At more than 42 million acres, the Pantanal is the world's largest tropical wetland.

It spans parts of three countries, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. If you visit the Pantanal, depending on the time of year, you may find open plains dotted with small green patches of forest, with water found mostly in the rivers that wind their way through the area. But when the rains come, those rivers spill out over the plains, covering them in water.

It is the perfect place for biologists to come and study the remarkable creatures that live here. Dr. Arnaud Desbiez is a biologist who's originally from France but has lived in Brazil for more than 15 years where he works to study and protect animals in the Pantanal. He's the founder of the Instituto de Conservação de Animais Silvestres (ICAS)

Houston Zoo's South America’s Pantanal allows guests to explore the tropical wetlands of Brazil. The lush habitat highlights animals they are protecting in the wild, including giant anteaters, tapirs, and more. Partnered with on-the-ground conservationists, the Zoo offers visitors the chance to see these animals in an immersive and engaging trail.

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it.

Mentioned in this episode:

AUTIO SHOW NOTE LINK

Autio

Please check out our affiliate link for AUTIO!

Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it. Professionally edited and narrated, the audio vignettes combine to paint a picture you’re unlikely to get from a history book or visitor’s guide.

Autio

AUTIO SHOW NOTE LINK

Autio

AUTIO SHOW NOTE LINK

Autio

WildWorld_S2E01_Pantanal_final

[00:00:24] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: first image, and that picture, that image, actually changed my life completely.

I was I could not believe what I was seeing. I could not believe. That this gigantic, prehistoric species had been living under my feet for all these years and I had never seen it. No!

Almost never encounter them.

Picture a wild place in South America. Maybe you're thinking of a rainforest with towering trees and wide flowing rivers. Or perhaps you're picturing an Andean mountain topped with ice and snow, where alpacas roam and condors soar. Or a windswept Patagonian grassland. But right in the middle of the continent is a place that is one of the wildest places of all.

One that's home to a tremendous amount of wildlife. And it might just be the best place to go if you want to see some of the most iconic species of South American animals. Jaguars, capybaras, caiman, toucans, and macaws. It's a place called the Pantanal. At more than 42 million acres, the Pantanal is the world's largest tropical wetland.

It spans parts of three countries, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. If you visit the Pantanal, depending on the time of year, you may find open plains dotted with small green patches of forest, with water found mostly in the rivers that wind their way through the area. But when the rains come, those rivers spill out over the plains, covering them in water.

For aquatic creatures like fish, caiman, and otters, the floods provide a wealth of habitat. But land animals have to seek higher ground. The local ranchers relocate their cattle during the high water season, leaving much of the Pantanal as a wilderness. The perfect place for biologists to come and study the remarkable creatures that live here.

My guest for this episode studies some of the more mysterious and enigmatic animals of the Pantanal. Dr. Arnaud Desbiez is a biologist who's originally from France but has lived in Brazil for more than 15 years where he works to study and protect animals in the Pantanal. He's the founder of the Institute for the Conservation of Wild Animals.

Also known as Ecus. Arnaud has worked closely with our friends at the Houston Zoo, which has an exhibit on the Pantanal. Arnaud's work in the Pantanal has focused on two species that are absolutely fascinating. Giant anteaters and giant armadillos. Arnaud Debier, thank you so much for being on Wild World.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Scott. So you work in this amazing area of South America called the Pantanal. And it's a place that, that I've been a few times. And I'm always amazed by it because, I mean, it's really famous as this wildlife Mecca, right? I mean, it's a place that people can go to see these amazing species of South American animals.

Animals, things like jaguars, and caiman, and some, um, spectacular birds. Birds like hyacinth macaws. And, and of course it's really good for fishing too. That's, and that's something that brings a lot of people there, but one of the animals that you work with is a species that I have actually never seen it despite having lived in Brazil and worked in Brazil and spent a lot of time out in wild places.

And that is the giant armadillo. They are pretty rare. I take it.

And her brother, who is almost 80 years old, her older brother, and he had never seen a giant armadillo either before. So this is a really rare, rare species that occurs throughout South America. They're basically found from Venezuela to Northern Argentina, everything east of the Andes. And the Pantanal is paradise for giant armadillos because it's one of the rare tropical ecosystems where man lives in a sustainable way.

Absolutely.

