Why in news?

The Chilika Lake, Asia’s largest brackish water lagoon, has 176 fishing cats, according to a census conducted by Chilika Development Authority (CDA) in collaboration with The Fishing Cat Project (TFCP).

Highlights:

• This is the world’s first population estimation of the fishing cat, which has been conducted outside the protected area network.
• According to CDA, the estimation was conducted in two phases.
  • Phase-I was conducted in 2021 in the 115 sq km marshland present in the north and north-eastern section of Chilika and its surrounding areas.
  • Phase II was conducted in 2022 in the Parikud side along the coastal islands of Chilika.
• Earlier this year, CDA had declared its intent to adopt a five year action plan for fishing cat conservation in Chilika.

The Procedure

• A total of 150 camera traps were deployed in two phases with each fixed in the field for 30 days. Spatially Explicit Capture Recapture (SECR) method was used to analyse the data.

The participants:

• Local fishermen and villagers of Chilika were the primary participants in this exercise.

About fishing cats

• Fishing cats are globally threatened cats that occur in wetlands like marshlands, mangroves and flooded forests in major South and Southeast Asian river basins starting from Indus in Pakistan till Mekong in Vietnam and in the island nations of Sri Lanka and Java.
• They are found in 10 Asian countries but have remained undetected in Vietnam and Java since the last decade or so.

Importance

• Wetlands in Asia are being lost at alarmingly rapid rates and proper data on their current status or even baseline data in many countries are missing. The status of many wetland species remains understudied and highly threatened. Tracking specialist species such as the fishing cat gives us an indication of what might be happening to these ecosystems, which are safeguards against climate change and droughts.