Episode 23 – Wildlife Poaching

TRANSCRIPT 

EPISODE 23: Wildlife Poaching

 

[music: The Oyster Waltz] 

 

Lisa Campbell: Hello listeners, welcome to Seas the Day, a podcast from the Duke University Marine Lab. I’m your host, Lisa Campbell, and today we bring you an episode from our Conservation and Development series. As regular listeners will know, students in my class of the same name produce these episodes, and they don’t always focus on a marine issue. That’s true of today, when former students Bo Baney, Victoria Grant, and Katie Ridgeway take on the controversial issue of wildlife poaching.  Whether wildlife hunting is illegal or legal, for sport or for food, for sale or consumption, it is almost always controversial, particularly if charismatic wildlife are involved – think lions, elephants, rhinocerus. Bo, Victoria, and Katie tackle the topic from a variety of angles, looking at history of the term ‘poaching’, changing attitudes to hunting over time, the role of social media, and the lengths to which governments and organizations will go to combat illegal practices.  I’ll turn it over to them now. 

 

Bo Baney: From WDUML, this is Concerning Conservation, with your hosts Bo Baney, 

  

Victoria Grant: Victoria Grant,  

 

Katie Ridgeway: and Katie Ridgeway.  

 

Bo: Today we’re taking a closer look at the poaching narrative and militarized enforcement.  

 

[Music ]

 

Katie: Picture yourself on a safari in the Serengeti.  

 

[Wildlife noises] 

 

Victoria: There you are, sitting in stadium like seats in an open-air Jeep waiting for a real life encounter with what you may have only have had the chance to see through crowded windows at a zoo. As you wind through dirt roads you see a giraffe stretching its neck to grab a bushel of leaves. A baboon swinging on a vine. A herd of elephants at the water’s edge. Your tour guide talks about the poachers who attempt to illegally enter the park and kill these majestic creatures. And you wonder “how could anyone want to take the life of a sweet, innocent pangolin?”  

 

Katie: But what isn’t he telling you?  

 

Bo: What aren’t you seeing?  

 

Victoria: Did you see any locals?  

 

Katie: Did you see any park rangers strapped with guns?  

 

Bo: Did you see a drone flying overhead?  

 

Katie: Probably not. You’re here to see the natural beauty, not the locals who’ve been removed who have shared this land with wildlife for generations. Not the locals who struggle to support their families most basic needs, who are forced to resort to poaching. Not the armed rangers who have the green light to kill such poachers on sight.  

 

Bo: You’re not meant to see any of this, because if you did, it might dispel your past convictions of the evil represented by poaching, convictions that have propagated the current narrative. What we’re interested in is if you are listener did see this, or at least learned about it, would you question the measures it took to make this wildlife a reality?  

 

Katie: Let’s take a look.  

 

Victoria: Poaching, think about your usage of the word. Unless you’re talking about how to make Eggs Benedict, you likely associated with negative actions: poach a customer, poach a seat, poach an employee, i.e. theft. Although illegal hunting has more recently been substituted, as alternative value neutral terminology, poaching is still the defacto language used in this discourse. And as such, we have chosen to use it in our discussion. American social scientists Robert Muth and John Bowe Jr. define poaching as “any act which directly contravenes the law and regulations established to protect wild renewable resources.”  

 

Katie: The concept of poaching has existed since those in power began inserting property rights, limiting access to priorly available natural resources, such as animals, plants, and lumber. Erica von Essen et al. traced the word back to the Middle English pocchen, meaning enclosed in a bag. Continuing to focus on medieval England, poaching was criminalized under William the Conqueror, who aimed to preserve hunting grounds for the Anglo Saxon aristocrats. 

 

[dogs] 

  

Katie: Similar scenarios played out in continental Europe, exclusion of locals for the benefit of the nobles. These new restrictions were enforced with the threat of imprisonment, along with the odd penalty of death here and there. Unsurprisingly, these regulations were wildly unpopular with the commoners.  

 

Bo: According to German forest historian, Winfrey Freitag, poachers at this time where any non-member of the court, but primarily as in some commoners. Their reasons were simple: attempts to reduce wild animals damage to their fields; A direct source of food and indirect source of money from the sale of meat; and a general form of protest. And although poaching was almost universally labeled a crime in Germany’s principalities, enforcers were met with a wall of silence from the rural population. These poachers were rooted inside these communities, as were the hunting masters charged with enforcement. These types of violations can be broadly labeled as folk crimes, which Muth and Bowe described as criminal acts that, although they may be fairly widespread, failed to constitute a serious violation of public sentiment.  