And so it's very, very flat. You kind of have to imagine a plate and you have the Cerrado around it. That's higher up. And then the Pantanal is just a very flat area where the water from the Cerrado kind of drains down to the Paraguay river. So it's an environment of very extreme variation in climates.

We have a flooded season, a dry season that are very extreme. So when it's flooded, everything gets flooded during the dry season. Everything's very dry. And yes, you're absolutely right. The Pantanal. Looks like a Garden of Eden, but in fact, over 95 percent of the Pantanal is privately owned and divided in these large cattle ranches.

And when I say large, it's very large. Thousands and thousands of hectares. They can be between 30, It's basically a mosaic of different habitats, and you have these large areas of grasslands which flood annually. So there's lots of native grass for the cows to forage on. And it's interesting because in Brazil, in this region, we don't have a mega herbivore.

If you look at the African plains. Every blade of grass has a different species eating it, depending on its size, etc. In the Pantanal, we have the capybaras, right, which are these large rodents. So there was an ecological niche that the cattle was able to fulfill. And, you know, so there's been cattle ranching in the Pantanal for the last 250 years.

And up until recently, it was fairly sustainable and, and so you can say that the Pantanal is, you know, one of the few examples in our world of a tropical ecosystem in which man lives and, and that is economically sustainable.

I mean, I imagine that, you know, during the wet season when it's flooded, you gotta, you gotta move your cattle elsewhere. Is that right? They, they use those pastures like when, you know, when the water levels go down.

But other areas, for example, where we work in Yekolandia, It just means that there is less pasture available and there's these patches of forest all over. And so when it gets really flooded, the cattle can use the for go into the forest. And so they can move around. But that is what I love about the Pantanal.

It's such a diversity. There are Plants from all other lots of the other ecosystems. Sometimes the Pantanal is like a melting pot of vegetation from the neighboring Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, Chaco. And so everything depends on just a couple of inches, right? And so if the soil is a little bit higher, usually it's soil that drains really much, a lot.

So if it's, Uh, like a foot or two higher, then that'll become a dryer so you can have cactuses and then right next to that, you'll have palm trees from the Amazon. So, so it's this huge melting pot diversity. Some people laugh and say that the bantanal has no personality. It's a, it's a big mixture of all kinds of trees and all this big melting pot.

But I like to see it as the big melting pot. And that also is found in the fauna. So you have, so the bantanal doesn't have a lot of. Endemism, I think there's like a rodent, but there's no real species that are endemic to the Pantanal Which means that are only found there whereas the Cerrado, no, there are a lot of species that are only found in the Cerrado However, what is striking in the Pantanal is the diversity and the large populations so, you know these species that are really rare in other biomes such as Jaguars, giant anteaters, giant otters Pampas deer, marsh deer, all these species that are hard to find or rare in other areas are found in large, healthy populations in the Pantanal.

And so, so it's a wonderful place to visit.

Absolutely. So if

Whereas if you're in the Pantanal, it's as close as you can get to the African Savannah kind of experience where you can really see lots of different species. And so actually I think more and more people are learning about the Pantanal, but the Pantanal is still kind of a, a well kept secret. Not that many people know about it.

So when people come to Brazil, for example, they want to go to Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon, maybe the Iguaçu Falls, Salvador. So the ranch Bahia das Pedras, where we work in the Nicolando region, they have a small ecotourism facility. They have six rooms and you can see that the people that come are really these very passionate.

People that like to step off the beaten track, right? I mean, it has huge potential for tourism, but there's still, I don't think there's a levels of tourism that there, there should or could be.

And your chances of seeing these things really are, I mean, quite good. I mean, when in my few visits I've made there, I've seen, I haven't seen a Jaguar there yet, but I've seen quite a few of the other large, amazing animals. As I said, the one thing I haven't seen anywhere is a giant armadillo. I have to admit, when I first learned about giant armadillos, I thought they were fake, or I thought they were like an extinct species.

I'm embarrassed as a biologist that I didn't initially know when I first started working in South America that such a thing still lived on our planet.

This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon. I'm talking with Arnaud Desbiez. When we come back, we'll hear more about some of the amazing animals that live in the Pantanal and the way that Arnaud Desbier is working to help understand and protect them. You're

listening to Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon. My guest today is Arnaud Desbiez. A wildlife biologist and conservationist that works in South America's Pantanal.

