Africa
zooillogix | October 28, 2008As reported in the NY Times and elsewhere, an auction of 108 metric tons of ivory took place today in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The buyers were exclusively from China and Japan. Not surprisingly, this sale has raised the ire of animal welfare groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
You might be surprised to learn however that this was a legal auction sanctioned, and in fact run, by CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. So here are the facts:
* All of the ivory sold comes from government…
gregladen | October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best…
gregladen | September 18, 2008The same man who said "God will protect us against gays" and who has done much more for repression of diversity generally in East Africa than the average person has gotten all hot under the collar (or somewhere) about women's skirts that end above the knees. He wants them banned like cell phones.
James Nsaba Buturo has also served in Uganda as Minister of Information where is he generally known to have been more corrupt than the average government minister in East Africa. Uganda generally needs to be (and I think mostly is) embarrassed by this guy. By the way, gayness is a life in prison…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2008tags: Okapi, Okapia johnstoni, camera trap, zoology, rare mammals, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo rainforest, African Wildlife, Zoological Society of London
This undated image provided by the Zoological Society of London, Thursday, 11 September 2008, shows an okapi, Okapia johnstoni, in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo proving that the species is still surviving there despite more than one decade of civil conflict. The Zoological Society of London says cameras set up in Congo have snapped the first photos of the rare okapi roaming wild. Okapi have…
awild | August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little Azteca ants. The equivalent in South Africa? I didn't know.
A little bit of poking around in the acacias revealed the culprit. It was Crematogaster tricolor, an orange ant about half a centimeter long:
They didn't appreciate the disturbance, apparently, because they came after me without…
gregladen | August 18, 2008ambia's leader Levy Mwanawasa, 59, has died in a Paris hospital after suffering a stroke in June.
Vice-President Rupiah Banda, who is expected to take over as acting leader, made the announcement on state TV.
President Mwanawasa suffered a stroke at an African Union summit in Egypt and was then flown to France, where he had remained in hospital.
He came to prominence recently for being one of the African leaders most critical of the violence in Zimbabwe.
Mr Mwanawasa's health was an issue during his presidency.
In April 2006, he suffered a minor stroke four months before general elections.…
gregladen | August 14, 2008A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a "Genetic Map of Europe" (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement of humans in and around North Africa and adjoining areas. Here I am passing on the press release and photos without comment, so that you can have the information right away.
TWO SKULLS. (Dark Skull, left) Radiocarbon dated at 9,500 years old, the skull of this mature…
zooillogix | August 5, 2008Wildlife Conservation Society researchers in the remote northern jungles of the Republic of Congo have made a startling discovery: approximately 125,000 western lowland gorillas - more than twice the previous worldwide estimate. Coined "the Green Abyss" by scientists and explorers eager to do some coining in a world running increasingly short on coinable areas, these remote forests are extremely swampy, making tent sites nearly impossible to find. Apparently the lack of KOA campgrounds accounts for the previous lack of research in the area and oversight of the vast majority of the population…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: flamingos, baboons, nature, streaming video
This streaming National Geographic video shows a group of hungry baboons in Kenya's Lake Bogoria that find themselves surrounded by a million unsuspecting, and unprotected, flamingos. I am sure you can guess what happens next. [2:40]
gregladen | July 26, 2008 Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) commandos Nigeria is where Western graduate students in political science who study corruption go to do their fieldwork. There appears to be an ensconced elite and externally connected ruling body and a down trodden underclass organized into various resistance groups. The discovery of abundant petroleum reserves in the Niger Delta and vicinity meant that the elite ruling group and external forces (including but not limited to Big Oil) have conspired to extract this resource at maximum profit largely setting aside the possibility of…
zooillogix | July 21, 2008In a sure sign that Kruger National Park in South Africa is angling to be the World Wrestling Federation of game reserves, yet another unlikely and brutal animal match-up has been caught on film. In this series of photos, a leopard ambushes a crocodile. A protracted struggle ensues but it's pretty clear who ultimately comes out on top. While crocodiles have been witnessed attacking leopards in the past, this is the first known encounter that began the other way around. Cut and pasted just for you from the pages of The Telegraph, check this out:
more below the fold
This encounter is…
awild | July 17, 2008
Leptogenys attenuata
In spite of the southern winter, the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal had plenty of ant activity to keep me occupied last week. In addition to the beautiful Polyrhachis I posted earlier, here are portraits of a few of the species I encountered.
