climbed,” he says. Sands deposited thousands of It’s extremely old rock feet thick over the Earth’s crust formed on the bed of cemented into hard sedimentary a primordial sea some rock called quartz sandstone. 1.7 billion years ago. NORTH AFRIC AMERICA A Area that will become SOUTH the Guiana Shield AMERICA Modern coastline 160-70 MILLION AFRICA S E PA R AT I O N YEARS AGO S TAG E When continental plates divided, Uplift a large area in South America was elevated, fractured, and incised with deep canyons. Guiana Shield GUIANA HIGHLANDS SOUTH AMERICA 70-40 MILLION W E AT H E R I N G YEARS AGO AWAY Rainfall over millions of GUIANA years released sand parti- HIGHLANDS cles from the original stone, hewing sheer cliff walls. 40 MILLION HARD YEARS AGO HOLDOUTS Today’s tepuis are the remaining MOUNT fragments of the Guiana Shield. They’ve kept much of their current G U I A N A RORAIMA shape for the past 40 million years. HIGHLANDS Auyán-tepuí Cerro Guaiquinima Chimantá N Massif



On top of Weiassipu, Pisani searches for frogs among a thicket of tank bromeliads. Each tepui offers a unique opportunity to study evolution, because many plants and animals on its sum- mit have been isolated from other species for thousands of years.



among the Akawaio for having climbed the Some of the frog 1,500-foot Prow route of Roraima with a British species encountered expedition in 2019. They didn’t know it yet, but on the expedition: we had brought medals from Guyana’s newly elected president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, to TOP LEFT present to them in honor of their feat. MacConnell’s pebble Short, rippling with muscle, and constantly toad (Oreophrynella smiling, Edward, 55, had accompanied Bruce and macconnelli) inhabits me on our previous expeditions to the region. the forest near Double He’d grown up in this forest and could survive Drop Falls and is one of out here more or less indefinitely with little more two known species of than his trusty machete, which he kept razor pebble toad that don’t sharp with a file he wore on a string around his live on a tepui summit. neck. He told me that since our last expedition, he’d been working off and on as a mining pros- TOP RIGHT pector, or “pork-knocker,” a Guyanese term that refers to the miners’ backcountry practice of An unnamed species living on pickled wild bush hog. of Stefania was found in the cloud forest Since I’d last seen Edward in 2006, Guyana below Weiassipu. had been gripped by a gold rush. A few thousand artisanal mines had been dug throughout the BOTTOM LEFT country’s interior. Like most Akawaio, Edward had spent much of his life farming and hunting. The Roraima tree frog But the lure of earning cash, maybe even find- (Boana roraima) lives ing life-changing treasure deep in the jungle, between the leaves of was impossible to resist. He described how the arboreal bromeliads. miners would dig down to a layer of clay, then inject high-powered jets of water to blast the clay BOTTOM RIGHT into a slurry, which then was pumped to the sur- face, sluiced and rinsed, and then mixed with The Kanaima tree frog mercury, which binds to the gold. The chemical (Nesorohyla kanaima) process especially worried Bruce. has unusually dark eyes. “Few other frogs “A teaspoonful of mercury can contaminate have irises so black an entire river system,” he told me. that you cannot see their pupils,” Bruce An Akawaio named Denver Henry showed me Means says. It’s unclear a map detailing the location of dozens of mining what advantage black claims scattered across the rainforest surround- irises may have over ing the Paikwa River. So far, the pork-knockers colorful ones. had been held off by the inaccessibility of the terrain and the Akawaio’s resistance to build- RYAN VALASEK (TOP LEFT AND ing an airstrip in their villages. But Edward told BOTTOM LEFT) me that during the last rainy season, when the lowlands flooded, outside prospectors had come B RUCE EMERGED from his in with boats from Kamarang, one of the biggest hammock the next morning villages in the region, to explore claims. Every wearing only muddy briefs and year these mines get a little closer to the Paikwa was met by a group of Akawaio River Basin. holding gallon-size Ziploc bags. Around the table, we agreed Bruce needed At the beginning of the trip, he’d time to recover, so we decided to split up. The climbing team would move ahead to cut a trail announced that in order to sample to the base of Weiassipu’s north face, about five miles away, while Bruce and a team of Akawaio the biodiversity, he would pay for specimens. The collected specimens at Double Drop Falls. payout was 100 Guyanese dollars (about 50 cents) per creature, with a premium bonus for a Stefania frog, which immediately created a thriving microeconomy in a land where there is little opportunity for Indigenous people to earn hard currency. Bruce opened his journal to a blank page and started taking notes. Edward was first in line. His 64 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

baggie held four frogs. Salio Chiwakeng was next, Meanwhile, Alex, Fuco, and I loaded up with with five lizards and six frogs. Markenson James food and gear for the climb, including a thou- confidently delivered a large black scorpion, sand feet of rope and three hanging cots, called Tityus obscurus, and his friend presented a spider portaledges, for camping on the side of the cliff. fit for a Stephen King movie. Bruce pulled it out Two Akawaio guides, Harris Aaron and Franklin of the bag with his bare hand, pinching its hairy George, led us up a narrow ridge and over a hump body between his fingers as one might hold a into a thick forest. Wielding machetes, they crab. “Theraphosa blondi,” he said, “aka the Goli- slashed a path through a carpet of giant ferns ath birdeater.” A member of the tarantula family and between old-growth trees held fast in the that happens to be the world’s largest spider by thin, sandy soil with colossal buttress roots that mass (and yes, it eats birds), this one tipped the extended, pyramid-like, 20 feet across their bases. scales at half a pound and was six inches across. It stared at us with beady eyes and bared curved Spiky bromeliads of every conceivable size black fangs that looked like a vampire’s. After and color covered the ground and grew up the jotting down a few notes, Bruce put it onto his sides of the trees, sprouting from clumps of moss. balding pate and let it walk around. Orchids with delicate white flowers emerged from rotten stumps. White bellbirds, rainbow-colored U P T H E M O U N TA I N , T O A W O R L D A PA R T 65