Just talk a little bit about giant armadillos. I mean, for one thing, how giant are they?

They weigh about 80 pounds. Kind of the size of a Labrador retriever. And as you said, this is a species that is not well known by the general public. Many people think the species has gone extinct, that it doesn't exist anymore. And yet giant armadillos have a wide distribution. They're found in 11 countries in South America, in lots of different habitats and biomes.

They can be found on the wet Amazon, the dry Cerrado. The extremely dry chaco. So they find this diversity of habitats, but yet always at very low population density. So this is a species that is naturally rare and it's nocturnal. They spend their day deep underground in their large burrows. And then they come out at night for on average about five hours to eat ants and termites.

And one of the characteristics and one of the most striking features when you look at a giant dormadillo is on their third finger digit, they have this huge claw, which is 15 centimeters. It's larger than the claw of a polar bear. So they have this really large claw that they use to break open termite mounds that are hard as rock, dig ant nests, because yeah, they feed mainly on ants and termites.

And then they use their back paws to kind of scoop up that sand and, and, and dig. And so as all armadillos, you'll see, they have this characteristic armor on their back, an amazing species. And I had been living and working in the Pantanal for eight years, and I had never seen a giant armadillo. And my wife who works with tapirs was working at the Bayadas Pedras Ranch.

I was working on another project. And one day she came home after one expedition and she said, my God, you're never going to believe what I saw. There were out searching for tapirs very early in the morning and they saw a giant dormadillo. And this was my dream species. I've always loved dormadillos. I've always dreamed of seeing one.

And so I got permission for the owners of the ranch to go pedras. And I just installed some camera traps and I searched around and first it was a little bit hard. The owner of the ranch and the cowboys had to help me to find these giant dormadillo burrows because they themselves knew nothing about giant dormadillos.

It's a nocturnal species. Everybody works during the day. They had never seen one. And so after about three months, I got my first image of a giant armadillo and that picture, that image actually changed my life completely. I was, I could not believe what I was seeing. I could not believe that this gigantic prehistoric species was I had been living under my feet for all these years and I had never seen it.

It's been a whole adventure and long story that we're now an NGO. I've founded an NGO called the ICAS, Instituto de Conservação de Animais Silvestres, the Wild Animal Conservation Institute. We have 23 full time staff working on giant dorminos and giant anteaters. Five interns, and at the moment, seven students between master's, PhD, and postdocs.

So you mentioned camera traps and, and talk a little bit more about that. So that's like a motion activated camera that you leave out in, in a wild area, right?

So you had, you know, the animal go, you'd have a film, you have to wait for the, I don't know, like 36 pictures to be taken. And Pantanal is very remote, so for me, it takes a whole day to get out of the field, right? And then you have to bring it to the shop, wait for it to be delivered, and you'd be like, woohoo!

Now, no, so that when I said, for the giant dormadillo, it's all digital, right? So, the animal goes, and so the cameras have batteries, and you can leave them for, for almost two months, taking all these images. And, and so they're really your eyes and even ears because they can record sound. There's video now.

So they can really be your eyes and ears in the field and detect things that you would never see. I got a, this amazing picture of a giant armadillo and, and yeah, and the detail, I didn't, you know, it was, it was so good that you could, it was, it was just amazing.

[00:19:04] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: Yeah, so how do we work with giant armadillos now? So we still use camera traps, and I wish I could tell you, okay, this is what you do. But the truth is we have become much better trackers under, we understand better how to read the science giant armadillos leave, but it's still still searching for a needle in a haystack.

And so we know that there's some habitats that they prefer. And so we search in those areas, but it's a lot of searching. And then we, so we work mostly during the day. And the trick is to find an animal in this burrow. And you know that an animal is in this burrow because when they dig down, they throw sand in front of the burrow and they close the entrance of the burrow.

Because you see these burrows, they will abandon usually after one or two nights. And they will dig another one. They have really huge home ranges, 25 square kilometers. So they'll stay underground at night, then they go out at night to feed, sometimes come back or they go dig another burrow. And they dig these really deep burrows in just 15 20 minutes.

And so our goal, if we want to capture giant tarantulas, is to find one that's in its burrow. And then we have this huge trap made out of steel called, it's called a jiki, and this is a traditional trap that was used by indigenous people to capture them. capture smaller armadillos, so it's a trap that they go in and can't come out of.

