This horned frog is unique to the Solomon Islands. Photo: Fredrique Oliver.
As dusk falls over the Solomon Islands, a cacophony of quacks rises from the forest floor. The noise originates from the small Solomon’s horned frog, an amphibian unique to the islands.
“This strange chorus dominates the early evening sounds in the forest,” says Christopher Filardi, director of Pacific Programs at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History. Filardi and his graduate student Patrick Pikacha found this particular frog at the biodiversity reserve on Kolombangara Island in the Solomon Islands, where Filardi, an evolutionary biologist, studies bird speciation and biodiversity.
“The Kolombangara biodiversity reserve is the largest protected area in the region,” says Filardi, adding that the reserve is “stewarded by the people who have lived there for hundreds of generations.”
The reserve’s protected status provides a home for animals like the colorful horned frog, which also appears in variations of white, purple and brown, in addition to the green pictured. Little is known about why these frogs have these colors or even how they reproduce, but what is known about the elusive species is intriguing. Read more »
Blogging from Argentina, Felicity Arengo (Associate Director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation) is counting flamingos. Andean flamingos leave their high-altitude lakes and disperse, among other places, to the cattle lands and soy farms of Argentina’s “pampas,” or fertile lowlands, for winter. Arengo and her colleagues have found numerous wintering sites over the last few years and are working to coordinate efforts to protect these birds from habitat destruction due to roads, mining, and agricultural practices, among other factors.
August 20, 2010
Photo courtesy of Felicity Arengo
The day began in my hometown, Rosario, Argentina, with my colleague Marcelo Romano and two students sorting through the gear we’ve gathered for our expedition. We stacked food coolers, rubber boots, and camping equipment on top of the Jeep. Inside we neatly packed our spotting scopes, computers, GPS, and other sensitive equipment. Marcelo and I are conducting a winter flamingo census in several wetlands nestled within Argentina’s primary agricultural zone.
It is winter here and up until last week, temperatures were well below freezing so I’ve come prepared with several wool and fleece layers, a couple of sleeping bags, hats, gloves, and scarves. But today seems almost like a spring day.
This winter census complements a comprehensive, simultaneous flamingo census that was performed in January this year, coordinated by the Grupo Conservacion Flamencos Altoandinos (GCFA). Of the six flamingo species worldwide, three are found in the Southern Cone. The Chilean Flamingo has a broad distribution throughout the region while the Andean Flamingo and Puna Flamingo are more restricted to wetlands in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Our counts focus on the latter two species; whose population numbers are cause for concern. With global population estimates at around 35,000, the Andean Flamingo is the rarest in the world, meriting its listing as one of the few foreign species in the US Endangered Species Act.
Photo courtesy of Marcelo Romano
Since 1997, the GCFA, an international initiative of scientists and conservationists, has been coordinating research and conservation activities focused on flamingos and their wetland habitats. The comprehensive censuses are key and involve dozens of trained volunteers simultaneously setting out to reach as many wetlands within the flamingo range as possible within a week’s time. After establishing a baseline with the first-ever reliable estimates of Andean and Puna Flamingo populations in the first few years, the group has since done two follow-up censuses in 2005 and early this year to track population trends. One important aspect we discovered early on is that the Andean Flamingo, originally thought to be relatively restricted to high altitude wetlands of the Andes, actually comes down from the mountains during winter months, particularly if the Andean wetlands freeze, to use the lowland wetlands of the Argentinean pampas. In the past five years or so, we have begun to realize the true importance of these wetlands in the Andean Flamingo’s life cycle. Read more »
Eleanor Sterling, director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, began blogging this week for The New York Times from the pristine Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific, where she and six Museum colleagues are studying the green and hawksbill sea turtles. This is the conservation biologist’s second stint with the new feature“Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field,” which was inaugurated in April by Christopher Raxworthy, curator in the Museum’s Department of Herpetology, with vivid accounts of his search for chameleons, frogs, and lizards in Madagascar. Sterling previously reported from the rainforests of Vietnam where she was part of a team surveying one of the last remaining populations of the gray-shanked douc langurs in the wild.
The Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is a unique environment relatively free from human influence. “We are smack in the middle of nowhere, just above the equator in the Pacific — about a thousand miles south of Hawaii,” Sterling wrote in her post to set the scene. “The total human population on the atoll varies month to month because it consists entirely of refuge managers, researchers and the research station crew. This two-week period we have 17 on the atoll.”
Sterling and her team are trying to understand the importance of the remote, uninhabited atoll as a foraging, as opposed to a nesting, site for turtles migrating across the Pacific Ocean. Now readers can peek over the scientists’ shoulders for the next few weeks.
Over the next few weeks, Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Natural History, will blog from a remote mountain in Vietnam as she and colleagues look for a highly endangered primate, the grey-shanked douc (Pygathrix cinerea). Sterling will take readers along on the expedition by posting stories about her field adventures, conservation work, and discoveries to The New York Times’s “Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field” blog.
“I still remember the first time I saw a douc langur, an elegant leaf-eating monkey, in the wild. It was in the 1990s in a rainforest in central Vietnam and I had heard an ever-so-slight rustling overhead,” writes Sterling in her post on June 8. “I waited quietly beneath the tree until I saw a beautiful porcelain-faced animal peer down at me through the mist and leaves.”
Sterling, a conservation biologist with over 25 years of field research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has conducted surveys, behavioral research, and ecological studies of primates, whales, sea turtles, and other animals. With her staff at the CBC, she has translated the information gleaned from research into recommendations for conservation managers, decision-makers, and educators. Sterling has also studied biodiversity and the history of land use in Vietnam, leading to the publication of the award-winning Vietnam: A Natural History, co-authored with two CBC colleagues and published by Yale University press in 2006.
Sterling is conducting her current field research in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund in Vietnam. A team will be traveling to Hon Mo Mountain to count the number of individuals and map the population boundaries of the grey-shanked doucs; this information will be used to formulate a conservation plan for this rare primate. Grey-shanked doucs are of the world’s most recently described primates and are found only in Vietnam. The species is considered one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates. Threats to this species come from both habitat loss (doucs live in trees) and hunting (for use in traditional medicine as well as for the trade in wild meat and pets).
Sterling also is director of graduate studies in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University.
Watch a video below of Sterling discussing the importance of biodiversity.
The American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Children’s Development Programme, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine on April 30, 2010 to discuss the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in relation to children’s health.
This panel discussion highlighted the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in meeting U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce child mortality and to promote child health and well being.
Panelists included Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Center for Health and Global Environment; Sigrid Hahn, associate director of Mount Sinai Global Health Center; Montira J. Pngsiri, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and Erika Vohman, director of The Equilibrium Fund.
The American Museum of Natural History’s 
