Wildlife Trust highlights my African work

...in their June newletter and on their website. Also on the home page is an interview I did about Florida manatees and power plants. Check them out!

The University of Florida has awarded me a 4 year stipend and tuition coverage for my PhD work on West African manatees! I'm really excited and a bit overwhelmed by this generous award. It will certainly help ease the burden of my fundraising efforts so I can focus on my research, and it will also give me the time to take those classes I'm going to need (thankfully not many, but I'll be struggling my way through BioChem!). My dissertation research will focus on the status, distribution and ecology of the West African manatee using genetics and behavioral tools. I'm looking forward to working with the other manatee researchers at UF, they are a very supportive and fun bunch, and hopefully they can teach me something about genetics analysis, since this field researcher hasn't been in a laboratory in a long, long time! Stay tuned for stories about broken glassware...

Disney comes through again!!

I recently received word that the Disney Conservation Fund has awarded me another year of funding! This news could not have come at a better time. This money will allow me to focus both on manatee behavioral and baseline health research in Gabon and on capacity building, research and educational outreach work in other West African countries. Yippeee!!!

Mamiwata art exhibition

(painting by Moyo Ogundipe, 1999, image courtesy of NY Times)

Aside from real manatees, I'm also fascinated by the Mamiwata spirit that many people believe is embodied by the manatee. Mamiwata is depicted as a woman, mermaid, seductess, even women's labor union organizer as well as many other forms, both in Africa and the Caribbean. My friend Sarah recently alerted me to a Mamiwata art exhibition currently going on at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, which just got a nice review in the NY Times. The NY Times link also has some cool images of on the art on display, if you can't get to DC.

Posters are ready to go!

Manatee informational posters in French that I created with Aimee Sanders, a graphic design and outreach speacialist working in Gabon, are now printed and ready to be distributed! These posters were created with funding from my USFWS Wildlife Without Borders grant for training and outreach work to help conserve West African manatees. I'm really happy with the way they turned out!
The main caption reads (for those of you who don’t speak French): West African Manatees are rare…they need your help to survive! Text boxes on the left side explain that manatees reproduce slowly so hunting increases their risk of extinction, that they need clean water and healthy habitats to survive so please keep waterways clean, and to please tell your friends and family not to hunt manatees or buy or eat manatee meat. The range map on the right side says that manatees are found in rivers, mangroves, lakes and coastal waters of central and west Africa.

Unfortunately since it's extremely difficult to get good photos of wild manatees in their natural habitat (believe me, I’ve been trying for 3 years!), I had to use photos of Florida manatees, but the species look quite similar and I was careful to use photos of animals in darker water similar to African habitat (although clearer).

Most people have never seen a live manatee and because they are hard to observe, people see them as shrouded in mystery and/or are even afraid of them, so the idea is to give some general information about them, to show some photos to hopefully remove some of the mystery and to raise awareness that they need protection. This poster was purposely designed to be very general because it targets a wide range of audiences, from school children to national park staff, tourists, teachers, resource managers and the general public. It was also designed to be used in multiple Francophone countries to help spread the awareness message as widely as possible. I’ll start giving them out in Gabon and Senegal, and I hope to get them to colleagues working in other countries as well.

I received word last week that I have been awarded a grant from Save Our Seas Foundation for manatee tagging in Gabon! I am very excited, I've been working to raise money for this for the past 3 years!! The award will fund 2 GPS tags, belt and tether attachments, satellite time, some tracking gear, boat fuel for tracking, a stipend for a Gabonese technician to help with tracking and alittle of my salary. I now need to raise the rest of my salary so that I am able to do the 6 months of fieldwork required, but I have fingers crossed for several other pending applications. This will be the first time this technology has been used to study West African manatees, so it is really going to be cool! I plan to go back to Gabon to do this work in Fall 2009.

Thanks!

I arrived back in Florida last week and am still catching up with myself. It was a productive but exhausting 6 months in Africa! I am looking forward to unpacking for alitte while and focusing on the next steps for work in Africa, which is basically fundraising. More on that next... Most importantly though, I'd like to extend my annual huge thanks to all those folks who helped me so much in the field this year.

In Gamba and Sette Cama, Gabon: Bas, Bas, Cathy, Richard, Joesph, DeDe, Jean-Pierre and all of the WWF Gamba and Ibonga staff. Also Herman for allowing me to visit his property and for all his manatee information. And Andrea and Sylvie for companionship in the field.

Bas, Bas, Andrea and Sylvie

Team Torquatus! Ziko, Cathy, Richard and Joesph who shared the fantastic WWF house at Sette Cama with me and helped with manatee work on top of their mangebey research.
In Libreville, Gabon: Aimee, Alden, Heaven, Pierre, Ruth, Michelle, Joe, Christian, Maite, Mr. Tchen, Pauwel and Stephane. Also thanks to Angela, Matt, Miguel, Tariq, Danae and Gary for keeping me laughing!

Ruth as a leatherback with Aimee laughing from the doorway

Pierre and Michelle

In Senegal: Tomas, Papis, Prisca, Pablo, Luis M., Haidar, Victor, Paco, Cristina, Junior, Luis, Iris, Momar, Madame Thiam, Emma, and all the fisheries people at Matam and Navel.

Planning meeting in Dakar before the manatee captures
Veterinary student Prisca and Biologist Papis
Momar of Wetlands International and Madame Thiam of Senegal National Parks

Last but certainly not least! Even though they were back in Florida, I am thankful for such great support and help from Cyndi, Susan K, Monica, Julie, Bonde, Margie and Chip. Your help from afar is appreciated more than you will know!