So we've adapted that system, and so we have this huge funnel. And the entrance, it's only the entrance, there's one way out and one way in. So if it's inside, we put the jeki, the trap in it, and then we'll, there's just this little door that kind of hangs, and then A piece of string and so when the animal walks in and knocks over the string, the door closes.

That will emit, we'll put a little transmitter and we'll be waiting far away and we'll hear a signal. We come, we remove the animal from the trap, we put in this gigantic wooden box. and then wait for it to, so then it'll relax, it'll be sleeping, next morning we'll open the box, we'll find it sleeping, and then we'll start a procedure where we will put an implant in the animal, so a small device, telemetry device, we perform a small surgery, intra abdominal, put the device inside, and that will help us to track the animal.

And so, then we use the technique of telemetry. And now, because this is an intra abdominal implant, the distance is not very big and the home ranges of these animals are huge. And so, what we also do is we use a little GPS tag that we put on the armor of the animal, but that will always, that will always fall off after 30 to maybe 50 days.

But the GPS tracker is really cool because the GPS will register in the tracker the exact position that the animal was in. And so we can get all its movement during the night. And so between these two techniques of the implants, we'll find the animal where it's sleeping during the day, but then the tracker will let us understand where it forages and everything else.

And so thanks to that, we've been able to learn much more about the biology, ecology, everything about the giant armadillo. So giant armadillo. It's interesting because what the, what our work in the Pantheon shows is that they need the forest actually. That's where they dig their burrows, but that's where they forage a lot.

And that's also when they breed, if they, when they have their pups, it will always be in a forest, in a, in a, in a forested area. Travel, they can use, they will use open areas to travel. One of their favorite places to forage is called the Murundu, and that's like a small island of vegetation. So if you're studying ants, that's probably a place to go.

It's kind of like, Just a couple of meters in diameter with a typically a termite mound and cerrado vegetation and these kind of little islands of vegetation they love to forge there. So that was really important for us to document that because that's very important for their survival. And that's the exact habitat.

That's the first habitat that gets removed sometimes by landowners when they want to increase the capacity for their cattle, they'll just say, Oh, there's flooded pasture. And then these little dotted island, they don't consider that forest. So they remove those. So it's really important for giant armadillos, but also for some species of birds and insects and reptiles.

And so there's, there's a lot of biodiversity going in these murundus. So the giant armadillos have helped us to learn about that.

How big are they?

And the truth is Scott, I have never seen a pup. Everything that you'll find on the media about us, where you see these images, you'll see as much as I've seen because we've recorded them with our camera traps or video camera traps. That's everything we've learned about for these pups. So what we have learned.

Is that giant dormant eels are amazing mothers, so they look like this really tough species, but they're really delicate mothers. And they have one pup every three to four years, so that's why they have such low densities, why they're so rare. Yeah, that's a slow reproduction rate, yeah. Very slow reproduction.

The pup will nurse for nine months, be dependent on its mom's burrows for almost 15 months. And then it will stay in its mom's home range from three to four years before it disperses. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of parenting. Yes. And so that means that every giant armadillo is precious because they have such low population growth rates.

And so that's really important. So that's something that we always try to share with the local communities and places we work about how rare this species is and how. You know, just a removal of a single individual can have an impact on the population.

Is, is it, is it important that they're there? Absolutely.

Ecosystem engineers are animals that modify resources in the environment and that can impact other species. So here in North America, a good example of an ecosystem engineer would be the beaver. Beavers build dams, which flood areas, which then create a whole new habitat for lots of other species. And lots of other species depend on that.

Well, giant armadillos, they dig these really deep burrows. And they're, nothing else digs burrows such as them. And these burrows are used by lots of other species as a refuge against extreme temperatures. So when it's really hot outside, it's cool inside the burrow. And when it's cold outside, it's warm inside the burrow.

It's also a place to seek refuge against predators. It's also a place where, because giant dromedolos go, they dig all these roots and it's a place to seek food. So lots of insects and roots and seeds to feed on. And then of course, because it attracts lots of other species that attract the predators, we have documented over 80 species using giant dromedolo burrows.

And so lots of different species. If you put a camera trap in front of a giant dormant little burrow, that's a great way for you to sample the, the, the biodiversity and species of, of vertebrates in the area. And I just had a master students finishes his, his, his thesis, and he was looking at the role on invertebrates.

