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The conservation of monkeys on Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea
by Dr Gail Hearn
Beaver College/Arcadia University, USA
 Bioko Island, the largest of the Gulf of Guinea Islands, has a surprising variety of native monkeys: four species of guenons ("cercopithecine monkeys"), two species of colobus, and the drill, a large baboon-like monkey that is now considered to be the most endangered primate in all of Africa. Until recently, the island's steep, volcanic terrain, high rainfall and low human population have combined to protect these monkeys and their undisturbed forest habitat from many of the conditions that now threaten wildlife in other African forests.
In the last fifteen years, Bioko Island, like much of the rest of West and Central Africa, has developed an unsustainable commercial bushmeat trade, where forest animals are hunted to be sold as a delicacy in city markets. On Bioko Island, which has plentiful supplies of fish and domestic poultry, the bushmeat ---including all seven of the island's monkey species --- is strictly a luxury food item. It costs more than fresh beef, the most expensive domestic source of protein. The development of oil fields off shore from Bioko has brought new prosperity to the people of Bioko, and has intensified the commercial hunting.
Since 1990, Dr. Gail Hearn of Beaver College/Arcadia University (located near Philadelphia in the United States) has been monitoring the monkey populations in the most remote part of the island, the Gran Caldera de Luba, a volcanic crater on the southwestern coast. All seven species of monkeys are found in the Gran Caldera. In 1996, to encourage conservation of the monkeys, Beaver College established the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program, which is dedicated to studying and protecting the wildlife in the two legally protected areas of the island: Gran Caldera/Southern Highlands and Pico Basile. These two areas make up more than 45% of the island, and remain, except for the bushmeat hunting, almost undisturbed by human activities.
Bioko Island's monkeys are especially interesting to conservation biologists. Because the island has been separated from the African mainland for more than 12,000 years, at least four of the seven species are endemic subspecies, found only on the island. Four of the species are very rare, and are now listed among the ten rarest monkey species in all Africa. None of the island's monkeys do well in captivity: the two colobus monkey species cannot be maintained for more than a few months; the guenons have very small captive populations, typically less than 20 captive animals worldwide; and the drill, Africa's most endangered primate, does well only in local African zoos. Fewer than 60 drills exist in zoos outside Africa.
In 1998, Beaver College/Arcadia University and the Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial (UNGE) began a collaboration based on a common goal of biodiversity conservation. The high point of this collaboration is an annual two-week survey of wildlife in the Gran Caldera where a team of more than twenty professors and students from Beaver, UNGE and other universities camp together in the rainforest to census the monkeys and other forest mammals. Students make a valuable contribution to these surveys. They provide much of the manpower for the census teams, and their photographic skills have been impressive: Christina Santiestevan, a student from Williams College in Massachusetts, took the first clear close-up photograph of a wild drill in its natural habitat (ever, anywhere); Bob Harrington, a Beaver college student, took two photographs of a young linsang, a small secretive carnivore never before photographed on the island.
These collaborative efforts have documented the protection of the Gran Caldera monkeys. Although monkey populations declined due to hunting after the initial 1990 census, they have remained unchanged since annual surveys were begun in 1996. The presence of local census teams, whose results also confirm the status of the monkeys, has been an additional deterrent to hunting in the protected areas.
The collaboration between Beaver and UNGE will enter a new phase this fall (September 2001) when Beaver College's Center for Education Abroad (CEA, one of the largest university-based study abroad programs in the United States) offers its first African study abroad semester at UNGE. CEA already has programs in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. The UNGE semester will focus on biodiversity conservation.
The international energy companies operating on Bioko Island have been very supportive of these conservation efforts. ExxonMobil has provided extensive logistical support for the annual survey of the Gran Caldera. CMS Energy has provided funding for a new initiative to extend the conservation and research effort to the more than 2000 marine turtles of four different species (leatherback, green, hawksbill, and olive ridley) that nest each year on the southern beaches of Bioko Island.
The situation for Bioko's wildlife remains precarious. Already forest buffalo, swamp otters, and palm civets are known to have been hunted to extinction on the island, and at the present rates of hunting, several of the monkey species, especially the highly endangered drill, will vanish from the island in the next five to ten years. The UNGE-Beaver partnership intends to provide the combination of active conservation research and intensive public education that will be necessary to prevent these extinctions.
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