macaws, and tiny iridescent hummingbirds E ARLY THE NEXT MORNING, we darted through the leaves, filling the air with started to climb Weiassipu. Our plan their warbles and whistles. For brief moments was to ascend the wall via whatever the clouds would lift, letting the sun filter through seemed to be the best route, laying a holes in the canopy, illuminating patches of the trail of ropes anchored to the moun- steamy forest floor where luminous blue morpho butterflies flitted in shafts of light. tain along the way. When the entire On the second day of fighting our way to the cliff was rigged, we’d strap Bruce into base of Weiassipu, we began to catch glimpses of its towering north face through occasional one of the portaledges and haul him up behind us. From the comfort of this hanging platform, Bruce would look for new species on the vertical THIS WAS THE DIAMOND WATERFALL, WHERE LEGEND HAS IT THE PLUNGE POOL openings in the forest. Soon we entered a maze walls that guard Weiassipu’s summit. of jumbled, slippery boulders cloaked in a Progress was painstakingly slow, and by late spongy blanket of electric-green moss. Grad- ually, the firm ground gave way to an elevated afternoon, Fuco and I found ourselves hud- lattice of deadfall that occasionally would break dling on a small ledge about 150 feet up the out from under our feet like a trapdoor. wall. Above us, a mud-stained rope snaked up and across a 25-foot horizontal section of rock— Late in the day I heard a loud oof behind me. known in climber parlance as a roof—to where I looked back to see Alex hanging by his armpits. it was tied to Alex, who hung like a bat with his One of his legs had broken through the rotten left leg hooked over a spike of rock. trellis of dead wood and augered into a jagged void between two rocks. After extricating him- “What do you think?” he called down. “Should self, he pulled up his pant leg. His shin was cov- I go for it?” The last section of the roof followed ered in a paste of blood and muck. Fuco caught a flake of rock that stuck out from the wall like my eye. He didn’t say anything, but I knew what a diving board. There was no way to say for sure he was thinking: How in the world are we going how solid it was. Earlier that day I had taken the to get Bruce through this section? first whack at this pitch, getting to where Alex was now, before chickening out and handing When we finally walked out of the forest at over the lead to Mr. Free Solo. the base of Weiassipu just before sunset, it felt like being reborn. The clouds had lifted, and “Better to leave it for tomorrow,” yelled Fuco. the wall glowed in the dusk. Across the valley, “It will be dark in a few minutes.” we stared at the nine-mile-long east face of Roraima, where a dozen waterfalls, each as tall Without saying anything else, Alex reached as the Empire State Building, poured out of the out to the edge of the flake with his right hand, mountain like flowing ribbons of golden silk. cut his feet loose, and swung out over the void. Then he proceeded to go hand over hand across Franklin directed our attention to the most the flake, completely trusting that it would stay spectacular cataract, which burst from a hole in attached to the mountain. After 15 feet or so, he the side of the cliff about 200 feet below the rim. let go with one hand to chalk up his fingers. This, he said, was the Diamond Waterfall, where legend has it the plunge pool at its base sparkles Watching him dangle casually by one arm, with diamonds the size of one’s fist. It’s a tale 200 feet above the jungle, I was struck by the that dates back to Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote uncanny resemblance he bore to a pebble toad that some of his Native guides promised to bring I’d seen clinging to Bruce’s finger a few days him to a mountain that had “very large pieces prior. Seconds later, Alex reached for another growing diamond-wise; whether it be crystal of crack above his head, and the last thing I saw as the mountain, Bristol diamond, or sapphire, I do darkness enveloped the mountain was his legs not yet know, but I hope the best.” slithering over the lip. That night, back down in our makeshift ham- mock camp at the base of the wall, Alex, Fuco, 66 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

and I were arguing about the feasibility of our the sun pulsed in a deep blue sky. Below, an ocean plan. In setting the route, it had become clear of clouds blanketed the valley. To the west, I could to me that hauling Bruce up the cliff like a piece see dozens of waterfalls pouring from Roraima’s of baggage was going to be a lot more dangerous 1,500-foot-tall east face, forming halos of rain- than any of us had expected. My biggest concern bows around the plunge pools at the base. was that Bruce was on blood thinners for a heart condition—something he had failed to disclose After downing a cup of coffee and some energy until we were well into the trek. What if he got bars, we set off across the ledge, hoping it might hurt somehow and we couldn’t stop the bleeding? lead to the summit. After half a mile of tunneling upward through thick bushes covered in spider- Right then, a light flashed in an opening in webs, we turned a corner and found ourselves at AT ITS BASE SPARKLES WITH DIAMONDS THE SIZE OF ONE’S FIST. the jungle far below, a signal from base camp. I the top of the tepui, staring across the plateau. In turned on our radio and heard Bruce’s voice. With the span of a few feet, we stepped from a hanging a heaviness in his speech, he told us that Brian cloud forest onto a bog covered in pitcher plants, Irwin, our expedition doctor, had just persuaded yucca, and sundews, glistening carnivorous flora him to pull the plug on our harebrained plan. that resembled Venus flytraps. Off in the distance, twin rock pinnacles rose above the sinkhole that “I can’t tell you how much this grieves me,” Bruce and I had explored in 2012. Bruce said. “Fuco, especially, knows the herpeto- fauna well. I’ll send up the picture that I’ve It started to rain, and the clouds that had blan- drawn of the Stefania that I’m pretty sure is new keted the valley began curling over the summit to science up there.” rim and enveloping us. Fuco and I found shel- ter under a mushroom-shaped rock, where we “OK, Bruce,” Fuco said. “I’m going to do my huddled, soaked and shivering, with my poncho best to find the lucky Stefania.” draped over us like a tarp. Alex, meanwhile, had disappeared, presumably to go climb something. The next morning, the entire valley below Weiassipu was enveloped in the same gray mist Fuco called Bruce on the radio. “Where is the that we had been living in for days. I now under- best place to find that lucky Stefania?” he asked. stood why Bruce called this zone a cloud forest. I felt bad for Fuco because I knew that he car- This basin seemed to create its own weather, and ried the weight of everyone’s expectations. Bruce it was a rare moment when we could see more told him to look on the branches of small trees than a hundred feet in any direction. It rained and shrubbery. But he also mentioned that Ste- for hours, but luckily the wall was overhung just fania like to hide inside clumps of moss during enough that we usually avoided getting wet. the day and that he usually finds them at night when their eyes catch the beam of his headlamp. While Alex led the way, Fuco and I followed, looking for frogs inside cracks and digging into Fuco and I spent the afternoon wandering in any patches of soil we found. At the end of each the fog and rain, poking through thick moss and pitch, we used pulleys to haul up heavy bags that combing branches and leaves, hoping to spot held everything we needed to survive on the wall one of the minute frogs, or any kind of verte- for a few days. It was an exhausting day, during brate, but all we found were some tadpoles from which the only creatures we found were a centi- a known species of frog. Fuco went out again pede with an orange stripe on its back and a big, that night in yet another rainstorm but found possibly carnivorous, cricket. It wasn’t until well nothing. It felt like a major defeat. Although the after sunset that we crawled into our portaledges, expedition had been designed to sample a broad anchored to the wall next to a narrow ledge 700 range of fauna, the focus had been to find frogs feet above the jungle. We fell asleep to the sound on this tepui, especially the new species of of rain pattering against our nylon rainflies. Stefania. That this was probably Bruce’s last expedition made our failure especially crushing. When the sun rose the next morning, I unzipped the door. The clouds were gone, and U P T H E M O U N T A I N , T O A W O R L D A P A R T 67



The nine-mile-long east face of Roraima, Guyana’s highest point, towers above the Paikwa River Basin. Frequent rain on its summit drains into the watersheds of three of South America’s major rivers: the Essequibo, Amazon, and Orinoco.

