The stakes are high; the guides\u2019 predictions are announced over the radio, drawing thousands of people from up and down the coast on buses, motorcycles, and bikes to Lor\u00e9 for a worm-calling ritual. A designated person lights a torch and scatters burning embers over the reef to attract the animals to the light, then others chant to the worms. Finally, people wade into the water to scoop the animals into specially made baskets. The spiritual guides haven\u2019t told Mondrag\u00f3n what clues they use to anticipate the worms\u2019 arrival, but they\u2019re usually right. \u201cThe locals knew exactly when it was going to happen\u2014I mean, almost to the minute,\u201d says Schulze, who attended the Lor\u00e9 festivities in 2018 with Mondrag\u00f3n.<\/p>\n
Further east, in Vanuatu, Vusqal\u2019s community likewise watches for environmental signals to gauge the worms\u2019 arrival. When the leaves of the wehr tree\u2014the oak species\u00a0Casuarina equisetifolia\u2014turn reddish-brown in October, \u201cthat\u2019s the sign we are nearly ready to harvest,\u201d explains Vusqal. Seeing a particular seabird circling over Wasaga Village is another clue. After noticing these signs, locals begin a countdown based on the lunar cycle: On the night of the sixth day after the moon first becomes visible in daylight, they know it\u2019s time. \u201cThat\u2019s when the palolo worm will swim to us,\u201d says Vusqal.<\/p>\n
After families gather and collect the worms\u2014at this point a fishy-tasting mix of epitoke remains, eggs, and sperm\u2014they carry baskets back to the village. They wash their harvest and collect the rinse water, which they use to treat fever, scabies, wounds, and other ailments. Then they wrap the strained palolo in leaves and bake it in underground earth ovens with hot rocks and coal. That way \u201cit can last for weeks,\u201d Vusqal says. Importantly, they give some palolo to other communities of Vanua Lava; in return, they receive meat from wild pigs and other hunted animals. \u201cWe use it for trading and also to keep our relationship \u2026 between us and them,\u201d Vusqal says.<\/p>\n
Just as the palolo forms a key link between communities, it also creates a critical bond between the fertility of the ocean and that of the land: On nearby islands, locals use water from the palolo-rich reef to fertilize crops. Similarly, people in Lor\u00e9 scatter worms onto the soil of cornfields. \u201cIt\u2019s really important that you fertilize the soil with it because it renews this marine and terrestrial relationship,\u201d Mondrag\u00f3n says.<\/p>\n
Islanders elsewhere attribute different symbolic meanings to sea worms, says anthropologist Cynthia Fowler from Wofford College in South Carolina, who wrote a 2016 book about people\u2019s interactions with sea worms in Sumba, an island in Indonesia. (There hasn\u2019t been a systematic study of the sea worm species harvested there, but they likely include palolo worms.) There, the appearance of the invertebrates\u2014which locals call nyale\u2014represents the return of the sea worm goddess, a beautiful Sumbanese woman who became a deity after throwing herself off a cliff to escape pursuit by suitors. In parts of Papua New Guinea, the palolo harvest is linked to the return of spirits from the underworld, forming a link between the living and the dead. Fowler marvels at how sea worms retained their cultural importance as contemporary Pacific Islanders\u2019 ancestors spread across the Pacific. \u201cEven though the patterns vary, there\u2019s still this heightened symbolic significance,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The palolo harvest is also critical to keeping time itself going. Not long after the November spawning on the island of Loh in Vanuatu, summer solstice dawns in the southern hemisphere and the sun reaches its lowest position on the horizon. According to Mondrag\u00f3n, locals believe the sun risks getting stuck there and that the palolo harvest is critical to ensuring the sun returns northward. People chant as they flip the animals from worm-catching nets into food baskets. The ritualistic transformation from animal to food is said to turn the sun back in the sky, Mondrag\u00f3n says. \u201cThat\u2019s meant to be a really important ritual which will anticipate the intended movement of the sun back to its northern horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n
In parts of Vanuatu and Fiji, the rise of the palolo reminds people of the upcoming cyclone season. It\u2019s a sign that people must prepare by building or repairing traditional cyclone houses made out of forest plants and storing up food and drinking water. As climate change intensifies tropical cyclones, Kelso expects that such reminders will become increasingly important.<\/p>\n
Some experts worry that young people aren\u2019t learning ecological timekeeping from elders as more move to other regions to find work and become less interested in traditional practices. There are also anecdotal reports in Samoa and Fiji that palolo worms themselves are declining, perhaps because of coastal development or ocean acidification, though Vusqal blames people who aren\u2019t respecting traditional harvesting practices. Still, Mondrag\u00f3n believes that ecological-calendar traditions are largely holding strong in the southwestern Pacific and that resilience to climate change is one of many reasons to protect these ancient calendar systems. \u201cThese are forms of traditional knowledge that\u2014it seems to me\u2014are going to continue being relevant,\u201d Mondrag\u00f3n says.<\/p>\n
While many Pacific peoples measure time in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the palolo harvest, they often stop counting the weeks afterward and only observe the lunar cycle, allowing time to relax back into months. As the cyclone season comes and goes and the wet season shifts back into dry, Vusqal\u2019s community will once again wait for the leaves of the wehr tree to brown and the palolo-heralding seabird to return. Meanwhile, inside the coral rubble on the reef bottom, the palolo worm will once again regenerate its epitoke, waiting for the right moment to return to its people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The stakes are high; the guides\u2019 predictions are announced over the radio, drawing thousands of people from up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[25923,390,134,126653,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-377325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-climate-adaptation","tag-climate-change","tag-health","tag-indigenous-knowledge","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}