 

Victoria: But somewhere between Sherwood Forest and today, the public sentiment towards poaching shifted. No longer is it championed as a form of harmless protest against tyrannical rule, as in the tale of Robin Hood. Instead, its practitioners are painted as opportunists who flout universally recognized laws to get their jollies or make a quick buck. There was no great shift in the harshness of penalties levied for poaching. Instead, its perception among the people as an acceptable activity changed. As Freitag puts it “The killing of animals as a leisure activity and hobby is seen as reprehensible to the vast majority of the population.” This shift in public sentiment allowed for greater enforceability and implementation of game and hunting laws.  

 

Katie: Cue the 19th century.  

 

[Music: Rule Britannia]  

 

Katie:  the arrival of colonial Europeans to Africa, a similar sequence of events played out, but in a far more concentrated time-period. Entering the 1890s, colonizers were fascinated with the exotic fauna found in their new Imperial lands. Given sports hunting’s popularity in Europe, it was naturally taken up here by the colonial elites. Colonist such as Ed Buxton who founded what is now known as Fauna and Flora International, characterized the expansive wildlife as a precious inheritance of the empire and hunting for game as an honest sport, that must be played fair.  

 

Bo: But what exactly or what exactly does play fair mean, and what is honest about it? For the elites, fair and honest meant using sophisticated weaponry to hunt their prized game as opposed to the methods practiced by the ‘savage tribes’, as alluded to in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Handmade traps and snares, viewed as primitive and destructive forces on wildlife were unfair practices in the eyes of the colonizers. They took it upon themselves to preserve their newfound inheritance, by jailing and fining the natives who infringed upon it. Just as they did to peasants and commoners in continental Europe.  

 

Victoria: Somewhere down the line jailing and fines weren’t enough as the colonial masters began to fear extinction of certain species and a depredation of populations. Framed through the ever pervasive Judeo Christian view of the colonizer, the possibility of depletion was the characterized as a loss of Eden. It had to be saved. Not from themselves, but from the destructive forces of the natives. Stronger mechanisms were needed to protect their inheritance.  

 

Katie: Enter ‘fortress conservation,’ a practice that views natives as dangerous and destructive to the natural landscape. A practice where nature and people should be separated and where conservation target species need to be fenced off.  

 

Bo: Now enter game reserves. A section of the natural landscape off limits to natives, but mostly free to the exploits of the colonists. Jane Carruthers, a scholar in the social history of African national parks, details the creation of one of the first reserves, the Sabi game reserve in South Africa. Patrolled by game wardens, they did not hesitate to seize or deny firearms to natives or fine them for trespassing.  

 

Victoria: Reserves are also created to settle land claims and as Carruthers later mentions land grabs or easier to justify when cloaked in the garb of conservation. This was codified in the Convention for Protection of African Flora and Fauna in 1933, which ushered in the era of national parks and wildlife reserves, where their removal and displacement of natives effectively became a prerequisite for preservation.  

 

Bo: But where were these evicted uncompensated natives relocated? For some, it was recognized undesirable lands where their prior ways of life were impossible. For others, it was lands boarding the reserves and parks, called fringe communities, where trespassing had dire consequences.  

 

Katie: Robert Nelson, a scholar in the field of environmental colonialism, details the relocation of the Masai, which may serve as one of the most provocative examples of displacing a people for the creation of parks. Throughout this period the Masai were evicted from their lands for the creation of the Serengeti, Tarangire and Nairobi national parks as well as other reserves. They’re predominantly pastoralist and their methods of trapping fauna that damaged their crops were viewed as a threat to wildlife at large by colonists. In reality, the Masai had practiced agriculture and wildlife control for centuries to no ill effect. In the post-World War II development boom and the following period of decolonization, the Masai sought to reclaim these lands in the mid 1950s, the Tanganyika legislature voted to cut the size of Serengeti Park in half, in order to allow them to reoccupy. Ultimately, this proposal was shot down by international conservation actors like the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who still had the final say in essentially every decision related to conservation matters within the Serengeti.  