T WO DAYS LATER we’d run out of supplies and were forced to head down the mountain. Bruce had relo- cated to a new spot, “Sloth Camp,” a day’s hike above Double Drop Falls. We found him sitting at a workbench sketching a rubbery brown frog, its body laid out on a metal tray next to his note- book. His field lab was covered with several glass jars of formaldehyde, filled with frogs, lizards, and snakes. He lit up when he saw us, but his eyes were puffy and red rimmed. His safari shirt was ripped and splotched with mud. As he gripped the edge of the table and tried to stand, he grimaced, and I realized that he was in a great deal of pain. “I’m so sorry we didn’t find the Stefania,” Fuco said, handing Bruce a baggie that contained the centipede and cricket. “It’s OK,” said Bruce. “The fact that you didn’t find any frogs up there is actually a scientific result in its own right.” I could see that a devilish Means pauses for a moment by Double grin was spreading across his face. He led us over Drop Falls before leav- ing the rainforest he’s to the workbench, where he picked up the brown studied for 35 years. The 2021 expedition frog and held it up for us to see. A small white was his 33rd and final scientific mission to tag with some numbers was attached to its foot. the Upper Paikwa, yet much remains to be “Is that … ?” I said, recognizing it from the discovered. Only about half of the region’s frog sketch of the Stefania that Bruce had sent us. species have been scientifically identified, “I won’t know for sure until I’ve been able to Means says. “It’s up to someone else to pick do the DNA analysis,” Bruce said, “but I’m about up where I’ve left off.” 95 percent sure that this is a new species of Ste- make the trek out. The only option was to call in an emergency helicopter rescue. fania.” He explained that it was different from The canopy was so thick that our satellite the one he’d seen all those years ago on top of phone didn’t work, but after several hours we finally managed to text our coordinates to our Weiassipu—the one Fuco, Alex, and I had just outfitter back in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown. been killing ourselves to find—but it was almost The next day a helicopter descended into the small opening at the base of Double Drop Falls. definitely another missing link in the Stefania After a round of hugs, Bruce headed for the chop- per, only to trip and fall one last time. As the heli- evolutionary tree that he and Philippe Kok had copter climbed out over the jungle, I saw Bruce in the passenger seat looking out the window. been working on for years. I knew he could see Weiassipu and Roraima to the south and west, rising from the cloud forest, Bruce put the frog back down and started pull- their waterfalls casting rainbows and diamonds into the rivers far below. Ahead, the veiny path ing out other specimens to show us. “It’s funny how it worked out,” he said. “Me not going up the wall turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it gave me time to thoroughly explore this cloud forest, which no scientists have ever investigated before.” In all, Bruce was confident he’d found six spe- cies new to science, including a nonvenomous colubrid snake and a spectacled lizard, which had a transparent lower eyelid that allowed it to see when its eyes were closed. That evening, over a dinner of watery noodles, we discussed what had long been the elephant in the room. Bruce’s condition had deteriorated to the point that there was simply no way he could 70 N A T I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

of the sparkling Paikwa River twisted northward, River Basin and the tepuis that surround it. And growing turbid as it passed through the scars of I thought about how my old friend would prob- the encroaching mines, which every year draw a ably never see this place again—and about the little bit closer to this Shangri-la of biodiversity. new species that he now carried in the water- proof bag between his feet. As I turned to begin packing up for the long trek back out of the jungle, Edward pulled me If the tepui gods were smiling, maybe one of aside. From an inside pocket he produced a these creatures might prove so rare and singular small plastic vial holding a pea-size raw dia- that the world would finally realize what Bruce mond. Now that our expedition was over, he was Means has known all along: The real treasures hoping I might buy it from him. Holding that of El Dorado aren’t gold and diamonds—they’re tiny stone between my fingers, I thought about the plants and animals that call this magical all the pork-knockers who wanted to dig mines place home. j to pull these out of the ground and all the money they could provide to their families. I marveled Writer Mark Synnott and photographer Renan at how such a small rock could threaten some- Ozturk last teamed up to search for George thing as ancient and primordial as the Paikwa Mallory’s lost camera on Mount Everest. Their story appeared in the July 2020 issue. U P T H E M O U N TA I N , T O A W O R L D A PA R T 71

The Weird Wonder of S E A HO 72

A pair of western spiny seahorses (male at far left) from Australia intertwine tails for sta- bility. Seahorses inhabit coastal waters nearly worldwide, clinging to seagrasses, corals, and sponges. Their populations are being squeezed by overfish- ing and habitat loss. HIPPOCAMPUS ANGUSTUS SEAHORSE WORLD, BEAUTY POINT, TASMANIA They look like a mix of other animals, the males give birth, and we still have much to learn about them. Now these unique fish are threatened. BY JENNIFER S. HOLLAND P H OTO G R A P H S BY DAVID LIITTSCHWAGER

Pacific Longsnout Tiger tail Long-snouted seahorse seahorse seahorse seahorse H. ingens H. reidi H. comes H. guttulatus The seahorses in this sample are shown almost life-size. All seahorse species belong to the genus 74 N A T I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

A sampling of the world’s 46 identified seahorse species reveals their array of sizes, colors, crowns, fins, and frills. Pot-bellied Barbour’s Short-snouted White’s Dwarf seahorse seahorse seahorse seahorse seahorse H. barbouri H. whitei H. zosterae H. abdominalis H. hippocampus Hippocampus, from the ancient Greek for “horse” and “sea monster.” BIRCH AQUARIUM AT SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA; RAMALHETE MARINE STATION, UNIVERSITY OF THE ALGARVE, FARO, PORTUGAL

M Miguel Correia pointed at the seafloor. I stared and Dried seahorses shook my head. He jabbed a gloved finger at the spot. confiscated at San I swam closer and stared harder. Sand. Algae. Rocks. Francisco Interna- A spiral of sea cucumber poop. I exhaled a swarm of tional Airport were bubbles in frustration.¶ And then, suddenly, there shipped from Asia, it was, tucked into the seaweed right where I’d been where each year looking: a three-inch-tall, long-snouted seahorse, millions are ground Hippocampus guttulatus, muddied yellow with up for traditional a smattering of dark freckles and a mane of skin medicines. Biologists filaments. Later that dive I spotted (also with help) worry about illegal its short-snouted cousin, Hippocampus hippocam- trade and other pus, the other seahorse native to this coastal lagoon threats depleting in Portugal called Ria Formosa. ¶ Every continent wild populations. but Antarctica has varieties of these fabled fish in its coastal waters. Worldwide, scientists recognize HIPPOCAMPUS KELLOGGI 46 species, the smallest no bigger than a lima bean, the largest the size of a baseball glove. And that CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF number is likely to rise: Four new species were named in just the past decade. SCIENCES, SAN FRANCISCO 76 N A T I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C





