Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 25
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G O RO N G OSA SPECIAL
to create a library of echolocation calls of bats, and recordings of singing
insects and frogs. They are currently putting together a dictionary of verbs,
phrases, and words used by bats to convey certain messages. “Everybody
knows about echolocation,” says Naskrecki, “but bats actually have a very
complex social language and we are trying to understand it.”
Another place to see interactions among species is in carcasses. On an
impala antelope, there might be 250,000 fly larvae, and those flies are being
preyed upon by hister beetles. The contents of an antelope’s stomach will
be food for dung beetles. Parasitoid wasps that come and start parasitizing
the larvae of other insects on the carcass. In biomass, those insects can
reach about a third of the body mass of that mammal—which means that a
single dead antelope can nurture about 60 pounds of insects—insects that
will feed songbirds or lizards, continuing the map of life.
As the world experiences a mass extinction, humans are racing to catalog our neighbors before they disappear. A larger Map of Life project, a
collaborative, multi-university platform that combines satellite imaging
with ecological data to determine the location of species across the globe,
is working to pinpoint where the most undescribed species may be found.
Scholars estimate that only 10 to 20 percent of Earth’s species have been
formally described.
Conservation also has a practical side to helping prevent climate warming beyond 1.5degrees Celsius. A growing body of evidence shows that wild
animals and their habitats can enhance natural carbon capture and storage,
and scientists are calling for protection and restoration of wild animals and
their ecosystems as a key component of natural climate solutions.
Species-mapping is taking place in national parks around the globe. In
the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States, a group of
scientists in 1998 started a park-wide biological inventory of all life forms,
known as the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, or ATBI, to figure out which
species live in the park, where exactly they live, and to identify their ecological community. ATBI has since discovered 10,000 species that previously had not been known to exist at the park, and about 1,000 that were
new to science. Now the ATBI is looking to speed up conservation science
by creating genomic barcodes, which use DNA to figure out species and
their relationships. Gorongosa’s project has similar goals, though its environment is even more diverse, Naskrecki says. ATBI “have been doing it
for the last almost 30 years,” he says. “They’ve already beat us in terms of
species, but we will meet them eventually.”
Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California,
who writes about environment, science, and parenting. She is presently reporting from
Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. You can find her on X (formerly known as
Twitter) @kategammon.
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