Photography and ... ethics? Part 2

Continuing on from last week, I found a short article on the impact of photography on a population of slender loris (Loris lydekkerianus) in India. The article can be accessed here. The slender loris is currently classified by the IUCN Red List as a Least Concern species. In the article, Kanagavel et al. found that most photos of slender lorises involved them being mishandled. This was done by analysing photos of lorises from India Nature Watch, a popular wildlife photography website in India. They found that 16 out of 28 cases involved the animals being mishandled. Even though the sample size is small (28 incidents), the article is useful in giving us an insight into this trade. Such activities seem to be commonplace as the villagers invited the research team to see a loris they had captured and it occurred over a wide area.

The article states that even though the locals perceive lorises to bring bad luck, they capture lorises for photographers to get paid. Such practices can have wider impacts on the environment. For example, in the article, a villager had to cut down 4 trees to restrict the movement of a loris.

Although the study only looked at the slender loris, I would foresee this type of unethical behaviour occurring more frequently in the future. With India’s rapidly rising middle-class population, more people would pick up the hobby, placing additional stress on India’s wildlife, not limited to the slender loris. However, it also brings up how citizens can help science through their observations.  For example, the photos suggest that the population of the two subspecies of slender loris overlapped contrary to previous information. I believe that photography can have a positive impact on conservation through the use of citizen science. However, steps have to be taken to dissuade unethical behaviours such as the type seen above.


On a separate note, I just received my copy of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert in the mail yesterday. Hopefully its an interesting and informative read.

Photography and ... ethics? Part 1

About a week ago, I read an article in the Straits Times that was quite disturbinge. From the article, a man tied a tern chick’s foot to a bush to allow photographers to get a clean shot of it while the stressed parents were seen flying above the nest.

 Photo by Jaieden Shen

 I find such actions distasteful for a few reasons: 

1. Handling the chick and stressing the parent might lead to them abandoning the nest and the chick. Compounding the issue is that the Little Tern is threatened in Singapore.
2. Nature photography should be about capturing the animals in their natural state. While affecting the environment is unavoidable, we should be trying to minimalise the impact of our actions.

I believe as photographers, we can all play a part bringing nature closer to the public audience. We are able to show the public the remaining biodiversity in Singapore and hopefully spark an interest in people. However, we have to be mindful that as ambassadors, the methods we use to capture the image are as important as the image itself.

 So how we (everyone using nature areas) behave? The Nature Society (Singapore) has a really comprehensive code of ethics on the way we should interact with nature. It is well worth a read to see how we can minimalise our impacts. Does a good photograph justify the stress inflicted on the bird? I would say no. 

Introductions

Hello and welcome to my blog where I will be sharing about environmental issues close to me, in particular, conservation. A little about myself, I’m currently studying at NUS and a hobby of mine is photography, hence the name of my blog. I mainly do macro photography. If you would like to see some of my photos, here's the link to my flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/48416502@N04/

For the first post however, I’ll be talking about my experience working in an ecology lab. After completing my National Service, I had worked for a short while at Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI). Fresh out of the army and coming from a junior college, it was a whole new experience for me. The job mostly consisted of sorting samples and I had the opportunity to see many interesting specimens in the process. Here is a photo of some fly (order Diptera) pupas we found:

Photo credits to Darren Sim.

Besides working on the project, I also got the chance to interact with a few of the researchers. One piece of advice I received was not to immediately start working after graduation but to go out of Southeast Asia and volunteer/work for a conservation organisation for a few months.

From my short stint at TMSI, I learnt there are many species that rely on water bodies as part of their life cycles. A slight change in the water quality can upset this balance and end up affecting humans as seen in swarming of midges in the past years (there many are other possible reasons for this and it is much more complex than only water quality).