the Portico
“Our mission is to enhance the relationship between the University and its alumni and friends and promoted pride and commitment within the University Community.”Saving ‘the lungs of the planet’
BY REBECCA KENDALL
Nineteenth-century conservationist and naturalist John Muir once said: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
More than 100 years later, it’s a quote that U of G zoology graduate Thomas Leuteritz, B.Sc. ’90, often refers to when asked about the importance of his life’s work.
Now stationed in the tiny African nation of Gabon, Leuteritz is the newly appointed director of the Gabon Biodiversity Program for the Smithsonian Institution. In this role, he is working to advance the Smithsonian’s goal to develop more environmentally friendly and sustainable management practices for resource extraction in the Gamba Complex. He will also create biological research stations to attract scientists from around the world who are interested in ecological research in this region.
“I’m a conservation ecologist, so I like the idea of taking the things I do as a scientist and the research that’s been done by others and applying it to practical applications people need,” he says.
Leuteritz’s work focuses primarily on a busy resource extraction corridor between the Loango and Moukalaba-Doudou national parks, which are rich in plant and animal biodiversity. On its own, Loango boasts more than 2,000 tree species, 67 species of reptiles and amphibians, 200 bird varieties, 18 species of medium-sized and large mammals and a dozen varieties of small animals.
“It’s one of the more pristine parts of the Congolese rainforest in west-central Africa,” he says. “Eighty-five per cent of the forest is intact, and we want to maintain that.”
But amid activity by the oil industry, which has had a strong presence in the area for 40 years, and the more recent introduction of selective logging, striking a balance between ecology and the need for resources is critical. For example, Leuteritz and his team are working to develop protocols to combat the movement of fire ants, an invasive species that can crawl into the wheel ridges and other parts of vehicles used by oil extractors. This may involve a strict policy of fumigating vehicles before they leave the region, he says. The team is working on this in partnership with Gabonese scientists, the Shell Foundation, Shell International and Shell Gabon.
“The reality in this world is that we need certain resources, but we also need to consider the biodiversity,” says Leuteritz. “Ecosystems in places like the Congolese rainforest, the Amazon Basin and New Guinea contain large tracts of rainforest that offer a variety of ecosystem services, which are basically the lungs of the planet. When one species is lost, that puts the entire ecosystem, including humans, at risk. It’s much like a spider web: when one thread is snapped, the entire structure becomes compromised.”
This is not his first time working in Africa. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan, he studied tortoises in Madagascar as part of his PhD research at George Mason University. He also did a post-doctoral stint in South Africa. Both of these nations have biological “hot spots” because of the high levels of biodiversity and the high levels of threat from such things as hunting and habitat loss, he says.
Leuteritz has also served as a consultant in the United Arab Emirates and taught conservation biology at the University of Redlands in California and at the University of Hawaii.
