Pantanal Is Feeling Effect of Stardom

Brazilian television, which was pretty steamy already, received an erotic boost last April when the nation’s third-largest network, Manchete TV, launched the prime-time soap opera “Pantanal,” about a wealthy ranching family in the vast Pantanal wetlands of central Brazil. Manchete had an instant hit.

But the success of the program, which mixes breathtaking views of the Pantanal with near-explicit love scenes, is having a devastating effect on the wetlands, according to area and international conservationists. Brazilians by the busload are discovering the area, and more often than not they are leaving it worse off. Conservationists are less critical, for now, of foreign visitors because, they say, these tourists are generally more environmentally conscious.

“For example, some tour guides will run through nesting grounds to frighten birds into flight to please their clients, disturbing the reproduction of these birds,” said Lou Ann Dietz, who is responsible for coordinating the Washington-based World Wildlife Fund’s program for Brazil.

“Without meaning to, the tourists may destroy the very birds they went to see,” Dietz said.

Sport fishermen, generally businessmen from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are also taking a toll on the area’s wildlife, says Rosana de Paola, a Brazilian bioligist working in the Pantanal. Although there are laws limiting the amount of fish an individual can catch, there is little enforcement and few sport fishermen abide by the laws, she added.

Poaching is also having a major impact on the Pantanal. Using flashlights in the dead of night, poachers with high-powered rifles aim for the caimans’ reflective orange eyes. According to government estimates, some 500,000 to 2 million caimans, which are protected under Brazilian law, are killed this way in the wetlands every year.

Other ecological threats to the Pantanal come from mercury contamination, dikes being built by some farmers to prevent floodwater from destroying crops, trash and sewage left behind by visitors that is not disposed of properly and pesticides used by farmers and ranchers.