Wildlife protection bolstered in Peru

Of the 180,000 sea lions that lived on Peru's Pacific coast before El Niño arrived late last year, only 30,000 remain, said Patricia Majluf of the Wildlife Conservation Society

November 13, 1998
Web posted at: 3:00 PM EST

By Environmental News Network staff

(ENN) -- Peru's coastal wildlife will receive some much-needed help after a devastating El Niño year that just about wiped out several marine species living around the southern beaches.

The Peruvian government has authorized the Wildlife Conservation Society to help manage the Punta San Juan reserve, a remote, 133-acre peninsula 300 miles south of Lima, where earlier this year thousands of starving sea lions washed ashore to die.

Beginning late last year, Patricia Majluf, a WCS associate Conservation Zoologist who has studied Punta San Juan since 1979, began recording massive die-offs of fur seals, sea lions, Humboldt penguins, guanay cormorants and Peruvian boobies due to a lack of anchovies and sardines which were driven into deeper waters by El Niño's warmer temperatures. Majluf believes that with wildlife populations at near historic lows, protected areas like Punta San Juan will become critical to the preservation of entire species.

Of the 180,000 sea lions that lived on Peru's Pacific coast before El Niño arrived late last year, only 30,000 remain, said Majluf.

According to a March 30 article by the Associated Press, biologists found 3,000 dead sea lions just in the San Juan reserve, where 9,000 to 15,000 sea lions usually live.

Guano, a valuable fertilizer, is produced from the excrement of marine birds

"After the severe El Niño we just went through, the populations of marine birds and mammals of Peru have been seriously depleted and require increased protection to allow them to recover," Majluf said.

The agreement grants WCS authority to safeguard the site for the next eight years and to establish a conservation, training and research center there. Most importantly, the Peruvian agency in charge of extracting guano will now coordinate its activities with WCS to minimize disturbances to local wildlife. Guano, a valuable fertilizer, is produced from the excrement of marine birds.

"We still have a long way to go before we get full control of the site, but this is a good first step toward improving the conservation status of this very important marine wildlife reserve," said Majluf.

Punta San Juan is one of nearly 300 field projects operated by WCS as part of its international conservation program.

For more information, contact Stephen Sautner, WCS, (718)220-5197, email: ssautner@wcs.org.

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