And he found that 300 species of invertebrates called giant dormant beetle burrows their home. You know, he had that control looking at traps for invertebrates outside 50 meters away from giant dormant beetle burrows in the same habitat. And he really demonstrated. So giant dormant beetle burrows provide homes for other species.

They're very important. This is a species, you know, that few people know about. understand. And yet it's providing a huge service to biodiversity. And that's one of the arguments to conserve the species. It helps maintain and create a healthy ecosystem.

I mean, here in Texas, we, we, I think, unfortunately, we most often see armadillos dead on the side of the road. Is that the case in, in the Pantanal as well?

And, but the fact is giant terminals are so rare that we don't have them. You don't really see giant armadillo carcasses, uh, but wildlife vehicle collisions is a big issue in the state where I live, Sul. And that's, uh, that's an issue that we're working on. We've been working on for the past 10 years, of course, yeah.

But for giant armadillos, I think every biome and every different place where we work, there are different threats. Interestingly, in the Pantanal, there is very little hunting. People, there is no culture of hunting. I think one of the reasons for this is just the abundance of meat, right? We said the Pantanal, the main, the main and practically only economic activity is extensive cattle ranching.

And if since you've been in the Pantanal, you know, we have meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And so they're certainly not a protein starved population. And there is now some habitat conversion that is happening where landowners. The traditional pantaneros are selling their land to people that work outside of Brazil, outside of the Pantanal, maybe from the south, Sao Paulo, and they tend to want to deforest areas to increase the carrying capacity, to plant more grass, to be able to have more cattle.

And so what we did When the fire started, our project, the giant armadillo conservation program, 80 percent of our funding comes from zoos in North America and Europe. And before you ask, there are no giant armadillos in zoos, but, but they, they're, but zoos are, are committed to conservation. And so when there were these catastrophic fires, we, our zoo partners actually got in touch with us and said, how can we help?

And so at first when, with the funds we had, we spent on rescue efforts. funding fire brigades, but then talking with the landowner in Baidas Pes, where we work, in Baidas Pes, we had experienced a big fire the year before. And basically the community just comes, takes branches and tries to beat the fire.

And we brought firefighters to train them. And we do this training now every year. And so we, in 2021, there were seven ranches participating. 2022, we're going to have five. 15 ranches participating and last year we had 22 ranches participating in this community fire brigade. So it's been growing and now we cover an area of 600 square miles of, and we haven't had a catastrophic fire since then.

So it has been working. However, this year being an El Nino year, we are very concerned. There has not been a flooded season. We are already at a drought in a drought situation where we should be in a flooded situation. So we are very, very concerned. And this fire community fire brigade, so 22 ranches has also really helped us expand our message of conservation for the giant armadillos, of course, yeah.

And this work is done in partnership also with the Lowland Taper Project, the I. P. Patrice Medici's project. So these are both funded by the Houston Zoo and participate. And so we talk about tapers or giant jar mills. It's really been a great way to talk about species conservation in a way that, and also be useful for the community.

This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon, and we're discussing a wild part of South America known as the Pantanal. My guest is Arnaud Desbiez. So you also work with another species that I am fascinated by. This one I have had a chance to see in the wild, and that's giant anteaters. They're just so cool. I mean, Every time that I have been lucky enough to see one when I've been out in South America, I just get like, so excited because it seems like, you know, let's be honest, it's kind of a strange looking creature, but I just think they're, they're amazing.

I mean, they've got these long snouts and this just enormous bushy tail, right? And they're, they're incredible. Tell me a little more about them. Well,

[00:34:04] Scott Solomon: Yeah. Kind of weird, right? They're

[00:34:16] Scott Solomon: look like a giant waving flag as they're walking and they move pretty fast, right? I mean, when I've seen them at least, maybe they're running away from me, but they seem like they move faster than I expect them to.

They can be fast.

Yeah. I'm picturing a giant butterfly net, but I'm guessing it's something a little more Yeah, it is. That's exactly what it's like. Oh my God. So it's like a giant butterfly net. Well, of course, really reinforced and strong. And usually we go two people. He kind of runs into the net and then he's inside and then the second person comes.

