Expedition discovers new chameleon

New species are rare. Werner Conradie, a doctoral student working with professor Branch on Mozambique’s Mount Mabu, puts it into perspective.

“Some people take years, maybe a lifetime, to find one new species. As a young scientist it’s a dream to find new species, and at this moment, being in this place, anything can be new,” said Conradie. There are a lot of new species on Mount Mabu, but it is unprotected, and for the team that has made these exciting discoveries, this is something that they would like to change.

Mount Mabu is an isolated mountain that rises more than a mile above sea level in Mozambique’s Zambezia Province. It is called an isolate, and isolates, like islands, breed unique species. The area has been isolated for so long that species adapt and evolve to suit that specific environment, occurring there and no place else.

Think of Darwin’s famous finches from the Galapagos Islands. They lived on separate islands, far enough away so that they could not fly between them. They evolved into different species of finches and each species was endemic to a separate island.

When new species are collected and studied by scientists like the Darwin Initiative team, they help to create a better understanding of life, the processes that drive it, and what is called the biogeography of an area. Biogeography seeks to understand life’s relationship with the earth’s geography and climate.

For intance, the new species of snake snake found on Mount Mabu suggests a link with the Congo Basin, some 870 miles away. Does that mean that at some distant point in the past the Congo forest stretched down to northern Mozambique? When did it recede? What climactic event drove it back to the north? Those are the questions these scientists are studying. Bio-geography is very important in light of the current climate change paradigm we live in, and the new species of Mout Mabu are new pieces of that puzzle.

There is another more pragmatic reason to get excited over the finds on Mount Mabu. The more species found to be unique to an area, the more chance there is that the rare forest will be protected. The forested valleys and ridges behind Mount Mabu are the largest stretch of remaining rainforest in southern Africa, and is in “pristine condition,” according to Bayliss.

This alone should warrant conservation, but not always. The discovery of so much diversity makes it all the more probable that Mount Mabu’s forest will not be logged or mined, but does not guarantee it.

When Julian Bayliss first came to climb Mount Mabu the forest was hidden behind the summit. It was only on his attempt to get to the top did he come over the eastern ridge and gasp at an unending forest as far as the eye can see. The team was shocked, and realized that they had stumbled upon something completely unique, something they hadn’t expected.

The story goes that Bayliss found the mountain on Google Earth. This is true to a point, but he explains that he had simply used the Google tool to locate all the mountains over a certain height in the area, and then he set out to climb each one. It was only by hiking up them, hacking through undergrowth, getting sweaty and bitten by spiders that he discovered the  forest. Then he used a satellite map, like Google Earth, to separate out the forest with infrared filters back in his office.

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