Using endangered barbary macaques as photo props could negatively impact Moroccan tourism

December 18, 2018, British Ecological Society

Wild animals are increasingly exploited for entertainment and photo opportunities. A new study highlights that tourists in Morocco object to the use of barbary macaques as photo props, raising concerns about the animal's welfare and risk to human health. The findings are presented today at the British Ecological Society annual conference in Birmingham.

Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus, L.), the only primate species endemic to Morocco and Algeria, have been categorised as 'endangered to extinction' on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species since 2008. It is prohibited to sell or keep them as pets.

Despite the restrictions, barbary macaques are used as photo props for tourists, principally in Marrakech's famous Jemaa el-Fna square (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and reportedly in other major Moroccan cities and Algeria. An infant macaque might act as a photo prop 18 times per hour costing visitors as much as 100 Dirhams (~£20). This practice could earn their handlers the equivalent of an average monthly Moroccan household income in just 3-4 working days.

Researchers from Edinburgh Napier University surveyed 513 national and international visitors to Jemaa el-Fna square during an Easter holiday period when tourism was at a peak, using a 25-item questionnaire to evaluate their perception of primate photo props.

88% of the respondents neither intended to use the photo props nor did. More than 200 people found it unacceptable because of ethical or animal welfare reasons.

Jay Mackinnon, a lecturer in applied sciences at Edinburgh Napier University, commented: "Most of the survey respondents didn't see the macaques as an attraction and found the photo props off-putting. They pitied the animals and raised concerns about hygiene and the risk of serious infections being transmitted."

Interestingly, while 66% agreed the practice should be illegal, 80% were unaware it is already illegal in the country.

"Barbary macaque numbers have plummeted by more than 50% since the 1980s due to habitat loss and juveniles being sold illegally as pets. Only one in four survey participants was aware that this species is endangered", said Kristina Stazaker who led the research as part of her master's project at the university.

Read more at: 

A genus of European paper wasps revised for the first time using integrative taxonomy

Date:  November 13, 2017

Source:  Pensoft Publishers

Summary:

The European and Mediterranean species of the paper wasp genus Polistes were recently revised. For the first time for this group, scientists applied an integrative taxonomic approach which combines traditional morphological methods with DNA barcoding. As a result, the researchers were able to identify a new species from Morocco.

The European and Mediterranean species of the paper wasp genus Polistes were recently revised by scientists at the SNSB-Zoologische Staatssammlung München (ZSM).

For the first time for this group scientists applied an integrative taxonomic approach which combines traditional morphological methods with modern DNA barcoding.

As a result, the researchers were able to identify a new species from Morocco. For this well-researched wasp group, this is an actual sensation.

The study is published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

The Munich researchers analysed more than 260 wasp specimens collected from across the study area with the help of DNA barcoding.

They managed to identify all species and determine their distribution. In addition, based on the genetic data, they were able to evaluate morphological characters for each species and created a completely new key for identification.

The wasps of the genus Polistes belong to the family Vespidae. The genus is represented by 17 species in Europe and the Mediterranean, with four species occurring in Germany. Within the genus, 13 species are social, with the queen overwintering and founding a new nest with up to 200 workers. Four species are parasitic and have no workers.

Continued  

'First of our kind' found in Morocco

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, Paris

7 June 2017

The idea that modern people evolved in a single "cradle of humanity" in East Africa some 200,000 years ago is no longer tenable, new research suggests. 

Fossils of five early humans have been found in North Africa that show Homo sapiens emerged at least 100,000 years earlier than previously recognised. 

It suggests that our species evolved all across the continent, the scientists involved say. 

Their work is published in the journal Nature.

Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin, of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told me that the discovery would "rewrite the textbooks" about our emergence as a species. 

"It is not the story of it happening in a rapid way in a 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Africa. Our view is that it was a more gradual development and it involved the whole

Prof Hublin was speaking at a news conference at the College de France in Paris, where he proudly showed journalists casts of the fossil remains his team has excavated at a site in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. The specimens include skulls, teeth, and long bones. 

Earlier finds from the same site in the 1960s had been dated to be 40,000 years old and ascribed to an African form of Neanderthal, a close evolutionary cousin of Homo sapiens. 

But Prof Hublin was always troubled by that initial interpretation, and when he joined the MPI he began reassessing Jebel Irhoud. And more than 10 years later he is now presenting new evidence that tells a very different story. 

