The colony is at most 3. 5 million ounces of removable gold, a resource that will be developed through Gold Fields, a gold mining company founded in South Africa.
Gold Fields CEO Nick Holland said in 2017 at a mining convention in Cape Town that chinchillas were one of the main obstacles to the project, but that the company made the decision to find a way to protect the colony.
Major mining allocations take years to develop, and conservation compliance fits into an increasingly important component of the package. chinchillas, which are through Chilean law. The result is a type of mini-arch Noah initiative in the mountains of northern Chile.
The Mining Camp of Salares Norte.
But not everyone is sure that the assignment will protect rodents. Their good luck, or failure, will provide proof of how mining corporations respond to the renewed certainty of government and investors to the impacts of conservation.
The Gold Fields Array conservation operation, which is expected to last nine months, began in August and aims to trap and relocate 25 chinchillas from the mine site to a domain with a suitable habitat about two and a half miles away. can generate billions of dollars in the long run. On the other hand, the cost of allocating chinchilla to date is $400,000, adding the generation of satellite population surveys in a complicated country.
Gold Fields is originally from South Africa, where conservationists developed techniques to capture and move the megafauna in the 1950s. Captures of lions, elephants and rhinos usually involve darts, from helicopters, leaving little room for error. These strategies were first developed with objectives, which included the repopulation of Kruger National Park with white rhinos from KwaZulu-Natal, at the time the last safe haven of pachydermos.
Operation chinchilla will have a bit of the drama of catching an elephant: short-tailed chinchillas are being moved through small traps to a domain whose faeces and other evidence recommend it once as part of its range, according to Luis Ortega, Chile’s environmental director for rodent removal. Animals are simple prey: fur hunters can capture rabbit-sized rodents with their hand in their shallow dens, Ortega said.
“We use a trap that has internal bait and it closes when the chinchilla comes in,” he added. The device, a Tomahawk trap, looks scary but it’s lethal. Bait is an aggregate of almonds, nut peels and grass, with an added sweetener. that rodents find curiously irresistible: vanilla extract.
“The total process will have to be carried out for each of the nine rocky spaces where the animals will be evicted from the structure of the mine,” Ortega said. “According to the government-approved procedure, two attempts will have to be made to capture specimens in each of the rocky areas, each lasting 10 days. “If the attempt fails, the operation should be suspended for 20 days before starting again, to minimize interruptions.
When each chinchilla is caught and taken to its new territory, it will be placed in a fenced enclosure for a few weeks to adjust to its new environment, then monitored with radio collars, techniques that are also used with transfers of megafauna such as rhinos and buffaloes from the Cape.
The chinchillas are glued with Tomahawk traps barleyed with vanilla extract.
The operation will be carried out in a delicate territory between 12,800 and 15,400 feet above the sea point through a team of experts familiar with the region. Although chinchilla is protected by law, its new habitat is protected only for the duration of the project, at which point the corporate will monitor the species.
External experts have some reservations. ” Yes, catching live in Tomahawk traps will be a negative delight for chinchillas, and mortality/death is possible,” Curtis Bosson, a Canadian biologist who has studied the capture and resettlement of small mammals, wrote in an email.
“Relocation will be a very negative delight for them,” Bosson added. “Chinchillas are a colonial social species, they are not accustomed to primary disturbances in their daily routine. They know where to place food and who their neighbor is each. and every day. One move would interrupt all this. “
Captured chinchillas are marked and moved two and a half miles from the mine site.
Closer to chinchillas in length and habitat is the American pika, a mountainous relative of rabbits and hares. In 2015 biodiversity magazine found that experimental translocations of the species between alpine habitats in the 1970s had “mixed results”. But he concluded that pikas were “an intelligent candidate species” for relocation projects in cases where animal habitats were threatened by climate change.
Ortega said that the chinchillas relocation team will be transparent about the good luck or slips of the project, with the collaboration and supervision of the Center for Applied Ecology, a Chilean environmental consultancy, who invited researchers from the University of Chile and the University. La Serena to examine chinchillas, and Gold Fields says researchers will take genetic samples from rodents to map their dating to other populations.
There are few published clinical studies on the species. A new population discovered in southern Bolivia in 2017, the first confirmation of the animal there in 80 years. The Authorized Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the short-tailed chinchilla as “endangered”. “and in decline, noting that the population is “severely fragmented” and that studies on its length and distribution are needed. The Red List also warns that “mining poses a primary risk to the habitat of the species. “
After resettlement, the chinchillas are kept in a corral for a few weeks.
Allocation is part of a context of increased pressure on mining corporations to restrict environmental impacts. More and more investors say they will take into account environmental, social and governance issues, also known as ESGS, in their decisions. FTSE Russell, a UK analytics firm, found that 53% of homeowners with assets incorporate ESG into their investment strategies. Angry shareholders expelled chief executive and two other senior executives from mining giant Rio Tinto after the company destroyed two former Aboriginal heritage sites in Australia to gain access to iron ore (destruction is legal).
In Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, government regulations have also tightened in mining permits. Its Ministry of the Environment was created only ten years ago, when Chile became the first South American country to register with the Organization for Economic Cooperation. Development (OECD), which requires member states to comply with foreign regulatory standards.
According to a 2017 discussion paper from the Economic Structures Research Institute, a consulting firm, “obtaining an environmental permit is a slower, stricter and more dubious procedure for mining companies” in Chile, as the government has “reacted to the environmental considerations of the public and organizations such as the OECD. “Holland, the ceo of Gold Fields, told reporters in August that the licensing procedure took 3 years and required the company to answer a lot of questions from regulators.
In an email, Ricardo Bosshard, Chilean director of the conservation organization World Wide Fund for Nature, said that from an environmental point of view, the Chilean public is “very conscious and is pressuring corporations and the government to change. “
Certainly, pressure from mining corporations in fragile habitats is likely to continue. As the relocation allocation of chinchilla begins in Chile, with the value of gold close to record levels, manufacturers of valuable metals are paying large dividends. the allocation, in turn, will pay conservation dividends.
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