When Manuel Lopes-Lima set out to survey aquatic biodiversity on the Corubal River in 2022, he’d set his expectations very low. The river that straddles the West African nations of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau was, after all, very remote and grossly understudied. Two expeditions later, the story has turned on its heels. With the help of environmental DNA sampling and analysis, Lopes-Lima and his team identified 125 species of aquatic and terrestrial vertebrates in the Corubal. This includes critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) and freshwater mussels (Pleiodon ovatus) as well as 21 other species, mostly fish, that weren’t known to exist in Guinea-Bissau. “We were not expecting the huge diversity that we found,” Manuel Lopes-Lima, group lead at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the University of Porto in Portugal, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We were expecting a lot less.” In a study= published in the journal Bioscience, the team laid out the methodology they used to filter DNA from water samples collected from the Corubal. According to the study, the findings emphasize the “conservation importance of the Corubal, provide a baseline for future monitoring, and highlight the challenges and opportunities of eDNA surveys in remote tropical rivers.” “Corubal is one of the last free rivers in Africa,” Lopes-Lima said. “There’s no major big city along the river and no dams, and that makes this river particularly interesting in terms of conservation needs.” Flowing nearly 560 kilometers (350 miles), the Corubal rises from the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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