Participatory monitoring of Madagascar’s Lac Alaotra fishery

By Andrea Wallace

Lac Alaotra lies 250km north east of Antananarivo (‘Tana’) and is the largest lake in Madagascar. Within a wetland area covering 7,225km2 the lake itself is 200km2 and is the nation’s most productive fishery. In 2003, it was declared a Ramsar site as a wetland of global importance and in 2007 the lake and its surrounding marsh, reedbeds, and rice fields was designated as a new protected area.

Durrell has worked here for some time conducting conservation education programmes and ecological monitoring to encourage sustainable use of the natural resources and protection of endemic species such as the Alaotran gentle lemur. Given how important the area is for artisanal (i.e. small-scale subsistence and commercial) fishing, it is very important to understand the relationship between conservation efforts and the fishers.

This is where I come in. I am a PhD student with Imperial College London and Durrell, and I will be spending the next three years investigating the impact of conservation efforts from the perspective of fishers. Doing this involves quite a lot of fieldwork in Anororo, a remote fishing village on the western edge of the lake. In June this year we started a pilot study in Anororo and, having never been to Madagascar before, it has been very interesting. With Durrell’s help we got set up very quickly. I keep referring to ‘we’ and ‘us’ here – I’m lucky enough to have a husband that I can drag along with me and put to work!

Getting around Madagascar can be challenging and getting to our field site turned out to be almost as much of an adventure as the research itself. First there was a nine hour taxi-brousse journey to the nearest city, Ambatondrazaka (‘Ambato’), from Tana, crammed into a Toyota minibus. Then from there it’s another long taxi-brousse ride that takes you to a small town, Antsapanana, and from there you either walk or hitch a lift on a tractor into Anororo.

With a population of 10,000, Anororo is large and densely populated - land that remains above water level during the rainy season is in short supply. There are rice fields as far as the eye can see on the west side of the village, and the marsh and lake are to the east of the village. We stay with a very nice host family who have a brick house. Another challenge is getting used to the lack of sanitation and private toilets, which makes dealing with the inevitable grumbly tummies quite interesting as we have to navigate ferocious dogs and cow dung in the dark for 150m down the road to get to the long-drop latrines!

During the study our aim is to interview and follow fishers to monitor their distribution, fishing effort, and catches. But we soon hit a few snags – it turns out that ‘collectors’ paddle out into the marsh to buy catches from fishers and so fishers return with either nothing or only the few fish that they are keeping for food. That meant that if we wanted to collect data, we would have to paddle out there first. Measuring fish in a pirogue (dug-out canoe) can be tricky and time-consuming but we soon developed a measuring board with a ruler attached to a wooden base that was quite portable. We could then pull up alongside the fisher and quickly measure the lengths of their fish. A very simple but efficient tool and all the fishers loved it!

The next challenge was one of timing – fishers tend to work at fairly unsociable hours of the day. To get fish to collectors in time for sale, the fishers were leaving their homes anywhere between midnight and 4am. Following fishers on their fishing trips means that we are gradually becoming more nocturnal!

Lac Alaotra is beautiful and being out first thing in the morning is very peaceful. The pirogues are generally small and can be a tight squeeze for big vazahas (foreigners)! They’re also a little on the ‘tippy’ side and most of them leak. Six to eight hours in a pirogue without being able to stand or stretch also took some getting used to!

With our methods in place, our initial interviews and fisher follows revealed that Anororo fishers use a variety of fishing methods including traps, gill nets, cast nets, and hook & line. Fishers fish in the marsh and in the open lake up to 10km north and 10km south of Anororo. We found five primary species of fish in fishers’ catches: Soraka (Nile tilapia), Beloha (Redbreast tilapia), Fibata (Asian snakehead), Besisika (Common carp), and Trondro gasy (Goldfish). All of these species were introduced to the lake over the years since the early 1900s and of the five, Nile tilapia were the main species caught.

Our in-depth interviews and discussion groups were also extremely valuable and informative. Participating fishers spoke about three key current problems: 1) use of prohibited fishing methods, 2) prevalence of invasive aquatic plants such as the water hyacinth and giant salvinia, and 3) the administration of the local Federation of Fishers. It will be interesting to continue exploring these issues with more fishers as the research continues.

Stay tuned for more updates from the field – there are bound to be some amusing stories!