The Gambles’s flatwing, a critically endangered damselfly with glittering translucent wings, is so rare scientists estimate there could be as few as 250 left in the wild. When zoologist Abiodun Adedapo first saw one perched on the back of a dry leaf in Nigeria’s Obudu Mountains, it was a pivotal moment. “We had read about it and seen it in the books, but coming across the species in the field was quite amazing,” he says. Known to science as Neurolestes nigeriensis, the Gambles’s flatwing is among six vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered damselflies found in Obudu, whose high-elevation grasslands and valleys, interspersed with patches of evergreen forests and crisscrossed by freshwater streams, nudge up to the highlands of western Cameroon. Cattle grazing on a hillside on the Obudu Plateau, Nigeria. Image © Abiodun Adedapo. Large expanses of those forests have been felled. “Because of the very high levels of deforestation going on,” Adedapo says, “the patches of forest on the Obudu plateau have been drastically reduced to only the edges of the streams.” When he saw the Gambles’s flatwing in early 2022, he and colleagues from Nigeria and the Netherlands were surveying Obudu and other parts of Cross River state for rare and threatened dragonflies and damselflies, known collectively as odonata. Cross River’s forests are part of an ecoregion known to host Africa’s highest diversity of the insects. The team recently published a comprehensive account of the expedition, including details of the habitat degradation they witnessed in some of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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