From anomalure to zebra duiker: Spotlight on West Africa's mammals

NOVEMBER 21, 2019 

by Tim Knight, Fauna & Flora International

If you thought zebra duiker and otter shrew were four different animals, think again. These are just two of the elusive creatures that Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and partners were hoping to track down during recent surveys of large and small mammals in one of West Africa's most important rainforests. 

When we talk about African mammals, it tends to conjure up certain images: elephants at a waterhole; lions lounging in the shade of an acacia; vast herds of wildebeest and zebra sweeping across a spectacular savannah backdrop dotted with towering giraffes and the occasional irascible rhino. 

It's easy to forget that the lush primary forests on the other side of the continent harbor some of Africa's most charismatic and endangered mammal species. Ziama-Wonegizi-Wologizi Transboundary Forest Landscape (ZWW), which straddles the border between Liberia and Guinea, is one such area. 

With support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through its West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC) program, survey teams comprising FFI staff, rangers from Guinea's Centre Forestier de N'Zérékoré and Liberia's Forestry Development Authority, external consultants, students and communities on both sides of the border have been conducting a series of rapid assessments of the biodiversity—including mammals large and small—in this relatively unexplored forest. 

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Human pressures on mammals in protected areas of West Africa

Date: September 23, 2019

Source:  University of Michigan

When University of Michigan wildlife ecologist Nyeema Harris started her multiyear camera survey of West African wildlife, she sought to understand interactions between mammals and people in protected areas such as national parks.

She expected those interactions to include lots of poaching. Instead, livestock grazing and the gathering of forest products were among the most common human-related activities her cameras captured, while poaching was actually the rarest.

"The common narrative in conservation, particularly in the tropics and African savannas, is the persistent threat of poaching and bushmeat hunting on wildlife and environmental integrity," said Harris, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of the department's Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, which is known as the AWE lab.

"Therefore, we expected to document heavy poaching activity in our camera survey," she said. "Instead, livestock grazing was the dominant human pressure, and the gathering of forest products -- such as wood, grasses and fruit -- was the primary human activity that we observed in these protected areas.

"Historically, the impetus for protected areas was exclusively to promote species persistence and to maintain biological processes and unique landscape features. More recently, contributions or benefits from protected areas have extended beyond an environmental perspective to a more inclusive social consideration."

Harris' study is the first wildlife camera survey in the West African countries of Burkina Faso and Niger. It documented human pressures on mammal communities in three national parks that are part of the largest protected area complex in West Africa, the W-Arly-Pendjari, or WAP.

Read on

Lions in West and Central Africa apparently unique

Date: August 11, 2016

Source: Leiden, Universiteit

Lions in West and Central Africa form a unique group, only distantly related to lions in East and Southern Africa. Biologists at Leiden University confirm this in an article published in Scientific Reports.

Genetic data

In this study, the researchers gathered a genetic dataset of lion populations covering a total of 22 countries. This included samples from each remaining lion population in West and Central Africa, a region where lions and other wildlife are rapidly declining as a consequence of the increasing human population. The researchers managed to gather all the information by teaming up with other people in the field and local conservationists.

300,000 years ago

Based on the genetic data, it was estimated that the split between the two major groups that can be identified in the lion must have occurred 300,000 years ago. To explain what happened in their evolution, the researchers made a reconstruction of African climatological history. It seems that periodic expansions of the rain forest and the desert drove lions into isolated pockets of suitable habitat, where the different genetic lineages originated that can still be observed today.

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Bats may hold henipavirus threat for West Africa

A family of lethal viruses that has leapt from bats to humans in Australia and Asia may also pose a threat in West Africa, where bats are butchered for meat, scientists reported Tuesday.

Known as henipavirus, the family has two main members, Hendra and Nipah, which came to notoriety in the 1990s.

They have been blamed for rare but worrying outbreaks of encephalitis and respiratory illness among domestic animals and humans in remote Australia, south and southeast Asia.

Like Ebola, henipavirus has a natural reservoir in fruit bats, which are immune to the virus but can pass it on to humans who come into contact with their blood, saliva or droppings.

In some henipavirus episodes, mortality rates have been greater than 90 percent.

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Lions Face Extinction in West Africa

By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer | January 08, 2014 05:00pm ET

Lions in West Africa are on the brink of extinction, new research suggests.

