Fewer foreign visitors and political chaos has led some Egyptians to turn to hunting Nile crocodiles as a source of revenue.
By Peter Schwartzstein, National Geographic, 6/23/17
LAKE
NASSER, EGYPT—If they’re small, you use the bulk of the boat to hustle
them into the shallows, then snag them by hand, Mahmoud tells me. He
should know, having spent the past decade poaching the scaly beasts
around the southern city of Aswan.
If
they’re medium-size, perhaps the length of a kayak, he says (he won’t
tell me his family name because of the illegal nature of his work), you
noose them with barbed wire traps. And if they’re monsters—up to 18 feet
of whiplashing tail, bristling teeth, and relentless aggression—you
dazzle them with a spotlight, entangle them in fishing nets, and subdue
them with a shot to their exposed underbelly.
“There’s not a crocodile I can’t catch, or a hunting ground I don’t know,” Mahmoud bragged. “I’ve made my life doing this.”
Mahmoud hunts the Nile crocodile, the world’s second largest reptile. Found across much of sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in large lakes and rivers, it’s renowned for its ferocious behavior.
The
Nile crocodile’s fortunes have veered from one extreme to the other
over the millennia. From an object of veneration in some ancient Egyptian
temples—and even the namesake of an entire city, Crocodilopolis—the
species was extinct along the lower Nile by the 1950s as people
encroached on its habitat.
The Aswan High Dam, finalized in 1970,
created Lake Nasser, and with it a 250-mile-long croc-friendly mecca in
Nubia, Egypt’s sparsely populated south. The species began recovering.
Now,
thanks to a dwindling tourism industry and an unstable political
system, the pendulum has swung back the other way as people look to make
a profit off illegal sales of the reptile.
High
prices for crocodile skin, meat, and penises—used as an aphrodisiac
across East Africa— have attracted some professional hunters, even as
larger numbers of impoverished local people try to muscle in on the
trade.
According
to Mahmoud, smugglers are exporting record numbers of
crocodiles—perhaps up to 3,500 eggs and hatchlings and a few hundred
adult live crocs a year—abroad mostly via Egyptian ports, mainly to the
Arabian Gulf.
The
Egyptian government’s last large-scale survey of lake crocodiles, in
2008 and 2009, estimated the population at anywhere between 6,000 and
30,000. Its historic numbers are unknown.
Even
with limited resources, Egyptian environmental officials have seen the
species’ numbers decline precipitously in their 60-mile study area of
Lake Nasser’s shorelines.
“The
population was down by half between [2008 to 2009] and 2012, and then
from [2015 to 2016], it was down again,” says Amr Hady, a researcher in
the Crocodile Management Unit of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, which was established to watch over the lake’s largest residents.
“The
habitat is the same, the pollution is the same. It’s because of the
hunting,” Hady said in his Aswan office, where a small mountain of
confiscated crocodile carcasses—all seized from the city’s airport and
ferry port since 2013—gather dust in the corner.
If
Nile crocodiles disappeared from Lake Nasser, the environment would
suffer. Vociferous consumers of dead fish, insects, rodents, and
invasive marine species, the reptiles occupy a key role in Lake Nasser’s
ecosystem.
Moreover,
part of the country’s heritage would disappear with it. The beasts were
once so synonymous with Egypt that crocodiles often served as its
symbol during the Roman era, says Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo.
This
means that some trade in the species is permissible once a quota is
agreed, but many hunters have interpreted this as legalizing their
activities, Hady says.
“People
always do what they must to survive—they make money where they can,”
says Abdelhalim Tolba, whose family is heavily involved in the illicit
and legal wildlife trade in Egypt. He estimates that his relatives
illegally take at least 500 crocodiles from Lake Nasser every year.
“Right now, the crocodile is very much in demand.”
Political
instability and the specter of terrorism have tanked the tourism
industry, hurting local economies that have long depended on foreign
dollars. Hotel occupancy in Aswan fell by more than 70 percent between
2010 and 2015, says hotelier Hussein Mohammed, proprietor of the Suheil
House.
Guesthouse owners and tour guides have been struggling.
Many
appear to have resorted to hunting crocodiles to make ends meet, for
example by offering illegal hunting trips on the lake, promising skins
as souvenirs. “You have to understand, they’re desperate,” Mahmoud says.
Meanwhile,
villagers on the Nile’s west bank have been illegally raising
crocodiles as tourist attractions. In some upscale lodges and hotels,
staff occasionally offer guests hatchlings as gifts.
