Current Challenges on the Orinoco.

Private and government institutions in Venezuela are raising awareness of the precious biodiversity of this mighty river and its role in the nation's future.

Arturo Uslar Pietri once described the Orinoco "as a magical phenomenon, like lung and heart, pumping and racing" across a long-ago seabed, the great river axis of Venezuela into which all the waters of the country flow. Explored and traveled over the course of centuries with a combination of fascination and greed, from mouth to source, the river today has assumed gigantic proportions in the public consciousness.

A new stunning exhibition at Caracas's Museo de Ciencias has brought together, in a stream flowing like the river itself, over thirty French and Venezuelan institutions to consider the subject of the Orinoco. An unprecedented multidisciplinary display, The Orinoco Kingdom is a historical, cartographic, and artistic testimony by those who have tilled the Orinoco's basin, been inspired by its beauty, or settled its banks.

"How can we persuade Venezuelans to gaze into the mirror of the Orinoco that reflects their history and their future?" asks museum director Sergio Antillano. "The museum can help by interpreting a comprehension of that reality."

"The Orinoco basin is the setting that defines the country's future," he continues, "not only because it contains oil fields, twenty-three ethnic groups (90 percent of the total population), the largest concentration of biodiversity, and the only two biosphere reserves in Venezuela, or the major electric power source in the territory (Guri Dam), but because it is the source of our roots."

"One goal of this exhibition--in which 192 researchers participated--is the protection of those ties," Antillano explains. "It is hoped that appreciation will serve as the springboard to action."

What are the dangers to this great river, the ninth largest in the world, whose hydrographic basin covers over 45 percent of Venezuela? They are familiar: deforestation, contamination, overexploitation of systems, expansion of the farm frontier, spreading urbanization, illegal mining, and poaching.

But, in the Orinoco, the solutions are likely to be as diverse as the panorama of life itself. For example, across Venezuela's central plains, landowners of private hatos, or farms, like Hato Pinero, El Frio, and El Cedral, have set up refuges for a variety of jungle wildlife. In a new reforestation project initiated last summer in the middle river town of Mapire, secondary-school students and teachers began planting the seeds of overharvested congrio (Acosmium nitens), a leguminous tree. Sponsored by the foundation PROVITA, the effort is focusing on groves and wetland forests that have typically been a popular source of house construction for local residents. In Puerto Ayacucho, FUDECI (Foundation for the Development of Physical, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences) is promoting small-scale sustainable farming techniques for crops and livestock. The group also compiles a database for the preservation of Indian knowledge concerning seeds, Piaroa medicinal herbs, and Yanomami curative prayers. An intensive reclamation effort is ongoing within the Upper Orinoco-Casiquiare Biosphere Reserve, home to Venezuela's entire Yanomami population and some fifteen hundred Ye'kuana, where past illegal mining endangered these indigenous people and degraded their environment. Established in 1991, the reserve covers 32,375 square miles. It is the largest such area in the world; within its borders is the source of the Orinoco.

Inspired to take our own river journey, we set out at the Orinoco's mouth, near the Gulf of Paria. Skirting Turuepano National Park, our penero sails past a water garden of palm trees and philodendrons with enormous roots and dappling light in the dense shade, where families of howling monkeys stroll. The deep jungle surrounding the river's mouth is vividly reflected in the dark, brilliant water thick with small floating weeds. Narrow channels are filled with the sounds of a crowd of whistling sun bitterns and ducks and of hoatzins, a partridge-like bird, sheltered in overhanging branches, while darting spectacled caymans and shad splash ahead of the penero.

The lives of the explorers of this river read like legend. More than two centuries before Humboldt, a Basque named Lope de Aguirre was the first to navigate the Orinoco downstream and emerge in the Atlantic across from Trinidad. Like so many before and after him, he was seeking El Dorado, one of the most powerful myths on the continent, when he ventured down the river after having killed as many of his army mates as he could and proclaimed himself king of the Amazon. Despite the nineteenth-century journeys of Alfred Russell Wallace, Richard Spruce, Henry Alexander Wickham, Jules Crevaux, Jean Chaffanjon, Enrique Stanko Vraz, Theodor Koch-Grunberg, and others, it was not until 1951 that a Franco-Venezuelan expedition, organized by the Museo de Ciencias, solved the mystery of the river's source, in the Delgado Chalbaud Hills, in the Parima Sierra.

Perhaps the best known symbol of wildlife conservation in Venezuela is the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus). Native to the Orinoco delta region, this gentle creature has become vulnerable to increased human traffic on the river. It is said that Columbus confused them with mermaids (although "not as beautiful," he wrote), but much of the life cycle of manatees remains mysterious, even given to its own legends.