Fewer than 250 adults may be left in West Africa, and those big cats are confined to less than 1 percent of their historic range.

The new study, detailed today (Jan. 8) in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that without dramatic conservation efforts, three of the four West African lion populations could become extinct in the next five years, with further declines in the one remaining population, study co-author Philipp Henschel, the lion program survey coordinator for Panthera, a global wildcat conservation organization, wrote in an email.

Read more

West African Bats: No Safe Haven for Malaria Parasites

Oct. 21, 2013 — In Europe, bats are normally discussed in the context of endangered species threatened by loss of their habitats. However, in recent years, bats have caught the eye of infection biologists. The animals are namely hosts to a surprising number of pathogens, many of which could be dangerous to humans. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and the American Museum of Natural History have been able to identify in West African bats four genera of parasites that are closely related to the malaria pathogen. One of them is the genus Plasmodium, which also includes the species that cause malaria in humans. The Plasmodium species in bats are very similar to that found in rodents and could advance the study of malaria pathogens' defence strategies against immune system responses.

Bats can transmit various diseases to human beings. Indeed, they serve as reservoir hosts for a long list of pathogens, including the "who's who" of dreaded killer viruses: Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra and Lyssa. The SARS outbreak in 2002 in Asia and the transmission of a previously unidentified virus (MERS) to humans in the Middle East in 2013 can both be traced back to viruses that have switched hosts from bats to humans. Bats have an exceptional immune system that can hold all these viruses in check. However, some infections in humans often have a deadly outcome.

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Pygmy hippo shot in NT

A PYGMY hippopotamus has been shot dead during a pig hunting expedition in the Territory.

The hippo is normally native to the swamps of west Africa, in particular Liberia.

Instead, this one - estimated to be about 250kg - was shot while roaming the bush of the Douglas Daly, 200km south of Darwin.

This is about 16,000km away from Liberia.

It is believed the female hippo is an old escapee from Tipperary Station, from when it used to be an exotic animal reserve.

This means it has been poking about the Douglas Daly for the past five years.

Nico Courtney, 27, was out spotlighting for pigs with his mate Rusty on a station in the Douglas Daly district on Saturday night.

"It was about 1am and running away from us - from the tail end it just looked like a big pig," the station worker said.

"We got out, had a look at it, and thought 'that's not a pig, it's a hippo'.

"Then we thought 'you don't get hippos in Australia'."

The pair thought it might be a baby hippo - and then naturally started wondering, as they stood in the middle of dark scrub, "where the hell" its mum and dad might be.

Continued:  http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2009/11/16/101241_ntnews.html

New Frog from West Africa

Meet Astylosternus laticephalus, a new addition to the frog fauna of West Africa.  The new species looks like a strange frog-toad hybrid.  It’s body shape is typical for frogs of the genus Astylosternus, but it has an exceptionally broad head. The color pattern is also unique – it has distinct red dots and a bicolored iris that is tipped with orange and red.

Rödel, M-O., M. F. Barej, A. Hillers, A. D. Leaché, N.G. Kouamé, C. Ofori-Boateng, N. E. Assemian, B. Tohé, J. Penner, M. Hirschfeld, J. Doumbia, L. N. Gonwouo, J. Nopper, C. Brede, R. Diaz, M. K. Fujita, M. Gil, G. H. Segniagbeto, R. Ernst, and L. Sandberger. 2012. The genus Astylosternus in the Upper Guinea rainforsts, West Africa, with the description of a new species (Amphibia: Anura: Arthroleptidae). Zootaxa, 3245:1-29.

 http://faculty.washington.edu/leache/wordpress/2012/04/new-frog-from-west-africa/

European trawlers scouring West Africa for fish

Activists confront EU trawlers in African waters - Plunder continues as EU fisheries ministers tinker around the edges of reform

March 2012 - European fisheries ministers meeting in Brussels to discuss the reform of EU fishing rules are expected to ignore the critical imbalance between the bloated size of EU fleets and dwindling stocks, said Greenpeace. Ministers are likely to reach an agreement on how to manage the impact of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy on fishing in foreign waters.

The Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise is currently off the coast of West Africa, near Senegal and Mauritania, where it has been involved in actions to highlight the destructive impact of European overfishing.

