“There's not much left”: at the front of a boat, the president of the Naturalists of Mayotte sees again “for the first time since Chido” the mangrove of the Mbouzi islet, whose thick plant cover has disappeared, revealing the bare roots of the mangrove trees.
The landscape of devastation contemplated by Michel Charpentier, head of the Naturalists of Mayotte for 20 years, on one of the islets off the coast of Mamoudzou, has unfortunately become widespread across the archipelago since the passage of the cyclone on December 14.
The large trees of Perfume Island – like the mango trees or baobabs – were “down, broken, uprooted”, the naturalist tells AFP. “It feels like an explosion has blown everything away,” he marvels.
The north and east have suffered but it is in the center of Mayotte that the spectacle is striking. For several kilometers, immense trees of which only the trunks remain populate the hills with sometimes blackened ground, noted an AFP journalist.
– Invasive plants –
On the Mbouzi islet, volunteers and employees of the Naturalistes clean and clear the educational trails, armed with trash bags, gloves, and sometimes small chainsaws.
Faced with timid buds, Michel Charpentier puts things into perspective: “It heals but it won't make the fallen trees grow back.”
The director of the association François Beudard warns: this situation will benefit invasive plants which “grow back more quickly than native or endemic species”.
Another point of vigilance for the director: the “legal or illegal” farmers who are already taking over these bare lands to “plant cassava and bananas” while slash-and-burn cultivation, in particular, is wreaking havoc in Mayotte, impoverishing natural spaces.
The tragedy would be “losing rare endemic species, which could disappear forever, like the Comoros ebony, very represented on the Mbouzi islet”, worries the curator of this national nature reserve, Thani Mohamed Ibouroi.
To underline the rich biodiversity of the department, the curator recalls that it is home to two species of baobabs, “when there is only one on the entire African continent”.
As for the mangroves, “quite badly affected”, they should however “go back”, consoles Juliette Crouzet, project manager within the association.
But before they can once again play their role as a “buffer” in the event of marine submersion or as a “feeder” for the marine species that reproduce there, they will have to be cleaned. “All the garbage and trash left in the lagoon (during Chido) return to the mangroves at each high tide,” notes the expert, in front of mangrove trees to which old soiled fabrics cling.
– Lemurs in disarray –
On the wildlife side, lemurs and bats “were the most impacted” by Chido, believes Michel Charpentier.
The lemurs, these familiar figures of the island which move on trees or electrical wires, their tails swinging, numbered 20,000 at the last census, figures the official.
But many must have died in the trees shaken by the cyclone, as did fruit bats, these large bats with orange heads, according to him.
Frugivorous, these species now struggle to feed themselves, and lemurs in particular are “malnourished” and “lost”, being crushed on the roads due to lack of vitality.
The little bats, “the ones we see in Europe” and which live under the roofs which have now been blown away, “no longer have a place to live”.
“There is going to be a high mortality rate, it is irremediable,” Mr. Charpentier predicts.
Thani Mohamed Ibouroi, who left for another islet, “where there is the highest density of straws-en-queue” in Mayotte, returns reassured: the fine, immaculate birds with long tails “are there, in activity”. On the other hand, “there are bird corpses” that he “could not identify”.
“I am not sure that we can return to the same thing because the damage is enormous” and that it will take a long diagnostic work, according to Michel Charpentier.
And this, “if there is no climatic accident of the same kind within two years”.
