The Primates of Africa's Bioko Island: IPPL Helps Sponsor Awareness Campaign
December 2007
Jessica Weinberg, Biodiversity Coordinator, Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program
Bioko is a small but spectacular volcanic island located in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the coast of Cameroon, in central
Africa. Once connected to mainland Africa, Bioko became isolated around 12,000 years ago as glaciers melted and sea levels rose. Today it forms part of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony and Africa’s only Spanishspeaking country, now known primarily for its offshore oil wealth.
No larger than Rhode Island, Bioko Island holds Equatorial Guinea’s capital, Malabo, and several smaller cities and villages. Undisturbed expanses of rainforest, woodland forest, and grassland still cover the majority of the island, which is marked by three volcanic peaks reaching 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) above sea level. Bioko’s forests support an amazing diversity of mammalian life, including eleven primate and two duiker species, as well as porcupines, tree hyraxes, pangolins
(or “scaly anteaters”), linsangs (small, nocturnal catlike creatures), anomalures (also known as scaly-tailed flying squirrels), and over 50 other types of small mammals. The diversity of other species also abounds and remains at least partly undocumented. For instance, a new butterfly species was discovered only a few months ago.
Eleven types of primates face new hunting pressures
Bioko’s primates include seven species of monkey and four galagos (also known as bushbabies, these four are prosimians, a primitive type of primate resembling the ancestors of monkeys and apes). As a result of thousands of years of isolation from
mainland populations, all but one of these primates has become an endemic subspecies, found nowhere else on earth. These primates include the Bioko drill, Bioko black colobus, Pennant’s red colobus, red-eared guenons, Bioko crowned guenons, Stampfli’s puttynosed guenons, Bioko Preuss’ guenon, Bioko pallid needle-clawed galago, Bioko Allen’s squirrel galago, Bioko
Demidoff ’s galago, and Thomas’s galago. Due to their restricted range and recent levels of unsustainable hunting pressure, all but the last two galagos have been classified as “Endangered” by the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Red List of Threatened Species. With so many endangered primate species in one place, Bioko Island has been declared Africa’s single most important location for primate biodiversity conservation.
As most habitat covering Bioko Island is still intact, shotgun hunting is the only current threat to the continued survival of Bioko’s primates—but it is a serious one. The problem is rooted in the recent population explosion in Malabo, on the northern coast of Bioko, which was triggered by the discovery of offshore oil reserves in the 1990s. Following that discovery, there has been an enormous influx of immigrants from mainland Equatorial Guinea, including a class of newly wealthy Equatoguineans accustomed to consuming bushmeat in their native villages. With money to spend, they have established bushmeat as a luxury food item. To satisfy high-paying consumers, hunters are scouring even the most remote parts of the island in search of bushmeat. Primates, Bioko’s largest and most charismatic wild mammals, are among the easiest and most profitable targets for shotgun hunters and, as a result, have been disappearing quickly from Bioko’s forests.
IPPL helps support public education
The Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program (BBPP), formed in response to unsustainable bushmeat hunting on Bioko, works together with the National University of Equatorial Guinea (UNGE) to protect Bioko’s primates through a combination of research, education, and direct conservation strategies. One of our most recent and exciting projects has been the poster campaign sponsored by IPPL to raise public awareness of Bioko’s primates and their disappearance due to shotgun hunting.
After a long process of researching of several different poster concepts and designs, BBPP developed four posters, each with its own message, in Spanish, related to the primates and the primate bushmeat trade on Bioko
Island.
Since their completion in September, the eyecatching backlit versions of these posters have been mounted in the primary
visitor room inside the Moka Wildlife Center and have proved to be informative and popular conversation starters. Each seems to get its message across clearly and concisely.
In addition to the backlit posters, paper versions were also printed with assistance from ExxonMobil. These are now hanging in the National University and other venues around Bioko, such as the Spanish Cultural Center and the Moka Village School. More widespread distribution to various other ministries and schools is ongoing, and the posters are being welcomed for publicity and as teaching tools.
Given the popularity of these posters so far and their effectiveness in communicating their respective messages, we have begun looking into elevating the visibility of these posters and their messages through other types of local media, such as radio and television. So far, the BBPP staff has done two television interviews in which we were able to explain the plight of Bioko’s monkeys in greater detail and respond to questions.
In addition to the IPPL poster campaign, BBPP has also been working in recent months on outreach including children’s educational workshops, a Field Research in Tropical Ecology course for Equatoguinean and American University students at our
Center in Moka, and field research, including censuses of the island’s primates, both in the forest and the bushmeat market. We are also working with UNGE and the Equatoguinean government on developing additional conservation strategies and hunting
legislation.
By using these multiple approaches to public education and sensitization, we hope that the primates of Equatorial Guinea will avoid the population crashes that have plagued other hotspots of African biodiversity and continue to flourish in their native island home.
Four poster displays educate the public
The top poster translates as “The Monkeys of Bioko: The Wealth of Our Country” and is designed to show viewers each of the seven monkeys that share their homeland and to give viewers a sense of pride and responsibility for being the only place in the world to have these unique monkeys. The second poster, entitled “Illegal Hunting: Putting Our Monkeys in Danger,” addresses the loss of Bioko’s precious monkeys to shotgun hunting and the possibility that they could be lost forever. The third, “The Monkeys of Bioko: For Our Culture and Our Future,” aims to endow the monkeys of Bioko with even more value in the eyes of the audience, given that they form a part of Equatorial Guinea’s rich culture and also represent great economic, touristic, and educational opportunities for the country.” The fourth and final poster aims to dissuade people from consuming bushmeat and is entitled “Bushmeat: A Risk for Our Modern Country.” It emphasizes that bushmeat is more expensive, and less safe, and then asks would-be consumers to “...please, take care of your family.”
