New African mole rat species discovery

From Wildlife Extra:

April 2013. Two new mammal species have recently been discovered on different continents, a porcupine from north-eastern Brazil, and a mole rat from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia.

…

The new species of mole-rat, Fukomys vandewoestijneae, is described from an area on the Zaïre-Zambezi watershed. Its known distribution is limited to the Ikelenge pedicle of Zambia and adjacent areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and presumably Angola. Colonies of this social mole-rat were observed in the chanas (dambos), degraded miombo woodland and in villages.

More information can be found in the online journal Zootaxa.

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World Bank destroys rainforests

This video is called Wildlife of the Deep Congo Rain Forest.

From Wildlife Extra:

World Bank encouraging industrial scale logging

World Bank refuses to review its support for logging in tropical rainforests despite criticism from its own independent evaluators

February 2013. The World Bank Board of Directors has blocked a call by independent evaluators to review the outcomes of the Bank’s support for industrial-scale logging in tropical rainforests. The evaluators concluded in a report that such operations have not been effective in reducing poverty, the World Bank’s core mandate, or achieving sustainability. Despite these findings, the Board voted unanimously against a recommendation that the Bank review the effectiveness of its support for tropical forest logging.

“The very survival of tropical forests and the way of life of people who live in them is under threat, and the World Bank is in denial about its contribution to the problem,” said Rick Jacobsen of Global Witness. “As a public institution tasked with reducing poverty, the World Bank should take very seriously its own evaluators’ finding that its approach is not helping vulnerable forest communities. It’s time for the Bank to stop defending destructive logging practices in the name of development benefits that never materialize.”

Widespread logging of tropical rainforests

The Bank has been instrumental in putting into place policies in many tropical countries that result in widespread logging of tropical rainforests. Yet according to a growing body of evidence, industrial-scale logging contributes to tropical deforestation while doing little to improve the lives of forest-dependent communities and indigenous peoples. Corruption and lack of government oversight further aggravate the problem. In the countries of Africa’s Congo Basin, home to the world’s second largest rainforest next to the Amazon, law enforcement in the logging sector is ineffective and corruption and cronyism are widespread. Recent reports from a government-appointed independent observer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, found that many international logging companies are carrying out illegal activities.

DRC forests in danger

“After 10 years of World Bank-led reforms in the DRC, roughly 150,000 km2 of rainforest remain in the hands of poorly regulated international logging companies, while communities are once again being left behind,” said Susanne Breitkopf of Greenpeace International. The reform process in the DRC has been marred with irregularities and widely criticized; meanwhile, a law that would support community management of forests has been stalled for years, and the Bank is financing a forest zoning process that is likely to earmark huge areas of rainforest for industrial logging.

Forest dependent communities

While the Bank fiercely rejected the evaluators’ criticism of its support for industrial-scale logging in the tropics, it accepted seven other recommendations made in the report. Two of these focused on the need to provide more support for forest-dependent communities to allow them to directly manage their own forest resources. The Bank has not yet indicated how it plans to implement these recommendations. Breitkopf remains sceptical: “In order to reduce poverty and deforestation, the Bank needs to put land rights and community forest management at front and centre of its projects, rather than making them cosmetic add-ons.”

Related articles

• Dr. Reese Halter: Rapacious War Against Nature: Indonesian Palm Oil (huffingtonpost.com)
• The year in rainforests (news.mongabay.com)
• Brazil to inventory Amazon rainforest trees (terradaily.com)
• Brazil wants to count every tree in the Amazon rainforest (smartplanet.com)
• WWF urges Indonesian pulp producer APRIL to immediately stop pulping tropical forests (wwf.panda.org)
• World Bank management rejects criticisms of industrial logging (climate-connections.org)
• World Bank Unmoved on Auditor’s Criticism of Forest Policy (ipsnews.net)
• Tropical Tree Climbing Offers Eco-tourists a Bird’s Eye View in the Amazon Rain Forest (prweb.com)
• Paper firm says to stop cutting Indonesia’s natural forests (reuters.com)

41 new moth species discovered in Congo

After bad news from Africa, some good news.

This video says about itself:

The horse chestnut leaf miner Cameraria ohridella is a leaf mining moth. This short film shows the moth on the leaves of a horse chestnut tree.

The moth grows up to 5 mm long and flies in the spring. Its larvae (caterpillars) feed on the leaves and cause the brown blotches seen on leaves from the summer onwards. Infected leaves become covered in small brown patches which will spread rapidly across the whole tree. Infected trees can look autumnal in appearance.

From Wildlife Extra:

41 new species of moths discovered on Congo

Tiny leaf mining moths have very unusual habits

December 2012. In the rain forests of the Congo, where mammals and birds are hunted to near-extinction, an impenetrable sound of buzzing insects blankets the atmosphere.

