Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Lemurs of the Lost World by Jane Wilson, Harrap/Impact, pp 216, Pounds
sterling 5.95 pbk

IN MANY respects, Madagascar could be the original for Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Lost World. Millions of years of geographic isolation have left
the island brimming with huge numbers of species – both of plant and animal
– that are found nowhere else on Earth. For instance, Madagascar has nearly
as many primate species as the rest of Africa, a thousand endemic orchids,
two-thirds of the world’s species of chameleon and seven of the world’s
nine baobab trees. But in the far north of the ‘red island’ there is a place
that even by the heady standards of Madagascar is remarkable. A lost world
within a lost world.

The place is Ankarana, a limestone massif rising abruptly out of the
flat, dry savanna to the south of the port of Antsiranana. It is a tiny
ecological island just 35 kilometres long and eight kilometres wide at its
broadest point. In places, rainfall has eroded the massif into razor-sharp
vertical fingers, known as karst (the locals call it tsingy because of the
ringing sound it makes when struck).

Subterranean rivers course though the massif, fed by the run-off from
the Montagne d’Ambre, the highest peak in the vicinity. The rivers, which
have gouged caves that would swallow dozens of St Paul’s Cathedrals, contain
crocodiles six metres long. And where the rooves of caves have collapsed,
isolated forest fills sunken canyons – lost worlds within a lost world within
a lost world.

It was to this biological wonderland that Jane Wilson, a British doctor
and zoologist, and Phil Chapman, a photographer and zoologist, led a scientific
expedition in the second half of 1986. Wilson’s nicely written and highly
entertaining account of the expedition is published now as Lemurs of the
Lost World.

Although, Madagascar designated Ankarana as a special reserve back in
1956, the area’s status is unknown locally and overlooked nationally. There
is no warden and no control over timber felling. No one had even made an
ecological inventory of Ankarana. This, then, was the task Wilson and her
team set themselves.

Madagascar’s best known species are, of course, the lemurs, primitive
primates that monkeys have supplanted everywhere else in the world. Ankarana
harbours at least 10 kinds of lemurs, nearly half of the world’s species.
As Wilson notes, this is a record number of primate species in a non-rainforest
habitat. ‘For nine out of ten surviving lemur species,’ says Wilson, ‘the
forests of the massif are undoubtedly a critical refuge.’

Still other species may be hiding in Ankarana’s more inaccessible corners,
she says. The lemurs are able to leap across the vicious tsingy unscathed,
descending into the sunken forests of the massif to feed.

Wilson’s team included entomologists, palaeontologists and specialists
in cave-dwelling, or troglodytic, creatures. They carried out a large amount
of detailed field work. Unfortunately, Wilson’s account is short on the
scientific discoveries made by the expedition. The appendix lists numerous
scentific papers that the team has published in august journals, and the
book is written for a series called ‘Traveller’s Tales’, but it is still
frustrating not to know the outcome of the expedition’s work.

What Wilson manages to convey, however, is a real feel for what it is
like to be on such an expedition – the excitement, the frustrations, the
problems of organising in a Third World country. She may not be Bruce Chatwin,
but her prose is full of lively and colourful anecdotes.

Take the troop of crowned lemurs which, each evening as the expedition
members were about to eat supper, would assemble along a branch above the
campsite. ‘A fine warm drizzle would descend,’ writes Wilson, ‘while they
peered to see what effect their urine was having on us.’

And next time I’m being pursued by a crocodile, I’ll remember the advice
of Jean Radofilao, the Malagasy mathematician-and-cave specialist who told
Wilson: ‘Crocodiles will not attack you while you are in deep water.’ Apparently,
they need their feet on the ground to get sufficient purchase on their prey.
‘I imagined treading water in the gloom while salivating crocodiles patiently
watched,’ writes Wilson.

Ankarana has survived because of its inaccessibility. But now it is
threatened by logging. Madagascar’s Direction des Eaux et Forets has no
money to protect its forests and cannot stand up to the powerful corrupting
economic arguments for timber exploitation. ‘As scarcity pushes up the price
of wood,’ says Wilson, ‘it becomes profitable to offer large bribes and
invest much money in getting trees out of difficult locations.’

Felling is one threat, but another is the clearance of the remaining
forest on Montagne d’Ambre as this regulates the water that supplies Ankarana’s
subterranean rivers. For Madagascar’s 11 million inhabitants, getting enough
to eat takes priority over conserving nature, and that means cutting down
the forest – a short-term solution which results, predictably, in catastrophic
erosion within a few growing seasons.

Ironically, it is someone who helped Wilson’s expedition who is apparently
involved in the latest attempt to cut down trees in Ankarana: Georges Kharma,
the ‘one-eyed Abyssinian’. In June 1988, writes Wilson, she heard that the
Kharma Sawmill Company had begun intensive timber extraction in the forest
of the Canyon Grande. ‘I received the news,’ she says, ‘with the same incredulity
and bitterness I felt when a good friend was raped.’