1988: My Time in Nicaragua

Guest post

Managua, 1988.

We didn’t quite know what to expect. We flew in on the now defunct Aero Nica, known to Nicaraguans as Aero Nunca. Many NGOs had started development projects to help the people in one of the poorest countries in the world. The overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship by the Sandinistas in 1979 had created a world of possibilities and opportunities. NGO workers and volunteers were warmly welcomed and they poured in from all over the world.

Projects included housing, education, infrastructure, health care, agricultural development etc. Many were successful but some were over-ambitious or under-funded. Conditions were bearable in the larger cities but rough in the rural areas, which by this time were under constant threat of attack by the Contra rebels, funded illegally by the USA through the sale of arms to Iran. Added to that, the US trade blockade meant severe shortages of vehicles, medical supplies, machinery and just about everything else.

My future wife and I headed to Nueva Guinea, a small town near the Costa Rica border whose population was swollen by thousands of refugees from Contra attacks on their farms in the surrounding countryside. There was a small clinic but no parts for the sole incubator due to the trade blockade, and only basic medications. A severe lack of housing, no paved roads, no trash collection, unsafe water. The 6-room hotel at $1 per night was vastly overpriced! But amidst the impoverished conditions many improvements flourished. A group from Spain were building houses. A group from Germany set up a mechanic shop to repair old vehicles. A group from Wales were setting up a trash collection. American volunteers had begun sustainable farming practices at a finca (property) outside the town. Medics from Cuba and Canada tended to the sick.

It was a similar story throughout the country. But in 1989 the Sandinistas lost the election and a new government favored by the USA took control. It became more difficult for NGOs to work in Nicaragua and many of the volunteers found themselves at ideological odds with the new regime. Government departments were abolished, local mayors and officials replaced and many volunteers abandoned the county.

Nicaragua remains one of the poorest countries on earth, but there are still opportunities to help. After moving from the UK and living in Japan, I eventually moved to California and discovered that only 30 minutes from my home is a small NGO called Paso Pacífico, working since 2005 on conservation and education projects in Nicaragua and El Salvador. I jumped back in and now volunteer for them.

Nicaragua is an area which gets under your skin. The warmth of the people. The beauty of the countryside, the fragility of the eco-systems.

And if you were wondering where all those idealistic young volunteers went, well, they got older—but I’m sure they are still around and waiting for a chance to help!

By Jason G. Goldman

Humpback whales can be found throughout the world’s oceans, from the iciest waters of Antarctica, to the balmy seas surrounding Hawaii, and everywhere in between. While the males are best known for their soulful songs that can be heard perhaps hundreds of miles away, the concert singers of the sea are also responsible for some of the longest migrations in the world.

The whales gorge on krill and small fish in the frigid poles throughout the summer. Then, following a migration of up to 25,000 kilometers (nearly 16,000 miles), they spend the winters in the tropics where they breed and give birth.

During those migrations, humpback whales seem to prefer hugging the coastline in fairly shallow waters. This probably helps older whales to protect the babies from predators like killer whales, though it undoubtedly made it easier for whalers in the last several centuries to kill some 90 percent of the world’s humpback population. Now that whales are generally well protected from anthropogenic slaughter, they have become more easily spotted when they gather in tropical regions each winter.

Central America’s Pacific coastline offers the perfect setting for whales (and people) to spend their winters since the waters are warm and the risk of predation is low.

A California Connection

Those whales that spend their summers near California, Oregon, and Washington have often been spotted wintering off the coast of Central America, some 6000 kilometers to the south. These whales form a unit known as the “Central American Distinct Population Segment,” and number around six hundred. It’s a fairly small, understudied population of whales that, while still recovering from centuries of persecution at the hands of whalers, continues to face a moderate risk of predation.

But these whales – especially those that winter in Nicaraguan waters – have a secret. Most whales focus their energy during the winter on breeding and giving birth. They can avoid spending time hunting for food because they spent the long summer building up fat reserves that can fuel them through the winter. But a team of researchers recently observed humpback whales feeding there. They say it’s the first formal scientific documentation of the behavior, in this area, by this population.

In addition to humpback whales, the biologists recorded frigatebirds, pelicans, and several types of dolphins feeding alongside them. The aggregation of so many predators in a relatively small area suggests that there is also quite a lot of prey available for them, likely due to a coastal upwelling that occasionally occurs off the coast of Nicaragua, where nutrient rich waters from the ocean depths rise to the surface.

Because the humpbacks here and around the world are still recovering from centuries of persecution, it’s impossible to know what this new finding represents. It isn’t clear whether this is a new phenomenon or whether the population simply needed to recover to a certain size before anybody would notice.

If it is truly a new feeding ground, then it could be that climate change has driven a shift in the geographic availability of food for humpback whales, and they are simply following the fish; or it could be that increasing humpback whale populations, facing a shortage of food in traditional hunting areas, have been forced to alter their survival strategies by foraging in new places and at a different times of the year.

Clearly, more information is needed to understand the origin of these unusual feeding behaviors. Whatever the reason, Nicaragua is in a unique position to protect the whales’ and their habitat, which may require a different set of management strategies than other, nearby countries. It is likely that much of the protection for whales in this region will come directly from the voluntary efforts of small-scale fishermen and women, working in collaboration with Paso Pacífico.

A Visitor from the South

Meanwhile, most of the Southern Hemisphere humpbacks that spend their summers foraging in the frigid waters of the Antarctic Peninsula overwinter in Costa Rica and Panama.

