New wildlife research station opens up on Bioko Island - Equatorial Guinea

23/07/2008 15:30:59 July 2008. A new wildlife research station has opened on Equatorial Guinea's Bioko Island, the first such facility in the region. The field station is expected to boost wildlife conservation efforts in the oil-rich African country and enhance educational opportunities for its people.

Biodiversity hotspot
Set in mountainous virgin rainforest, the station will serve as a training and research venue for scientists, students and others interested in the island's rare primates, sea turtles and small carnivores and its hundreds of species of birds, reptiles, frogs, insects, spiders and plants. Bioko Island is rapidly becoming a centre of global biodiversity conservation, thanks in part to its location in the Gulf of Guinea twenty miles from the West African coast, an insular existence that allowed its endangered monkeys and other wildlife to thrive in relative abundance.

Major threats
Bioko Island's wildlife remains under serious threat from poachers supplying the commercial bushmeat market. Last autumn Equatorial Guinea acted to ban the hunting and consumption of primates throughout the country, a forward-looking move to promote ecotourism as an alternative to oil revenues in the future. The island is home to 11 species of primates, including the drill monkey and Pennant's red colobus monkey, both among the most endangered in Africa. Four species of endangered sea turtles excavate thousands of nests on the southern beaches, making it a major nesting ground. Despite intense conservation efforts, the survival of Bioko Island's wildlife remains tenuous.

"We are delighted to see this research station open," said Drexel University professor Gail Hearn, founder and director of the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program, a joint educational initiative of the National University of Equatorial Guinea and Drexel. "It will serve as the lynchpin of conservation efforts throughout the island, attracting scientists and students from around the globe to collaborate with local researchers and enrich our understanding of Bioko Island's unique natural heritage."

"Equatorial Guinea has the opportunity to become a leader in African biodiversity conservation" said Hearn. "It still has intact ecosystems and abundant wildlife, and even more important, with the petroleum money, it has the resources to support research and conservation."

The field station was made possible by a grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation. Her research was supported by the National Geographic Society's Conservation Trust.

A professor in Drexel's Department of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Hearn received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in protein biology from Rockefeller University.