Category: Madagascar

The World’s Smallest Chameleon Now Discovered

October 28, 2021 erinwilligan

The World’s Smallest Chameleon Now Discovered

Contributed by Megan Watson

A new species of chameleon, Brookesia nana, has recently been discovered in the mountainous forests of northern Madagascar. Measuring just less than 30 millimeters in length, it may be the smallest reptile ever identified, according to research published in Scientific Reports. Nicknamed B. nana for short, this amazing species is a member of a genus comprising around 13 other tiny chameleons found throughout the region. Sadly, however, scientists expect the chameleon to soon be considered critically endangered.

The size of a sunflower seed

So far, only one adult male and one adult female specimen has been discovered. The male measures a mere 21.6 millimeters in length, while the female is significantly longer at 28.9 millimeters. It’s thought this discrepancy in size (known as sexual dimorphism) may be the reason for the male’s larger genitalia, which equals almost 20% of its body length, herpetologist Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology explains. However, at the moment, since only two individuals have been identified, it’s difficult to know whether these sizes are the norm for the species. Ultimately, it’s unknown why B. nana evolved to be so tiny, however it probably makes them more efficient at catching prey with their projectile tongues. Similar to other chameleons, B. nana uses its projectile tongue to catch tiny invertebrates like mites and springtails on the rainforest floor during the day.

The need for conservation

Unfortunately, habitat degradation and deforestation put a question mark over this tiny reptile’s future. The region’s increasing population and poverty levels have forced inhabitants to clear rainforests for agriculture (94% of Madagascar’s previously forested lands have now been deforested). As such, it’s likely B. nana will be officially considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). However, Sorata massif, the region where the B. nana was found, has at least recently been made a protected area by the Malagasy government.

Moreover, 36% of all chameleon species worldwide are actually facing extinction, the SSC Chameleon Specialist Group finds. Nine species are listed as critically endangered, 37 as endangered, and 20 as vulnerable — resulting in 66 species of threatened chameleons in total. More than just chameleons, the whole reptile family is facing a bleak future with 19% currently threatened by extinction. In fact, an average of nearly one million endangered and threatened snakes are legally sold every year on the international market, which puts snake species, human health, and entire ecosystems at risk. People looking to keep snakes as pets should at least choose species that aren’t endangered. The Amazon Tree Boa The Amazon Tree Boa, for example, is currently classified as “least concern” by the IUCN.

How small is the smallest?

B. nana’s minute size raises the question of just how small it’s possible for vertebrates to be. There are frogs, for example, that are still actually much smaller. However, surface area eventually becomes a problem for tiny creatures who, surprisingly, typically have larger surface area to volume ratios than big creatures. And, when these ratios are high, the more the animal becomes at risk of water loss. “There also seems to be a limit as to where you can put all the stuff you have,” says researcher Tony Gamble. Many small creatures have reduced skull sizes or overlapping bones, and some lose entire structures through evolution.

Ultimately, this discovery serves as a reminder to everyone just how diverse the island of Madagascar is. “I think what keeps stories like this front and center in our imagination is that every time something like this is discovered, it’s like, ‘Oh man, I guess [living creatures] can get a little smaller,’” says Gamble.

Categories: Amphibians, Madagascar, Saving Nature Collection, Science Corner, Species Spotlight

Exploration 101: The Dream Jobs Begin with a Slog

October 25, 2009 erinwilligan

October 25, 2009

Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm has a long and brilliant career as a scientist. Author of numerous research papers and books, he has given lectures in distinguished forums across the world. Yet he is never happier than as a teacher and mentor.

In this blog entry Pimm addresses what it takes to be a young explorer in the field, interviewing some of his protégés about the high and low points. He finds that much of the excitement and challenges of getting started have not changed over the past forty years. It all begins with a willingness to pay your dues.

Exploration 101: The Dream Job Begins with a Slog

By Stuart L. Pimm

Special Contributor to NatGeo News Watch

The Seven Stars is not the oldest pub in Derby, England. Nearby, the Dophin dates from 1580–a hundred years earlier. But in the late 1960s, the Seven Stars served draft Newcastle Brown ale. It was worth hitchhiking home to Derby from Oxford at the weekend. Beer in the south of England was terrible.

