Prologue
Nigeria 2009

April 5, 2009

The Cameroon Volcanic Line is a group of mountains that runs roughly in a line and passes through Nigeria and Cameroon and extends out into the ocean where it forms the islands of Bioko (Equatorial Guinea) and São Tomé and Príncipe. As pointed out by friend and colleague Dr. Bob Drewes (at the California Academy of Sciences), it is one of the only mountain ranges in the world to be both on a continent and out in an ocean!

Many millions of years ago, rifting in the African plate allowed magma to rise up to the Earth’s surface and form this mountain chain. The largest mountain on the mainland that is still active is Mt. Cameroon; it most recently erupted in 1999 and 2000. In 2006, the Project Frog field team worked in the mountains of Cameroon that are part of this chain of mountains; specifically, we visited Mt. Manengouba, Mt. Bamboutos, Mt. Mbam, and Mt. Oku. The biodiversity in these mountains is among the richest in all of Africa, and there are many species that are found nowhere else!

In comparison to Cameroon, there are not many high mountains in Nigeria, but there are a few interesting ones along the eastern border with Cameroon. While there is a history of research on the frogs of Cameroon’s mountains, very little is known about the frogs from the mountains in the far-east of neighboring Nigeria. Nigeria is one of the wealthier countries of Africa and has one of the largest populations. In the 1960s (and a few times since), there were surveys of the frogs in a mountainous area called the Obudu Plateau in Cross River State. Much later in the mid-and late-1980s, there were more casual survey of frogs in the more remote Taraba and Adamawa States. These last surveys were very interesting because they turned up some unusual frogs, several of which could not be identified by the authors of the scientific papers describing these surveys.

Enter Project Frog 2009. While I was a graduate student, I made contact with Professor Hazel Chapman at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. If I remember correctly, the way that I found out about Hazel was by seeing a paper in a scientific journal which mentioned something about a field station in Nigeria—I made a mental note of this! Hazel is the director of the Nigerian Montane Forest Project, which runs a small field station at the edge of the Mambilla Plateau that is just next to the Ngel Nyaki Forest Reserve. This forest is home to an endangered subspecies of chimpanzee, a number of monkey species, and is one of BirdLife International’s Important Bird Areas. But it turns out, that essentially nothing is known of the frogs of the Mambilla Plateau or any of the adjacent mountains or forests! In a way, this is truly remarkable. There are many places in Africa, including mountains, for which we still don’t know much about the frogs. But few (if any!) of these places have a biological field station next to them. This is a very exciting opportunity because it is almost completely uncharted territory as far as amphibian and reptile diversity.

For those of you that have read any of the Project Frog 2006 updates from Cameroon, you will know that Cameroon is just crawling with frogs (nearly 200 species so far described and many more waiting to be described). As I figure it, there are three possibilities for Ngel Nyaki and the Mambilla Plateau:

1. There are new undescribed frog species;
2. There are populations of threatened frog species that are currently known only from Cameroon; and/or
3. There are no frogs. I already know that #3 is not true, so I’ve narrowed it down to know that there can only be exciting discoveries waiting to be made!

During April 2009, I will make a short two-week visit to eastern Nigeria. My goal is to survey the frogs there and make a small collection of specimens, which will serve as a reference collection for NMFP. Most importantly, I am excited by the possibility of finding interesting species that I could study in a natural habitat that is near a field station. Working in small villages in Cameroon is always fun and you meet really wonderful people, but staying for more than a few days can really be a big burden on a village. By working at a field station that is set up for long-term visiting researchers, we could make some excellent progress for understanding the natural history, ecology, and evolution of many poorly known species of African frogs.

I hope that you’ll find my posts from Nigeria to be both interesting and fun. Even though Africa and its biodiversity occupies my thoughts every day, it has been nearly three years since I left Cameroon. I am excited to be headed back to the field to see the animals that I study alive in their natural habitats. But I am also very excited to visit a new country, meet new people, and hopefully make friendships and collaborations that will last for many years into the future.