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Three men equipped with a light-emitting diode lighthouse for a nightly hunting holiday in the congo jungle.
Powerful and affordable lanterns make it less difficult for rainforest hunters around the world to kill nocturnal animals, adding endangered species like pangolins, according to a new study. Scientists warn that the new generation threatens to continue damaging ecosystems that are already affected by over-hunting.
Humans have been stalking prey with bright lighting devices, such as lanterns, for decades. Sudden lighting can cause animals to freeze, making them less difficult targets. But traditional incandescent lamps for lighting fixtures are temporarily depleting, making this search expensive and difficult.
In comparison, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which emit soft light from small electronic chips, can provide an explosion of light with less than a quarter of the power. Their power and brightness have made them ubiquitous in everything from televisions to cell phones over the past decade. Mark Bowler, an environmentalist at Suffolk University, wondered whether the generation could also replace the way other people hunt in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon, where they study animal ecology.
There, electrical energy is a valuable asset. Every time Bowler came to a village in the early 2000s, other people asked him if he had batteries. Batteries were covered in the sun or around fires to heat them to save a few more minutes. The hunters were also attracted to their beloved LED flashlight. But in 2012, when LED prices fell, they had all of their own. “That’s when I said, “Okay, we want to do interviews and find out what’s going on here,” Bowler said.
The body of a walnut slaughtered in the Peruvian Amazon rests in a canoe.
He joined researchers in Brazil and Gabon to gather knowledge from hunters about the use of these lights. The effects showed their suspicions. Of 120 hunters, almost all reported LED lights, Bowler and his colleagues report this week on Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. In South America, two-thirds of hunters reported hunting more at night with the new lanterns; in Gabon, where such a hunt is illegal, only a third said it had been dedicated to hunting more at night. More than a portion of the hunters reported that LEDs facilitated hunting.
These responses were supported by thirteen years of knowledge about hunters’ efforts to kill small animals in remote villages in the Brazilian Amazon. Hunters shoot bales (Cuniculus paca), nocturnal rodents that look like spotted piglets, from canoes at night, highlighting the state of the animals across the river. In 2011, hunters suddenly were much more effective at catching animals, almost doubling the amount of bale meat they can catch in 1 hour.
This sudden replacement baffled Hani El Bizri, a Brazilian PhD student. A student at Manchester Metropolitan University studying hunting in those villages, until he realizes that this corresponds to the time when LED lanterns were widespread. “It makes sense to me,” says El Bizri, co-author of the new investigation.
Increasing LEDs for wild animal game can be a blessing or a scourge, says Robert Nasi, forest environmentalist and executive director of the International Forestry Research Center, an Indonesia-based nonprofit that studies wildlife hunting in Africa, America. America and Asia. For example, Gabonese hunters running at dusk in Congo’s vast forests have reported the death of endangered species, adding giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) and small antelopes called cephalophos. LEDs can simply power an extensive hunt of the kind that can have negative consequences on jungle ecosystems, Nasi says. But for other people looking for food, lighting artifacts can simply save them time and lose them to do other things like fish or harvest.
“This is the case of humanity,” says Nasi, who was not concerned about the new investigation. “The challenge is not the tool. The challenge is what you decide to do with the tool.”
Warren Cornwall is a freelance journalist in Washington state.
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