As I elbowed my way to the bar, a vaguely familiar face introduced himself, a conversation ensued, and seven months later, I drove with him and ten others overland to Afghanistan.

My career as an explorer had begun.

That it almost ended that summer–I came back so sick that I had to miss a year of university–is another story.

The story I write here is how one starts a career in exploration–and in this century, rather than in the last one, when I started mine.

So I turned to three remarkable young explorers: Dr. Luke Dollar is a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer–and a former student of mine. The other two are undergraduates at Duke–Varsha Vijay and Ciara Wirth.

“How did you get started,” I asked them.

Luke was first. “I spent three years cleaning up lemur poop at the Duke Lemur Center. I ingratiated myself in every way with Professor Patricia Wright and eventually was invited to do equally menial stuff in Madagascar.” (Like me, Pat is a former member of the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.)

“I was the first up, the last down, and at the end of the day the dirtiest, most tired, most sweaty of everyone.”

From that experience, Luke returned year-after-year, working first for Pat, then on his own, with the island’s largest predator–the fossa.

Almost every year, Luke takes teams to his study sites with Earthwatch–an organization which people pay to do field research for a couple of weeks each northern summer.

Each year, Luke needs the same kind of assistance that Pat needed–someone who is prepared to start by doing the very basic stuff in the field and what is often quite numbing organization to get there.

(I remembered from the first expedition I led, how much time we spent on calculating how many rolls of toilet paper we’d need for 14 people in the field for several months. We didn’t think it would be easy to buy in Afghanistan.)

Varsha got her start helping Luke for one summer in Madagascar.

Then came Ecuador. This was a chance to work with Ciara Wirth, other students from Duke, and Save America’s Forests. Varsha did not hesitate.

Ciara and Varsha worked with Waorani Indians in a remote part of the Amazon.

I told them: “You fly to Quito, then fly across the Andes into the Amazon lowlands, then take a bus for a day — or longer if it gets stuck in the mud — then two days by canoe.”

“Madagascar, the Amazon … two of the most amazing places on Earth! How could I say no?” Varsha replied. And after the first summer there, she took a year off from Duke to continue her work in the field. Ciara came back for a second summer too.

“What were the high points and what were the low points?” I asked them.

“Food”–was near the top of Varsha’s list. ”Growing up in a Hindu family, we did not eat meat. Going from that to eating monkey parts and every kind of rodent was a challenge.”

And the language. Ciara had traveled extensively with her very adventurous parents and spoke Spanish. Varsha did not. Remarkably, both have learned the language of the Woarani Indians.

Initially, they did so in a remarkable way–by talking over Skype in the evenings whenever their Woarani guide, Manuela, came into Puyo and would log onto the computer in an Internet café. The transition from rain forest nomad to using the latest communications technology happens within a generation.

“How did you make friends?”

Varsha’s story was that she regularly joined the women in the traditional villages in making chica–manioc “beer.” “You chew the manioc for a few minutes, spit it back into the bowl, grab another mouthful, and start chewing again.” And yes, it’s a communal bowl.

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“So what went wrong?” All of us have stories of bad experiences.

Ciara’s project depending on mapping–and the essential tools were the GPS units she had taken with her. She left them in a taxi–threatening the viability of the entire project.

After a frantic night and a visit to the police station–” a scary place at night”–they found the taxi and within hours were on their way.

When they arrived, “it was one of the greatest experiences Varhsa and I had the entire summer–a really beautiful community,” Ciara said.

Through all the challenges, all the things that go wrong, Luke and Varsha were all excited about going back into the field. And Ciara is there now, working in Africa.

Luke’s final advice: “Keep your mind open–and be prepared for anything.”

Categories: Madagascar, Saving Nature Collection

Why Boycott Madagascar’s Rosewood and Ebony?