Stripped from the seabed as bycatch, the fish are sold around the world for traditional Chinese medicine and for trinkets. A male pot-bellied seahorse displays a crown of skin filaments as individual as a human fingerprint. BIRCH AQUARIUM 79

Newborn seahorses emerge from a male’s pouch, where a female deposited her eggs for incubation. This pot-bellied seahorse may give birth to hun- dreds of young, most of which will be gob- bled up by predators. SEAHORSE WORLD

It wasn’t long ago that Ria Formosa, in the The female Algarve region of Portugal, was home to as many impregnates the as two million seahorses, says Correia, a biolo- male rather than gist at the University of the Algarve’s Center for Marine Sciences. He and colleagues breed and the reverse, study the animals in a small waterfront facility, an evolutionary and they’ve seen populations of both species quirk unique decline dramatically. “We’ve lost up to 90 per- to seahorses. cent in less than 20 years,” he says. changes and tail embraces. They may tango for Such falloff appears widespread, in part days and stay together for an entire season. because seahorses live in the most hammered marine habitats in the world—including estuar- And here’s the twist: The female impregnates ies, mangroves, seagrass beds, and coral reefs. the male rather than the reverse, an evolution- In Ria Formosa, for example, human activity— ary quirk unique to seahorses and their close from farming of clams to illegal bottom trawl- relatives. She deposits her yolk-rich eggs into his ing—buries or rips up the seagrass beds that belly pouch through a port on her trunk called seahorses prefer. an ovipositor. Several weeks later the distended male goes into body-spasming labor, ejecting The hardest hitter globally is unregulated dozens to thousands of young—depending on fishing, which fuels a wide-reaching trade in the species’ size—into the current. Offspring dried seahorses. Stripped from the seabed as drift awhile before settling down, and only a bycatch—the incidental capture in bottom scant few avoid being eaten by predators in trawlers and other catchall gear—the fish are those early days. sold around the world for traditional Chinese medicine and for trinkets. A much smaller num- When a seahorse needs to move from here ber are sold live for the aquarium trade, mostly to there, it swims upright with the frantic flut- to U.S. consumers. ter of its dorsal fin at up to 70 beats per second and steers with its pair of pectoral fins. To stay It’s easy to see the seahorse’s allure, with its put, it uses its flexible tail to grab onto seagrass, fanciful blend of traits that seem borrowed from coral, or other fixed items on the seafloor. The other animals: a horse’s head, a chameleon’s seahorse’s excellent camouflage then makes it independent eyes and camo skills, a kangaroo’s all but invisible. pouch, a monkey’s prehensile tail. Hippocampus comes in colors rivaling Crayola’s Big Box and For all their notoriety—who wouldn’t recog- in a multitude of bumps and blotches, stripes nize a seahorse?—much about the fish remains and speckles, spikes and lacy skin extensions. A little known, including where they live and seahorse has bony plates instead of scales, and, precisely how their populations are faring. The with no stomach to store food, it almost con- IUCN Red List of Threatened Species includes stantly sucks up copepods, shrimp, fish larvae, all Hippocampus species, and many are listed and other tiny edibles. as data deficient. These sit-and-wait predators are dancers of a “For the vast majority of species,” says marine sort. During courtship, a pair rises and falls face- biologist Amanda Vincent of the University of to-face in the water, communicating with color British Columbia (UBC), “beyond taxonomy and a basic description, we know almost nothing.” Photographing his Vincent is the director of Project Seahorse, a con- subjects in research labs servation alliance between UBC, where Vincent and public aquariums, David Liittschwager captures the singular beauty of three groups of mysterious sea creatures in a new book, Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish, from National Geographic. S E A H O R S E S 81

Meet the Cousins Seahorses, pipefish, the family traits are such as the weedy sea and sea dragons long snouts, fused dragon (inset below) belong to a family of jaws, and bony body and the ribboned fish known as Syng- armor. After fertilizing pipefish (right), are nathidae, a taxonomic the eggs, males carry masters of disguise. group that includes them during incuba- 295 species. Among tion. Many species, HALIICHTHYS TAENIOPHORUS (RIGHT) BIRCH AQUARIUM PHYLLOPTERYX TAENIOLATUS (ABOVE), AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC, LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA



Commercial fishing example, that dried seahorses boost virility, operations scoop have anti-inflammatory properties, and can up at least 76 million treat everything from asthma to incontinence. seahorses a year. Some 80 countries TO G E T A S E N S E of the pressures on seahorses, I are involved in visited a warehouse at the California Academy of Sciences, where Hamilton rummaged through trading them. one of many boxes of plastic bags bulging with brittle skeletons that had been confiscated at is a professor at its Institute for the Oceans and San Francisco International Airport. There were Fisheries, and the Zoological Society of London. hundreds, maybe thousands, of fish, “represent- ing just a year’s worth of what was stopped at a Such a knowledge gap, blamed in part on the single port,” she told me. dearth of scientists who study seahorses, is espe- cially problematic for a fish that’s so exploited. Occasionally officials seize a supersize haul: Project Seahorse estimates that commercial In 2019 in Lima, Peru, more than 12 million fishing operations scoop up at least 76 million dried seahorses were confiscated from a sin- seahorses a year; some 80 countries are involved gle Asia-bound ship—a load worth some six in trading them. “Fishermen used to throw them million dollars on the black market. But more back,” notes Healy Hamilton, chief scientist of often, seahorse shipments escape detection, NatureServe, a Virginia-based conservation Hamilton said, with incalculable losses to each group, “but now in many places you’ll see a exploited species. [buyer] on the dock just waiting to take them.” On a positive note, in 2020 the Portuguese While some fishermen target seahorses, it’s government created two small marine protected bycatch that’s devastating seahorse populations, areas within Ria Formosa to act as seahorse says Project Seahorse’s program manager, Sarah sanctuaries. It’s good news, but experts say the Foster. Global exports should have edged toward key to maintaining seahorse numbers is better sustainability after 2004, when worries about fisheries management, with severe limits and extensive international trade prompted new reg- even bans on trawling. Market demand doesn’t ulations under the Convention on International have to be a death sentence for Hippocampus, Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Foster says—“if we can get CITES rules to work Flora (CITES). “Unfortunately, it seems that most as intended to support sustainable legal trade.” trade in dried seahorses has just moved under- ground,” Vincent says. The good news is that the Meanwhile, Asia’s consumption of seahorse live trade is relying more on captive breeding, products could shrink on its own “as younger, reducing pressure on wild populations, she says. more progressive-minded people move away from using wildlife in traditional ways,” Foster Field surveys and CITES records have exposed says. The traditional-medicine community ulti- Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, as the mately shares a goal with conservationists, she main supplier of seahorses, and indicate that says. Traders and users often are vilified, “but in two West African countries, Guinea and Sene- the end we all have incentives to keep seahorses gal, have increased their exports. Hong Kong is from disappearing.” by far the top importer, with heavy shipments also to Taiwan and mainland China. Most of Acting on those incentives matters because the demand for seahorses reflects their use in “there is absolutely no way seahorses can sus- traditional medicines. Vendors promise, for tain today’s level of exploitation,” Hamilton said from her perch overlooking the warehouse shelves. “And people need to know: We are headed towards a world bereft of too many of these extraordinary fishes.” j Longtime contributor Jennifer S. Holland is writing a book about dog intelligence, due out in 2023. David Liittschwager has published seven books, including A World in One Cubic Foot. 84 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