Because it is a fairly inaccessible region with political unrest, much of the Congo’s insect biodiversity remains largely unexplored. In a new book, researchers at the University of Florida and the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium provide insect biodiversity information for this area in Central Africa that is increasingly under threat from habitat destruction.

41 new species

Focusing on a group of leaf-mining moths, researchers name 41 new species, nearly doubling the number previously known from the region. Leaf miners occur worldwide and the biodiversity research is important because some species are agricultural pests, while others help control unwanted invasive plant species. Some are also known to delay plant aging.

“When we began this project, we had no idea how many species would be out there,” said co-author Akito Kawahara, assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “In a two-week field trip, we discovered nearly 50 potentially new species, which is really surprising. There is still an enormous amount of life out there that we know very little of.”

Tiny moths

Lead author Jurate DePrins has been working on leaf miners in the Congo for nearly 10 years and was joined by Kawahara about five years ago. As the name suggests, the small moths burrow within leaves as larvae, making them particularly difficult to find. Adult moths measure only about 2 to 5 millimetres in length, but they can be extraordinarily beautiful with colourful markings and metallic scales, Kawahara said.

Flat caterpillars

“The caterpillars are completely flat so they can live inside the thin leaf,” Kawahara said. “If you think of a regular caterpillar and then you squished it and shrunk it, that’s what they look like.”

After collecting caterpillars in the wild, researchers raise the larvae to adulthood on-site, a process that takes less than a week for some species.

Micro-world

“It’s so hard to tell what’s actually happening because they’re so small and they get overlooked, but if you look at what is happening inside a leaf under a microscope, it’s just an incredible world,” Kawahara said. “You’ll see a tiny wasp larva living within a caterpillar, and another, even smaller wasp larva living inside that larger wasp larva that is inside the moth larva. It really opens your eyes to this incredible, unknown world and makes you think, ‘What is going on here?’ It’s truly amazing.”

Very unusual

Leaf-mining moths have unusual survival strategies, poorly understood by researchers, Kawahara said. Relatives of the new species are known to make “green islands,” patches of green leaves found in a pile of brown leaves. When leaves fall from trees and turn brown, the caterpillars preserve the leaves they live in and keep them green.

“Some of these caterpillars actually have the ability to control plant tissue and prevent aging in the plant,” Kawahara said. “Now we’re trying to actually understand the mechanism behind how they actually do it.”

Lithocolletinae, the group that the authors focused on, is one of the oldest-known subfamilies in Lepidoptera, first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The only book describing its species in Africa was published in 1961.

“This is really one of the first major revisions on species level of any of the African members of this large family,” said Donald Davis, a research entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. “Any of their discoveries is going to be important because it greatly increases what we previously knew, how little we knew.”

While many large organisms are being studied, not many researchers focus on the smaller organisms, Davis said. Information about Lithocolletinae is needed to understand which species may be agricultural pests or used to control invasive plants.

“It’s an unknown fauna and so they’ve made a major step to start telling us something about this biota,” Davis said. “Because the moths are herbivores, they have both beneficial and detrimental benefits. It’s one of the things we get a lot of questions about.”

The research was published in Zootaxa.

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• Parasites Use Sophisticated Biochemistry to Take Over Their Hosts (nytimes.com)
• Skull-Faced Caterpillar (uniquedaily.com)

British Africa aid to corporations, not Africans

This video about Congo says about itself:

The greed for resources and Christian souls was a lesson in brutal European colonialism. In this case Belgian King Leopold II.

By Paddy McGuffin in Britain:

Britain ‘spends Africa aid on big business’

Tuesday 11 December 2012

The British government is spending millions of pounds promoting the interests of multinationals in Africa instead of fighting poverty, charity War on Want claimed today.

Global food and drink firms that produce many household brands have benefited at the expense of small-scale farmers in countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi, the charity alleges.

According to War on Want those companies include Monsanto, Unilever, Diageo and SABMiller.

It also accuses the Department for International Development (DFID) of undermining efforts to combat poverty by increasing corporate power over local agriculture and supporting land grabs in Kenya, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone.

It further argues that the government’s policy will increase hunger levels in Africa, already up from 175 million to 239 million in two decades, citing UN figures.

In a new report published today the charity also criticised close personal connections between the British government and multinational companies.

Unilever is one example, where its CEO Paul Polman sits with David Cameron on the UN High Level Panel on global poverty.

DFID’s director of policy Nick Dyer started his career with Unilever, while the firm’s external affairs director for Africa Douglas Brew was previously Africa regional manager for DFID.

The report also exposed DFID’s support for a complex network of companies and investment funds registered in Mauritius, one of Africa’s foremost tax havens.

The revelation comes at a time when senior government officials are pledging to crack down on corporate tax avoidance in response to the public outcry over avoidance by firms such as Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

War on Want executive director John Hilary said: “DFID is channelling more and more UK aid to multinational food companies seeking to take over land and agriculture in Africa.

