In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone.

For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia’s first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There’s an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They’ve all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo.

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations¹, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed.

The Pan Africa Great Ape Program, the first Africa-wide great-ape census to be mounted, could change that. In addition to surveying chimpanzee numbers (see ‘How many chimpanzees are left?’), project scientists plan to set up automated video and audio recording devices at 40 research sites in 15 countries with chimp populations. Led by Christophe Boesch, director of the primatology department at the EVA, and Hjalmar Kühl, also at the EVA, the programme aims to get a picture of how chimpanzee behaviour — from nut cracking to vocal calls — varies across Africa. Ultimately, the hope is to learn about the origins and extent of what, in humans, would be called culture.

Until recently, scientists regarded culture — defined as socially transmitted behaviours — as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. “It is not black and white,” says Kühl, who is Leinert’s supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, “only humans have culture”, says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages,” he says. But “if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture”.

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The first ever pan African great ape survey aims to get an accurate estimate of chimpanzee populations remaining in the wild.

He was 42, a ranger in the nearby forest, and a tree branch fell on his head. Like funerals elsewhere in West Africa, the entire town is in exuberant mourning. There is plenty of cane juice (alcohol made of sugar cane) and beer to go around, courtesy of the Forestry Development Authority. Supplies were fetched from Greenville, the closest ‘city’, and everyone has been drinking heavily for the past few days.

Once the cans are empty, children pick them and pretend to be adults as they dance to high life music while swigging down invisible spirits.

Heavily armed officials from the immigration authority march through the town, keeping on their vests and boots and hats despite the heavy heat.

Goats for slaughter are paraded in front of officials who’ve turned up at the funeral. Men use the chance to ask for jobs, and the village football team dances in at a critical juncture to demand a football to play with.

Tears finally flow as the coffin is hoisted up on the shoulders of his friends and colleagues and left on the outskirts of the village. The next day, the man’s family shave their heads in a cleansing ritual.

Kenyan science is a study in contrasts. Among sub-Saharan nations, it ranks third — behind South Africa and Nigeria — in its output of scientific papers published in international journals, and its publishing outranks that of economic heavyweight Nigeria in fields such as environment, ecology and immunology. It is also a hub of collaborations on the continent (see ‘Country connections’). But Kenya’s research output has grown more slowly than most other sub-Saharan nations. In the recent African Union survey, Kenya scored last in terms of the increase in the numbers of published research papers, normalized for population size.

Most of the scientific work in Kenya is centred in government-owned research institutes that have extensive international collaborations. Among the most renowned is the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), which has centres around the country and does basic research as well as developing drugs, vaccines and products such as diagnostic kits for HIV — an important service because Kenya lacks a thriving private sector for commercialization of research. KEMRI has a budget of $37.5 million, with 45% coming from its international collaborators, including the Wellcome Trust, a London-based medical research charity.

Other centres also stand out, such as the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, headquartered in Nairobi, which has an international reputation for its work on crops and agricultural diseases. And the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, headquartered in Mombasa, has a programme focused on mangrove research that is considered the best in sub-Saharan Africa.

By contrast, the universities suffer from lack of infrastructure and money. The government and donors have focused on boosting primary and secondary education, but have neglected universities, say observers.

The government invested only $3.6 million in 2010 on university-based research, according to Shaukat Abdulrazak, secretary of the National Council for Science and Technology. And there is a shortage of professors to serve a student population that grew from 90,000 in 2004 to more than 120,000 in 2008.

Read at Nature News

Njoro, Kenya (Jun 30, 2011) — David Cheruiyot noticed that his wheat fields were turning the wrong colour. The stems of the plants took on a sickly brown hue, and when he peeled open the heads there was no grain inside. “If you go to inspect it, there is nothing but dust,” he recalls.

Ug99, a virulent fungus that causes a disease called stem rust, arrived on Cheruiyot’s farm in Kenya in 2007. It devastated wheat fields in the country that season, slashing yields by as much as 80% in some regions. Since that epidemic, Cheruiyot has sprayed his wheat three times a season with fungicide, something that few farmers in Africa can afford.
Online collection.

Stem rust has plagued farmers for millennia, but Ug99 is a new superstrain that overcomes defensive genes in 90% of the wheat crops planted around the globe. Since it was first detected in 1998, spores of the fungus have spread from East Africa into Yemen and Iran. If the disease continues its march eastwards, hitting the breadbaskets of south Asia and China, it will threaten the food supply of hundreds of millions of people.

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For March and April 2011, about 593.0 square kilometers of forest area were cleared, according to DETER. This is five times the corresponding clearing in 2010.