The vibrant long- snouted seahorse can fade to a muddy green by contracting muscles attached to pigment-filled sacs under its skin. How bright is the future for these fanciful fish? That’s up to us. RAMALHETE MARINE STATION S E A H O R S E S 85

PLASTIC RUNS THROUGH IT BY LAURA PARKER P H OTO G R A P H S BY SARA HYLTON 86

The Ganges River is a sacred waterway in India. It’s also a major source of the manufactured waste that fouls the ocean. Two rivers, the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, converge in the western Himalaya to form the Ganges, at the Indian town of Devaprayag—Sanskrit for “holy confluence.” The amount of plastic waste flowing out of the Ganges is esti- mated at more than 6,000 tons a year.



A National Geographic expedition set out to document the extent of plastic pollution in the river—and its sources on land. Fisherman Babu Sahni, 30, and his son Himanshu Kumar Sahni, eight, approach a bank on the Punpun River, a Ganges tribu- tary. Throughout rural India, trash collection is rare, and ad hoc dump sites like this one are common. Most plastic waste in the ocean gets there by washing off the land.

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminat- ing and protecting the wonder of our world, funded Explorer Sara Hylton’s reporting along the Ganges River. ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRY

Kolkata’s Mullick I Ghat flower market is jammed before IN THE PAST DECADE, as the world has awakened the Durga Puja festival. to the growing accumulation of plastic debris In operation since the in our oceans, the efforts to solve the mounting 1850s near the Hooghly crisis have been numerous, imaginative—and River, a branch of the insufficient. By 2040, the amount of plastic flow- Ganges, the market ing annually into the sea is forecast nearly to now features plastic triple, to 32 million tons a year. That means by flowers as well as real the time a baby born this year graduates from ones. Both are some- high school, there will be, on average, a hundred times scattered on pounds of plastic trash for every yard of coast- the river as offerings. line around the globe. The message from scientists is, it’s not too late to fix it. But it’s past time for small steps. Most of the research about plastic waste has focused on plastic already in the oceans and its potential for harm—it poses a lethal threat to a wide range of wildlife, from plankton on up to fish, turtles, and whales. Less is known about how the waste gets to the ocean. But it’s clear that rivers, P L A S T I C R U N S T H R O U G H I T 91

Sita Ram Sahni (seated), 70, and his nephew Vinod Sahni, 50, pose in front of their home on the Ganges’s north bank in Bihar. The Sahni family has fished the river for more than 50 years. Their nets, once made of cotton, are now made of blue nylon, a kind of plastic. OPPOSITE Nylon nets are commonly used—and frequently replaced— on the Ganges, one of the world’s largest inland fisheries. When lost or discarded in the river, the nets can entangle turtles, otters, and endangered river dolphins. Over time, they break down into microplastics. especially rivers in Asia, are major arteries. know what it is,” said Jenna Jambeck, a Uni- In 2019 the National Geographic Society spon- versity of Georgia environmental engineering professor who was one of the leaders of the sored a research expedition to one of those rivers: expedition. It was her groundbreaking research the Ganges, which flows across northern India in 2015, including her calculation that an aver- and Bangladesh, through one of the largest and age of 8.8 million tons of plastic end up in the most heavily populated river basins in the world. oceans every year, that captured the world’s A team of 40 scientists, engineers, and support attention and helped transform marine plastics staff from India, Bangladesh, the United States, into a top environmental concern. Like most and the United Kingdom traveled the full length experts, Jambeck believes the solution lies not of the river twice, before and after the monsoon in cleaning up the oceans but in reducing and rains that dramatically swell it. Sampling the containing plastic waste on land, where most river and the land and air around it, and inter- of it originates. viewing more than 1,400 residents, the team sought to find out where, why, and what kind of On a balmy November afternoon, I met Jam- plastic was getting into the Ganges—and from beck in the ancient Indian city of Patna, which there into the Indian Ocean. sprawls along the south bank of the Ganges, some 500 miles inland from the mouth of the “The problem can’t be solved if you don’t 92 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

river in the Bay of Bengal. In a busy commercial said, you need to know what’s “leaking out of the district, Jambeck walked slowly along a row of system” and what’s not. shops and cafés, her eyes on the ground. She counted litter piece by piece, logging each one “Do you want to ban what ends up on the into a phone app that recorded its location. ground? Do you want a tax? Something else?” There were a lot of pieces to log: Patna, a rapidly she asked. “Or, if you’ve banned plastic bags, for growing city of more than two million, has had example, is your ban working?” municipal house-to-house trash pickup only since 2018, and the practice of dumping trash The top three plastic items Jambeck doc- in the streets has long been a problem. umented on Indian streets were filmy food wrappers, cigarette butts, and tobacco During the 98-day expedition, Jambeck and “sachets”—single-serving packets that are sold her team conducted 146 such litter transects, by the billions in Africa and Asia to deliver a wide each about the length of a city block, in 18 cities range of products. About 40 percent of the lit- and villages along the river. They recorded 89,691 tered items carried international brand names, individual littered pieces. They also cataloged including brands from companies headquartered the products sold in nearby shops—because to in the U.S. or the U.K. Getting the attention of design solutions to the waste problem, Jambeck such companies was one of Jambeck’s purposes in doing this research. P L A S T I C R U N S T H R O U G H I T 93