Read more

Tree-climbing goats spit out and disperse valuable argan seeds

25 May 2017

Goats climb argan trees to eat their fruit and leaves


By Elizabeth Preston

In south-western Morocco, acrobatic goats climb argan trees to eat their fruit and leaves. A tree full of goats is a striking sight, but the goats’ widely overlooked habit of regurgitating and spitting out the nuts may be important to the life of these forests.

Goat herders lead their flocks through the argan (Argania spinosa) forests, where the animals can clamber up trees 8 to 10 metres high and strip them nearly bare. Popular accounts say the goats defecate the nuts of argan fruits, which can then be retrieved from the goats’ manure.

Cracking these nuts open is the first step in making argan oil, a valuable export to richer countries where it is used in beauty products and foods. People may also harvest the fruits directly, but the goats save them a step.

“Some scientists have accepted the defecation hypothesis, probably because they did not speak to the herders,” says Miguel Delibes, a biologist at Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain.

The herders say the goats mostly spit the seeds out.
Seed of a thought

“Goats do not usually defecate large seeds,” Delibes and his co-authors write. This made them sceptical that argan nuts, about 2.2 centimetres long, took this route through the animals.

So they fed Spanish domestic goats fruits with seeds of various sizes, including olives, hawthorn fruits, and carob tree pods. The researchers didn’t have access to argan fruits as the tree doesn’t grow in Spain.

Despite not being able to find all of the seeds afterwards, the authors note, they recovered spat-out seeds from every type of fruit. The largest seeds — still smaller than an argan nut — were most likely to be spat out. Smaller seeds more often wound up in faeces.

Food that a goat swallows travels to the rumen, the first of four stomach compartments. Like other ruminants such as cattle or deer, the goat regurgitates material — the cud — from this compartment for extra chewing.

“The time in the rumen is very variable,” Delibes says, because goats may chew foods several times. A goat might spit out a swallowed seed hours or days later — up to six days in the study.

The researchers tested the viability of regurgitated seeds and found that more than 70 per cent could still grow. That means spitting goats might be an overlooked ecological factor, helping to scatter the seeds of plants they eat.

 

Read more 

African T. rex was one of last dinosaurs alive before extinction

4 May 2017

By New Scientist staff and Press Association

One of the last dinosaurs living in Africa before their extinction 66 million years ago has been discovered in a phosphate mine in northern Morocco.

The scientist who made the discovery likened it to winning the lottery as the new species – Chenanisaurus barbaricus – is so rare.

The dinosaur is a smaller African contemporary of the North American T. rex.

Last year, Nick Longrich, from the University of Bath, studied a rare fragment of a jaw bone that was discovered in the mines at Sidi Chennane in the Oulad Abdoun Basin, Morocco.

In collaboration with colleagues based in Morocco, France, and Spain, Longrich identified it as belonging to an abelisaur.

Abelisaurs were two-legged predators like T. rex and other tyrannosaurs, but with a shorter, blunter snout and even tinier arms.

While the tyrannosaurs dominated in North America and Asia, the abelisaurs were the top predators at the end of the Cretaceous period in Africa, South America, India and Europe.



Continued

Spiny, armored slug reveals ancestry of molluscs

Date: February 6, 2017

Source: University of Bristol

Scientists from the University of Bristol have uncovered a 480-million-year-old slug-like fossil in Morocco which sheds new light on the evolution of molluscs -- a diverse group of invertebrates that includes clams, snails and squids.

One of the defining characteristics of the molluscs is the possession of a radula, a kind of toothed-tongue which is used to rake up or rasp food.

The radula houses hundreds of teeth, the patterns of which can be used to determine diet and identify species. Whilst not all molluscs have a radula, a radula cannot be found in any other group of animals. Dr Jakob Vinther, from the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences, is lead author of the study, which is published today in Nature.

He said: "The molluscs are amongst the earliest animals identifiable in the fossil record, however determining what their ancestor looked like is difficult since many of the groups appear within a small window of time, making the sequence of evolutionary events difficult to piece together."

The recent discovery of a new species of mollusc in the Anti-Atlas region in Morocco has enabled palaeontologists to revisit this problem and infer the appearance of the ancestor of all molluscs.

Read on