Deforestation in the Amazon has been declining since 2004, but recent months have suggested a reversal, although month-to-moth figures tend to vary. The deforestation rates between August 2010 and July 2011 – the year covered by the programme – are yet to be released.

The rise in deforestation in recent months may be due to proposed changes in Brazil’s Forest Law under consideration by the Congress. The amendments reduce the amount of privately-owned land that must be maintained as forest by small landholders from 80% to 50%. It requires landholders to register how much of their land is forested, as well as providing amnesty from fines for forest cleared before 2008.

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Germany is still recovering from one of the world’s worst outbreaks of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, which as of 18 June had sickened more than 3,200 people and caused 39 deaths¹. The unusually deadly bacteria moved undetected through the food supply from livestock to agriculture to the dinner table, and the response to the outbreak was branded slow and inefficient by physicians and scientists (see ‘Microbe outbreak panics Europe‘).

Now a group of health professionals assembled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has called for biosurveillance efforts in the United States and worldwide to be streamlined to help recognize and respond to threats quickly.

“We are trying to create an international immune system, a system that has the capacity to recognize abnormalities,” says Ian Lipkin, co-chair of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS) and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York.

Read at Nature News

16. As agreed at the first Meeting of the Parties, each Party is expected to pay an annual subscription of €3,000.  To date only one Party has complied: the host of the Technical Committee meeting, the Government of Rwanda has paid for both 2009 and 2010.  Invoices were sent to Parties on March 17, 2010, and again on July 7, 2010. As a result of the non-payment by most Parties, the Gorilla Agreement and its activities have, to date, been funded entirely from contributions from donors.

17. The CMS Standing Committee, at its 37th meeting in November, 2010, expressed concern at the apparent lack of commitment shown by the Gorilla Agreement Parties, as evidenced by the non-payment of overdue contributions. They noted that this situation could be very discouraging to potential donors asked to contribute funds to an initiative to which the range states themselves had yet to demonstrate a firm commitment.  The Vice-chair of the Standing Committee sent a letter to all range states that same month, urging Parties to pay their contributions, and urging non-Parties to accede to the Agreement.

18. This meeting has been made possible by grants from Monaco and Germany, both of whom have also made funds available for past field activities.  UNEP/CMS Secretariat on behalf of the Parties to the Gorilla Agreement thanks these donors and specifically looks to Governments and organizations to further sponsor and promote such activities aimed at
implementing the Agreement’s Action Plans

19. The UNEP/CMS Secretariat continues to encourage Parties to pay their contributions as soon as possible.

Flickr photo courtesy __Wichid__

Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Uganda are most affected. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 8.4 million people are in need of food aid in the region, according to spokesman David Orr. Thousands of livestock have already died in Kenya and Ethiopia from animal diseases associated with the drought. The severity this year will depend on the rainy season between March and May.

A drought for the record books

Unlike more instantaneous natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought progresses slowly like a drumbeat. There is an apex, usually around the ninth month when the numbers of cattle dying rises drastically. The numbers depend on how poor the rainfall is, and meteorologists have so far predicted below-average rainfall for 2011 in eastern parts of the Horn.

Predictions of the current drought depend on ocean temperatures. A La Niña episode, caused by cooling ocean surface temperatures, began in the central Pacific Ocean in July 2010. Temperatures lowered by 1.5 to 1.6 degrees Celsius, changing ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns.

In historical terms, this episode has been among the strongest in a century, according to the World Meteorological Agency. The system unleashed massive flooding in Australia and Southeast Asia. In East Africa, it caused a dry spell between October and December 2010. It was the driest short rain season in 30 years.

“It is too early to say yet, although the general view is [the rains] look like being quite poor in certain parts of Somalia and Ethiopia,” said Orr. “Combined with conflict and rising food prices in Somalia, this could be particularly serious in that country.”

The WFP is continuing its normal operations of providing a food basket of cereals to the regions but is underfunded by 56 percent for the April to September period, Orr said.

Read at Greenwire/NYT

Funding gap persists as agencies and organizations attempt to wipe out the tenacious virus.

Some 99% of wild poliovirus has been eradicated, but it clings on in a few places. The last endemic hot spots are the conflict-ridden front lines of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas of India and Nigeria — and governments and charities are scrambling to eliminate it entirely.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, announced in his annual letter yesterday his commitment to eradicate polio by 2012, by giving the vaccine to all children under five in poor countries. The initiative is led by the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which includes among other organizations Rotary International, a non-profit foundation headquartered in Evanston, Illinois.

Nature examines the challenges that remain before the virus can be wiped out.

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