Up to the 1970s, the vultures (Langja in the vernacular) were sighted in good numbers… Today, they are just a fiction of the mind, seen only in the school textbooks. So, how did the vultures from Manipur disappear just like that without a trace? To date, there perhaps are no studies tracing the history of the decline of the scavengers, nor of the obvious implication of their absence from the food chain cycle and their contribution to cleaning up the environment in their own way.
By Salam Rajesh
In the days of yore, the vulture was a defiant sight along the river banks and within the family’s courtyard in urban Imphal, pestering everyone with their harsh calls and their outrageous forays into people’s homes to snatch at the garbage piles. Today, however, the vultures are a forgotten specimen in Manipur, hardly imagined by the growing kids of the present times.
Up to the 1970s, the vultures (Langja in the vernacular) were sighted in good numbers, in flocks of three to five individuals, within urban Imphal and where this writer lives (in the urban Sagolband area, in close proximity to the central marketplace) there were two of the pestering winged creatures that virtually fought with the family’s dogs every time they approached the kitchen area to look for leftovers. Today, they are just a fiction of the mind, seen only in the school textbooks (or maybe a rare sighting in the Tamenglong area once in a blue moon).
So, how did the vultures from Manipur disappear just like that without a trace? To date, there perhaps are no studies tracing the history of the decline of the scavengers, nor of the obvious implication of their absence from the food chain cycle and their contribution to cleaning up the environment in their own way.
The quest and concern on this very subject matter are reflected in economist Eyal G. Frank and Anant Sudarshan’s analysis of the decline of vultures and its implication with particular reference to health issues in India in their study “Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India (2023)”.
Eyal and Anant’s study was picked up by the India Today issue of 17 July (2024) with the intriguing caption “How the decline of Indian vultures could have led to 100,000 human deaths a year (in India)”, and also reproduced in a few newspapers.
The India Today analysis opines that Eyal and Anant’s findings have significant implications for biodiversity management and conservation resource allocation. By quantifying the human cost of species loss, the study provides a compelling argument for protecting seemingly less charismatic species that play critical roles in ecosystem functioning.
The Indian vulture (Gyps indicus) is a large bird of prey that belongs to the family Accipitridae, and with an impressive wingspan of 1.96 to 2.38 meters, amassed with a body length of about 75 to 85 centimeters, it can easily intimidate the domestic dogs guarding the household! And, as it is, they are seldom frightened of the humans’ presence or the pestering dogs barking their head off.
Indian vultures are scavengers, feeding mainly on the carcasses of dead animals. They play a critical role in the ecosystem by disposing of dead animals, which helps prevent the spread of diseases. Indian vultures are primarily found in South Asia, including India, Pakistan, and Nepal.
Vultures play a crucial role in India’s ecosystem by efficiently removing livestock carcasses, which number in the hundreds of millions. Their disappearance led to a sanitation crisis, with rotting carcasses left unattended, potentially spreading diseases and contaminating water sources, writes Eyal and Anant in their study.
The researcher duo found evidence of increased feral dog populations and higher incidence of rabies in affected areas, wherein the surge in feral dog numbers was likely due to the abundance of carrion previously consumed by the vultures, leading to more human-dog interactions and rabies transmission, and thus being a health issue of certain concern.
Global biodiversity loss and species decline is an area that the world community is quite concerned of in the present context where the inroad of humans into pristine nature reserves and biodiversity hotspots for commercial exploration and exploitation are gradually leading to the rapid decline of ecosystems, and subsequently leading to species decline and loss.
The decline of pollinators like the honey bee was of serious concern to Europe and other regions around the globe as this tiny insect is vital in the continuity of the food chain cycle. Without honey bees to pollinate the crops and other fruit-bearing plants and trees, it was of concern that crop species loss could occur and which would in turn impact the agriculture sector extensively, affecting the economies of millions of farmers.
Tropical rainforests are globally important biomes that host an outsized proportion of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and are critical to climate stability. However, these ecosystems and the people who depend on them are under severe threat from the continued expansion of agribusiness and logging (Forest & Finance: Banking on Biodiversity Collapse, 2023).
From the assessment, it is generally inferred that human interferences lead to the extensive depletion of forest cover for multiple purposes, many of which are not aligned to the protection and conservation of ecosystems in their natural status. This accounts for biodiversity and species loss.
On the other hand, humans’ profuse use of chemicals and drugs is said to have influences on species loss, too. For instance, Eyal and Anant in their study say that in India, a country with over 500 million livestock, vultures provided an important public health service by removing livestock carcasses from the environment. In the mid-1990s, vultures experienced the fastest population collapse of a bird species in recorded history. The cause of death was unknown until 2004 when it was identified as poisoning from consuming carcasses containing traces of a common painkiller, diclofenac.
The same could be true of Manipur’s case, too, as vultures were seen to feed on dead cows, dogs and pigs that people randomly deposited on the river banks and other open spaces. At the same time, too, it is quite fairly known that birds and animals (including Manipuri ponies) sometimes suffocate and die from consuming plastic wastes that constitute one of the major items of solid waste that are piled up randomly on roadsides and marketplaces.
Quite concerning is the observation by Eyal and Anant in their study that, “As vultures died out, the scavenging services they provided disappeared too, and carrion were left out in the open for long periods of time. Ecologists have argued that this may have led to an increase in the population of rats and feral dogs, which are a major source of rabies in India. Rotting carcasses can also transmit pathogens and diseases such as anthrax, to other scavengers. In addition, these pathogens can enter water sources either when people dump carcasses in rivers or because of erosion by surface runoff.”
In a nutshell, then, the disappearance of the vultures from Manipur’s urban landscape could have exposed people in general, unknowingly, to diseases from rotting carcasses and other sources of filth that are commonplace in the unplanned, non-monitored, and inefficiently-managed growth of the urban Imphal city-scape.