 

Victoria: This final say is important in the context of development because as African states gained independence, they depended on aid, money that came from their colonial counterparts, which also meant respecting their wishes. Therefore, and the conservation sphere, many of these stipulations came from foreign governments, development organizations, international NGOs, and their constituencies. Not only did these groups directly give governments money, in doing so, they provided political legitimacy to government actors who used these funds to continue past practices of exclusion and removal of their own people to preserve protected areas.  

 

Bo: As Kaddu Sebunya, president of the African Wildlife Foundation says, there’s a line of continuity in conservation between the colonial period in the last six decades of interdependence. This line of continuity has led organizations that fuel development to become the new colonizer. As postcolonial conservation scholars, Jaidev Singh and Henk van Houten detail in the contemporary situation, international actors have placed an increase importance on the economic value of parks and reserves. In other words, wildlife is commercial value, where the utopian romantic version keeps the influence of the conservation of it in the hands of the foreigners.  

 

Katie: For international actors, poachers disrupt the romantic portrayal and economic value of wildlife and parks. By stigmatizing the poacher as an antagonist through the systematic removal of natives from their lands, poachers have become a burgeoning threat that is necessitated an interventionist style of conservation practices that are tied to the still ever present imperialist relationships. One of the ways this burgeoning threat plays out, is from the lucrative financial returns in the illicit trading of wildlife.  

 

Victoria: Cue 1975.  

 

[Music] 

 

Victoria: The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITIES, was internationally enacted to ensure the trade in endangered species did not threaten their survival. The confusing nature and overlap of CITES appendixes severely complicates even legal avenues of trade, and secondly, enforcement of regulations is severely muddled. For instance, CITIES allows and monitors trading under a permit system. The problem is, these permits are easily falsified and forged, defaming such a system. Additionally, intercepting illegal wildlife trade is not a high priority for states. National security apparatuses are more concerned with the entry of illegal arms and drugs more so than tiger bones.  

 

Bo: A more recent development has been the framing of poaching and illegal wildlife trade as a means of financing terrorism. In this respect, the current narrative is groups such as Al-Shabab, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram exploiting the opaque trophy market to launder and fund their operations. A convenient story, framing conservation within geopolitics, but misleading and exaggerated, as conservation scholar Rosaleen Duffy details in her paper “War by Conservation.” The genesis of this narrative can be traced back to a widely cited but dubious story, published by the Elephant Action League or EAL in 2012. An NGO dedicated to disrupting wildlife crime, EAL’s paper “the white gold of jihad”, claimed that during the duration of their study from 2009 to 2012, 3 tons of ivory were smuggled out of East Africa a month, under the auspicious of Al-Shabab, the earnings of which were obstensibly used to fund their operations, most notably the Westgate Mall bombing in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013, which resulted in 71 deaths.  

 

Katie: Following this horrific attack, the EAL report began to receive greater attention. Duffy relates how the paper was cited in numerous reports and news articles, making the tenuous connection between terrorism and poaching. NGO’s such as Conservation International and Wildlife Conservation Society promoted the idea that engaging in conservation could contribute to national security interests. Later, former US President Barack Obama issued executive order 13648 to combat wildlife trafficking. Duffy writes of this poaching terrorism narrative:  

 

Victoria: “It demonstrates how poachers are defined in ways that provide the foundation for calls for a more forceful approach to conservation that can deliver a win-win of primarily contributing to global security and saving species as a secondary positive outcome.” 

 

Katie: The latest portrayal of poaching as a result of radicalization and terrorism financing is happily propagated by both governments and private organizations. It is also worthwhile to examine other sources of imagery that feed into our current antagonizing view of the poacher.  

 

Bo: Enter social media.  

 

[twitter sound] 

 

It reinforces and alters narratives regarding wildlife issues. The dialogue often negates the value of human lives, while overvaluing animal lives. For instance, Twitter’s become a common space where you can witness in real time the hatred of the poacher and the love for wildlife. 

 

Victoria: In July of 2018, the UK Daily Mail published an article about the deaths of three poachers on this Sibuya game reserve in Eastern Province, South Africa. According to the author, Jamie Pyatt, Sibuya game staff discovered a bloody scene: one head a number of bloodied body parts, 3 pairs of shoes along with high powered hunting rifles fitted with silencers, wire cutters and an axe, which are often used by poachers to cutoff rhino horns. The suspected poachers were thought to have become the dinner of the reserve’s lion pride. The article received thousands of comments including : 

 

Man’s Voice: Excellent 

 

Woman’s voice: these wild animals deal better justice than our own law system 

 

and  

 

Man’s voice: I hope the Lions haven’t got indigestion.  