“Yet the expansion of corporate control over farming will increase vulnerability among the world’s poorest communities, deepening poverty and hunger for years to come.

“DFID should be using the aid budget to support small-scale farming in Africa, not boosting the profits of big business.”

Related articles

• More UK aid channelled via investment funds in tax haven of Mauritius (guardian.co.uk)
• Aid for Diageo? UK’s private-sector emphasis comes under scrutiny | Felicity Lawrence (guardian.co.uk)

Good mountain gorilla news

This video, recorded in Uganda, is called Touched by a Wild Mountain Gorilla (HD Version).

From Wildlife Extra:

Mountain gorilla population grows

Some good news at last, but the threats are ever present and the huge conservation effort must continue

November 2012. The total world population of mountain gorillas has risen to 880, according to census data released by the Uganda Wildlife Authority. The number of mountain gorillas has increased from the 2010 estimate of 786 after a count in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. The critically endangered animals live only in two locations, Bwindi and the Virunga Massif area, which spans parts of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.

Growing population for 10 years

A total of 400 mountain gorillas have been confirmed to be living in Bwindi and 480 were counted in the Virunga Massif in 2010. Both populations have had positive trends in population growth over the last decade.

“Mountain gorillas are the only great ape experiencing a population increase. This is largely due to intensive conservation efforts and successful community engagement,” said David Greer, WWF’s African Great Ape Programme Manager.

Major tourist attraction

Many mountain gorilla groups have been habituated to human presence and are a major tourist draw. In addition to supporting the important surveillance activities of park staff, visitor revenue has been reinvested into community projects such as wells and schools.

Threats – Snares, disease and habitat loss

The greatest current threats to mountain gorillas are entanglement in hunting snares, disease transfer from humans, and habitat loss. The prospect of oil exploration in Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Virunga National Park by petroleum companies is also cause for concern.

Virunga under threat

While oil drilling would not occur directly in gorilla habitat, industrial activity would compromise the integrity of Virunga National Park, Africa’s first national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. An influx of workers and heavy equipment could greatly threaten the park’s prized biodiversity, which also includes elephants, hippos and the rare okapi antelope.

Seven gorillas caught in snares

“More people in Virunga would likely lead to an increase in deforestation, illegal hunting and more snares in the forest,” Greer says. “At least seven Virunga mountain gorillas have been caught in snares this year and two did not survive. The gorilla population remains fragile and could easily slip into decline if conservation management was to be disregarded in the pursuit of oil money by elites.”

36 groups of gorillas in Bwindi

Mountain gorillas live in social groups and the census results indicate that the 400 mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park form 36 distinct social groups and 16 solitary males. Ten of these social groups are habituated to human presence for either tourism or research.

The Bwindi mountain gorilla census was conducted by the Uganda Wildlife Authority with support from l’Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature and the Rwanda Development Board. The census was also supported by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme (a coalition of the African Wildlife Foundation, Fauna & Flora International, and WWF), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Conservation Through Public Health, the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, the Institute for Tropical Forest Conservation, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.

This census was funded by WWF-Sweden with supplemental support from Berggorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe e.V., the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Republic of Congo creates new National Park to protect 115,000 gorillas: here.

March 2013. The world’s leading conservation organizations have joined together to fight for the survival of the Endangered Grauer’s or eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri). Found only in the mountain and mid-altitude forests of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Grauer’s gorilla is not only the largest of the four gorilla subspecies but also the largest primate in the world: here.

Related articles

• Mountain gorilla numbers rise by 10% (guardian.co.uk)
• Endangered Mountain Gorilla Population Grows Slightly (livescience.com)
• Mountain Gorilla Population Up 12% in Past Two Years (treehugger.com)
• Great news: Mountain gorilla population has increased! (holykaw.alltop.com)
• How does Baby Kong keep dry in the rain? A gorilla mumbrella! (thisismoney.co.uk)
• Western tourists funding attacks on Virunga’s wildlife and rangers (wildlifenews.co.uk)
• Can Ecotourism Save the Great Apes? (harvardpress.typepad.com)

Another milestone for this blog

This is a Spanish video on the new monkey species discovery.

I have to thank the newly discovered owl faced monkey species from Congo again.

My blog post on this discovery not only caused my blog to have the highest number of visitors on one day ever since the blog moved to WordPress. It also made last week the week with most visits ever.

New record visitors’ number for this blog

Yesterday saw a new record number of visitors at this blog, at least since the move to WordPress.

For the first time, over 1,000 a day: 1,064.

As I wrote, for my earlier record number of visitors I had to thank a dinosaur, extinct for 75 million years, which I had blogged about.

