Congo River Days

On Tuesday we boated 40km up the Congo River from the mouth, to several tributaries where I have been on previous trips and interviewed villagers about manatees. Accompanying me was Tim B. (the Angola LNG wildlife specialist), Wilson (a translator since I don’t speak Portuguese, Kisolongo or Lingala), Junior (Angola LNG environmental team assistant) and our two boat drivers who have taken me on almost every trip, Eduardo and Perreira. We stopped at the local Navy base, villages of Kibaka, Nzadi Caca and a new village I had not been to before. At Kibaka and Nzadi Caca they still see manatees everyday, throughout the year. They said there has been no targeted hunting since the hunter died last year, but that occasionally manatees are getting caught in fishing nets, and of course they eat them when they do. I can't fault people for making use of the meat once the manatee has drowned, this area is very poor. We didn’t see any manatees as we traveled several tributaries, but unfortunately we also didn’t really have time to sit and wait for them anywhere.

Eduardo and Perreira, doing one of their many radio check-ins to base.
Back at Nzadi Caca. The village continues to grow as they add more clam shells and then build their houses on top of them.
We interviewed the guys in Nzadi Caca while they skewered clams to sell

View from the new village we visited

Woman making thatch roof panels at Kibaka We released the baby python while we were upriver On Thursday we went upriver again, and this time Joao accompanied me as translator. We didn’t go as far upriver, but explored some new tributaries I had not been to before. It still amazes me how many hundreds of miles of tributaries there are here, and that there are very few people living along them. We interviewed several fishermen and stopped at a manioc plantation (manioc is a root vegetable, also known as cassava). Although there is plenty of good habitat and favored food plants in the area we went, people there said they don’t see manatees very often. There were no hunters in this area; they only knew of Mr. Domingos, who died last year.

Some of the tributaries here are half a mile wide and 13 meters deep, while others are narrow channels (but usually still 4-5 meters deep). Most of this area is still pristine, with very few villages or other signs of people.

Watching the GPS map as we travel the new rivers.

One of the fishermen we interviewed as we explored several new tributaries. This woman at the manioc plantation proudly showed me her fish. She and her husband said they don't see manatees frequently there, but occasionally they (and hippos) travel by in the river.
Young guinon that was a pet at the manoic plantation, tied to a tree. Beautiful little monkey, I felt sorry for it.
Nice skink I saw at the manioc plantation. (this one's for you Tess!)

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.