Between 1974 and 1975, Nigel Downing conducted what was probably the
only in-depth research on live sawfishes in West Africa. A withdrawal in
funding led to his project being abruptly terminated after only 18 months, and
he switched to a laboratory-based research project in order to complete his
PhD. Forty years later, I collaborated with him to resurrect some of the data
he painstakingly collected in The Gambia and Senegal. Having myself spent much
time in this region, searching for the now-elusive river monsters, his data
brought to life a West Africa unknown to me – where rivers and coastal waters teemed with juvenile
sawfishes. His stories have brought me closer to understanding what we have
lost, both in West Africa and in other parts of the world.
Interview by Ruth Leeney.
What were your research objectives in West Africa?
Dr. Jean Maetz, a French physiologist who ran a radio-isotope laboratory
in the South of France, was keen to discover how elasmobranchs survived in
fresh water. He proposed that I find suitable animals, catch them, look after
them in captivity locally and then arrange the transport of about 20 by air to
his laboratory. Then I would work with him using radioisotopes to study the
flux of water and ions in and out of the fish under experimental conditions.
This last part I never achieved.
Where did the idea for the project come from?
As an undergraduate student, in a lecture on osmotic and ionic
physiology, I was informed that cartilagenous fish were stenohaline - unable to
tolerate wide variations in salinity. While there are teleosts (bony fish) that
can move from sea water to fresh water and vice versa, salmon being the
best-known example, we were told that elasmobranchs were restricted to the sea.
However, I knew otherwise. As a young boy in South Africa I was well aware of
the Zambezi shark (bull shark), which had been held responsible for a spate of
attacks off the Durban beaches in the 1960s. I even remember an ambulance
arriving to pick up a shark attack victim off a beach where we used to swim. I
also knew that this shark penetrated rivers and had frequently been observed in
fresh water. Further, I had spent several months working at the Oceanographic
Research Institute at the Durban Aquarium before going up to university, and
knew that sawfish were also found in rivers as well as the sea.
Three things therefore compelled me to do this project: I really liked
sharks; field work was my thing; and I was curious to find out how euryhaline
elasmobranchs controlled their salt and water balance (osmoregulated) as they
moved between salt and fresh water.
Were you aware that sawfishes were present in you study areas when you
first started the project in The Gambia and Senegal?
My initial plan was to head back to South Africa, use the Durban
Aquarium facilities and collect from the rivers and estuaries of Zululand, but
that fell through. Dr. Maetz said he had heard there were sawfish in West
Africa and so, as a result of hearsay, I ended up working between The Gambia
and Senegal, both of which proved to be excellent places to capture bull sharks
and sawfishes. By that point I had realised, from my time at the Durban
Aquarium, that keeping bull sharks alive and healthy in captivity was going to
be far more difficult than looking after sawfishes. The latter can happily
spend hours on the bottom using their spiracles to ventilate, whilst bull
sharks needed to keep swimming. For that reason, sawfishes became my primary
study species.
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| This adult male Largetooth Sawfish, 4.5 m in length, was landed by a fisherman in October 1975. (c) Nigel Downing. |
Can you paint a picture of your fieldwork and day-to-day activities in
The Gambia and Senegal?
I was based in Thiaroye, on the outskirts of Dakar (the Senegalese
capital), at a French laboratory. However, I set out for the field very early
on to establish where best to find the fish I needed. I discounted the Senegal
River from the outset, and investigated most of the Gambia River in Senegal (by
road) and in The Gambia (by road and by boat). Finally, I established two field
bases in the Casamance, in southern Senegal. Sawfish appeared to be more
numerous in the Casamance River and it was an easier place in which to work,
and since I was based at a French research station, it made sense to do my
fieldwork in Senegal too.
Initially, my main priority was to find out where, when and how to catch
small sawfishes. They can grow to several metres in length, and for
obvious reasons I needed them neonatal-size, preferably. Once I had located
them, the next phase was to keep them in captivity, locally. Thiaroye and the
Casamance are miles apart, and there were no holding facilities at either
place. So I had to build tanks and equip them with water circulation and
filtration systems in Thiaroye, and pens along the river in which to hold
recently-caught sawfish. Finally there was the issue of transporting them from
the pens in the south of Senegal to the tanks up in the north. All of this took
me six months, and I had only been given eight months in which to get the fish
to France! I was given an extension to collect again in 1975, and with all the
infrastructure and logistics firmly in place, I conducted an intensive sampling
season in the Casamance River.
