CHITWAN: Bishnu Bahadur Lama, a senior wildlife technician uses a capture gun to shoot at a Rhino deep inside the jungle in Chitwan National Park. The rhino collapses after about 10 minutes after the dart injects Meditomedine-(M-99) and catamine into the male adult. Nearby, a group of people stands ready to fit the Global Positioning System (GPS) radio collar on the neck of the animal.

The whole idea behind this is to conduct a study, for the first time in Nepal, whether an invasive plant species Mikania Macarantha (Michaha Jhar) that is spreading at an alarming rate in the Park has any impact on the rhino population there.

“The plant was first reported in Ilam district in 1966, while its presence was reported in Chitwan in 2000, but during the 2008 rhino census, it was found that the plant spread like wildfire in the national park area.

“We are now conducting a research to find out the impact of the plant species on the rhino population,” said Naresh Subedi, research officer, National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) at the Biodiversity Conservation Centre in Sauraha.

The radio collar will store data of the rhino’s movement. The data will be transferred through the receiver to a laptop computer in the field when it is needed.

“We have an antenna that will detect the rhino while the receiving device will download the track records of its movement stored in the GPS collar from a distance of 1km,”said Dr Shanta Raj Jnawali, the Tarai Programme Director at NTNC.

This research is the first of its kind in Nepal, according to NTNC, and a complete report on the macarantha and its impact on rhinos will be disclosed after three years.

This study will show whether the plant poses any threat to the habitat of Rhinoceros Unicornis, one of the most endangered species. “As the rhino is the indicator species, the first impact of the ecosystem degradation falls on the species. This is why the animal was chosen for the research, while all this will help plan the conservation process,” Jnawali said.

This is the second rhino to be fitted with the collar while five more are on the pipeline.

“In the next GPS collars we will use the satellite system and the movement of the rhinos could be tracked from the office directly,” Subedi said.

There are 408 rhinos in the Chitwan National Park. The GPS system is brought from South Africa is provided by the world wildlife fund and they cost about $10,000.