Black rhinos + Butterfly farming + Lemur tree-huggers + Fantastic beasts
Black rhinos + Butterfly farming + Lemur tree-huggers + Fantastic beasts
A rare bit of good news for black rhinos
As the world marked World Rhino Day on Thursday, there was some good news for black rhinos. The population of this critically-endangered species has expanded by 3% per year from 2018-2021 across their range, according to updated figures from the IUCN’s African Rhino Specialist Group. There are now 6,200 black rhinos, up from 2,500 in the 1990s.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) attributes some of this population growth to a programme it runs known as the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project. It has created 13 new populations on more than 300,000 hectares of land.
Black rhinos are resident in a number of southern African countries, including Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Last year on World Rhino Day I happened to be in Haka Park, a nature reserve on the eastern outskirts of Harare. The park has no rhinos, but while walking in woodland studded with granite outcrops I stumbled upon an ancient rock painting of a black rhino.
It was probably painted a thousand years ago or more. I hope rhinos are still around in this region to inspire artists a thousand years from now.
Butterfly farming to promote biodiversity on Sao Tome island
BirdLife International has launched a project to promote butterfly farming on the island of Sao Tome, the largest of the two islands in the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, which lies off the coast of west Africa.
Under the initial phase, BirdLife Sao Tome and Principe will support three farmers to produce at least 3,200 chrysalids each per year. These will be exported to private collectors in Europe, mainly France.
It is projected that each farmer could earn around 1,800 euros per year, with a potential to earn up to 4,000 euros per year.
Sao Tome is home to 116 species of butterfly, including Acraea jodutta (pictured). Some, like the rare bright blue and black Charaxes montieri, are found nowhere else.
The project is expected to expand to allow more farmers on the island to supplement their income through butterfly farming. Most of the island’s farms are pesticide-free, making them friendly to insects.
BirdLife hopes that putting a value on the forest and its natural capital like butterflies will incentivise locals to protect it, instead of exploiting it for less profitable and less sustainable enterprises, like charcoal-burning.
Pic credit: Charles J. Sharp, Wikimedia Commons
Lemurs hug the base of trees to keep cool on hot days
A charismatic species of lemur, the sifaka, spends most of its time in trees in southern Madagascar. But the animals do descend to rest on the ground during the midday heat of the dry season. While there, on really hot days, they engage in bouts of tree-hugging.
To find out why, a research team collected more than 600 hours of behavioural data on sifakas from six different groups, along with recordings of the temperature of the air, ground and tree trunks.
The bases of tree trunks were found to be between 3-5 degrees centigrade (37-41 Fahrenheit) lower than the ambient air, and likely helped the animals to cool down.
“The capacity of sifakas to avoid heat stress will be critical to their persistence under predicted temperature increases in southern Madagascar over coming decades,” the authors note in the International Journal of Primatology, adding that this “needs to be better understood in the context of long-term conservation planning.”
Zimbabwean artists turn invasive plant into fantastic beasts
I drove a long way down a dirt track in Domboshava, a rural area north of Harare. Small homesteads lined the road, and flocks of feral pigeons took wing, flashing white primaries. Suddenly ahead of me stood two giraffes, their long necks stretched serenely towards the blue September sky. Not real giraffes though. These were the latest creations of sculptor Joe Zata and his brothers.
This family of artists is creating giant sculptures — giraffes, rhinos, elephants, wild dogs and much more — from Lantana, an invasive plant species native to tropical America that has spread aggressively throughout Zimbabwe and the region over the last century.
Joe and his brothers are keenly aware they are performing a crucial environmental service alongside their creativity. “Lantana is everywhere and people don’t want it,” Joe told me, “so I’m trying to make use of it through art.”
