A Scientist, Not a Politician

One of the most unique qualities of the living laboratory of pozas at Cuatro Ciénegas is that the system is relatively closed. In oceans or streams, where most microbial ecology has been studied, the water moves organisms around, making it difficult to draw easy conclusions about how things are living, growing, and evolving.

“If you’re sitting a mile offshore, then you have to worry about the shore, you have to worry about the beach, you have to worry about what’s below you, you have to worry about everything else that’s going on,” Travisano says. “In Cuatro Ciénegas, the ecology is rich but bounded. Water comes up, it cycles around for a couple of miles, and it goes back down.”

But it is that closed nature of the cycle that is threatened by the economic needs of the surrounding community. Cuatro Ciénegas, unlike most other places in Coahuila province, has water that can be used for irrigation—since the earliest Spanish settlements in the region, canals have been dug to channel the water elsewhere. Another potential threat is recreation. Cuatro Ciénegas had become a popular spring break destination, and several of the pozas serve as year-round swimming holes for the 12,000 people inhabiting the small town of the same name located just north of the protected basin.

Irrigation and recreation disrupt the flow of water through the mysterious maze of the basin’s underground aquifers. Siefert notes that while some geologists have dived into some of the larger sinkholes to explore the region’s hydrology, no conclusions have been reached on how the water’s flow is tied together. “We only know that it is connected,” Siefert says. “Removing water from the area for any reason affects everything.”

Beto Lugo, a resident of Cuatro Ciénegas, knows this firsthand. He used to make a living harvesting bat guano from the caves in the surrounding mountains and selling it for use as fertilizer. But starting in 1968, Lugo reports, the bat guano began to disappear. “The area used to be marshy, with lots of mosquitoes and, therefore, lots of bats,” Lugo says through an interpreter. “But it’s different now—very dry.” Lugo doesn’t blame recreation or irrigation for the loss of water—he thinks it has more to do with climate change than anything else. But he does recognize that pulling water from the region will only exacerbate the problem.

Lugo has transferred his knowledge of the region, gleaned from walking it for 73 years, into a new career as a tour guide to scientists visiting Cuatro Ciénegas. His choice may be the next step in a family tradition begun by his brother, the late Jose “Pepe” Lugo-Guajardo, who worked for more than 30 years with the zoologist W. L. Minckley of Arizona State University. Minckley’s name has been given to some of the fish swimming in the pozas. Lugo—like Pepe before him—understands the uniqueness of the place in which he lives and wants to preserve it. But doing so pits him against divergent foes—economic desperation, political nonchalance, and public carelessness and ignorance.

To residents of Cuatro Ciénegas, the basin is the key to riches. Passing the cemetery, Lugo points to the large mausoleum near the front entrance. “He was the richest man in town,” Lugo says, explaining that the man buried there made his fortune by harvesting wax from one of the desert plants and selling it to candlemakers in the border town of Piedras Negras. At its heyday, the wax factory employed 3,000 people in Cuatro Ciénegas. Residents also once found work at the gypsum mines west of town, but the last mine closed in 2004. Most residents make meager livings by harvesting mesquite, distilling xotol, and selling peyote found in the desert. And a few are farmers, raising cattle and planting alfalfa, both of which require lots of water.

So how are a few signs marking an area as protected going to dissuade the region’s entrepreneurs from taking what they need? Slowly, community members like Lugo are teaming with scientists and conservation groups to enforce regulations and change the mindset of locals. In November 2000, the Mexican nature conservation association, Pronatura Noreste, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, purchased Rancho Pozas Azules, effectively cordoning off 7,000 acres in the basin and protecting 130 of the springs. Several of the protected pools are fenced; these are the ones that most scientists are studying.

Yet these formal conservation efforts don’t keep the scientists themselves from becoming embroiled in politics. Valeria Souza, the Mexico-based member of Siefert’s team, has been working in Cuatro Ciénegas for five years. She comments that her research “got green” because of the focus on “protecting this paradise from the silly use of water in the north of Mexico.” For instance, when Souza learned in 2002 that alfalfa farmers were going to open 250 wells and tap into a deep-water source in a valley just south of the basin, she began a campaign to stop them. “My intuition told me that the same deep water was nurturing this amazing ecosystem,” she says. A month later, all 250 wells were closed, though Souza reports that dairy farmers later opened 30 wells. “The battle has gone on for two years,” she says, and while the congress and governor of Coahuila seem keen to preserve the region’s water, Souza says, “Things are slow.”

Siefert’s team is taking the political situation into account in its plans for working in the region. “We can’t use U.S. government research funds directly for the benefit of another nation,” Siefert says. “But we can implement programs to educate people here and in Mexico about the area and its unique biology.” Team members already have attended one conservation-oriented conference held in the region in August 2004. The team also expects to launch an exchange program to bring undergraduate and graduate students from Mexico to work with U.S. team members and vice versa. And a team project, led by Solis, is in the process of developing interactive learning modules featuring the creatures and ecology of Cuatro Ciénegas. The targets are K–12 students in both the United States and Mexico, particularly in Cuatro Ciénegas.

“Children instinctively love nature,” Siefert says. “We want them to understand that they’ve got something special right in their backyard—and if we can teach them a little science as well, that’s even better.”

“The more we can be a positive, active presence in the region,” Siefert says, “the better our chance to educate the community to hold onto and protect what they have.”

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