The animal gets Into the net, and then we apply an anesthetic, yeah. My

[00:35:14] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: Yeah, they have very poor eyesights, and armadillos and anteaters in general have poor eyesight, but they have an incredible sense of smell, and they can hear

I think my most memorable experience with the, the smaller type of, of anteater, they call the, the Tamandua, right? The one that goes up in trees. I remember being in Costa Rica one time and one of them came down the tree and started walking in my direction and I, I guess it didn't see me until it got within just a few feet away.

And then suddenly it either saw me or smelled me or whatever, but it, it stood up and they do that. That anteater thing where they put their arms out to the side to try to, I think it's to try to look big and intimidating. Right. But to me, it just looked like it wanted to give me a big hug.

[00:36:02] Scott Solomon: It

[00:36:29] Scott Solomon: to give them a hug.

Yeah. I do want to give him a hug. So, so tell me a little bit about the kind of work that you do with these giant anteaters. These are an animal that I have unfortunately seen as a roadkill on the, on the side of the highway in Brazil. That's gotta be a threat to them.

It's so. We started working with giant anteaters first in the Pantanal studying their ecology and biology as we did with giant armadillos. But the main threat we're looking at and that we've been focusing on for over 10 years now has been the threat of wildlife vehicle collisions. And so giant anteaters are one of the most killed animals.

on the roads in Sul. We have data now. We did lots of wildlife monitoring on the roads, roads counting. When we did this monitoring, so you drive in your car, not too fast, and you count carcasses, take GPS positions. When we did this work, doing these surveys every two weeks, we saw that there were 19 individual giant anteaters dead on the side of the road for every 100 kilometers per year.

However, those surveys were done every two weeks. So then we did the surveys every day to see if we were missing out on animals. And we saw that, yeah, we're missing about 25 percent of the carcasses. And that's just because, you know, rain or animals drag the carcass off and things like that. So we have also placed radio collars on giant anteaters.

And we've placed now in the, I guess it will be more than 70 collars on these, on different animals. Some of our animals have perished being hit by cars, trucks, or vehicles. What's that? Interesting is more than half of these animals that were hit, they go and die a little bit further off the road. They manage to drag themselves off the road.

And so actually, if the number of animals on the side of the road is frightening to you, that's only the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Over half of those animals go and drag themselves and die away. And we know that, you know, we have the data. We know that they die 24 to 48 hours later, right next to the road.

But that means you can't see them when you're driving because, because the vegetation. So putting these two studies, right, the persistence study and the telemetry study together, it turns out that it's not 19 giant anteaters. Dying per year by 100 kilometers. It's 40 giant anters dying per year on a hundred kilometers of paved road.

Yeah. Huge numbers. Yeah, that's huge Numbers. These are huge. That a lot. That's a really high number. That's a lot of animals and that's why these roads are acting as what we call population sinks. So if you imagine you're a sink and you open the drain and all the water comes out, that's the role the highway is doing.

It's sucking animals outside of other habitats. It's making them disappear. And of course, it's not just giant anteaters. It's lots of other species. The tapirs, the foxes, the armadillos, the big cats, all of our biodiversity, they're animals. that I have never seen in the wild that I have seen dead on the road.

So it's a really huge problem. But what our work has shown, Scott, and where our project has been able to make a lot of progress is demonstrating that this is not just a problem for biodiversity. People die on our roads. The problem of anteaters being killed is a problem meaning of collisions, vehicle collisions.

That means that there's a person that hit the animal and that person, that person can die, be paralyzed, get injured, or even sometimes just when the animal crosses and you swerve. And so that's why in the project, we now speak of wildlife vehicle collisions and not of road kill. And we, the mission of the project anteaters and highways is to make roads safe for all.

And sometimes when you make a partnership, so in this case with the local authorities, the state authorities that are responsible for managing the roads for this partnership to work, we had to change our vocabulary and the way that we talk about this issue, not talk about, tell them about the giant anteaters dying and boohoo.

No, we had to talk about collisions. That are threatening the lives of the road users. And that we need to find a solution to that. Because people are dying on the road. And that's a political problem. And then with our data, because we collected lots of data. We can predict where there are collision hotspots.

The authorities now have maps for the highways in the city. state where there's a high probability of these collisions happening. We know the solutions. What work is fences linked to underpasses are our telemetry data with the anteater showed that underpasses without fencing only 1 percent of the giant anteaters used the underpasses.