INDIA’S RIVER HARSIL OF PLASTIC Bhagirathi R. Devaprayag RISHIKESH Alaknanda Haridwar The holy Ganga, aka Ganges, is now heavily polluted, Chandpur a massive waterway carrying the detritus of millions Delhi of humans out to sea. In 2019 the National New Delhi Geographic Society sent a team to survey the G A Gang(Gaanges) Ganges River Basin specifically for plastics. RamgangaN The researchers studied dozens of sites ANUPSHAHR Garra on land and water in multiple locations, following the river’s 1,560-mile Jaipur Aligarh GANGES BASIN journey from Himalayan G Chauka glaciers to its delta on R. the Indian Ocean. Agra E Chambal S KANNAUJ SIA A Brahmaputra Populated and polluted Gwalior Lucknow Ganges Basin The Ganges has become one of the most populous Basin river basins on Earth, home Kanpur to more than 400 million people. Every year the Betwa Yam river carries an estimated INDIA 6,200 metric tons of plastic waste to the sea. INDIA una GA INDIAN OCEAN 0 mi 50 N G E S Prayagraj (Allahabad) 0 km 50 Tons Indore Bhopal Built-up area N Seasons of trash Plastic waste and other trash accumulate in and along the Ganges and its tributaries all year. But most of the waste is flushed into the river and out to the Bay of Bengal during the monsoon rains, which last from June to September. S ABuHrIhBi GGAanNdJak PATNA Farakka Barrage VARGAoNmAaStiI KRAamNgNaAnUgaJ ANUPSHAHR RAISlaHkInKaEnSdHa HARSIL Average flow in 1,000 Average flow 10,000 Ghaghara the Ganges watershed Gandak in cubic meters Peak (post-monsoon) flow Kosi per second Padma Bhagirathi Ganga (Ganges) Peak (post-monsoon) flow data unavailable below Farakka Barrage Tons Yamuna Son JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF; NAT CASE Punpun SOURCES: JENNA JAMBECK AND KATHRYN YOUNGBLOOD, Hooghly UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA; IMOGEN NAPPER, UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH; SHARAD K. JAIN AND OTHERS, HYDROLOGY AND WATER RESOURCES OF INDIA; SANA KHAN AND OTHERS, HYDROLOGICAL SCIENCES JOURNAL, 2018; LANDSCAN, 2018

Microplastic density In water and on land 14 at sampling sites Litter density Particles per liter Surveys were taken before and after the monsoon season, which 12 per 1,000 people Pre-monsoon Post-monsoon washes waterborne plastic toward in items per (May-June) (Oct.-Dec.) the sea. One team examined square meter microplastic density in the Ganges; 0.025 another studied locations on land. 10 0.075 Low population areas often had 0.125 more plastic waste per capita than 8 densely populated ones, mostly due to poor waste management 6 in rural areas. 4 2 I Areas with Between Less than H more than 2,000 and 2,000 10,000 people 10,000 M C H I NYa(BrlruanhgmaZpauntrgab)o A N E PA L L GANGES BASIN Monsoon flood A During the summer, winds from the Indian Ocean flow Rapti up the Himalaya and shed their moisture. The result: Faizabad monsoon rains that deluge the Ganges Basin. raGhaghaGPorakhpur Gandak Kathmandu A Arun Y Gomati L Thimphu B Sun AS B H U TA N A II N Kosi A Chhapra N si PATNA VARANASI Burhi Gan Ko Hooghly Son Punpun dak Bhagalpur Tis Brahmaputra GANGES BASIN Jamuna Ganga (Ganges) ta SAHIBGANJ Farakka Barrage Padma Damoda A tangled delta BANGLADESH The world’s largest river delta r RAJBARI is formed by the intertwining of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Dhaka Rivers in Bangladesh, where they empty their plastic-laden water GANGES CHANDPUR into the Bay of Bengal. The Farakka Howrah BHOLA Barrage, a gated dam completed Kolkata Khulna in the 1970s, diverts some of this Meghna R. water to the Hooghly River. RIVER DELTA Sagar I. Bay of Bengal

“We need those people who are 6,000 miles lethal counts of fecal bacteria, belief in the away to come to the table and be open to mythic purity of the Ganges endures—and it change,” she told me. complicates long-running efforts to clean up the river. Sudipta Sen, who grew up in Kolkata and Like climate change, plastic waste is a side teaches South Asian history at the University effect of our hydrocarbon habit—most plastics of California, Davis, spent 14 years writing his are made from oil and gas—and its impacts, as book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River. well as the solutions to the problem, are both He found the paradox of the modern river, so local and global. At least some of the litter I worshipped and yet so neglected, frustrating watched Jambeck record in Patna eventually to write about. would make its way into an open curb drain. From there a large pipe emptied it directly “The river is really two rivers,” Sen said. into the river, setting it on a course for the Bay “There is this belief that the river can clean of Bengal. itself and has magical properties. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to T HE GANGES RIVER IS worry about it? I have seen this. I have heard many people say the river cannot be polluted; one of the world’s it can go on forever.” largest, worshipped by a billion Hindus as The Ganges reinforces that story line during Mother Ganga, a living the summer monsoon, when it is said to be “in swell.” At Patna, where the river is joined by sev- goddess with power to eral large tributaries, widening considerably, the monsoon converts it into a raging torrent that cleanse the soul. The regularly floods Bihar, the mostly rural state of which Patna is the capital. headwaters emerge from the Gangotri Glacier Early one morning, with members of the high in the western Himalaya, just a few miles National Geographic expedition, I crossed from Patna to the Ganges’s north side and drove to from Tibet, and then drop down steep mountain a small village fringed with banana palms and populated by farmers and fishermen, who eke canyons to India’s fertile northern plain. There out a living catching carp. Frayed blue-nylon fishing nets lay in piles near a group of brick the river meanders east across the subcontinent houses and thatched-roof shanties. Abandoned fishing nets are a significant source of plastic into Bangladesh, broadening as it absorbs 10 pollution in the Ganges, one that endangers river dolphins, turtles, and otters. large tributaries. Just after it merges with the A large earthen berm stood between the river Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay and the homes, but during the recent monsoon season, it hadn’t been enough to protect them. of Bengal. It’s the world’s third largest fresh- Some of the locals had only recently returned after evacuating during the flood. Chip bags and water outlet to the ocean, after the Amazon and other litter were scattered about. Not a trash bin was in sight. the Congo. It supports more than a quarter of The fisherman I had come to see was asleep, India’s 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal, and part so I climbed over the berm, still covered with sandbags, and sat on the ghat—the steps down of Bangladesh. to the river—watching people go about their morning chores. Five women crouched on the So sacred is the river that its water, Ganga bottom step and washed clothes in the murky water. Several men arrived to bathe. Each jal, has been hauled home in jugs by con- emptied shampoo from a plastic sachet before discarding it in the river. When the men had quering armies and guidebook-toting tourists. finished, they offered water back to Ganga in cupped, uplifted hands. Seventeenth-century traders believed it stayed “fresher” on long sailing voyages than water drawn elsewhere. Sir Edmund Hillary, who con- quered Everest, was a fan. You can buy it today in blue bottles from Walmart. Sadly, the Ganges also has long been one of the world’s most polluted rivers, befouled by poison- ous effluents from hundreds of factories, some dating to the British colonial period. The facto- ries add arsenic, chromium, mercury, and other metals to the hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that still flow in daily. Plastic waste is only the most recent insult. Yet even in the face of it, and of sometimes 96 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

