Last summer, the magazine featured some mighty impressive bugs from Mozambique — the pictures could've been casting shots for a "Starship Troopers" sequel. This month's National Geographic includes new photos (creepy-crawlies and more!) from the same place, Gorongosa National Park, to go with an article by the biologist E.O. Wilson, who has been involved in surveying its wildlife.
Wilson's assistant there was a local named Tonga Torcida, who shared with him an origin story that explains why Mount Gorongosa, at the park's heart, is considered sacred.
In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult — and so it has been to this day.
Life for Mount Gorongosa certainly improved after the country's civil war ended two decades ago. But deforestation remains a problem, which in turn threatens its biodiversity. All the more reason to get a sense of what's at risk of being lost, especially given that the area is a kind of "ecological island" that has hardly been surveyed by biologists. Wilson describes one method of changing that:
To sample the current biodiversity on Mount Gorongosa, Greg Carr [a philanthropist] and I decided to hold a "bioblitz" there and to engage the community living on its lower slopes. We asked Tonga Torcida to help organize the event and to recruit local children as our helpers. Bioblitzes are counts of species found and identified in a restricted area over a fixed period of time, usually 24 hours. They follow simple rules: Participants search within a set radius around a focal point, assisted by local naturalists who are familiar with one or more groups of organisms and can identify the species discovered. The first bioblitz I helped organize was at Concord, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1998, with Walden Pond as the focus. Naturalists came from all over New England. The effort was so successful and well publicized that similar events have since been conducted all over the United States (including two in New York City's Central Park) and in at least 18 other countries.
(A bioblitz in Central Park sounds fun, right?)
Wilson figures that tens of thousands of species of insects, arachnids and other invertebrates — "the little things that run the world . . . that form the foundation of ecosystems" — have yet to be discovered in Gorongosa National Park. Me, I'm sort of wondering if that's where the cicadas went. Weren't they supposed to have been crawling and whirring all over the place by now?
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