So you need fences to guide them. So we know the problem. We know the issue. And now we started communicating a lot with the population people to know so that people don't think that all wildlife collisions, all. That's, it's, it's just a tragedy. It's no, this is a predictable tragedy. It will happen and the authorities are not doing anything.

So, and so we kind of have this role where we're telling the people, no, revolt because the roads are not safe for you because, but even though there are solutions and then with the authorities, we're like, look, we could do this and this and working with them to create these solutions. So that's where the project's at right now.

[00:42:23] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: But you know, Scott, In this, so I don't think we mentioned it, but I'm participating in the zoos and aquariums committing to conservation conference where lots of different conservationists are here. And you'll see that a lot of the projects that have been working for many years for over a few decades, all these projects, they started, they really started to protect a species.

So the The person got in there and tried to save species and then you'll see that they started making partnerships with local people, local authorities, key stakeholders. And now all these projects are actually working for people and that they've, there are ways and there are, our interests are in common.

The final goal is the same. And so what's important in conservation is finding ways for your interests and the local communities, the stakeholders, the people around you, for your interests to align so that you can work together for a goal, interpret the problems, think together so that we find the solutions together.

And that's what this conservation is all about.

This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon, and we're discussing a wild part of South America known as the Pantanal. My guest is Arnaud Desbiez. So, Arnaud, you live and work in Brazil now, as I understand it, but, but you're originally from France, is that correct? Yes, so I was actually born

Yes. But we lived half in the France and half in the United States. So I don't have that awful accent that French people have usually, where they attempt to butcher English. You don't have a French accent at all, no. No, no, no. No, because I was born in the, we lived in New York, yeah. Okay. But I don't have a New York accent, either.

Thank God, yeah. But, and I went to university at McGill University in Canada,

[00:44:50] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: But I've always been passionate about animals and wildlife. So. How did I get into this kind of work? Well, I studied zoology and, and then I actually started my career as a zookeeper. And then little by little got interested in learning more about animals in the wild back in the days when I started my career almost 30 years ago, zoos were not really involved in, in wildlife conservation.

And so I started trying to learn more and then I lived and worked in Belize. Argentina, Bolivia, Nepal, also for a while, and then ended up going to do my PhD in Brazil in the Pantanal looking at the influence of pigs and peccaries, the exotic pigs impact on native peccaries. Well, then I, I, I, I met my wife and fell in love, got married and ended up staying in Brazil.

[00:46:07] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: Scott, I've always been kind of obsessed by animals. I've always loved animals, but I, I, I never imagined that I could have such a career. My family always worked in business. And so I was never exposed to any of these possibilities. So it was really going to university and then. Participating in a few congresses and getting to know some people.

It was really word of mouth that I started, the world started opening up to me. This brilliant primatologist called Robert Horwich gave me the opportunity to work in Belize on howler monkeys. And so it was really getting to know people, volunteering and having a chance that I was able to to learn about all these things.

But as a kid, I mean, I never imagined that I would be doing what I do today. And I'm, I'm, I'm grateful for it every day. And if I, if I was to give any advice to teenagers or youngsters listening to us, and that are interested in getting into conservation and wildlife conservation or saving species in the wild.

I would say figure out what it is that you love to do and something that you're good at and you love to do because to work in conservation, you don't need to be a field biologist like I am, or you don't need to be a veterinarian. Conservation is such a multidisciplinary science that you could be an artist.

We need artists to portray our animals. Wildlife and inspire people. We need communicators. If we could communicate about wildlife conservation the way McDonald's does about their happy meals and their specials, we would not be in this position. We need lawyers, environmental laws. We need people fighting for us for public policies.

We need teachers. So the field of wildlife conservation is extremely diverse. So find out what you're good at. What are your skills? And I'm sure that there are ways to apply that to conservation. And to get into this field, this is a field where it's great to know people. And so, you know, I would say go volunteer at your local zoo, see what's going on, talk to the people there, try to talk to as many people as you can to find out what's out there and the possibility.

So, you know, follow your passion, follow what you're good at. Don't think that, Oh, I'm not good in science. So, no, you, any skill that you have

[00:48:39] Dr. Arnaud Desbiez: The Houston Zoo funds 35 projects such as ours, right? So we're just one of many. They work in Africa, Asia, you name it. They kind of work there on all kinds of different species. And their projects are also long term projects that the Zoo is very involved in. And I'll give some examples of how the Zoo is not only involved in financing these projects, but building capacity, finding solutions.

