Elephant and forest

As go the elephants, so go the trees. That’s the message of a new study published in the May 2013 issue of Forest Ecology and Management that found more than a dozen elephant-dependent tree species suffered catastrophic population declines in new plant growths after forest elephants were nearly extirpated from their ecosystems. The fruit-bearing trees all rely on forest elephants as their primary means of seed distribution, a process known as megafaunal dispersal syndrome.

-- John R. Platt

The number of African forest elephants has "declined by 62% in 10 years."

See also Gomphotheres of the Rambunctious Garden

Fate of the elephants

“They were good shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.”

-- from Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits, the first in a series of three articles.

Garamba, a 1,900 square mile national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, used to have tens of thousands of elephants. Last year, there were around 2,800. This year, maybe 2,400. While Africa’s total elephant population is unknown, the latest figures, from 2006, put it at 472,269 to 689,671, but poaching has increased significantly since then.

Looking up

More giraffes in Niger these days, apparently.

Future eaters

The prognosis for biodiversity will be bleak until biodiversity becomes something that everybody can and does read. As long as we remain a bioilliterate populace of which only the wealthiest 0.1% can afford to have an expert interpret the hieroglyphics, and only lions and other celebrity species attract our interest, then we will continue to turn the dazzling diversity of life into cannon fodder.

-- Todd Palmer and Rick Pringle fisk Thomas Friedman.

(related: Kenya's lions could vanish within 10 years and [added 27 Aug] The growing specter of Africa without wildlife.)

Siege mentality

Last week the wildlife service said it planned to double the number of armed guards in Kenyan parks over the next five years and was studying whether to put electric fences around Mount Kenya, the Mau forest, Mount Elgon and the Cherangani hills. The model would be a 250-mile fence which has almost been completed around the Aberdare mountain range by the Kenya-based conservation group Rhino Ark.

"Kenya is destroying itself. The population has reached an unsustainable level. We are killing ourselves slowly by destroying the forests and settling there. Destruction of the Mau is like dancing with death. We should see environmental destruction as a greater threat than anything else."

John Vidal quotes Julius Kipng'etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

No Lark

I agree with Fred Pearce that Consumption dwarfs population
as the main environmental threat. But on the face of it the probable extinction of the African lark [1], for one, looks as if it's linked of the sheer pressure of human numbers.


The BBC reports that the Sidamo lark lives in an area of highland savannah that used to be maintained by fire and by the grazing of large herbivores, such as elephants, antelopes and gazelles:

Borana pastoralists traditionally walked their cattle across the plain as they migrated between different wet and dry season grasslands.

For millennia, both the wild animals and pastoralists kept the grasslands in good condition. This habitat is now being destroyed.

Wild animals are too few to stop shrubs regrowing, while intensively reared livestock and agriculture are increasingly damaging the grasslands.

...[Scientists] found that the Sidamo lark lives within a single patch of grassland of just 35 square kilometres.

That compares to a range of 760 square kilometres...just last year.

There may be a number of factors behind the bush encroachment and the planting of crops that are reported to have led to this change. It seems likely that a major one is 'simply' more human mouths to feed. Ethiopia's population grew by just over 3.2% in 2008 to more than 82.5 million. It is projected to rise to 149.5 million by 2050. In 1950 it was 18.4 million.


Footnote

[1] Before reading the story on the BBC I'd never heard of the Sidamo Lark (Heteromirafra sidamoensis). Discovering new beings and learning at the same time of their imminent extinction seems to be quite a common experience. Is there a word for the combination of wonder and almost instantaneous grief this arouses?

P.S. 22 April: Giraffe numbers in Masai Mara down 95%

Sphinx

The sound was out of place. "Here we were, far from the sea in the middle of the rain forest, and through the great trees came a sound like waves drawing across a massive pebbly beach". It was, Lee White soon saw, a big troop of Mandrills sorting through the leaf litter in search of food. The encounter set him on a path of research and discovery that helped to revolutionize understanding of these colorful monkeys and do more to protect them. [1]

Now, as a representative for the government of Gabon, White tries to negotiate the best deal for his country not to fell the forests where the Mandrill and other amazing species live [2] by getting those forests recognised as carbon stocks within the UNFCCC. [3]

Carbonize your wildlife. Charles Darwin called the adult male mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, “the most vividly colored specimen in mammaldom.”

