Team Mammal's surveys for BioGaps-Zoe Woodgate and Nadine Hassan

It constantly amazes me how time flies. Indeed, our months spent trapesing across the Karoo feel like a lifetime ago- and yet we’ve only been back home for three weeks.

Since October last year, Nadine Hassan and myself have been surveying the Karoo for mammal species as part of SANBIs Karoo BioGaps project. In total we’ve been on five fieldtrips, with each one taking a few weeks due to the great distances we needed to transverse each day. To help us in this end the EWT Drylands programme kindly lent us their vehicle for the duration of the fieldwork. The Mazda (affectionately known as ‘Karoo Bean’) has been both gutsy and reliable.

The two main tools of our trade, so to speak, are camera traps and Sherman small mammal traps. Camera traps stand on an allocated site for a minimum of 30 days, dutifully taking photographs of all that moves past. Interestingly, whilst many photographs were of the usual suspects (steenbok, kudu, black-backed Jackal, scrub hare and the like), there were the occasional novelties. In particular rock monitor lizard, secretary bird and bush pig made cameo appearances. As expected, the sheer amount of data collected has been immense. Approximately 400 gigabytes of photographs lie in wait on my hard-drive. As one can imagine, going through them all is proving to be quite the challenge.

Nadine’s Sherman traps have produced equally important data. At each site she patiently baited and left 120 traps overnight, scattered amongst the various micro-habitats available. Pre-dawn every morning we checked each one, carefully processing and releasing any live captures. What a pleasure to be up close and personal with these fluffy creatures, whom are so often over-looked in mammal surveys. Despite the drought Nadine captured at least 10 micromammal species. The most cosmopolitan species for the drylands, the Namaqua rock mouse (Micaelamys namaquensis) was found around the various rock formations that characterise much of the Karoo landscape.

As winter approaches it becomes too cold to sample for the small mammals. Thus for now we must take a step away from the Karoo and turn our attention back towards our laptops. Fieldwork was only half the story- now begins a rigorous session of data cataloguing and analysis. Nonetheless we are both excited to see the result of our hard work, and eagerly await our next fieldtrip come spring.

Karoo BioGaps - Press Release -How you can help

How you can help:

We are calling on the public to be part of the Karoo BioGaps Project and help us undertake fieldwork in the Karoo and/or help us integrate existing data from museums and herbaria. We will study 12 different taxonomic groups: plants, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fish, birds, bees, spiders, dragonflies, scorpions, grasshoppers and butterflies. By the end of the project, approximately 200,000 new records will inform species occupancy and habitat richness models.  These, along with approximately 300 Red List assessments of species of conservation concern, will be given to decision makers. The project also provides research opportunities for postgraduate students, building critical capacity for converting foundational biodiversity science into policy advice.

1.     You can photograph Karoo species and post your observations on http://www.ispotnature.org/projects/karoo-biogaps 

Why would posting observations on iSpot help? Any record of any species in the Karoo is useful to us, particularly those in the 12 taxonomic groups. By posting your picture of a species with its location information onto iSpot, you will be adding to the knowledge about the distribution range of that species.  Species experts will have access to your image on the website, and will identify it for you. You might spot something really unique!

2.     You can help transcribe data from museum and herbaria collections using the online platform http://transcribe.sanbi.org/

Why do we need help transcribing? There are thousands of historical museum and herbaria specimens collected before the time of computers! The information in these specimen records is critical to understand previous distribution patterns of species, but the information is inaccessible if it remains in hard copy only.  We need to digitise all museum and herbaria records so that scientists can analyse the data. Photographs of the specimen have been uploaded onto this website, but we need your help to type the data from the specimen label into the database. By doing this transcribing, you are helping to make species information as old as 1830 available to scientists and the general public!

Prizes are available for the most iSpot uploads and the most records transcribed!

The Karoo BioGaps Project led by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) in partnership with a consortium of research institutions, and is funded by the Foundational Biodiversity Information Programme (FBIP), a joint initiative of the Department of Science of Technology (DST), the National Research Foundation (NRF) and SANBI.

The Bee Team

Bees tend to have a high species diversity in arid areas, particularly those with a mediterranean climate. South Africa, being a largely arid country, has its fair share of bee species, but when there are no rains and consequently no flowers, they cannot be found. As with most insects, solitary bees breed through the summer and their progeny emerge during the following summer to reproduce. Therefore, productive bee collecting has much to do with the previous summer’s weather.

During 21 November to 1 December 2016 the bee team began fieldwork. The team consisted of Elisabeth Khumo Mwase and Connal Eardley, who spent a day collecting at each site. One day is adequate to sample a square kilometre for bees.

The trip focussed on the East Karoo BioGaps sites. The area was dry, with some sites being very dry, except for the Black Hill farm that had received rain. Surprisingly, bee collecting was not much better on Black Hill than on the other farms, but the results were different because we collected many more small carpenter bees than elsewhere. With one or two exceptions, bee collecting was average. A few sites were very dry and bee collecting was poor.

The second BioGaps bee trip took place in the Central Karoo during 30 January to 4 February 2017. The team consisted of Reinette Swanepoel and Connal Eardley. . Although flowers were plentiful near Victoria West, bees were scarce in that area. We had sampled bees there during the previous summer and had found the area very dry with few flowers; hence the knock-on effect described above. The other sites, near Beaufort West, Fraserburg and Loxton were devastatingly dry and bees were non-existent (because we could not find any bees we sampled more than one site per day). This was disappointing as we now have no bee records from those areas. It will be interesting to see how long it takes after good rains have fallen for the bee populations to recover. Let’s hope that the rains come soon and that long-term sampling can be undertaken.

Near the BioGaps site on Chris Hayward’s farm