Crematogaster tricolor
Platythyrea cooperi
Myrmicaria natalensis
Plectroctena mandibularis
Anochetus faurei
Oecophylla longinoda (African Tailor Ant)
Cataulacus brevisetosus
Dorylus helvolus
Pachycondyla (Bothroponera) mlanjiensis
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi
Pheidole megacephala (Big-Headed Ant)
Solenopsis geminata (…
gregladen | July 10, 2008Wild game is good. More wild game and fewer cattle, in some habitats, would better. But when wild game is extracted en masse from a wild area (usually a rain forest, usually in Africa) and shipped to a city, or an enclave of logger's camps, or overseas to nostalgic African populations in Europe, it is no longer called wild game, or venison, or just food or meat.
It is called bushmeat, and bushmeat (in modern parlance) is bad.
Havalook:
Although illegal wildlife poaching is conducted worldwide, the impact in Africa has been devastating. Unsustainable commercial hunting for bushmeat will…
gregladen | July 10, 2008This article in PLoS Medicine investigates the difference between modern multi-drug treatment with individuals monitoring of patients in a developed country (Switzerland) with similar treatments using a different, non-individualized "public health" approach in South Africa, to see if there is any difference between the two approach. The results are surprising, and encouraging.
AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) has caused the death of over 25 million people worldwide since 1981, and an additional 30 million people are currently infected with the causal agent of AIDS, the virus HIV…
gregladen | July 1, 2008A trip overseas, especially with today's fuel prices and other changes in the airline industry, is different now than it was even a few years ago. This is especially true in regards to the topic of this post: How to deal with the problem of vicarious travelers and their need for trinkets, as well as your desire to bring trinkets to everyone you know when you go on a trip.
At the very outset I want to tell you this: There is precious little in the way of legal trinkets that a traveler can find anywhere in the world they may go that can not be obtained at the local trinket shop in your own…
gregladen | June 26, 2008Join Zuska and her commenters in a pile on regarding the Smithsonian Magazine's recent article on the archaeology of southern Africa.
It's racist, it's sexist, and it's even anti-Neanderthal. (The article, not Zuska's post)
Regarding the writing about the use of stone tool technology in the article:
It says, "could be women - but no one really knows, do they? The safe bet is on men." It's the equivalent of saying "the PC police are always watching, so we'd better pretend like there is an actual possibility that we are including women in this discussion, even though we know we're talking…
gregladen | June 20, 2008Well, now it's official. The leader of Zimbabwe is an out of control nut-job who will probably linger in office until very slow moving pressures from outside push him out, or until there is a bloody coup of some kind.
This comes after his opposition has publicly considered pulling out of a contested electoral process under threat of increased violence that seems to be perpetrated by Mugabe's corrupt organization.
Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe says "only God" can remove him from office, as the opposition MDC considers pulling out from a presidential run-off vote.
"The MDC will never be…
gregladen | June 19, 2008Do you have any idea of what is going on in Zimbabwe? And has been for quite some time? I've not chosen to make any effort to note the African news that I semi-regularly follow, but I think it is time for that to change. Expect a bit more. I don't know how much insightful commentary I can add, but I can at least point to goings on of interest.
In ZImbabwe, we have a situation of a long term leader who won't seem to go away even though many people seem to want him to. There was an election recently, and that may have been co-opted by the ruling party. And this, today:
The bodies of four…
gregladen | June 18, 2008In the early days of South Africa ... well, not the really early days, but some time in the 19th century or early 20th century, a fairly large number of Chines people were imported as workers/slaves. One of the reasons to do this was to break the indigenous workers' efforts for reform. It failed, and the Chinese became of no special use to the Apartheid government or the mining corporations, so they were sent back. All of them.
Nonetheless, there are some 200,000 or so "ethnic Chinese" living today in South Africa. Now, I do not really know for sure who these people are or how they got…