Nearly 2.3 million square kilometres of rainforest in the Congo basin countries are estimated to contain carbon equivalent to about 15 years worth of anthropogenic emissions at current rates, and be 'worth' about US$1.25 trillion at current market prices. [4] To a non-market fundamentalist the logic and the numbers may seem surreal.

Gabon is relatively fortunate in being more sparsely populated and better governed than some of its neighbours.  [5] Its rainforests may be quite robust under some climate change scenarios. One of the 'nightmares' would destruction that arises as a consequence of greater climate change elsewhere: if, for example, some decades from now millions or tens of millions of people try to escape a West African dust bowl by migrating this way. [6]

A Fang Ngil mask.

Footnotes

[1] Mandrills live very differently from baboons, whom they superficially resemble, in groups that can be more than 600 strong.

[2] The range of species still hanging on in the Congo basin is vast. In Gabon it includes the Sun-tailed monkey (one of those names that definitely sounds better in French: Singe au queu de soleil), a survivor in what was a forest refugium during the Pleistocene.

[3] (added 22 March): See, for example, 'Crunch year' for world's forests.

[4] The calculation goes roughly as follows. There 227,600,000 hectares of forest averaging 125 tonnes of carbon per hectare. That makes 28,450,000,000 tonnes of carbon, or 104,411, 500,000 tonnes of CO2. The carbon price is given as $12 per tonne.

[5] (added 18 May) The country's relatively intact biodiversity persists in some of its coastal areas too.  The 'world's largest' colony of Leatherback turtles has recently been found there.

[6] There has been substantial human migration in the past. Bantu peoples equipped with iron tools, banana plants and oil palm seeds swept down this way about 2600 years ago. The population crashed more than a 1000 years ago, and huge mahogany forests now grow in places that were extensively settled. But the size of a human migration in the 21st century could be greater might by two or more orders of magnitude.

From the deepest river

Elephant fish from the Congo.

682

...is the estimated number of mountain gorillas still living in the wild. Of these, about 302 are thought to be in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and 380 in Virunga National Park (Mountain gorillas in dire straits, DNA reveals).

P.S. 30 Jan: 'ten babies' born in Virunga.

Something like gold

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas...Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.

-- from Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas.


See also Congo riches are plundered by renegade army brigade and these posts from Grains of Sand.

Wild 2.0

Dr Claudio Sillero...says vaccinations are the only hope of maintaining the Ethiopian wolf population.

-- from Race to save world's rarest wolf. (Ewolf blog here)

Ownership and collapse

Fisheries in which individuals (or groups of) fishermen have a right to a share can provide incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse, says research based on a study of 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003 [1]. But, warn the authors:

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved.

On land, there may be almost no level of killing of some animals (such as great apes and other primates taken as bush meat in Africa) which allows a viable population to survive. Nevertheless, argues a report, the best way to reduce the slaughter is for hunting by local people to be legalised and regulated [2]. Also, it's suggested, new ways should be found of making endangered animals more valuable alive than dead, perhaps through government schemes to reward local villages financially if they preserve or increase populations. But, warns one conservationist, "People living in poverty are in for dire times, and both they and many species are heading for a train wreck."


Notes

[1] Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? by Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines and John Lynham. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159478. [Peter Kareiva, Amy Chang and Michelle Marvier argue "the key to success in conservation is the development of market mechanisms and new sources of finance for conservation." (DOI: 10.1126/science.1162756) ]

[2] CBD Report 33 by Robert Nasi et al from CIFOR , discussed in Should we legalise hunting of endangered species? by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, 18 Sep. "In central Africa, 1 million tonnes of bushmeat are harvested each year, supplying 80 per cent of the protein and fat that people in the region consume." (More photos of bush meat, some of them disturbing, can be found here.)

Forest music

From Congo, a BBC report of "the first official sighting" of an okapi [in the wild] in fifty years.

It's striking from this old photo how large the animal is, even taking into account that the man, who was perhaps Mbuti or Twa, may have been less than five feet tall.

In a recently rebroadcast radio show about the origin of music, Jerome Lewis suggests that one of the purposes of the music of the forest peoples -- in which 3, [8?], 9 and 12 beat songs merge in polyphony -- may be to connect with the "music" of the forest itself: a "technology of enchantment" such that you lose your sense of self and become aware of greater reality.

Lewis Thomas, whose intuitions seem so often to have proven right, wrote (some time before 1974, in The Music of This Sphere):

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

(P.S. 12 Sep: Greg Laden.)

(P.S. 15 Sep: A reminder of the music of the seas in jeopardy. )