55 minutes ago
By Jonah Fisher, BBC Environment correspondent
Perched on a remote mountain top and surrounded by lowlands, Mabu is what’s known as a “sky island” and is the largest rainforest in southern Africa. BBC environment correspondent Jonah Fisher went to Mabu with a team of scientists who have discovered dozens of new species there, helping to convince Mozambique to protect it.
“Let me get my magic spoon,” Dr Gimo Daniel says with a smile.
It’s hard to imagine anyone taking more delight in their work than the 36-year-old Mozambican beetle expert.
We’re crouched around a small hole in the dirt not far from our camp in the centre of Mabu forest. Dr Daniel’s mission, like that of almost everyone on our expedition, is to find things that science has not seen before.
Dung beetles are Dr Daniel’s specialty and he chuckles as he pulls out a big plastic tub of bait – his own faeces.
The smell is as you’d expect. Pungent and impossible to ignore.
Dr Daniel tells me that he has already discovered what he believes are 15 new species of dung beetles.
“They can smell it up to 50 meters from here, so they come as fast as they can,” he says. “It’s brunch.”
Twenty years ago, Mabu was a secret to all but the locals.
It was ‘discovered’ for the outside world by Prof Julian Bayliss in 2004. An explorer and ecologist who now lives in north Wales, he was surveying satellite images of northern Mozambique when he came across a previously unknown dark green
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