Angola Trip #3

It’s been almost a year since I’ve been here in Soyo, so it’s interesting to be back. It takes the better part of 2 days to get here; I flew from Tampa to Houston, spent the night, then flew from Houston directly to Luanda, the capital of Angola (15 hours, 7640 miles), then took another short flight up to Soyo, in northern Angola. I arrived Sunday afternoon, checked into my room in a nice new house on the base and then was invited to a wine and cheese party! Certainly a nice way to end the journey.

Landing in Luanda... it's the dry season, but no matter when I come, the city always has this brown dusty haze, I've never seen it look clear.
Coming in to Soyo we flew over the Congo River and this village. I've been here by boat before to check out the large grassy area (ie manatee salad bar) Soyo AirportOn Monday I sampled 36 new manatee bones that were brought to the base by the deceased manatee hunter’s wife since my last trip. These bones were fresher than most of the previous ones we found at the hunter’s village last August, which is hopefully good news for DNA extraction. Tim, the wildlife advisor on base, enthusiastically cut all the samples with a hacksaw as I labeled them. He also showed me some of the cool animals he’s recently found on the base (which will be relocated back to the wild off base).

Most of the manatee bones were ribs. Although it's a bummer that these animals were hunted, hopefully their DNA will help us better understand the species.
Tim cutting samples- we take about a 3 inch sample of bone from each. Puff Adder, quite a dangerous snake... I was not actually this close!
Pelusios castaneus, a local species of freshwater turtleBaby python as wrist accessory

Looking forward....

Today colleagues and I announced the next round of African manatee conservation training workshops, to be held in Ghana in October and November. These training sessions, which are held over 2 weeks as we camp on Lake Volta, are one of my favorite things that I do in Africa. It's a rare opportiunity to be able to spend a nice long period of time with a group of people who are trying to start or continue manatee research and conservation in their countries, and there's alot of comraderie and a sense of shared purpose. So I'm excited to continue planning for that. This is the last year Earthwatch will fund these training programs (they set out to do 3 years and this is it!) but I plan to continue similar training on a smaller level in other African countries in the future, since capacity building is included in all my research work.

If you are an African national interested in learning more about the training workshops (the application deadline is August 10) please submit a comment to this posting and I will forward the information.

But before all that, I'm headed back to Angola next week for a quick 10 day trip to do another round of manatee surveys in the Congo River. It'll be great to get back out in the field after several months of being chained to my desk working on budgets and reports! So I'll have fieldwork adventures to post.

I took this last August, a man using a small mangrove tree as a sail heads up the Congo River

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.