I N KOLKATA, I MET A FLOWER VENDOR Affordable named Goutam Mukherjee who plastic goods told me he gave up selling fresh made life flowers years ago. We were standing better in in the center of one of Asia’s largest India, but and most famous wholesale flower the pileup of markets, where his booth was sur- plastic waste rounded by stalls hawking garlands of fresh marigolds and other outpaced the fragrant blossoms. Mukherjee ticked off the reasons why his nation’s ability plastic flowers, which were imported from China, were better to contain it. than the real thing: They cost less, look real, and don’t wilt. The miracle of plastics arrived in India recently enough that there is no Hindi word for the stuff, and in some places take-out food still comes wrapped in banana leaves. The love affair really took off in the 1990s, as the rapid growth of the global plastics industry coincided with the liberalizing of India’s economy. If in the U.S. the golden age of plastics ushered in the throwaway culture of convenience, in India, affordable plastic consumer goods simply made life better—not only for the expanding middle class but also for those who live near the bottom rung. Plastic storage containers, bags, and food wrap helped keep food fresh longer. Barefoot children could get cheap shoes, and inexpensive synthetic fabrics allowed them more clothes. Tiny sachets provided people with access to products they couldn’t afford to buy in larger volumes. Yet even with the improving quality of life, the romance faded fast. Before the decade ended, India found itself swim- ming in plastic packaging waste that outpaced any ability to contain it. By the mid-1990s, newspaper accounts sounded the alarm. Plastic bags, handed out by the thousands in depart- ment stores in Mumbai, were “suffocating the city.” Delhi landfills were an impending “eco disaster.” The problem has since spread beyond cities to rural areas and even nature reserves, where numerous species, from leopards to foxes to birds, have been seen eating plastic. At the Rajaji National Park outside Rishikesh, a pilgrimage city in the Himalayan foothills made famous in the West by the Beatles, who spent several weeks there in 1968, elephants are eating plastics in dump sites around the edges of the park. “There are many places just outside the forest where vil- lagers throw trash out, and the wild animals go there to eat,” ranger Mohammad Yusuf told me, as we toured the park’s grassy meadows and stands of tall pines. “I have seen plastic in elephant poop many times in the last five years.” In nearly every nation struggling to contain plastic waste, the problem is primarily packaging, most of which is dis- carded immediately after use. Globally, it accounts for 36 percent of the nearly 500 million tons of plastic manufactured annually. India’s problem has less to do with per capita con- sumption than lack of adequate waste collection. In the United States, a person creates an average of 286 pounds of plastic waste a year—the highest rate in the world and more than six times India’s rate of 44 pounds per person. But the U.S. P L A S T I C R U N S T H R O U G H I T 97

‘The biggest waste management infrastructure is the river itself … That’s not an easy thing to fix.’ Heather Koldewey, National Geographic expedition co-leader Tannery workers hang hides to dry on wooden poles on the banks of a canal in Kolkata. The canal carries factory waste, plastic trash, and other pollutants toward the Ganges Delta and the Bay of Bengal.



People in the Ganges Basin use stairways such as the Chandi Ghat in Haridwar to reach the river for a dip in what they see as purifying waters. Hindu belief in the river’s cleansing powers draws millions of pilgrims to the river every year, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. OPPOSITE Swami Shivanand Saraswati, 75, bathes in the Ganges at his Matri Sadan ashram in Haridwar. He leads a long-running and ambitious campaign to protect the river from mining, new dams, and pollution. Plastic waste is just one of many pollutants to befoul it. has a more or less functioning system of trash One large municipal dump the team visited— collection and disposal. unofficial, but used by city trucks—was so close to the riverbank that the Ganges devoured a Trash collection in India’s cities is often portion of it during each monsoon. inefficient, and collection rates are low. The situation is more disheartening in rural areas, “As soon as you’d get to a town or anything where about two-thirds of Indians live. In the smaller, there was no waste management at state of Bihar, which has a population of 129 all…It was like they fell off a cliff,” Koldewey told million, roughly the size of Japan’s, plastic me on the river one morning, as she collected waste gets burned or dumped in ad hoc sites, water samples from an inflatable boat. “The fact where foraging cows and other animals inad- is, the biggest waste management infrastructure vertently consume it. Or it’s deposited on a is the river itself. People would put their waste sandbar for Ganga to carry away. along dry river channels in recognition that it would all be taken away. Heather Koldewey, a marine and freshwater scientist at the Zoological Society of London “That’s not an easy thing to fix. If you are and co-leader of the expedition, says she came replacing the river with a waste management to understand the river’s flushing power in a system that is equivalent, that becomes quite new light as she traveled the length of the river. significant in terms of cost.” 100 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

C OULD YOU INSTEAD ocean—or at least make a big dent in the prob- lem. That hope turns out to have been naive. A just collect waste more recent and comprehensive survey by some from the river itself? of the same scientists found that you’d actually In 2017, as global have to clean more than a thousand rivers to concern about ocean cut the amount flowing from rivers to the sea by 80 percent. plastics was cresting, Nevertheless, in Asia, Africa, and both Amer- two studies were pub- icas, river-cleansing operations are under way, and they’re doing some good. The grandfather lished that came to a surprising conclusion: A of the effort is Mr. Trash Wheel, a googly-eyed trash-eating barge that has been collecting rub- small number of rivers—one study identified bish in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor since 2014. But the most ambitious river cleaner is Boyan Slat, 10, the other 20—were responsible for the over- the 27-year-old founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit in the Netherlands. whelming bulk of what rivers put into the ocean. Slat came to fame as a teenager, when he Most of the rivers on the two lists were in Asia. The Ganges figured prominently on both. The image of waste-choked rivers was shock- ing, but the studies’ conclusions suggested a silver lining: By cleaning up just a few rivers, one might stanch the flow of plastic into the P L A S T I C R U N S T H R O U G H I T 101



The Ganges is worshipped by Hindus as a goddess with the power to cleanse souls— and itself. That complicates efforts to clean up the river. Celebrants transport a likeness of the god- dess Durga through the streets of Howrah, near Kolkata, during the Durga Puja festi- val. It ends with the immersion of the idols in the local river—the Hooghly in this case. Hindu rituals often involve offerings to the Ganges or its branches. Plastic is banned now in many temples.

