Arrival in Guinea-Bissau

On Friday morning I flew from Dakar to Bissau, which was a short 40 minute flight, but as usual in Africa the process at the airport beforehand took several hours, most of which I spent with my fellow passengers standing on the bus that eventually transported us from the terminal to the plane. They loaded us onto the bus and then left us there for an hour while the airport staff loaded the plane. In classic Africa fashion, some passengers got annoyed with the delay and disembarked the bus to wander around the tarmac, yell at the driver, and head back into the terminal to buy food. Most of the passengers were a Christian group returning to Guinea-Bissau from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so when we finally boarded the plane they began to sing hymns and chant “Obrigado Deus” (Thank You God) accompanied by clapping for the entire flight.

As I looked out the window, it was easy to see why Guinea-Bissau seems to be a manatee paradise: the entire coastline is a series of wide rivers and mangrove channels, apparently sparsely populated by humans. As we got closer to Bissau many rice fields were evident, and previous reports tell of manatees raiding flooded rice fields at night, which obviously does not endear them to the farmers (this is also a big problem in Sierra Leone).

A close-up of the mangrove canals in northern Guinea-Bissau

When I arrived in Bissau I discovered that although my equipment was there, the bag with my clothes had not made it from Dakar. Apparently about half the baggage wasn’t loaded onto the plane, and we were told it would come on Sunday night (I’m not sure whether or not to believe the airlines, but I have no choice but to wait and see). Fortunately I had a few extra t-shirts in the bag with my equipment and I was able to buy a few toiletries at a shop.

I was met at the airport by Tome, the local CBD-Habitat employee, and Aissa, who works for IBAP, the Guinea-Bissau equivalent of USFWS. They drove me to the IBAP office and introduced me all around- IUCN has offices there as well as several other collaborating organizations. Both Tome and Aissa will be part of the manatee capture team and are very enthusiastic. After IBAP they brought me to a very pleasant hotel where I settled in for the weekend. The rest of the Spanish team from CBD-Habitat arrives on Monday, so I have time to catch up on other work and visit with my friend Betania, who I worked with in Angola a few years ago and who is now working here with IBAP’s sea turtle program. Since Betania’s work is focused in the Bijagos Archipelago, where we’re headed to try to capture manatees, she was able to tell me a lot about the habitat and the realities of working out there.

Bissau is a small city, and actually it feels rather more like a small town than a national capital. The buildings are mostly colonel era but reasonably well-maintained, and brightly painted in oranges, greens, yellows, and pinks. It’s hot and dusty here now, although the rains are due to start any minute, so the air has a feeling of heavy humidity. From my hotel’s rooftop tiki bar I can see the main Canal do Geba that drains out to the ocean not far from here, and where we’ll boat out to Bijagos.    

Brief Visit to Senegal

I've now been in Senegal for 10 days, and tomorrow I continue south to Guinea-Bissau. While here in Dakar I had a productive meeting with Captain Abba Sonko at the Water and Forestry to discuss future plans. Captain Sonko was the person who submitted the proposal to CITES to up-list the African manatee to Appendix I, so he's very proud that it succeeded, and we're now both working with the Species Survival Network to implement activities to try to increase protection for manatees. In addition I showed him some of my preliminary genetics and age determination results for Senegal. I'm sure he's going to be a great partner for my long-term work here.

Tomas and I also went south to Saly for a couple days to check on the progress of our future base there, and I met some very enthusiastic people who are interested for me to do manatee outreach programs with school children there, so I look forward to starting that when I come back next year. Now I'm just packing up the crazy amount of equipment I need to bring to Guinea-Bissau for captures. Hopefully I'll have internet for at least the first few days so I can post more before we take off to the remote Bijagos.

Time To Go!!