For the new record, I have to thank a new owl faced monkey species, recently discovered in Congo. Fortunately, it is not extinct yet, and I hope that it will not become so.

This video is on the monkey discovery.

New African monkey species discovered

The new species Cercopithecus lomamiensis turned out to be different from the species Cercopithecus hamlyni, the owl faced monkey, which was already known.

From the Public Library of Science:

Researchers have identified a new species of African monkey, locally known as the lesula, described in the Sep. 12 issue of the open access journal PLOS ONE. This is only the second new species of African monkey discovered in the last 28 years.

The first lesula found was a young captive animal seen in 2007 in a school director’s compound in the town of Opala in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The young monkey bore a resemblance to the owl faced monkey, but its coloration was unlike that of any other known species. Over the following three years, the study authors located additional lesula in the wild, determined its genetic and anatomical distinctiveness, and made initial observations of its behavior and ecology, as reported in the PLOS ONE paper.

The new species’ range covers about 6,500 square miles in central DRC, in what was one of Congo’s last biologically unexplored forest blocks. Although its range is remote and only lightly settled at present, the lesula is threatened by local bush meat hunting. “The challenge for conservation now in Congo is to intervene before losses become definitive,” say John and Terese Hart, who led the project. “Species with small ranges like the lesula can move from vulnerable to seriously endangered over the course of just a few years.”

See also here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

‘Vulture capitalists’ exploiting poor Congo

This video from Britain is called Jubilee Debt Campaign: Toxic Debt.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Vulture fund ‘picks the bones’ of DR Congo

Sunday 27 May 2012

Debt campaigners are set to demonstrate outside the Supreme Court [in London this Monday] … against a bunch of vulture capitalists trying to pick £64 million off the bones of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.

New York-based hedge fund FG Hemisphere is claiming the massive sum on a debt it bought for just £2m, the Jubilee Debt Campaign said.

The debt originated in the 1980s, when the Yugoslavian government lent money to dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to win contracts for its businesses.

The case is being heard under Jersey law, before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

“Vulture” funds specialise in buying the debts of countries in financial difficulty and then sue for the full amount once other creditors have written off debts and the country is solvent again.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the poorest country in the world according to the UN.

Jubilee Debt campaign director Nick Dearden said the amounts being claimed on the “odious” loan were “extortionate.

“It is outrageous that the Jersey government has allowed this appalling case to be brought.”

The protest will take place at 10.30am in Parliament Square.

What an insult to interesting and useful vulture birds to compare them to those disgusting human “1%” profiteers.

New lizard species discovered in Congo

Fortunately, not just bad wildlife news from Congo about (Ugandan?) military helicopters butcherring elephants …

From Wildlife Extra:

New species of lizard discovered in central African minefield

New armoured lizard from The Democratic Republic of the Congo

May 2012. An international collaboration of scientists has announced the discovery of a new species of lizard from remote, war-torn mountains in Central Africa.

The new species, Cordylus marunguensis, is described from the Marungu Plateau, a montane area west of Lake Tanganyika in south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The research team spent several weeks exploring the area around the plateau for new species of amphibians and reptiles. The new lizard was discovered near the village of Pepa under rocks in grassy fields that were riddled with landmines and unexploded ordnance left over from a heavy conflict that engulfed the region at the turn of the 21st century.

The expedition that led to the new species discovery in 2010 was led by Eli Greenbaum, assistant professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Chifundera Kusamba, a research scientist from the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles in Congo.

See our full list of new species discovered recently.

Suspecting the lizard represented a new species, Greenbaum sent DNA samples to Edward Stanley, a student at the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School in New York City. Mr. Stanley compared the DNA of the Marungu lizard to similar species throughout Africa and confirmed that it was indeed a new species to science. He bolstered the finding by using a new technique called high resolution x-ray computer tomography to reconstruct the lizard’s skeleton in three dimensions, the first time such a technique has been used in a living lizard species description.

Digital skeleton

The digital reconstruction confirmed the presence of tiny bones called osteoderms in the heavily armoured scales of the new species. The reinforced scales are thought to protect the lizards from attacks by predators, and in some cases, to allow the animals to avoid attacks by wedging themselves between small, rocky crevices.

The discovery of the new species offers hope for conservation, even though none of the lizard’s habitat is currently protected.

“Although the Marungu Plateau has been heavily damaged by warfare and habitat destruction, the new lizard proves that it is not too late to implement conservation efforts,” said Greenbaum. It is hoped that the new discovery will lead to the protection of the plateau’s unique plant and animal biodiversity in the near future.

Description of the new species: here.

Conservationists recommend that guard strength in northern Congo’s Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, where elephant numbers have remained stable, should be doubled immediately to protect the park’s estimated 2,300 individuals. In addition, protection should be bolstered just outside the protected area where 4,000 elephants remain in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified logging concessions and swamps patrolled by forest guards: here.