VCU news

By Sathya Achia Abraham

A jewel of tropical biodiversity lies tucked in the forest highlands of the ancient East Arc Mountains of Tanzania and Kenya – home to a diverse collection of invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds, small mammals and plant species found nowhere else in the world. It’s no wonder the region is often identified as the Galapagos of East Africa.

However, its grand luster – the region boasts excellent climate, fertile soils, low levels of malaria, and, of course, the natural resources of the forests themselves - has caught the attention of human populations, and now faces incredible pressure as old and new inhabitants attempt to strike a balance.

Human population densities in these mountains are some of the highest in rural Tanzania and Kenya and continue to increase rapidly, raising the threat of potential extinction to some animal and plant species as the forests become lost and degraded.

Enter an international team of biologists, ecologists and conservationists who have been steadily exploring this biodiverse hotspot -- doing their part to discover, document and record the exuberant flora and fauna of the region.

Among them is James R. Vonesh, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biology at Virginia Commonwealth University, who specializes in the study of amphibian life. His fascination with tropical biodiversity began when he was a child, growing up in tropical locales around the globe like Papua, New Guinea, in the South Pacific.

Finding Amani

Vonesh’s initial introduction to the East Arc Mountains and its frog inhabitants happened somewhat serendipitously. In fact, at first, he didn’t know they existed. In 1995, while working on his master’s degree, he traveled to Uganda – following his girlfriend, now wife, who was a primatologist conducting field work in the area. His field work led him to develop a dissertation project proposal to return to the same forest in western Uganda.

With funding support from the National Science Foundation in hand, Vonesh was ready to dig in and get down to work when he hit a wall. Funding was halted due to a travel advisory warning for western Uganda because of guerrilla rebel activity along the Congo-Uganda border.

After speaking with his Ph.D adviser, a plan was hatched to attempt this same work in a safer location, yet still be true to the research questions Vonesh had proposed.

“The funding organization indicated that they’d give me half the money to provide proof of concept that another locality could work. But where could I do the work? My study system was pretty specific - I was studying a parasitoid fly that attacked and consumed the arboreal eggs of leaf-breeding treefrogs. Where else was I going to find a system like that?” he said.

Perplexed about the situation, Vonesh went to his office to figure out his next move. His officemate, Charles Msuya, was a visiting Ph.D. student from the University of Dar es Salam in Tanzania who would later become the first Tanzanian to get a Ph.D. focused on herpetology. Msuya offered up a listening ear to his colleague.

“Charles smiled and said, with characteristic Tanzanian pride, ‘Anything you can find in Uganda, it’s better in Tanzania!’” Vonesh recalled. “He then gave me a list of several sites I might investigate - the first site, the one he felt would be most promising was Amani Nature Reserve, in the East Usambara Mountains. Turns out he was right - I ended up doing all my dissertation work there.”

Identifying What Remains

Now, almost 10 years later, Vonesh continues to travel to Amani, meaning ‘peace’ in Swahili, to do his part in preserving this slice of paradise.

According to Vonesh, amphibians are experiencing dramatic and often enigmatic declines globally, with an estimated 30 percent to 40 percent of all species threatened with extinction, and more than 120 species recently extinct.

Through a considerable amount of tedious field work, Vonesh and his colleagues have already begun to make incredible progress to facilitate research, conservation and management of one of the world’s most unique amphibian faunas.

Vonesh; Elizabeth Harper, Ph.D., a former mentee of Vonesh’s and currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the State University of New York; and David Patrick, Ph.D., director of the Center for Adirondack Biodiversity, led a recent effort to produce a comprehensive field guide to the amphibians of the region, made possible with funding from Conservation International.

“A fundamental challenge with trying to conserve tropical biodiversity is that you can’t conserve what you don’t even know exists. This is where our field guide plays an important role. It provides, for the first time, a reference for identifying the diversity of amphibian fauna of this region,” explained Vonesh.

“Further, and importantly, this is the first guide to be completely English-KiSwahili bilingual. This aspect of the guide will facilitate its use by local land managers,” he said. KiSwahili is the native language of some 5 million to 10 million people dispersed along the East African coastline – stretching from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique.

Building the Guide

Vonesh met Harper in 2002, when she turned up at his Ph.D. field site to volunteer and observe his investigation of tropical amphibians in the Amani Nature Reserve. A recent graduate of Middlebury College, Harper had earned a prestigious Watson Fellowship, a one-year grant that allowed her to travel the world and engage in independent study of tropical frogs. She’d just been up close and personal with the amphibians of Australia and Thailand when she volunteered in Amani.

During her time in Thailand, Harper had completed a photo guide of frogs, and as her mentor, Vonesh encouraged her to do a similar one for the Amani Nature Reserve, titled, ‘Guide to the Amphibians of the East Usambaras,’ which is available online.

After a few years of scholarship and discovery, the team reconvened and the idea for the “Field Guide to the Amphibians of the Eastern Arc Mountains and Coastal Forest of Tanzania and Kenya” was born. Initially, the region Vonesh, Harper and Patrick proposed to cover was too small, and they were encouraged by the funding organization, Conservation International, to broaden the spectrum.

“They asked us to expand and consider the entire Eastern Arc and coastal forest of Tanzania. That’s like proposing to do the amphibians of Virginia and being asked to do the entire Atlantic coast,” explained Vonesh.

But Vonesh, Harper and Patrick had only worked in the Usambaras, which was considered the best studied of the Eastern Arc forests.

“In some other regions, many new species were being discovered and were waiting formal description. We actually delayed publication a bit to allow some of these species to be formally described - otherwise the guide would have been outdated even as it was published. To some extent, that is still true,” said Vonesh.

To expand the guide the team recruited additional experts - John Measey, Ph.D., a tropical ecologist with The South African National Biodiversity Institute, and Michele Menegon, with the Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali in Italy,who were very well versed with the other forests of the Eastern Arc forests.

The colorful field guide includes a host of information about rainforest frogs and caecilians – wormlike amphibians – including their distributions, microhabitats, life history and identification.

Halting the Declines

In other work in the region, through a grant from the National Geographic Society, Vonesh, Harper, Patrick, and a team with the Tropical Biology Association, are examining the relationship between life history traits and basic population biology of chameleons endemic to the East Usambaras.

According to Vonesh, unsustainable harvesting by humans is a principal cause of vertebrate species declines and extinctions worldwide – and in the case of wild chameleons – they are collected for the pet trade. The team will help the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute and the Wildlife Division set sustainable harvest levels.

Believed by scientists to have formed up to 290 million years ago, the mountains have a climate that has remained relatively stable compared to the lowland areas that lie between 13 separate mountain blocks that run in a broken line from north to south. The consistency in climate likely provided a safe harbor for forest-dependent species to survive and thrive.

With any luck – and the help of these dedicated biologists, ecologists and conservationists – delicate regions such as the East Arc Mountains will continue to be fruitful in decades to come.