October 6, 2009 Stuart Pimm

Photo of baobab trees in Madagascar by Stuart L. Pimm

October 6, 2009

Representatives of Malagasy civil society, conservation and development organizations and the international community issued a statement today lamenting the ongoing destruction of Madagascar’s last fragments of forest for the illegal harvest and export of precious woods. Consumers of rosewood and ebony products are asked to check their origin, and boycott those made of Malagasy wood. The full statement is at the bottom of this page.

Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm writes about his observations of the diversity in Madagascar and how the current pillaging of the country’s natural heritage threatens not only to destroy decades of conservation work, but also ruin the one chance that communities adjacent to national parks have to escape poverty.

The Call to Boycott Madagascar’s Rosewood and Ebony Explained

By Stuart L. Pimm

Special Contributor to NatGeo News Watch

Madagascar has long been the worst country to be a tree. In the last year, things have got even nastier.

“To how many continents have you traveled with National Geographic,” people ask me. “Eight,” I reply with complete confidence. “But there are only seven continents!” I will not win the National Geographic Bee. I am unmoved, nonetheless.

Madagascar is the eighth “continent,” and no one who loves the great diversity of life on Earth would disagree. Almost everything a naturalist sees in Madagascar is unique to the place.

There are the lemurs, of course. But even to a birdwatcher, broadly familiar kinds of birds are so special to the island that they must have “Madagascar” in front of their names: Madagascar partridge, Madagascar pochard, Madagascar buttonquail–and on down a long list. It turns out that most of these birds are not all that familiar–they are peculiarly from Madagascar.

Simply, Madagascar is an entirely isolated world. It has landscapes that could be the sets for science fiction movies, and one odd lemur, the aye-aye, that is too incredible to belong in one.

Most of Madagascar’s trees–and other plants–are also unique.

Sadly, Madagascar is a wretchedly bad place to be a tree, even in the best of times. Most of the country has been deforested. A coup earlier this year ejected a democratically elected president. In the lawlessness that has followed since, the remaining trees are getting an even worse deal than they have in the past.

Along with other members of National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration (CRE) a few years ago, we flew from the capital city, Antananarivo, towards the northeast end of the island–the Masoala peninsula, a place of exceptional diversity.

But almost as soon as we took off there was smoke in the air–and on the ground beneath us we could see fires, small and large. I know from looking at satellite images that many are large enough to be seen from space.

I first traveled to Madagascar with my then graduate student, Luke Dollar–now a National Geographic emerging explorer. On the ground, the problem was obvious. To clear their fields or to give a short flush of nutrients for the grasses on which their cattle feed, villagers set fire to the land.

The remnant patches of forest–often in national parks–would go up in flames too as the fire spread into them. Wherever we traveled, we saw forest edges that had been recently burned.

“Why should they care,” Luke asked. “They get no benefit from parks.” Rural areas of Madagascar contain some of the poorest people on Earth.

Luke, and my fellow CRE member, Professor Patricia Wright, spend their energies ensuring that poor people near Madagascar’s parks do benefit from the sanctuaries.

Luke founded a small restaurant near one park, for example. The committee ate there during our visit. (Rice and beans, French fries and eggs–a definite improvement on the food we ate during our field work in earlier years.)

With an income stream from the restaurant, the children in the village were all in school. Literacy is the first step on the ladder out of poverty.

Pat’s efforts in Madagascar are even more extensive. Near the Ranomafana National Park her lemur research helped establish, she’s created the research station where almost every young conservation biologist–Malagasy or foreign–goes to learn the craft.

“I watched an aye-aye from the dining room of the research center,” she told me on my first visit to the facility, bursting with obvious pride and excitement.

An entire community has come to depend on the benefits of Ranomafana and the money it generates from visitors.

All this makes what is happening now in Madagascar so tragic.

Reports from the field make it clear that in the last year there has been a surge in logging inside protected forests. The trees involved are mostly “rosewood” and “ebony,” Peter Raven told me.

Peter is the chairman of National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration and has overseen many National Geographic grants to local and international researchers in Madagascar.

In his other capacity as president of Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter is responsible for a large staff in Madagascar. Missouri Botanical Garden runs a multitiered botanical training program in the country, with a network of local collectors working in parks and reserves.

Peter Raven is truly in the middle of the country’s research and conservation.

