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NEBC Meeting News

February 2005. Dr. Lisa A. Standley shared with the Club her experiences on her latest foreign excursion in a talk entitled ‘‘Lemurs, Lianas, and Lizards: A Natural History Tour of Madagascar.’’ She began with a brief introduction to the island, which has an area similar to California and lies 300 miles off the coast of southeast Africa. Of particular importance to the biota of Madagascar was its long history as part of the great southern continent, Gondwanaland. Although Africa separated from Gondwanaland over 150 million years ago, Madagascar, along with India and South America, remained attached for another 50 million years or more. Thus Madagascar has greater biological affinities with these two land masses than with Africa, even though it is much closer to the latter. You can, for example, find boas in both Madagascar and South America, but nary a one in Africa. The island is varied in topography and climate, with sites on the east coast receiving several meters of rainfall a year, while the mountainous spine of the island creates a rain shadow, producing arid conditions in the west. Humans have apparently occupied Madagascar for scarcely two millennia and the original residents came from the east, not from Africa. The first colonists brought with them customs and traditions reminiscent of India and even Indonesia, and they settled largely in coastal areas. More recent arrivals from Africa brought with them a subsistence culture emphasizing cattle, and settled more in the uplands. The current population of Madagascar is young, with over half of the residents under 15 years of age, and poor, with a per capita gross domestic product of only $240 per year. Of the 20,000 fishing vessels sailing from the island, only about 200 are motorized. Slash and burn agriculture is widely practiced, even in areas designated as parks. Extensive deforestation results from the production of charcoal, the primary fuel. Only 18% of the island’s primary forest remained in the 1970s and the number is substantially lower today. Erosion of the exposed red lateritic soils is extensive in deforested areas, producing a red halo in the coastal waters around the island, visible from outer space during the rainy season. Despite the extensive and growing human imprint on the island, species richness is impressive, though poorly known, and levels of endemism are especially high. The 12,000 described vascular plant species (of which 80% are endemic!) exceed the number in California’s better known flora by several thousand. The number of orchid species