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| Nigel placing a sawfish in a holding pen. |
A typical day in the field went something like this: I got up well
before dawn, left the empty classroom where I slept at a mission station and
went to pick up the local fisherman, Timothé, who helped me with all my work in
the Casamance. We would go back to the classroom, cook and wolf down huge bowls
of porridge, washed down with cups of tea or hot chocolate. We then made our
way to the river by car with all the equipment: fuel, transport tank,
net, syringes, portable centrifuge, battery, ice and much more. The boat was
dragged into the water, engine attached, all the equipment was loaded in and we
made our way to the river mouth. The net was set… and we waited. If anything
was snagged in the net, we knew it and went to retrieve the animal immediately.
If it was a sawfish, one of us held it firmly in the water while the other
patiently disentangled the rostrum from the net. This could sometimes take up
to 20 minutes to achieve. The animal was sexed, measured, and sometimes a blood
sample taken. The animal was put into the transport tank and the water
circulation system switched on. If another animal had been caught meanwhile, we
would retrieve that one too. Then we had to dash to the holding pen to release
the sawfish, before heading back to continue netting.
At the end of the day the net was retrieved and repaired by Timothé if
necessary, while I took care of the boat and loaded up the equipment for the
next day. I wrote my notes up by gas-light, cooked myself a meal and fell into
bed, exhausted. The days were long and tiring.
By July of 1975 I had a holding pen in the river filled with 15 small
sawfish. As I was preparing to transport them north, I was told that lightening
had struck my tanks, and the research vessel that was to transport them had
broken down. I released all the sawfish back in to the river, and headed back
to my base in Thiaroye. Not yet defeated, I was able to arrange for the French
Airforce to send a Nord Atlas transport aircraft to Ziguinchor (such things
were possible in those days!), and in October 1975 I successfully transported
six small sawfish by air to the tanks in Thiaroye, where they thrived. Despite
this eventual success and the enormous effort I had invested, the project’s funding
was withdrawn in December of the same year, and I returned to the UK, immensely
sad and rather despondent.
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| Adult female Largetooth Sawfish landed in The Gambia, 1975. (c) Nigel Downing. |
You took a remarkable photograph of an adult female sawfish that was
landed on a beach in the Gambia. Can you describe the experience of seeing that
animal being landed?
I was very excited. Only a few days before I had helped collect an
equally large female at Niani Maru, several hundred kilometres up the River
Gambia and in fresh water. Now here was one taken in the sea not far from the
river mouth, and she was pregnant with 15 young. It is such a shame that she
had not delivered them, and I felt overwhelmed to witness all those baby
sawfish so near to term, all out of the one huge female. I could only suppose that
she too was about to make the journey upstream, and to deliver her young.
Instead, in no time at all she was reduced to chunks of meat, ready to be
dried, then to be bagged up and exported to Ghana.
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| The pups from a pregnant sawfish landed in The Gambia. |
Forty years on, sawfishes are in danger of extinction throughout much of
the world, and many may even have been extirpated from the areas where you saw
so many of them. How does that make you feel?
I don’t wish to be too morbidly philosophical, but I believe very
strongly that we are stewards of the world we live in and we are doing a pretty
poor job of looking after it. The loss of the sawfish is global, with the
exception of a couple of places where they are properly protected (Florida and
Western Australia). I am sad that sawfish are probably no longer present in
significant numbers West Africa. In other parts of the world, their recovery
will depend on credible and guaranteed protection being put in place, which may
be too much to ask for in some places.
The fishing net and motorised boats have been the demise of the sawfish
in West Africa. Although they may now fetch a good price largely because of
their fins, back in the 1970s the fishermen did not particularly like catching
sawfish. They were not valued as fresh food, and they made a huge mess of their
nets.
What influence did your time in West Africa, working on sawfishes, have
on the rest of your life, your interests or attitudes?
Overwhelmingly I feel a sense of privilege. I have to pinch myself
sometimes to realise what I experienced and witnessed some 40 years ago. The
experience of working largely alone and undertaking the task I did certainly
formed me, and I would never trade it for anything, tough though it was at
times.
Nigel’s description of the time he spent studying sawfishes in West
Africa provides a solemn and somewhat dramatic contrast to the present
day and highlights the almost complete loss of these extraordinary
creatures from the coasts and rivers of Senegal, the Gambia and many
other West African countries over just a few decades. I hope, however,
that his story will inspire others, as it has me, to seek out and
protect any remaining sawfish populations in far-flung corners of the
world, lest they too meet the same fate.
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A blog post on how the sawfish specimens Nigel
brought back to the UK are being used for contemporary sawfish research and
conservation: http://saveourseas.com/update/the-ghosts-of-sawfish-past/