The EU fisheries Council is expected to recognise the right of fishermen in foreign coastal nations to retain priority access to local fishing grounds and to only allow European and other foreign vessels the option of fishing unclaimed quotas within sustainable levels. However, ministers will likely omit any reference to agreed international commitments on the reduction of fleet capacity. The EU acknowledges that there are simply far too many powerful and destructive vessels for the amount of fish left in the sea. As recently as autumn 2011, the EU joined other countries in the UN General Assembly in a pledge to "urgently reduce the capacity of the world's fishing fleets to levels commensurate with the sustainability of fish stocks."

Ministers will also debate rules to prohibit the damaging practice of discarding unwanted catches, as well as a new fisheries subsidy regime and common market rules.

Read on:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/trawler-fishing.html

West African lions in danger of extinction due to trophy hunting

Safari hunting in Africa has serious impact on social structure and population density of lions
October 2011. Recent PhD research at Leiden University by the Beninese researcher Etotépé Sogbohossou has demonstrated that safari hunting may have serious impact on lion social structure and lion densities.

Etotépé did four years of field research in the Pendjari Biosphere reserve (North Benin) under the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University.

Impact on sex ratio
Her research showed that lion densities inside hunting zones were significantly lower (1.3 lions per 100 sq km) than the densities in the national park (2 lions per 100 sq km). Also the average group size of lions in the hunting zones was significantly lower (2.2) compared with the lion group size inside the national park ( 2.7) en the sex ration inside hunting zones ( one male to 0.8 females) was also significantly different compared with the national park (one male 1.4 females).

The results of this research confirm that safari hunting in Africa may have a serious impact on lion populations.

Cameroon
A recent article in the Journal of Biological Conservation, written by Barbara Croes and colleagues from Leiden university, covering the impact of safari hunting in Cameroon, demonstrated that lion densities inside hunting zones were also significantly lower compared with national parks . In this research the densities' of other predators like leopard and hyena and of large herbivores did not differ significantly.

The researchers from Leiden University concluded that a combination of indiscriminate shooting of often young male and female lions by safari hunters (Benin) in combination with the high quota and take of lions (Cameroon) have caused these significant differences.

Recommendations for governments - Moratorium on lion hunts
A recommendation has been prepared to the Ministers responsible for fauna management to consider a moratorium on lion hunting.

West African lions in danger of extinction
Lions in West and Central Africa are genetically different from lions of East and Southern Africa and are threatened with extinction according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/west-african-lions.html#cr

New species of antelope discovered in West Africa

New species of duiker found in Togo, Benin & Nigeria

October 2011. Scientists from The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Erik Verheyen, Gontran Sonet and Zoltán T. Nagy, have, with a team of international researchers, discovered a new species of antelope that is found in Togo, Benin, and Nigeria.

Very small duiker
It is a very small antelope, measuring no more than around 40 cm at the shoulder and weighing four to six kilograms. It belongs to the duiker subfamily of antelopes. The Afrikaans name, 'duiker', meaning 'diver', comes from the habit these timid animals have of diving into the vegetation at the slightest sign of danger.
Walters Duiker
The new species has been named Philantomba walteri, or 'Walter’s duiker' in homage to Erik Verheyen’s father, Professor Walter Verheyen (1932- 2005). As professor at Antwerp University, he was the first scientist to collect a specimen of this species.



Maxwell’s duiker relation
Until now only two species of antelope had been recognised within the genus Philantomba. Both are widely distributed in West and Central Africa where they are hunted extensively. Their horns are used in traditional medicine and their meat is much in demand at bushmeat markets. It was known that one of these species, namely Maxwell’s duiker (Philantomba maxwelli), showed a geographical variation between different populations. Morphological studies and DNA tests have now shown that some of these populations form a distinct species.

The scientists were able to demonstrate this on the basis of specimens bought from local hunters or found at markets. Use was also made of specimens from museum collections. For the morphological studies, detailed skull measurements were taken, while the genetic research used DNA samples obtained from muscle tissue. This was of course not possible using the skulls from the museum collections, and so DNA had to be extracted from the teeth of the animals.

Antelope taxonomy is considered to be well known, like that of all other large mammals. The discovery of this new species of antelope therefore comes as quite a surprise. A surprise which was all the greater since Walter's duiker was found in the Dahomey Gap, a region where the discovery of a new animal species was certainly not expected. This just goes to show, once again, just how many gaps still exist in our knowledge of the Earth’s biodiversity, and just how important taxonomical research can be.