Rosewood and Ebony

I asked Peter for more information about the rosewood and ebony trees, for these common names are misleading.

“Rosewood is Dalbergia, a legume, and it has some 47 endemic species in Madagascar, and Diospyros, ebony, which is also being logged, we now believe has nearly 200 species–a remarkable array of endemics in each case,” he told me. (“Endemics” are those species found only in the country.)

I’ve not seen the illegal logging firsthand in Madagascar. But I know the way it works in other countries. The essential ingredients are a good river and bad policing. You select a tree near a river, fell it with a chain saw, float it downriver. There will always be someone to pay for the chain saw, so long as he doesn’t get caught.

So who buys these trees? Try typing “Madagascar rosewood” into Google. The first couple of hundred entries are almost all about guitars. And I gave up checking after that.

There’s a lot of money to be made in poaching trees that provide beautiful wood that we desire. Do you know where your guitar came from?

There was a time when people thought that leopards looked best as skins draped over expensive women. Then we learned that they never look more beautiful than when they’re in their natural habitat.

I hope there will be a time when we’ll agree that there is nothing so lovely as a tree. (I borrowed that.) Except, perhaps for the lemur sitting in it.

But more than anything, there is nothing more precious to behold than the children in the schools that tourist dollars build.

Text of statement released today by conservation groups regarding forests and export of wood from Madagascar:

Malagasy government’s decree for precious wood export will unleash further environmental pillaging

Recently Madagascar’s transitional government issued two contradictory decrees: first, the exploitation of all precious woods was made illegal, but then a second allowed the export of hundreds of shipping containers packed with this illegally harvested wood.

Madagascar’s forests have long suffered from the abusive exploitation of precious woods, most particularly rosewoods and ebonies, but the country’s recent political problems have resulted in a dramatic increase in their exploitation.

This activity now represents a serious threat to those who rely on the forest for goods and services and for the country’s rich, unique and highly endangered flora and fauna.

Precious woods are being extracted from forests by roving and sometimes violent gangs of lumbermen and sold to a few powerful businessmen for export.

Madagascar has 47 species of rosewood and over 100 ebony species that occur nowhere else, and their exploitation is pushing some to the brink of extinction.

Those exploiting the trees are also trapping endangered lemurs for food, and the forests themselves are being degraded as trees are felled, processed and dragged to adjacent rivers or roads for transport to the coast. No forest that contains precious woods is safe, and the country’s most prestigious nature reserves and favoured tourist destinations, such as the Marojejy and Masoala World Heritage Sites and the Mananara Biosphere Reserve, have been the focus of intensive exploitation.

Currently thousands of rosewood and ebony logs, none of them legally exploited, are stored in Madagascar’s east coast ports, Vohémar, Antalaha, and Toamasina. The most recent decree will allow their export and surely encourage a further wave of environmental pillaging.

Malagasy civil society, conservation and development organisations and the international community are united in lamenting the issue of the most recent decree, in fearing its consequences and in questioning its legitimacy. Consumers of rosewood and ebony products are asked to check their origin, and boycott those made of Malagasy wood.

October 6, 2009

CAS California Academy of Science

CI Conservation International

DWCT Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

EAZA European Association of Zoos and Aquaria

ICTE Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments

MBG Missouri Botanical Garden

MFG Madagascar Fauna Group

The Field Museum, Chicago

Dr Claire Kremen, University of California, Berkeley

Dean Keith Gilless, University of California, Berkeley

Robert Douglas Stone, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

WASA World Association of Zoos and Aquariums

WCS Wildlife Conservation Society

WWF World Wide Fund for Nature

Zoo Zürich

Categories: Madagascar, Saving Nature Collection

The World’s Smallest Chameleon Now Discovered

The World’s Smallest Chameleon Now Discovered

Exploration 101: The Dream Jobs Begin with a Slog

Exploration 101: The Dream Job Begins with a Slog

Why Boycott Madagascar’s Rosewood and Ebony?

The Call to Boycott Madagascar’s Rosewood and Ebony Explained

Rosewood and Ebony

Malagasy government’s decree for precious wood export will unleash further environmental pillaging

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