 

Victoria: Comedian Ricky Gervais from the hit show The Office retweeted the article with the caption ‘Rest in Pieces’ with pieces spelled out PIECES on his Twitter account. His tweet received over at 60,000 likes and more than 8000 retweets, along with over 2300 mostly positive comments.  

 

Katie: In contrast, people can be found guilty of wildlife crimes in the court of public opinion, like in the case of Cecil the Lion. In July of 2015, a famed lion named Cecil was killed by an American dentist, doctor Walter Palmer, outside his reserve in Zimbabwe. From CBS News reports, some speculated that Cecil was lured out of the bounds of his protected area, and was then shot by a bow and arrow, tracked for a 10-hour period and later shot by rifle. Cecil’s death created in an international uproar. Although Dr Palmer did not face harsh legal ramifications, the public was not as forgiving.  

 

Woman’s voice: He’s despicable. He’s a killer. He’s a murderer. Poor Cecil. I mean, how many lions do we have left? You have to kill them all? What are our kids, what are our  grandkids gonna see when they’re older. You know, it’s not right. It’s just plain not right.  

 

Katie: Animal rights activists posted Doctor Palmer’s personal information on line. And upon his return to the US, Doctor Palmer faced harassment and his home was vandalized with messages like lion killer. Activists pressed for legal charges to be brought against the dentist and even called for him to be extradited to Zimbabwe.  

 

Victoria: The excitement caused for injustices to wildlife and competing imagery for resolving the poaching crisis, has sparked a new conservation movement to address a more aggressive view of the poacher, one in which the poacher has to be taken out completely. But let’s pause for a moment. How do we get here?  

 

Bo: Rewind to the 1980s. 

 

[rewind sound] 

 

Bo:  The idea of fortress conservation began to be questioned as conservationists started to see the potential benefits associated with involving local communities. In contrast to fortress conservation, this community-based conservation argued that people in in around protected areas should participate in the management of natural resources, and that conservation could work to solve development needs in these communities. The idea behind community conservation was that people poach because they had no opportunities to work and needed to feed their families. To stop poaching, provide people jobs for community projects to implement stability. By ameliorating the conditions that precipitated poaching, the problem would disappear. But despite these arguments, major international players continued prioritizing investments in military technology rather than community based approaches, and ignored the role of community input in conservation goals. High level conferences continue to gloss over the role of local communities. In 2013, out of 14 urgent measures identified at the International Union of the Conservation of Nature’s African Elephant Summit in Gabarone, only one addresses the need to work with local communities.  

 

Katie: Without attention to community based approaches, the need to quickly resolve the poaching crisis encourage greater investment in what Duffy terms ‘war for biodiversity’, which evolved into the conservation approach to known as green militarizing. As defined by York University scholar Elizabeth Lunstrum, green militarization refers to the use of military and paramilitary actors, techniques, technologies and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation. How does this play out? Policing of national parks and reserves, forcibly evicting populations to create, maintain, or expand protected areas, and the use of military equipment like drones to survey protected areas. Militarization of conservation has also contributed to changes in policy. Botswana, for instance, was one of the first countries to adopt more aggressive anti-poaching approaches like a shoot-to-kill policy, which allows armed park rangers to shoot and kill suspected poachers on sight in protected areas.  

 

Victoria: A perfect embodiment of militarized conservation in action can be found in the case of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The park is most well known as one of the last remaining habitats for endangered mountain gorillas. Threats of this flagship species were a central theme of the 2014 Academy Award nominated documentary, Virunga, which introduced new audiences to the issues facing the park. Two Belgian political ecologists, Esther Marijnen and Judith Verweijen examine the narrative espoused in the documentary in leading up to the current conflicts. The legacy of Virunga is similar to most sub-Saharan national parks, exclusion and displacement of local peoples, proliferation of fortress conservation, and current green militarization exemplified this shoot-to-kill policies. Marijnen and Verweijen focus specifically on the spectacularization of militarized conservation and how imagery and narrative have been used to further current agendas. In casting conservationists as heroes and poachers as villains or other factors are able to create a simple but powerful narrative of us versus them. Casting this current struggle as a green crusade, any skepticism about diverting NGO development aid to special forces training or deploying mix battalions of park rangers and Congolese army members is washed away. These conflicts are even marketized to concern private citizens with impassioned pleas for funding on their website. The Virunga Foundation goes as far as framing supporter donations in concrete anti-poaching actions such as: 

 

Katie: $8 for a new pair of Ranger boots,  

 

Bo: $50 to support the widow and children of a fallen Ranger. For one month. 