Vulnerable or Endangered?
The discovery also has implications for nature conservation. The duiker populations in Togo and in Nigeria are classed as 'vulnerable', while those in Benin are 'endangered' species. Now that it has been demonstrated that these populations from a separate species that is distinct from the more widespread Maxwell’s duiker, the pressure is even greater for tougher protection measures to ensure the survival of Walter’s duiker.

Go the website of the Institute of Natural Sciences.

New gecko species identified in West African rain forests

New gecko species identified in West African rain forests
Secretive Hemidactylus fasciatus is actually 4 species distributed in forest patches across W. Africa

1-Jun-2010

The West African forest gecko, a secretive but widely distributed species in forest patches from Ghana to Congo, is actually four distinct species that appear to have evolved over the past 100,000 years due to the fragmentation of a belt of tropical rain forest , according to a report in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The discovery by former University of California, Berkeley, students Adam D. Leaché and Matthew K. Fujita demonstrates the wealth of biodiversity still surviving in the islands of tropical rain forest in West Africa, and the ability of new DNA analysis techniques to distinguish different species, even when they look alike.

"We tended to find this gecko, Hemidactylus fasciatus, throughout our travels in West Africa," said Leaché, a herpetologist with UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. "Despite the fact that it is recognized as one species, using new methods we have established a high probability that it is composed of at least four species."

Though the forest fragmentation is part of a long-term drying trend in West Africa, the loss of forest and the resultant impact on the gecko is increasing as a result of human activity, he noted.

"These rain forests are classified as one of the biodiversity hotspots on the planet, yet they are one of the most endangered areas on the earth," Leaché said. "Human deforestation is accentuating the process of habitat destruction."

Leaché, currently a post-doctoral fellow at UC Davis but soon to become an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington, has mounted five expeditions since 2003 to the tropical rain forests of West Africa to survey reptile and amphibian populations. All of the forest patches are isolated, some requiring hours of hiking to reach, and many are protected in national parks. Access was often difficult because he had to hire porters to carry liquid nitrogen with which to preserve tissue specimens of rare species, plus pickling containers in which to bring home more common animals, including the forest gecko.

"Out intent was to go to remote sites where people haven't done much exploration to try to document biodiversity in Africa," he said.

Having collected numerous specimens of the six-inch gecko, he and Fujita, who accompanied Leaché on several of the expeditions, decided to see whether genetic diversity among the geckos could tell them something about the history of the rain forest belt. That belt stretches nearly 3,000 miles from the coast of Sierra Leone through the Guinean rain forest in Ghana, through Nigeria and Cameroon, to the Congolian rain forest. Over millions of years, the forest has expanded and shrunk with climate change, and an aridification trend over the past several hundred thousand years has caused the forest to contract to mountainous areas, Leaché said.

Leaché and Fujita found sufficient genetic differences among the 50 geckos collected from 10 different forest patches to identify four distinct species. The different species were found in different forest patches, suggesting that the species divergence was driven by the isolation of gecko populations from one another after gaps developed in the rain forest.

Not all of the species were separated by forest gaps, however. The wide Sanaga River in Cameroon is the dividing line between two species, which the researchers named Hemidactylus coalescens and Hemidactylus eniangii, the latter in honor of Nigerian conservation biologist and herpetologist Dr. Edem A. Eniang.

They retained the name Hemidactylus fasciatus for the westernmost species, which ranges from Sierra Leone to the wide Dahomey Gap, but identified an isolated species, Hemidactylus kyaboboensis, in the Togo Hills, which they named after Kyabobo National Park in the Volta Region of Ghana.

A key component of their research was testing a different statistical method, called Bayesian species delimitation, that provides odds that researchers are correct when naming a new species.

"This method gives you a probability associated with the number of species identified, something we haven't been able to do in speciation research until now," Leaché said. "Before, it was more of a qualitative assessment. Here, we get a quantitative assessment, which is reassuring."

As a result, the researchers were able to state with high probability – essentially 100 percent that the specimens break down into four species.

Fujita, formerly of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, took tissue samples from the specimens and conducted the Bayesian analysis. The analysis involved five genes from the cell nucleus and one gene from the mitochondria.

Leaché plans to continue his biodiversity survey of West Africa, but also to look more closely at the forest gecko to see what observable differences – size, shape or scale arrangement, for example – can be used to confirm and identify the four species.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/uoc--ngs060110.php