A dump in Patna illustrates a pervasive problem in the Ganges Basin: Lack of adequate trash collection has resulted in plastic being strewn in areas where the monsoon rains wash it and other waste into the river. OPPOSITE A woman in Rishikesh sorts plastic waste by hand, paying particular attention to the most valuable kind: bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which can readily be recycled to make clothing, for example. Thanks to waste pickers, India has a far higher plastic recycling rate than the United States. But much plastic trash has no value. announced a grand plan to sweep up the Great rivers. It was his organization that funded the Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of loose new study showing how many rivers were sig- marine debris, much of it plastic, that swirls nificant sources of plastic pollution. In 2019, he around the North Pacific. He raised $30 mil- unveiled a solar-powered barge similar in design lion and launched his contraption: a floating, to Mr. Trash Wheel and announced plans to 2,000-foot-long, U-shaped boom that skims clean the thousand worst rivers within five years. waste from surface waters. Several marine sci- The pandemic delayed work; so far, Slat’s “Inter- entists told him it was a terrible idea—that he ceptors” are operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, would have to operate his device indefinitely, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. Together at unsustainable costs, as long as plastic flows with the Pacific device, they have collected more into the Pacific, and that it would be virtually than 2.4 million pounds of trash. impossible to remove microplastics because they are so tiny and spread throughout the water Though Slat has taken on the Pacific, even he column. But Slat persisted, and his device is still thinks trying to skim plastic from large conti- out there, mostly gathering abandoned fishing nental rivers, including the Ganges, would be nets. Even critics praise it for that. the wrong approach. Meanwhile, Slat has turned his attention to “It’s too wide, and the trash is diffuse,” he said. The better strategy would be to attack smaller 104 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C

tributaries, to “go to the cities in the delta (Dhaka hand in hand with policy changes and behavior and Kolkata) and deploy in the small streams changes as well.” of these cities.” W ASTE COLLECTION IN After I returned from India, I visited John Kellett, the inventor of Mr. Trash Wheel, at his India would be even marina in an inlet south of Baltimore. He was more dysfunctional finishing work on his fourth trash wheel, which if it weren’t for the later was deployed on a stream near the down- “informal sector”: the town football stadium of the Baltimore Ravens. The four have collected 3.5 million pounds of army of independent trash and dramatically transformed the har- bor’s appearance. But Kellett was skeptical of operators who collect a global effort. plastic waste from households to sell for recy- “It’s good that the interest in it is strong, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle,” he said. “I don’t cling, and the waste pickers, who scavenge at think we’re ever going to clean up the oceans by tackling one river at a time. It needs to go dumps or on the streets. These workers, estimated at nearly 1.5 million, are one reason you don’t see many plastic bottles P L A S T I C R U N S T H R O U G H I T 105

In Asia, Africa, and both Americas, river-cleansing operations are under way. But the Ganges is too wide, and the trash in it too diffuse. In Patna, a boatman surveys the Ganges near a recently con- structed expressway. The country’s rapid development has fueled demand for plastics, and its plastics industry is now one of the world’s largest.



on Indian streets—bottles are the highest value elsewhere, Ballani’s group favors recycling and recyclables. Plastic waste makes up roughly half opposes bans, arguing that they cost jobs and that of waste pickers’ earnings, and bottles made of the problem is not single-use plastics themselves polyethylene terephthalate (PET) account for but the way people dispose of them. about half of the plastics collected, Bharati Chaturvedi, director of Chintan, a nonprofit that Since 2016 the Indian government has been supports waste pickers, told me. working on new regulations that would require producers of plastic packaging to take respon- The informal sector is largely responsible for sibility for the cost of collecting and recycling India’s high recycling rate, estimated at 60 per- their disposable products. Similar regulations, cent. (In contrast, the U.S. recycles less than 30 known as extended producer responsibility, or percent of its trash overall and just 9 percent of EPR, have helped curb plastic waste in the Euro- plastic.) But there’s no money in nonrecyclables, pean Union since the mid-1990s. In the U.S., the and so bags, food wrappers, sachets, and so on plastics industry has opposed national legisla- don’t get picked up. Instead they litter Indian tion. Only Maine and Oregon have passed laws streets and wash into the Ganges. requiring EPR for plastic packaging. Last October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Meanwhile, the amount of plastic waste flowing launched phase two of his “Clean India” cam- into the ocean keeps increasing. The forecast that paign. In the first phase, the country had installed it will almost triple by 2040 under a business-as- nearly 90 million toilets in a bid to end open defe- usual scenario comes from a report drafted by cation, which remains common in India. One goal Pew Charitable Trusts and Systemiq, a London- of the second phase is to make cities garbage free. based environmental and investment company. Modi’s government is building waste-to-energy All the localized bag bans, bottle bills, and recy- plants—that is, incinerators that generate electric- cling commitments you hear about would at best ity. It also has announced a wide-ranging national shave a few percent off business as usual, the ban on the manufacture and use of single-use report concludes; solving the plastic waste prob- plastics. Scheduled to take effect in July, the ban lem will require all of the above. But it also will will cover thin shopping bags, foam containers, require governments to fundamentally realign cutlery, cups, plates, straws, candy and ice-cream the plastics industry’s economic incentives. In sticks, certain films, and other disposable plastics. particular, if we don’t want plastic waste in the ocean to double or triple, we have to keep plas- In India, however, the gap between ambitious tic production from doubling on land—which is national legislation and its enforcement at the what the industry is projected to do if it’s allowed local and state levels is sometimes large. Existing to do business as usual. federal waste regulations are “absolutely marvel- ous, everything you could ever want,” said Robin Pew and Systemiq are hardly the only voices Jeffrey, co-author with Assa Doron of Waste of prescribing such an approach. In December a Nation, a study of India’s garbage. “Except 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engi- nobody in the country could come within a neering, and Medicine recommended the U.S. bull’s roar of achieving them.” India has been develop a national strategy to reduce plastic trying for more than 35 years to limit discharges waste, one that could include a cap on virgin of sewage and factory waste into the Ganges—so plastic production. Such a cap would help far with little success. address the climate crisis as well; the plastics industry accounts for about 6 percent of global The pandemic slowed government action on oil consumption. The two crises are linked. projects to clean India. It also led to a surge in And the suggestion that the solution to both plastic waste here, as it did globally, as people requires leaving oil in the ground, which once in lockdown ordered more take-out food and was considered radical, has become part of the home deliveries. mainstream conversation. “Post-pandemic, civil society has a better In India too, the calls for action have become appreciation for plastic and its role in saving more urgent and widespread. Brajesh Kumar humankind,” said Deepak Ballani, director gen- Dubey, an environmental engineering professor at eral of the All India Plastics Manufacturers’ Asso- the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, told ciation. “At the same time, the awareness about me he was surprised, as he traveled the Ganges environmental impact resulting from littering has Basin on the National Geographic expedition, to increased severalfold.” Like the plastics industry 108 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C