 

Victoria: $300 for one hour flight time for anti-poaching patrol  

 

Katie: $1000 for a comprehensive sweep and removal of deadly snares in the mountain Gorilla sector  

 

Victoria: And the results? Increase further training and technology seems to have fueled armed group activity and exacerbated his conflict dynamics. The needs of the others continue to be dismissed with only one out of seven Virunga Foundation sponsor programs addressing their needs, while the remainder is stressed military hardening. All this aligns with their current narrative, championing wildlife and their defenders over fellow humans.  

 

Bo: Let’s look at the impacts of his alignment. Is there evidence to support this shift in militarized conservation practice  

 

Katie: Regarding Botswana’s shoot-to-kill policy, two researchers at the University of Botswana say so. They argue that the policy not only reduces rhino poaching, but also sends a clear message to poachers:  

 

Victoria: “Wildlife is not the only thing that has to worry about guns.”  

 

Katie: Other researchers in Zimbabwe also find that the policy has been effective in deterring local poachers from taking the risk to kill rhinos. So could the reduction in poaching events in these areas suggest militarization and resulting policies are necessary evil to address the poaching crisis? 

 

Bo:  Maybe. When looking solely at the population health of target species, yes, there is evidence to support shoot-to-kill policies achieve their aim. Economist Kent Messer identified a potential connection between shoot to kill policies and the rebound of wildlife populations. According to his study, there’s a visible trend of increasing elephant and rhino populations with the implementation of the shoot-to-kill policy.  When Zimbabwe implemented their anti- poaching unit, Operation Stronghold in 1984, elephant populations increased by nearly 50%. Kenya implemented shoot to kill in 1989 and witnessed an increase in their elephant population from 17,000 to 26,000 in an 11-year period, along with an increase in the rhino population.  

 

Victoria: Another way Messer examines the efficacy of these policies is from economic benefit analysis perspective, relying on a value of a statistical life model. He argues that given the dire economic conditions and lack of any feasible alternatives found in the surrounding park areas, the economic costs of imprisonment or fines are too low to disincentivize a lucrative opportunity presented by poaching. In these instances, the threat of death is the only viable penalty. Yet, even with the reduction of poaching events stemming from shoot to-kill-policies, hunting still exists.  

 

Katie: Which leads us to the second impact of the alignment of the current narrative. What effect do these policies have on people who continue to hunt? For starters, those living in communities on the fringes of national parks and reserves who poach for subsistence can be mistaken for commercial poachers. In other words, those hunting for small game to feed their families receive the same fate as those who hunt for large fauna such as rhinos and lions that go towards the legal wildlife trade. Furthermore, subsistence poaching methods like snares and traps, the very same methods that earned them the name of savage and barbarian during colonial times, are still used today. And although they’re not typically meant to catch large fauna, that rare unintended lion or other charismatic fauna that can end up in them perpetuates militarized enforcement, throwing mistaken identities out the window.  

 

Bo: Although plenty of literature brings up poverty as one of the main drivers of subsistence poaching property has been primarily defined through income, leaving out other important indicators touch to the lack of power and voice and even lack of access to culture resulting from the systematic removal and exclusion of people from their lands. Thus, there is inherent risk and further alienating and excluding local communities when increasingly militarized tactics are relied on. However, as Peter Goldwyn, Zimbabwean correspondent to National Geographic, writes:  

 

Victoria: “Like it or not, the economics of wildlife are impossible to ignore. If the impoverished human neighbors of a wildlife domain see less advantage in conserving wild animals than in eating or selling them, than neither squadrons of helicopter gunships nor miles of razor wire fences will ultimately, prevent them from poaching.” 

 

Katie: Phew. That was a lot to unpack. Now that we’ve looked at the impacts, let’s do some self-reflection, any thoughts?  