In
the past, local security services cracked down on illegal wildlife
trafficking, even conducting shop-to-shop searches in Aswan’s downtown
bazaar. But since the 2011 revolution, there’s been none of that.
The
governor’s office, responsible for local administration, is loath to
pick a fight over animals at a time of hardship, and the security
services are preoccupied with other types of smuggling—drugs and
weapons, for instance—and with foiling political dissent. (Read about unusual wildlife smuggling busts.)
“The
police are not a big obstacle because they know that this is just good
people making their living,” says Assad Tolba, Abdelhalim’s brother.
Because
there are increasingly fewer and smaller fish in Lake Nasser, some
fishermen reason crocodiles are to blame, and kill them out of revenge.
“They’re
enormous, so obviously they have huge appetites,” says Abdullah Salem
Abdelaziz, a fisherman who plies the lake’s northwestern reaches with
his two young sons.
But
that supposition, according to biologists, is misguided. The crocodiles
actually have relatively small stomachs, and they mostly eat species
unappealing to fishermen, such as catfish, says Sherif Baha El-Din,
co-founder of Nature Conservation Egypt, a local nonprofit.
Some
fishermen have also gone into the trafficking business, looking to
supplement their meager earnings by selling a croc or two on the black
market.
“You
have fisherman who catch these things, and they just want to make an
extra buck, so they put these things on the market,” says El-Din.
As with the police in Aswan, marine authorities appear to be turning a blind eye, according to Abdelaziz.
“In
the past they supervised everything,” he says. “They actually weighed
your catch and checked to make sure you hadn’t caught small fish. But
what happens now is that you can take anything—small fish, all the fish
in the lake, crocodiles, and no one will notice.”
Some
smugglers ferry live crocs across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia to be
sold as household ornaments. According to Mahmoud, crocs have allegedly
been hidden in shipments of frozen vegetable shipments out of the port
of Safaga.
“The Saudis alone could take 10,000 a year if they were available,” Abdelhalim Tolba says.
Other
smugglers send crocodile meat abroad, especially to Southeast Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa. (Many Muslims won’t consume carnivorous animals due
to their religious beliefs.)
Crocodile
skins are big business. After skinning an animal, hunters soak it in
saltwater, then leave it to dry in the dark, before selling it on to
leather dealers, usually in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.
“It’s
a real art—it’s ruined if it sees any sunlight,” says Assad Ibrahim, a
former hunter who now works as a tailor just off Aswan’s riverside
boardwalk. (See pictures of the life-giving Nile.)
He
once sold large skins for around $400 a pop, most of which ended up in
China, he says. By the time they’ve been treated, and molded into
clothing accessories, they can sell for up to $2,500 a wallet.
Then
there’s the appetite for crocodile genitalia. According to Ibrahim,
some Egyptians—and people in East Africa—eat the animal’s penis (the
largest ones sell for more than $100) crushed up with honey and ginger,
believing it will improve their sex lives.
The
fate of Egypt’s Nile crocodiles depends on how authorities in Cairo
respond. The Crocodile Management Unit is severely underfunded, with
only two researchers on staff.
The
small team has no access to aerial surveillance, which is necessary to
properly survey Lake Nasser’s jagged 3,700-mile shoreline. “It’s a big
issue, you often feel like you’re working alone,” Hady says.
Coordination
among the dozen or so ministries and agencies responsible for managing
the lake and its wildlife is poor, according to an agricultural
official, who spoke off the record for fear of publicly criticizing the
government. He says that enforcement of wildlife protection laws is so
lax that some of those involved in the trafficking business genuinely
appear to believe what they’re doing is legal—in particular due to the
change in the species’ CITES designation.
And
no one has yet come up with a plausible plan for what the hunters and
smugglers could do instead. Jobs are scarce in rural areas, and so
there’s little incentive for them to change their ways.
“Maybe
30,000 or 40,000 depend on [reptile dealing] as our main source of
bread,” Abdelhalim Tolba says, and with large crocodiles selling for up
to $1,200 each, it will be difficult if not impossible to staunch the
illicit trade.
There
are some signs of progress. In 2016, the Egyptian Ministry of
Environment announced its intention to start raising crocodiles—in
partnership with the army—on a farm a few miles from Lake Nasser.
They’ll take eggs from the lake, incubate them, and then harvest a
certain number of crocodiles every year for legal sale in skins.
With
the lake’s crocodile population acting “as an open bank,” Hady says,
both the authorities and local villagers, some of whom will be hired to
work on the farm, will, in theory at least have a stake in protecting
the wild population.
Egypt’s Nile crocodiles have come back before, and there’s reason to hope they can do it again.
Posts
