The secret treasure trove still hidden in Africa’s forests
Al JazeeraIt’s 8am on a Tuesday and Rudi Swart, 33, is getting ready for yet another day in the office. If you want to have a clue what’s pollinating these trees you have to look at what’s going on up there.” Haddad has used canopy fogging – a method pioneered by entomologist and visionary biodiversity researcher Terry Erwin in the 1970s that uses targeted poisons to kill the critters living in a single tree – to identify six novel species of jumping spider at Hogsback, some 450km east of Groenkop. There’s also a moral obligation to catalogue every critter you kill, says Haddad: “Fogging a single tree can keep you busy for six months,” he says, pointing to a mayonnaise jar filled with specimens. “They retain connectivity between the forests and keep ecosystems healthy.” Cataloguing the secret world above our heads is the first step to conserving this biodiversity, says Midgley: “We need to know what we’ve got. Midgley is experimenting with artificial baits in a bid to attract hoverflies to bucket traps; Haddad is “frantically trying to describe as many species as possible”; and Swart is working hard to secure funding for Africa’s first canopy crane.
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Third of global tree species threatened with extinction due to farming, logging
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