Ctenosaura melanosterna, male and female, photo credit: John Binns

The Honduran proposal has also been accepted by concensus with verbal support during the session by Guatemala, Libia, Liberia, Burkina Faso, European Union and USA.

Only the Animal Trade Organization was opposed to the Honduran proposal but since any Parties have objected, the proposal has been accepted by concensus. These are the first proposals in the COP15 that have been approved by concensus.

This is a significant achievement for Iguana conservation in Central America!

Thanks to all the people and organizations that have helped in these proposals, including: Zootropic, CONAP, DIBIO-SERNA, ICF, Department of Interior -USA, Humane Society Inernational, Zoo Atlanta, International Reptile Conservation Foundation -IRCF-, Fundacion Islas de la Bahia and Iguana Station.

Best wishes,

Daniel Ariano
Guatemala Delegation Advisor

Ctenosaura Bakeri - Utila iguana, photo credit: John Binns

3 December 2009

Fred Burton MBE receives Blue Turtle Award from JNCC Chair, Peter Bridgewater

JNCC Chair, Peter Bridgewater, one of the panel of judges for the Award, said: “It is not often that one person’s efforts are contribute so much to bringing a species back from the brink of extinction, but in Fred’s case this was absolutely the case. There are many examples of extraordinary professional and enthusiastic work being done to conserve and manage the biodiversity of our Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies by the local populations, often with little fanfare. JNCC wanted to help by, once a year, rewarding the work of a particular individual or group. For 2009, Fred was the unanimous choice of the judging panel.”

Blue Turtle Award

Gina Ebanks-Petrie, Director, Department of Environment, Cayman Islands Government said of the Programme: “The Blue Iguana was once referred to as the most endangered rock iguana on the planet. Through Fred’s work a very successful captive breeding programme was established and blue iguanas are being re-introduced to the wild. Fred has taken the programme from a backyard project to a fully-fledged captive breeding facility which produces over 100 young iguanas for release into protected areas each year. The programme has been so successful that it serves as a model for other regional projects.”

Tara Pelembe, JNCC’s Overseas Territories Officer, commented: “We hope this is just the beginning of JNCC being able to shine a light on projects and actions that deserve a wider audience and acknowledgement. Fred is inspirational in his care for the blue iguana, and it is a pleasure to celebrate his success.”

Cayman News Service
Posted on Wed, 10/10/2009

Photo credit: John Binns, IRCF

(CNS): He may be cold blooded, but Gorgeous George, one of Cayman’s best known Blue Iguanas, will be extending a warm welcome to the Cayman Islands to everyone who passes through Owen Roberts international. With the help of local legal firm Walkers, the National Trust has created a stunningly attractive poster of the endangered, indigenous creature for the airport to help raise awareness and promote the work of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme. Gorgeous George will be one of the first things that people see when they arrive in the customs hall and his poster tagline puts things in perspective: “His ancestors have been here for two million years.”

The Blue Iguana Recovery Programme was started by the National Trust in 1990 when they first began breeding captive blue iguanas. The conservation programme has helped ensure the survival of the species, by releasing captive blue iguanas into the wild. It has already had tremendous success with over 120 baby blue iguanas hatched this summer.

Fred Burton, Director of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme, envisions a self-sustaining, free roaming population of at least one thousand Grand Cayman blue iguanas, living freely in the wild within protected areas, reproducing naturally and continuing to evolve in step with their ever-changing natural environment.

“At the moment we have very roughly about 300 blues restored to the wild, so we have to lift that to at least 700 more and ensure as best we can they are allowed to survive, breed and sustain themselves,” Burton said. “To that end the captive facility is now literally crammed to capacity.”

Walkers and National Trust Airport Sign

Walkers have long been supporters of the programme and the Blue Iguana’s vital part in Cayman’s heritage. The firm said the success of the recovery programme is extremely important and it has adopted the Blue Iguana as a promotional icon, producing branded soft toys since to promote the work of the breeding project at international conferences, as well as to educate children in Cayman.

As a Gold Sponsor of the National Trust, in 2006 Walkers pledged CI$ 60,000 over three years to fund the operating costs of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme.

“I have been very impressed by the Recovery Programme’s plans to develop native ecosystems for the blue iguanas to attract nature tourism to Cayman and inspire a range of commercial products, in order to generate sustainable revenue to fund the management of the blue iguana population indefinitely,” said David Byrne, Chief Marketing Officer at Walkers. “This year we have created an even more realistic blue iguana toy and we hope they will continue to be used as an educational tool and help raise awareness of the need to support the efforts made by the National Trust to help save this beautiful creature.”

Walkers will also provide the National Trust with unbranded toys to sell in their store with the profits from sales going to support the recovery programme.

Walkers said it is committed to being a responsible corporate citizen and its support of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme is just one way in which the firm looks to make a difference within the community, with active participation from staff at all levels.

Understanding a complex, diverse region
The Caribbean Islands Hotspot is made up of thousands of islands, mainly in three large groups between North and South America: the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and the Greater Antilles (Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola, which includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti).

“As a consequence of having many islands, the endemism is exceptionally high in some of the groups of species here. Right up to 100 percent of all amphibians here are endemic to the hotspot,” said David Wege, senior Caribbean program manager for BirdLife, which led the ecosystem profiling process for CEPF in the region. “So it’s critically important at a global level for its biodiversity.”

The region’s biodiversity is, in turn, important for sustaining communities in the region, Wege said.

“People are relying on the services that these key biodiversity areas provide, whether that’s forest products, whether that’s provision of fresh water or indeed food, non-timber forest products—they’re often reliant on it and they’re often impacting it unsustainably. So working with people around these areas is going to be critical in ensuring their long-term management and in finding ways for people to use these resources sustainably,” said Wege.

The Caribbean Islands is one of three biodiversity hotspots where CEPF is preparing to launch new investment programs as part of a major expansion. Similar stakeholder consultation processes are under way or soon to start in the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany Hotspot in southeastern Africa and in the Mediterranean Basin Hotspot.

Profiles useful beyond CEPF investment

When CEPF embarks on investing in a new region, one of the first steps is the development of an ecosystem profile. It provides an overview of biodiversity importance, as well as overall targets for and major threats to conservation. The document provides key policy, civil society and socioeconomic context, and identifies funding gaps and opportunities.
The profile not only serves as a guide to CEPF’s investment, but also provides an outline for strategic investment that can be used by national governments, donors and others planning to implement or invest in conservation and development efforts in the region.

The involvement of a wide swath of stakeholders through a series of workshops held around the region is, therefore, crucial to developing a profile that will best serve not only biodiversity but also communities and national economies.

National coordinators facilitated the gathering of information and review of priorities within their own countries. Jean Vilmond Hilaire, executive director of Société Audubon Haïti, which served as the national coordinator for the ecosystem profiling in Haiti, said the process brought an analysis of the issues and threats to biodiversity conservation in his country. “It also allowed us to analyze the roots of those threats and also the barriers, anything that can prevent us from putting in place a genuine national system of protected areas,” he said.

“I am an optimist, and I believe that the future of conservation in the Caribbean is promising,” said Yvonne Arias, president of Grupo Jaraugua Inc., which served as the national coordinator in the Dominican Republic. She said the growing influence and involvement of the public in conservation decision-making is an important factor in the outlook for the region.

“Because the Caribbean is an extremely important region for development of tourism, of agriculture, the people know that conservation provides benefits,” she said.

The final stakeholder meeting for the Caribbean Islands Hotspot was held in July in Antigua, in conjunction with the regional meeting of the Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds. It drew representatives of nations and territories big and small, and elicited questions and input on the best strategy for CEPF’s investment.

“I don’t think that the specific CEPF money will be able to solve all the conservation issues in the Caribbean, but if we have a good strategy, if we pick our investments where they are needed, then I think we have a good chance of success and the investment can be multiplied by 20, by 30, based on the results that we can achieve in the field. It’s not so much the amount that is important but the strategy,” said Hilaire.

Once completed, the ecosystem profile will be submitted for review and approval by CEPF’s Donor Council. If the profile wins approval, the award of grants is expected to start in 2010 after the Council selects a regional implementation team to help guide the investment.

We are looking for short manuscripts featuring natural history and/or conservation. The ultimate criterion guiding the editors in the selection of papers will be the assumption that Dr. Fitch presumably would have enjoyed reading them. Because Reptiles & Amphibians employs color throughout, we also ask that contributors supplement their manuscripts with high-quality photographs of their subjects, their habitats, and even people conducting fieldwork related to the project in hand.

We are NOT looking for monographs nor are we looking for manuscripts that are more appropriately published in conventional scientific journals. Instead, we want to publish short papers that emphasize descriptive natural history. Dr. Fitch enjoyed and, on numerous occasions, commented on the value of such notes — and that is the tradition we seek to acknowledge and promote. Because mainstream journals rarely publish such observations or descriptive studies (Herpetological Review and a few regional journals are obvious exceptions), many field biologists accumulate in their field notes a plethora of data that will never see the light of day. Those are the gems we seek in honoring Dr. Fitch.

We impose no taxonomic or geographic restrictions, and will consider publications addressing any herpetofaunal species or community.

Manuscripts and accompanying photographs should be submitted electronically as e-mail attachments to Robert Powell If image files are too large to send via e-mail, they may be uploaded to the IRCF website but be sure to label the upload but be sure to label the upload as indicated in the instructions provided. Authors should use the style employed in recent issues of Reptiles & Amphibians. If contributors are not familiar with the journal, Click Here for a Sample Article. Please direct any inquiries to Dr. Powell at the e-mail address listed above.

Call for Photographs

We wish to illustrate many of the species with which Dr. Fitch worked during his long career. A list of his publications through the mid-1980s is available in Vertebrate Ecology and Systematics: A Tribute to Henry S. Fitch (1984. Richard A. Seigel, Lawrence E. Hunt, James L. Knight, Luis Malaret, and Nancy L. Zuschlag, eds. University of Kansas Museum of Natural History Special Publication No. 10). Although we are eager to receive any high-quality images, we are particularly interested in vertically oriented photographs of sufficient quality and resolution that they could be printed as full-page inserts (click here for criteria for photographs) . As above, if image files are too large to send via e-mail, they may be uploaded to the IRCF website here.

Note:

Because space in the special issue is limited, if the number of acceptable submissions exceeds our capacity to include them all in the March issue, consideration will be given to publishing additional papers in subsequent issues, in effect extending the tribute to Dr. Fitch through those additional issues.

Flying frog (Rhacophorus suffry). The bright green, red-footed tree frog was described in 2007. It is a 'flying frog' because long webbed feet allow the species to glide when falling. (Credit: Copyright Totul Bortamuli / WWF Nepal)

A decade of research carried out by scientists in remote mountain areas endangered by rising global temperatures brought exciting discoveries such as a bright green frog that uses its red and long webbed feet to glide in the air.

One of the most significant findings was not exactly “new” in the classic sense. A 100-million year-old gecko, the oldest fossil gecko species known to science, was discovered in an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley in the northern Myanmar.

The WWF report The Eastern Himalayas – Where Worlds Collide details discoveries made by scientists from various organizations between 1998 and 2008 in a region reaching across Bhutan and north-east India to the far north of Myanmar as well as Nepal and southern parts of Tibet Autonomus Region (China).

“The good news of this explosion in species discoveries is tempered by the increasing threats to the Himalayas’ cultural and biological diversity,” said Jon Miceler, Director of WWF’s Eastern Himalayas Program. “This rugged and remarkable landscape is already seeing direct, measurable impacts from climate change and risks being lost forever.”

In December world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to reach an agreement on a new climate deal, which will replace the existing Kyoto Protocol.

The Eastern Himalayas- Where Worlds Collide describes more than 350 new species discovered – including 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, 2 birds, 2 mammals and at least 60 new invertebrates.

The report mentions the miniature muntjac, also called the “leaf deer,” which is the world’s oldest and smallest deer species. Scientists initially believed the small creature found in the world’s largest mountain range was a juvenile of another species but DNA tests confirmed the light brown animal with innocent dark eyes was a distinct and new species.

The Eastern Himalayas harbor a staggering 10,000 plant species, 300 mammal species, 977 bird species, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 types of freshwater fish. The region also has the highest density of Bengal tigers in the world and is the last bastion of the charismatic greater one-horned rhino.

WWF is working to conserve the habitat of endangered species such as snow leopards, Bengal tigers, Asian elephants, red pandas, takin, golden langurs, Gangetic dolphins and one-horned rhinos.

Historically, the rugged and largely inaccessible landscape of the Eastern Himalayas has made biological surveys in the region extremely difficult. As a result, wildlife has remained poorly surveyed and there are large areas that are still biologically unexplored.

Today further species continue to be unearthed and many more species of amphibians, reptiles and fish are currently in the process of being officially named by scientists.