ORIGIN OF (A NEW) SPECIES
Part 3, Continued from page 2
The Udzungwa Mountains, once heavily forested, have been fragmented over generations, leaving pockets of dense forests known as “relic forests.” These relics contain a number of species found nowhere else in the world. Ehardt had every reason to believe her team had found the only colony of the animals on the planet. She and her assistants began working on an article for the journal Science to announce their findings.
A chance meeting over dinner changed her plans. “I had to go into Dar Es Salaam [Tanzania’s capital] for several things,” Ehardt explains. “Graeme Patterson is the assistant director for the Africa program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. They had funded my Sanje mangabey research, and he and I knew each other. He invited me to join him for dinner while I was in town. I was really torn about whether I should tell him about the new monkey. Science is very strict about not revealing anything about what it’s going to publish. If they find out you’ve told anyone else about your work, they’ll yank your article. I was really excited and wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure I should.”
Ehardt’s excitement grew when Patterson asked if Tim Davenport, director of WCS’s Southern Rift and Southern Highland Conservation Program, could join them for dinner. She swore both men to secrecy and began describing her new find.
“When I told them we’d found a new species of mangabey, Tim asked what it looked like. I told him one of the distinctive features is that the last third of the tail is solid white with a tuft on the end.
“He just put his face in his hands and shook his head,” Ehardt says, sympathetically. “I asked him what was wrong. ‘It’s not just in the Udzungwas,’ he said. ‘It’s in the southern highlands, too. We’ve been following them trying to get enough information about them to write an article for Science about a new species.’
“He showed me pictures of what he’d seen, and sure enough, it was the same thing.”
Ehardt pulled her article from Science and, after further research, co-authored a more comprehensive paper with Davenport and his team.
“It was a win-win-situation for everyone,” she says, “especially the mangabeys. Adding another endangered primate to the list shows how vital it is to conserve Tanzania’s southern highlands, [where Davenport and his team saw the new mangabey] in addition to the Udzungwa Mountains. In fact, it’s more important, given the extreme alteration and destruction of the southern highlands forests.”
Ehardt is on her way back to Africa with her research team to genetically categorize the new species, which has a world population of approximately 600, and determine its relationship to other mangabeys. She is eager to learn as much about the new species as she can before it disappears.
“We need to do much more if we’re going to be comfortable that we’re not going to destroy them,” she says. “What really drives me is to contribute to ensuring that biodiversity does exist in the future, despite the tremendous challenges facing us.”
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— Randy Lankford
Illustrations by Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation