Saving the Desman

Two rangers from the Klyazma Wildlife Sanctuary, 120 miles east of Moscow, carefully draw an illegal fishing net from a floodplain lake into their small boat. Fish squirm in the contraption. As they take up the

net, the men free the fish one by one. Nearly half the net is in the boat when they notice a small, bedraggled animal with a long nose and scaly tail entangled in the strands. As they pull it near, the men recognize it as a Russian desman, an aquatic insectivore distantly related to the mole, whose ancestors have inhabited lakes like these for 30 million years. The creature is lifeless. Gennady Khakhin, who conceived this refuge to conserve the endangered desman three decades ago, watches solemnly from the shore.

Stationary fishing nets, prohibited by law in many regions, pose the greatest threat to the Russian desman today. Though the desman spends most of its life underwater, it requires air to breathe. With the illegal use of fishing nets increasing in poor rural regions of Russia, the desman is caught in a fight for survival. Khakhin, deputy head of the Center for Wild Animal Health at the Institute for Nature Conservation in Moscow, says that saving the desman is primarily a socio-economic problem. “Those fisherman don’t need the desman,” Khakhin said, “they just need to feed their families, and the desman keeps coming up in their nets.” According to a census organized by Khakhin in 2002, fewer than 35,000 desman remain in Russia – roughly half as many as 30 years ago.

Ideal habitat for the Russian desman is limited to floodplain lakes in forested areas with relatively mild winters. In the 18th century, desmans were common in such lakes from Kiev to the Ural Mountains. Today, desman populations are restricted to the Volga, Don, and Ural river basins. Its only relation, actually a different species, is the Pyrenean desman, found in the Pyrenees and in central Portugal.

While use of illegal fishing nets is a relatively recent problem for the desman, loss of suitable floodplain habitat and hunting have long factored into the animal’s decline. Desmans were also once hunted for their soft, durable pelts. Homemakers used desmans’ dried, musk-scented tails as sachets for their linens – to deter moths. Later, the oil was used in perfumes and colognes. By the 1920’s, desman populations had declined so far that the Soviet Government prohibited their hunting. It lifted and imposed restrictions several times over the next 30 years, until declaring a complete moratorium on desman hunting in 1957.

Despite the ban on hunting, subsequent disappearance of suitable floodplain habitat continued to reduce desman numbers. Wetland drainage for agricultural crops in the 1960s and 1970s eliminated many floodplain lakes. Reservoirs, often built without considering environmental consequences, flooded desman habitat and drowned many of the animals. Logging in floodplain forests removed trees where desmans take refuge during spring floods.

Fascinated by the strange-looking species, Khakhin, 66, has been observing desmans since he was a boy. He remembers sitting on the banks of lakes now protected in the Klyazma Sanctuary, listening for the desman’s mating call, which he describes as resembling something “between a violin and a drill.” Khakhin was drawn to the desman by its elusive behavior: “If I was really lucky, I would catch a glimpse of the desman’s snout or head sticking above the water, sniffing the air for danger.” Khakhin acknowledges that “not many people are crazy enough to spend their nights as mosquito bait, wading through cold water and sticky mud to catch a glimpse of this shy creature.” As a result, says Khakhin, desmans have been poorly studied and little is known about their behavior.

What is known is that the small Russian desman, no larger than a guinea pig, is uniquely designed for life in the water. Its compact eight-inch body (when fully grown) and its cone-shaped head reduce resistance as its webbed feet paddle and its rudder-like tail steers it through the water. Its flexible nose (more like a trunk, actually) is used as a periscope to breathe and sniff out danger above the water. Glands in a pear-shaped bulge at the base of the desman’s tail produce a strong musk-scented oil, which the animal rubs on its silvery-brown coat to increase its water resistance. The desman also uses the musk scent to mark its territory, helping it retrace its course in murky water and compensating for its poor vision.