But new research suggests that they may be starting to pop up further north, in Nicaraguan seas. Between 2015 and 2018, a team of researchers photographed humpback whales nearly one hundred times off the coast of San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. One of the whales was matched to a photo taken 257 days earlier in Antarctica, a distance of some 10,000 kilometers. It’s the northernmost record of a Southern Hemisphere humpback whale ever spotted overwintering in Central America.

Nobody knows whether the two populations of whales, both of which take advantage of Central American coastal habitats, ever meet up to trade genetic or cultural information. So far, it would seem unlikely. That’s because the North American whales overwinter between January and April, during the boreal winter. The Antarctic whales don’t cruise north until it becomes winter in the Southern Hemisphere, between July and October.

Because the tropics are generally pleasant all year long, this habitat can host both groups of animals during each of their respective winters.

Header: A humpback whale seen in Los Cóbanos, El Salvador. Taken by Daniel Boyano S. Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

By Jason G. Goldman

When Lila Higgins first had the idea to pit Los Angeles against San Francisco in a race to see which city could generate the most biodiversity data in just eight days, she had no idea it would spawn a global movement.

The year was 2016, and the Obama White House had declared April 16 of that year as “Citizen Science Day.” Higgins, the Senior Director of Community Science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and Allison Young, her counterpart at the California Academy of Sciences, wanted to find a way to celebrate. With the support of their respective museums, they worked together to engage residents and visitors in both cities to document urban biodiversity. That year, more than 1000 people recorded more than 20,000 observations of urban wildlife, cataloging some 3200 species altogether. (And Los Angeles won!)

In 2017, the competition became national and was officially called the “City Nature Challenge.” In 2018, it went global, with participation from sixty-eight cities. But it wasn’t until 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, that participation happened in Nicaragua.

That year, the challenge was framed more as collaboration than competition. “We had to do something that would keep people safe but also acknowledge the power of nature for healing; we all needed healing,” Higgins recalls. In all, the challenge generated more than 815,000 observations from more people than ever: over 41,000. In Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, 42 people contributed 901 observations of 430 species.

The numbers for the 2021 haven’t been tallied yet, but Higgins says that four cities from Nicaragua participated this year. Paso Pacífico wildlife biologist Osmar Sandino helped organize the challenge in the small Pacific beach town of Ostional, south of San Juan del Sur. This town is famous for the arribada, the annual mass arrival of olive ridley sea turtles to reproduce and lay their eggs – but there’s a lot more biodiversity in this small town than just sea turtles.

A mantled howler monkey mother and baby, seen on the day of the City Nature Challenge. Photo by Oswaldo Saballos.

In all, participants in the Ostional area, including children from Paso Pacífico’s Junior Rangers program, recorded 141 species there. They included howler monkeys, Inca doves, Central American boa constrictors, striped hog-nosed skunks, northern jacanas, cattle egrets, ferruginous pygmy-owls, giant toads, laughing gulls, golden silk spiders, spiny-tailed iguanas, and, of course, olive ridley sea turtles.

Each observation consists of a photo taken with a smartphone and uploaded to an app called iNaturalist. Because the photos are taken with phones, they automatically come with a timestamp and a geolocation, with latitude and longitude. Data about the person taking the photos can be made private. Once the species identification is confirmed, the data becomes available to researchers of wildlife biology, ecology, or natural history. Taken together, the millions of observations uploaded each year for the City Nature Challenge probably represents one of the largest biodiversity datasets in the history of science. Even without access to the plants and animals themselves, researchers have a historical record of when and where different species occur on the planet. That allows scientists to investigate a huge variety of questions, including tracking the introduction of non-native species into new ecosystems or the movement of species in response to climate change or other anthropogenic impacts.

And because most animals and plants are found on private property, rather than public lands, these records become even more useful to researchers, who would in most cases be completely prevented from making those observations themselves.

That’s the real power of citizen science, also known as community science. Not only does it involve non-experts in the scientific process, it also generates a wealth of information that scientists themselves could never produce on their own.

Paso Pacífico biologists Osmar Sandino, Marlon Sotelo and Oswaldo Saballos were among the Paso Pacífico personnel that participated in the 2021 City Nature Challenge. Photo by Osmar Sandino.

Local communities are critical partners in our mission, and they are now under threat. Nearly 700 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in Central America. El Salvador is completely locked down. In Nicaragua, almost no COVID-19 mitigation measures have been taken and food prices have doubled. We anticipate both food shortages and high rates of infection very soon, which means the most vulnerable people will starve as this pandemic hits them.

Would you please make an urgent gift of $50 (or more) to help them?

Our rangers know a family in need, shown below – let’s call them the Martinez family. The parents are in their 80s and 90s and care for their adopted daughter, who is disabled by epilepsy. They depend on their neighbors for food, but now the whole community is struggling under doubled food prices. How can the Martinez family feed themselves, afford medical care, or prepare for the worst right now? They can’t. But you can help them.

Your gift will provide emergency food assistance and other needed aid to the Martinez family and others in need. You can help save them from hunger and put them in a stronger place to fight infection once the coronavirus comes to call.

Many other families are also in vulnerable situations and have nowhere to turn for help. There are no funds in our budget to meet their unexpected need, but your gift today will provide fast relief.

Your action is needed now. Please donate to provide emergency aid to these communities, who will soon be very hard hit. Your gift will help people survive another day – and now, every day counts.

We are deeply grateful for everything you do.