But I think one of the things that we have in common in these 35 projects funded by the Houston Zoo is that we all work very close, have very close partnerships with our stakeholders, local communities, authorities. and work in a diversity of ways. And so I love when I talk to some of the staff at the Houston Zoo, because these people are experienced in finding solutions for in Borneo or, or, or West Tanzania, and they have experience of things that then sometimes can apply to us.

And so we often have long discussions about where the project is going. They help us to be strategic in the work we do and in planning. And so they've always been very, very helpful in that sense. I would like to say the parts where Houston Zoo has helped me the most is in the capacity building of my staff.

And that's one of the cool things in this, at the Houston zoo is the cultural conservation. So people at the tills, when you come into the Houston zoo, they would tell you, Oh, would you like to. Buy a bracelet for 2 to go for conservation, and then they pull that money to get together, and then the staff would decide on who would win this award, and then the, so Gabriel won this Wildlife Warrior Award, and then he came for two months to the Houston Zoo to be trained in education, in communication.

data management, how to present himself, et cetera, et cetera. And, and he also, it was really, he had English classes in the morning. So the zoo sponsored his English classes in the morning. And then afternoon he would go through different sections of the zoo learning. And that has been such a transformative experience.

That's amazing. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I can't express enough how much the help of the Houston Zoo has been transformative for my team. This investment in people, because conservation is people, this investment in people has made the difference.

This idea that when you go and visit the zoo. The money that you spend there, part of that is going directly to support conservation efforts around the world and including yours. So it's really great to hear like specific examples of the ways in which that money is actually making an impact. And I mean, you can go and you can see the, the Pantanal exhibit.

I mean, it's actually one of my favorite exhibits in the zoo and they do have giant anteaters there, don't they?

The plants, the animals to provide, you know, people of Houston with this incredible experience, I even brought to Houston, a lot of the, the stuff the Cowboys use, the gear, the Cowboys use. So, so it should bring, we also share, you know, lots of our field work, uh, materials and, and so it's, it's really based, this exhibit is based on the project.

And that concept has been extended to the Galapagos and lots of other projects. And so I think this idea, so really when you go to the Houston Zoo, you should have a good day out and take the kids out, have fun. But you can really learn something. And you are contributing to conservation just by going to the zoo.

Sometimes I hear, And I know that there's some anti zoo movements and some people get a little bit angry that, oh, animals are confined. And I'm inviting on people, if there are any animal rights people on this podcast that are listening to this and that are have any anti zoo feelings, come Visit the field with me.

Come spend a few days walking in my shoes and seeing what animals in the wild are going through now. The giant tentacles are being run over, burned by fire. Agriculture is expanding. We're losing habitat. There are fires. There are so many threats to animals in the wild. People do not realize that. The Wild is not a Disney movie, and it's rough out there.

So I re we reintroduce this orphan giant anteater whose mothers have been killed on the roads. The survival rate of our anteaters after two years is 50 percent. Always man made threats. We're having a hard time sometimes finding habitats to re to bring these put these animals back in the wild. So go if you are anti zoo, please go to the Houston Zoo.

And if you're still at the zoo, come spend a few days with me and look at the life of the animals. These animals at the Houston Zoo, I guarantee you they have better health care than you and I have, Scott, and probably a better diet. It's incredible what the amount of care that is put into to these animals.

So I thought it's an important message to talk about when we talk about zoos.

Thank you so much, Scott. That's it for this episode. To find out more about Arnaud Desbiez's work in the Pantanal, go to giantanteater. org. If you're in the Houston area, check out the Houston Zoo's exhibit, South America's Pantanal, where you can see giant anteaters and other animals that call the Pantanal home up close.

They've also got an anaconda, tapirs, a jaguar, and more. It's one of my favorite places in the zoo, and Arnaud actually helped to design the exhibit. Go to HoustonZoo. org to learn more and to get tickets. We'll also have links on our website, WildWorldShow. com. You can listen to Wild World anywhere you get your podcasts.

Follow us on social media at at Wild World Show. This episode of Wild World was produced by 3Wire Creative. I'm Scott Solomon. Join me next time as we explore another part of our wild world.