| Preserving marine diversity, lemurs and your chance to help us raise £10,000 |
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| August was another busy month in Madagascar, with tree planting getting underway for Project Ala, more marine conservation activities, and our conservation team hard at work collecting data in Sainte Luce. |
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Preserving marine diversity in Anosy |
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Did you know, Madagascar is one of the biggest lobster exporters in the World?
However, catches have more than halved since 2006, due to overfishing, illegal practices and environmental decline. Project Oratsimba is encouraging community-based, sustainable lobster fishery management across three villages in the Anosy region.
With technical advice from the Lobster Research Unit (URL), the first steps were taken this month to complete the buoy system placed around the 13km square periodic No-Take Zone. This will help the fishers visualise where they can and cannot fish at certain times of the year. The buoy system will be completed and deployed later this month.
We’re currently recruiting for Project Development interns to join our team in Madagascar, could this be you? |
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For a small charity like us, donations make a huge difference to our programmes on the ground. With £10,000, we could...- Build a classroom so children have a clean, suitable place to learn the skills they need to change their future
- Expand our sexual health curriculum, bringing information on sexual health to young people and training teachers across Madagascar
- Provide a year's beekeeping training for rural subsistence farmers, diversifying their crop and income
One of our donors has offered SEED Madagascar £10,000 if we can get to 10,000 followers on LinkedIn by the end of September. It's quite a challenge, and we’ve come a long way, but we still need your help to get there.
Click below to find our LinkedIn page, follow us and encourage your family, friends and colleagues to do the same! |
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Conserving endangered lemurs with Project Ala |
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In 2018, following extensive research by SEED Madagascar, we confirmed that the mouse lemur found in Sainte Luce is Microcebus tanosi, a rare species only identified for the first time a few years ago. This species, together with three other lemur species which inhabit the area is threatened by dwindling habitat as the forest is fragmented further and further.
With the official launch of Project Ala, we’ve begun tree planting to conserve these lemur species by reconnecting forest fragments. People living in the surrounding areas will benefit too, with fast-growing tree species also being planted to provide future natural resources alongside native habitat species.
Laza, Coordinator for Ala, has written a blog about his motivation and why the project is so important. |
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Discover the beautiful herps of Sainte Luce! |
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If you are a SEED volunteer alumni (hello, by the way!) and you've been out with our SCRP team on transects, you will understand the frustration of trying to spot and identify some of the reptile and amphibian species! Two frogs that look nothing alike will be the same species, identifiable by the fact that their flanks are grey-ish. You have to look for the distinguishing features for several brown-ish species that have incredible variation. Does that frog have a white line near its lip, or perhaps a yellow spot near the hip?
All our hard work gains us more knowledge so we can best represent the biodiversity that Sainte Luce, and indeed the whole of Madagascar, has to offer. With over 150 records of Phelsuma antanosy, a critically endangered day gecko, being recorded over the past three years, we have an invaluable set of data to feed into future conservation projects. So we soldier on, trying to remember those difficult, and sometimes infuriating, defining characteristics of the beautiful herpetological species of Sainte Luce.
- Kashmir Flint, Senior Research Assistant |
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