In 1994 Wilfried Merle, of the Fundacion Proyecto Paria, rescued a months-old manatee from fishermen's nets. The story of this manatee, named Eva, became known countrywide when it was published as a children's book, by Antonieta Marturet, with illustrations by her daughter. Relating how Eva was fed, first with milk from a buffalo at Merle's Hato Rio de Agua, and then from a bottle until she was large enough to be returned to the channels of the Orinoco, the book became a potent environmental education tool.

The manatee had great significance in the mythological history and daffy life of the Warao, a tribe inhabiting the delta wetlands. According to Martin Correa-Viana and Thomas O'Shea, in El manati en la tradicion y folklore de Venezuela [The Manatee in Venezuelan Tradition and Folklore]: "Their extinction would mean not only the disappearance of a unique ecological component of Venezuelan mastofauna but the loss of an animal of inestimable aesthetic-cultural value to the tradition, folklore, history, and identity of Venezuelans."

We arrive at the Refugio Santa Maria del Orinoco, at the fork of the Apure and Orinoco rivers, to speak with scientists from PROFAUNA, part of the government's Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, and FUDECI, about their current work with two species endemic to the region, the Orinoco crocodile (Crocodylus intermedius) and the arrau river turtle (Podocnemis expansa). "There are hundreds of saurians buried in the savanna mud," Alexander von Humboldt wrote in 1800, but today the Orinoco crocodile is one of the region's most endangered species. Unfortunately, it is said that the crocodile's peculiar smell alerts hunters to its presence. "Present-day cayman hunting is driven by fear and by traditional labeling of the animal as a threat to human life and livestock," says Xabier Elguezabal, PROFAUNA's director of protected natural areas. One of the organization's objectives is to guarantee successful hatching, which they are attempting to do through the use of zoocriaderos, or nurseries. "Otherwise," says Magaly Ojeda, the group's director of wildlife, "although the brood nests are built high up, the survival rate is very low."

Nearby, at Isla de Las Tortugas, we find some of the island's namesakes basking on beaches where their like have been resident for millennia. The arrau river turtle, a side-neck species, is the largest turtle in the Americas, typically measuring some two feet in length and weighing seventy pounds, though females of three feet and two hundred pounds have been recorded. Compared to the one million that Humboldt estimated laid their eggs on the beaches and islands of the middle Orinoco, about eight hundred lay eggs on those same beaches today. The disturbing drop is caused not by natural predators but by man's zealous hunt for turtle meat and eggs. "An adult turtle this year was priced at $150.... Fishermen capture them to sell in Puerto Ayacucho, the largest market," says Omar Hernandez, project coordinator for FUDECI. The critical situation of these aquatic chelonians prevents the species from recovering unaided. "FUDECI installed a nursery in Puerto Ayacucho in 1994," adds Hernandez, "with the expectation of releasing twenty thousand marked baby turtles each year on the same beaches where they were born." The turtles are protected while laying, and the young are rescued immediately after birth, at the end of May, when the Orinoco rises, flooding the beaches and submerging their nests. Scientists say it is still too early to evaluate the program's success. Other groups in the area also act as nurseries to support the arrau river turtle, as well as the box turtle, the Orinoco crocodile, spectacled cayman, and the anaconda.

The mysterious jungle of the Orinoco is a Noah's ark, an impenetrable labyrinth of vegetation, and its savannas reach to infinity under a burning sun. Here, stretching across the vast north-central plains, is one of the largest cattle ranches in Venezuela, Hato Pinero. Long at the forefront of combining wild animal conservation with ranch production, in the last few years the hato has expanded its mission to include jaguars and pumas. With a mixture of habitats--extensive forest, savanna, and pasture--Hato Pinero is ideally suited to monitor these large felines. Led by an experienced team from the University of Florida, this effort seeks to provide models of balance between the needs of humans and those of wildlife. Since cattle production occurs throughout the forests and savannas of the American tropics, researchers believe there are international implications for their work. As the felines are captured, collared, released, and monitored, scientists hope to learn more about their behavior and predation habits.

There are multiple Orinocos, and on this small journey we have experienced only a few. Alejandro Reig, of the Museo de Ciencias, poetically summed up this river's many personalities: "The river is water, people, environment, flora and fauna, controversy, it is development and scientific history, it is suffering and leisure, it is politics, ethics and aesthetics, and it is, in the end, a euphoric celebration of the life that the natural world offers, in its indifference, to our eyes."

Parisina Malatesta and Jorge Provenza are a writer and photographer team based in Caracas, Venezuela. They are regular contributors to Americas.

Article Details

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Title Annotation:	Museo de Ciecias, Caracas, Venezuela
Author:	Malatesta, Parisina
Publication:	Americas (English Edition)
Article Type:	Brief Article
Date:	Dec 1, 1998
Words:	1709
Previous Article:	A Collection of Puerto Rican Life.
Next Article:	AN ADVENTURE OF HISTORIC MEASURES.
Topics:	Rivers Exhibitions

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