Timid and wary, the desman is mostly active in the twilight hours. It builds an intricate network of above-water dens with underwater entrances. There it can sleep, eat, breathe, and raise young while hiding from predators. Dens are usually located at about 100-foot intervals around the lake – approximately the distance a desman can swim under water in one minute. Paddling along the lake bottom in search of food, the desman clears trenches between its dens, which retain the animal’s musk scent. The desman’s primary prey – bottom-dwelling insects and their larvae, snails, and small fish, are lured to the trenches by the aerated water and musk scent.

Now endangered, the desman is also luring Russian scientists and conservation activists to its rescue. Eighty sanctuaries (zakazniks) and four strictly-protected nature reserves (zapovedniks) have been established throughout central Russia to save the desman, protecting one-third of the entire desman population. Yet the Russian public knows little of the creature’s existence or its struggle for survival. Khakhin cites the lack of public awareness, the surge in use of illegal nets in poor regions where unemployment is high, and the absence of state funding to enforce protected area regimes as the main obstacles to desman conservation. Khakhin advocates taking the human factor into account: suggesting that Russia needs to address the needs of poor people living alongside desman habitats. If wide-reaching measures are not taken soon, Khakhin said, he fears the animal will become extinct in spite of its protected status.

Concerned with the desman’s decline along the Oka River, a tributary of the Volga, biologists Maria and Alexander Onufrenya began to study the animal while students at the Oka Nature Reserve, 180 miles southeast of Moscow. Twenty-five years later, the Onufrenyas are two of the top desman biologists in Russia.

The Oka Nature Reserve, one of the several places where desmans find refuge from threats, was created in 1935 to conserve floodplain habitat. Today, its desman population hovers around 1,000 animals. Rangers regularly patrol the floodplain and fine violators caught fishing with stationary nets. Even so, desman populations reached a critical low in the 1970s and 1980s as wetland drainage on neighboring lands and increased water use for irrigation reduced the amount of lake habitat in the Oka floodplain. In 1994, the Onufrenyas received funding from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to restore habitat for the desman in the Oka floodplain. Within two years, they created 14 lakes that were deep enough to remain unfrozen through winter. Even before plants took root along the freshly formed banks, desman settled in half of the new lakes. Within three years, desmans had inhabited all 14 of the lakes.

Now the Onufrenyas are helping to restore the animal to its former range, capturing desmans from the colonies thriving in these new lakes so as to introduce them into other nature reserves. Previous attempts to reintroduce the desman were largely unsuccessful. From 1929 to 1999, nearly 10,000 desmans were captured in the wild and redistributed to lakes stretching from Ukraine to Western Siberia, but “only five to six percent of those animals survived,” Maria said. She attributes this to a failure to address the very reasons the animal originally disappeared: illegal fishing and absence of suitable lakes in the floodplains.

In 1996, Alexander toured parts of western Russia to identify promising areas to release desmans. He focused on strictly protected areas and national parks with appropriate conservation regimes. “We can take as many as 100 desmans from the Oka floodplain to other areas without damaging the local population,” he said. In 1997, with support from the Russian National Parks Fund, he and Maria captured 18 desmans and released them in the Oryol National Park, in western Russia. The desman population there is now thriving, thanks to adequate protection measures and the abundance of suitable habitat. In 2002-2003, the Onufrenyas released another 40 desmans from the Oka Nature Reserve into the floodplain of the Nerussa River, which flows through the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve, near Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Maria said she believes it will not take much to reverse the desman’s population decline. “The desman is a vital and hardy species that has survived on Earth for millions of years,” she said. If more floodplain habitat is set aside and existing protection regimes are enforced, she said, the desman will make a swift comeback.

The Russian desman, the Onufrenyas said, could actually be a symbol for Russia, much as the panda is a symbol for China. After all, they noted, “it is found nowhere else on Earth” and, in a curious way, it also reflects Russia’s national character: gentle and mysterious, but persistently surviving hardships through the ages. Apparently, Russia’s Party of Life, chaired by Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov agrees. Last year the party adopted the little-known desman as its mascot, catapulting the obscure, shy creature into the public spotlight. Such exposure alone will not save the desman from extinction, but greater public awareness of its plight cannot but do it some good.   RL