"We feel that helping them to learn and love to appreciate nature when they are young will help them when they are older to want to protect, preserve and conserve nature," Lufafa said.
#SHOEBILL STORK EATING HOW TO#
Generation Root Foundation does outreach programs to school kids to teach them how to connect with nature and understand the importance of conservation. But his work to help communities with conservation and environmental issues hasn't stopped. The shoebill storks Lufafa had been looking for, eventually returned to the lake, which he was very happy about. We felt like it was divine intervention in all of it." "Sometimes these small things can have a huge impact. "It wasn't a huge effort on BYU," Galbraith said. "Now a few years later, it's been cleared and it's a beautiful thriving lake."ĭuring Galbraith's visit, he canoed the lake, photographed the transformation and met with villagers who were catching massive amounts of large fish in the lake. I passed a piece of advice on, and I didn't expect it to change people's lives," Galbraith said.
"It was one of those things where none of us expected anything. The professors, students and librarians at BYU didn't know their advice helped the lake become a success until Galbraith visited Uganda again in April 2023 after he spoke at an academic conference in Kenya. Smaller lakes near Lake Nakuwa had also become infested with the weed, but Lufafa and his team were able to help clean those lakes with the weevils too. Lufafa said people had abandoned hope and let their boats rot because they thought their lake would never be clean again, but now people tell him they were saved. "People were very happy when they saw that they could go back and fish," Lufafa said in an interview with Galbraith.
#SHOEBILL STORK EATING FREE#
(Photo: Quinn Galbraith)Īnd sure enough, the lake started clearing.īy December 2020, the lake was free of the weed that had plagued it for almost five years. Godfrey Lufafa and a village member stand next to a stone cistern that was built to breed weevils to help clean Lake Nakuwa in Uganda in April 2023. He worked with Lufafa to connect him with local organizations to bring this solution to Lake Nakuwa. Through connections that spanned all the way to Australia, South Africa, then back to Uganda, Rader learned a few other communities in Africa were successfully using the beetle to fight the Salvinia molesta populations. Rader researched the weed Salvinia molesta and discovered a small weevil native to Brazil can effectively control the plant's spread. Galbraith and Spackman contacted the BYU plant and wildlife sciences librarian Mike Goates who connected them with Russell Rader, a professor of aquatic ecology. The village leaders asked the BYU group if they could help devise a solution to eradicate the weed. "Many people say they have never done anything else apart from fishing," Lufafa told Galbraith. Villagers try to clean the lake by pulling out weeds that had infested Lake Nakuwa in Uganda in May 2019. The villagers tried everything to get rid of the weed, but every time they hauled plants out to the shore, the plants multiplied and filled in the gaps within days.īeing a lake about 2 miles wide and 8 miles long, it was impossible to get the lake fully cleaned. Lufafa had been researching the shoebill stork - a significant bird that used to nest near the lake but had been driven off since the infestation. The weeds also were affecting the lake and the surrounding environment's ecosystem. "These villages - dozens of them - that relied on the lake for fishing, had all given up," Galbraith said. Without the lake, Lufafa said almost 10,000 people didn't know how their families were going to survive. Lake Nakuwa was crucial to the economic and physical well-being of the community: it provided food, transportation, water and a source of commerce with farming communities. A man tries to pull invasive weeds out of Lake Nakuwa in Uganda in May 2019.
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