PARENT SESSION
Thursday, August 10, 5:00-6:30 pm
Poster Session 25 - Ecological and science education
Exhibit Hall, Ballroom Level, Cook Convention Center
Sustainable hunting among indigenous groups in the BOSAWAS Biosphere reserve, Nicaragua.
Lugo, Aurora*,, Williams-Guillen, Kimberly, Camilo, Gerardo, Asa, Cheryl,
ABSTRACT- Understanding how traditional indigenous hunting practices are structured in space and time is a crucial part of community-based conservation for many reserves where indigenous people are part of the system. There is a significant amount of speculation and anecdotal explanations on how sustainable hunting practices may have emerged. Yet, little hard data exists. Part of the problem is having the proper experimental system in which the hunting practices of different indigenous groups, as well as hunting rates and prey species population can be evaluated. Our work in the BOSAWAS biosphere reserve, Nicaragua, provides a new system to test such ideas. BOSAWAS is the largest contiguous rainforest north of Amazonia (>8,000 km2). Two indigenous groups live there, the Mayangna who have occupied the same general areas for between 900 and 1300 years, and the Miskito, who settled in the reserve 90 to 110 years ago. The Mayangna are a forest culture, resistant to market influences, while the Miskito are a costal culture, open to external influences. We enrolled indigenous hunters from both groups in most of the villages from each of two territories, one Mayangna (12 of 16 villages) and one Miskito (11 of 13), for a period of thirteen months. All hunting kill sites were recorded with GPS, while data for all hunted animals included species, sex, age, and weight. We also established monitoring transects to determine the abundances of hunted species. This will allow us to compare the temporal and spatial hunting patterns for both groups and them to see how these two cultures adhere or not to what were determined to be sustainable hunting rates. Preliminary results suggest that for most mammal species hunted, both groups are within sustainable levels, but that is achieved differently by each group.
Key words: Traditional ecological knowledge, Sustainable hunting, Tropical rainforest