It's been a busy spring, I've just finished my very last class for my PhD and a lot of lab work for both my genetics and stable isotope projects, and now it's time to get back out to fieldwork in Africa! On Sunday I fly to Senegal where I'll spend a couple weeks and will have some meetings about project sites there (the Senegal Ministry of the Environment has pledged some financial support and they're trying to leverage more, which Tomas and I are very excited about). In mid-May I'll travel to Guinea-Bissau to join my Spanish colleagues in an effort that has been over 3 years in planning- we will attempt to capture and satellite tag manatees in the Bijagos Archipelago. This will be the first time anyone has studied African manatees in a marine ecosystem, so all our fingers are crossed that we'll catch a few. This is where we'll be working:

We are all aware of the difficulties we face... just getting all the equipment, people, and camping supplies out to the very remote capture site will be challenging. And capture efforts in other similar remote places such as Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba have had teams that have made multiple capture attempts over many years and were not successful (in Cuba they just tagged their first manatees last year, after something like10 years of trying! And in Costa Rica they have not yet been successful despite 3 capture attempts).

We'll be working at a spring in a mangrove channel that manatees regularly use to drink freshwater. Manatees are seen in these islands year round, so we hope to discover if they live there permanently, feeding on the extensive seagrass beds and depending entirely on the springs, or do they travel back and forth to the mainland 25 miles or more away to use the river systems there? I also hope to collect genetic and other biological samples since previous results have shown that manatees here are very genetically diverse, and I'd like to analyze their diet.

So I'm packing up, and will post my adventures as often as I can!

It's Official! African Manatees are now CITES Appendix I

Not surprisingly, after the CITES COP overwhelmingly reached a consensus to uplist African manatees from Appendix II to Appendix I, the proposal was quickly approved at the CITES plenary session last week. So it will be official in approximately 90 days. What does this mean? It will ban international commercial trade, but in reality not many African manatees are legally traded (about 19 have gone to aquariums in Asia over the past decade). I dearly hope this measure will bring attention to all the poaching of the species and lead to crackdowns in illegal trade of manatee meat and parts in African countries, but the skeptic in me is concerned that without dedicated funds, not much will happen. The good news is governments in many African countries support protecting their manatees (13 country reps signed a declaration stating they will work towards specific objectives to decrease illegal hunting, improve manatee habitat altered by human development, and promote research, conservation and educational outreach), but I hope we can keep the good will and momentum going. And work on fundraising! I plan to continue my collaboration with the enegetic folks at the Species Survival Network in order to start working on those declaration objectives.

For researchers such as myself, a CITES Appendix I designation also means we'll need additional permits to export/import manatee scientific specimens for analysis and educational purposes, and it will be more difficult overall. It adds another level to the dizzying number of permits I already need to keep up with, and I'm not complaining, but it can be frustrating to work so hard to do the right thing, and then see poachers openly selling manatee meat in markets. It'll take alot of work and a long time to change the way things are, but I'm happy that I have some very dedicated African colleagues to work alongside. Here's hoping the new CITES rule will make a real difference in African manatee conservation.

CITES COP16 African Manatee Consensus‏

On Wednesday at the CITES Conference of Parties (COP16) in Bangkok, Thailand, the range states reached a consensus to uplist the African manatee to CITES Appendix I. This is actually a bit surprising given the lack of population and illegal trade data that exists for African manatees, but I think it speaks well of the interest of countries around the world wishing to protect our favorite species! If interested, you can read a blog post written by a colleague from Species Survival Network, who is attending the meeting. The consensus will not be official until after the COP16 plenary meeting next week, but it should encounter little difficulty being adopted since there has already been a consensus. I hope this status change will translate into actual protection on the ground for manatees in Africa, and not just become another rule that is never enforced. I don't mean to be a pessimist, but there are already so many laws meant to protect African manatees, yet almost no enforcement anywhere in Africa. I also hope this new CITES designation will also raise awareness about the species around the world, since most people I encounter don't even know there are manatees in Africa. There's been some good reporting from the CITES COP16, see the following links:

Born Free Foundation
The Guardian
National Geographic

African Manatee Proposal to CITES

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is an agreement between governments to ensure that trade of animals and plants does not threaten their survival (I got that wording from their website because I couldn't have said it better myself!). For endangered species, legal international trade (which includes both commercial trade as well as import/export for scientific study, educational purposes, etc.) requires obtaining an export permit from the country the wildlife originates from, and an import permit to bring it to another country. CITES also works to try to stop illegal wildlife trade by agreeing upon regulations that are agreed upon by their 177 member countries. Every few years they hold a Conference of Parties to review and vote upon proposals to update species regulatory status. This year the conference is in March in Bangkok, Thailand, and there's a proposal to uplist the African manatee from Appendix II to Appendix I, meaning that there is a request to increase restrictions on trade for African manatees.

The co-chairs of the Sirenian Specialist Group have written a very strong and eloquent letter to CITES in support of raising the African manatee to CITES (to read it click here)

It's Never Dull

Even though I'm not in the field right now (I postponed my return to Africa until later in the spring to get some much needed lab work done here in Gainesville, FL) the African manatee project still has alot of different things going on. I've spent quite alot of time over the past couple months working with partners on a proposal to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) that would hopefully increase regulation and protection of African manatees (more about this in my next post), as well as setting up collaborations with colleagues in 4 African countries, working on the usual grant applications and reports to keep the project funded (always my greatest challenge!), writing a proposal for a national manatee management plan for Senegal that was requested by their Ministry of the Environment, and shipping equipment to Africa.

Yesterday I sent off several barrels full of project t-shirts (that we give out during educational outreach programs), books and other field equipment by ship to Senegal. It will only take 3 weeks to get there, and this method will save the project thousands of dollars over shipping via the airlines.

In the lab I'm focusing on the stable isotope work these days, which is the analysis that's going to help me determine what types of food African manatees eat, to see if there are seasonal differences in their diet, and if their diet varies by age. Right now I'm processing reference samples- the food resources that manatees eat (which have either been confirmed by observing manatees eating in the wild or found in stomach samples from dead manatees, and even a few sources I'm not sure of, but that I suspect they might eat). As readers of the blog will remember, I collected many species of plants, fish and mollusks in Senegal last summer, so that's what I'm working with now.

First we sample different parts of each specimen... I've learned quite a bit about freshwater mussel anatomy! For plants I sample leaves, roots, stems, and seeds.

Samples go into these tiny glass vials, and once I have alot of them they are dried in a special oven for 24 hours.

After they're dried, all the samples are crushed into powder. Which turns out to be harder than it looks, because the samples are minute yet somehow the powder goes flying everywhere. One of the best methods I've learned so far is to chop the samples inside the vials using very fine scissors. After a couple hours your hands cramp up, but at least it preserves most of the sample!

Every single thing about this process is tiny and delicate, which is challenging for a fairly non-graceful person like myself! After the powder is crushed, a minute amount has to be placed in individual tin capsules. First the empty capsule is weighed on a very sensitive balance, then the powder is added with a miniture spatula. This is my biggest nightmare- a couple grains of powder too much and I'm over the limit, and getting excess powder back out means I always take too much. It literally took me 15 minutes to get the correct amount of powder in my first capsule. I started calculating 15 minutes x 200+ samples and almost had a nervous breakdown, but they tell me I'm getting better at it!

 Thankfully Michelle, an undergraduate in the lab, is a very patient teacher! Once the powder is in the capsule, the tin is gently closed up and smashed into a tiny ball. This is good for getting some aggression out after dealing with the balance!

After that each ball goes in a separate well in a mini tray. We also put in "standards" that have known values, to make sure the machine that reads the carbon and nitrogen content of each sample is working correctly. Once the tray is full, it goes off to another lab to have the sample values read. And then I'll hopefully get some interesting results!

I'm really enjoying learning the technique, as well as the great discussions I'm having with stable isotope researchers about all the possible ways we can study manatees with this tool. There has been very little of this kind of research done for manatees so far, and all of it was with the Florida manatee, so everything we're learning about African manatees is completely new... which makes it all worth it!