Nature, Snail and Conservation for Me

Me while snailing (Nurinsyiah, 2014)

Nature is additive. There's something in nature makes me feel free, relax, comfortable, and i can enjoy everything about that. So, it's always fascinating to learn about it. 

Actually, i have researched about land snail. And that was so amazing, i never expected before. Some of them were tiny creatures, we have to use a microscope to saw it clearly.

But seriously, the tiny creatures brought me to know not only about themselves but more than that. I knew about the karst issue, the people and the ranger. The Rangers were the people who fought for nature conservation__the local people, the NGO, the government, the researchers/scientist, and everyone who care about nature. I saw by myself how the local people and the ranger fought for Karst Area.

It was Sukolilo Karst Area. There was a conflict area. When we (I, my friend and our lovely supervisor, teh Ayu) just arrived in the area, we saw in the side of the road were sharped bamboo and coloured by red-white (Indonesian flag). We visited and asked for a permit to the leader of the Sedulur Sikep community, Gunretno. This community was famous, they also fought for the Karst area. They are really kind to us and one of them follow us when we took the sample. He's named Pa Handoko, he guided us there.

Sukolilo Karst Area in The Distance (Nurinsyiah, 2014)

You know sometimes it's hard to take samples, sometimes we just found something that we never want to found. When we talk about snails in their habitat we also talk them in their food chains and yeah we talk about the interaction between ''prey-predator''. If snail was prey so there was predator too, such as snakes. It is scared.

But there was a more scary thing than a snake, yup that was human.

In one of the sampling area, when everything was under control, suddenly one of the local people with their celurit on their hand came to us and asked us, what we did? He's really unkind.
But when we tried to explain what we did and who guided us there, he understood and turned to be kind. 

And here, Pa Handoko really helped us, he told us the conditions of the area, all of them. Not only the physic of the area but also the people, the culture and what they have been through for years. How the people afraid of newcomers. YES afraid, the newcomers just want to exploitation karst area.

Karts itself was dry on its surface but really rich of underground water. I heard from the local people they never knew how is hygienic freshwater for long times until the karst ranger helped them by looking for water and pumped it up so that the local people have water. Then the Karst ranger told the local people about the Karst and gave them the spirit to protect the Karst. The karst not only just Karst area from them, it's was their land of birth, that has to protect and inherent to their children. I think they're truly heroes.

Refuse the cement factory by Handoko (2014)

I have learned, everyone has their own roles to make a change. It's just like the ecosystem, every part of the system have a big role. Even just the tiny snail, that Little thing can make big differences. 

So do I, I have a role, A BIG role and they really rely on us, it's such an honour. To protect the Karst area we need scientific data. That's a task and responsibility of scientist/researcher to make it true.  What my team did, was data of biodiversity of karst area especially land snail. 

Land snail is one of the animals that can live and adapted well in Karst area. Where contains high calcium carbonate, it makes karst have unique area and of course the living thing on/in it such as land snail.

According to the data, we hope we can share what we have in there. And how valuable they are. The last to invite everyone to protect what we have and maybe we can do some collaboration from the other subject, not only from malacology (one of biology field, learned about molluscs) not only about the land snail but also the other field (microbiology, entomology, etc) with the other amazing creatures, even more than biology such us geology, law, and etc. We really need it, more data, more info, more strong reasons to protect it. 

Alhamdulillah. This land snail made a story. They also brought me to attend a congress. There, i met the other researcher. They're expert about malacology but they're really humble to shared their stories about many things.

One of them was Tony Whitten. I never imagine before that can i met him, who wrote the book "Fauna Malesiana: Guide to Land Snail of Bali", that i used on my research. My lovely supervisor teh Ayu ever told about him too. He fought for conservation by 'cool' way. He with his article about micro land snail saved the karst area. But in November 2017, we lost our great conservationist. My sincerest condolences to you. You will never be forgotten. Thank you for inspiring us.

The last, in the Congress I also saw in one of the participants' presentation (Ka Afifah) there was a quote:

"One will never know what we lost if he never knows what he had" -Wong and Arshad (2011)."

It always reminds and motivates me to appreciate what we have here. And the first thing we can do, by know what we have so we can protect it well. 

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