 

Victoria: Yeah, I actually have some concerns coming from the battle experience between wildlife and humans. The poaching crisis is a wicked problem that needs to be solved, but people are becoming the victims of new proposals to solve this issue. People and wildlife are in conflict and the introduction of green militarization has put wildlife in the lead of this competition. The people hurt in shoot-to-kill policies are not the high-level players. In the illegal wildlife trade there, the low level workers who are putting in the most risk for these returns. I don’t want endangered species to be killed, but I also don’t want people to be hunted, so where is the middle ground that stops illegal hunting and does not harm the people who get caught in the crossfire? Can community-based conservation be the tool that solves human wildlife conflict, while resolving community economic issues. Recent relocation programs conducted by the Indian government may show relocations in executions may not be the only viable option for protecting species. Relocate people from tiger dominated spaces to reduce human wildlife conflicts and allow tiger populations to rebound. Completely voluntary, people moved to new locations where there is either not a viable habitat for tigers or have no current tiger populations. For the relocation, the people are compensated with solar powered housing on two acres of arable land and given seeds to start their farms. Learning about these programs, I have to wonder if they can be implemented in parks throughout Africa, and if so, why haven’t they been?  

 

Katie: Well, you know, for me, I keep trying to imagine what this policy would look like in the US. That is, if our own park rangers were strapped with weapons and had the authority to kill poachers on sight. Although I think we do a significant amount of stigmatizing the poachers and antagonist, our negative feelings are not nearly enough to justify such an aggressive policy in the US, because we have the privilege is developed nation to rely on our government and justice system to respond accordingly. Obviously, some African countries do not have the same privilege to rely on their government, amd I feel that we’re to blame for that. After independence, we never let them develop on their own, as we’ve constantly injected our own conservation agenda. Consequently, as this agenda has played out, I think we collectively see and view Africa through what it is not, rather than what it is. Somehow, there’s got to be a collective shift in this view where wildlife and native peoples live together in harmony with their own unique methods of hunting and conservation practices, void from those in another continent. Yet given the neoliberalization Africa’s endured, I’m pretty pessimistic if we’ll ever be able to see it this way.  

 

Bo: Both of you guys have some really solid points there. I suppose I don’t really look at this from possible solutions too much, more Looking at it, I suppose as a systemic issue. Reflecting on my ultimate view, I can right best sum it up as veering towards cynicism, or at least pragmatism.  I mean these ideas of wilderness and preserving African savannas versus the motives of the poachers have always been black and white for me, and now it’s just like 1000 Shades of Grey. I mean, I remember seeing this documentary Virunga we brought up earlier, and having like no sympathy for the rebels or even giving any thought to the locals who aren’t even shown. Similarly, I’m surprised by some of the actions by the big four NGOs and how unethical their agendas can be at sometimes. From what I’ve read, like these groups are at least cognizant of the misconceptions surrounding poaching and park locals. With such a compelling story that continues to motivate donors then it’s honestly not in their best interest from a financial standpoint to attempted to debunk this. For me it all circles back to this imagined wilderness, whether related to Ansel Adams photos or Nat Geo documentaries, there’s a constant. No people. This has never been the case though. So we keep ratcheting up defense measures to protect something that never was. And the ones who were displaced in the first place, to make this dream a reality, they continue to pay the price. And sometimes it’s the ultimate price.  

 

Victoria: We went different directions, but I feel like we all got something out of this topic. So the next time you flip open a National Geographic magazine to an essay on snares, see at WWF bus ad of a detusked elephants, or turn on Animal Planet to watch a show about an anti- poaching unit comprised of retired American Navy Seals, just keep in mind what, and more importantly, who you aren’t seeing.  

 

Bo: From WDUML’s Concerning Conservation this has been Victoria Grant, Katie Ridgeway and Bo Baney. Thanks for listening and we hope you tune in next week. 

 

[music] 

 

Lisa Campbell: You’ve been listening to Seas the Day, a podcast from the Duke University Marine Lab. 

 

Today’s episode was rewritten and produced in January 2019, by Bo Baney, Victoria Grant, and Katie Ridgeway.  

 

Final editing was done by Rafa Lobo. 

 

Our theme music is by Joe Morton, and our artwork is by Stephanie Hillsgrove. 

 

If you enjoyed today’s episode, why not leave us a rating on apple podcasts? You know you want to.  Thanks for listening. 

 

END OF TRANSCRIPT 

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