Science News: New Monkey Species Discovered in the Amazon

New Monkey Species Discovered in the Amazon

Wow, a lot of new species from Brazil have been in the news recently. Here’s an article from Guardian about the discovery of a new type of titi monkey, found in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.

Monkey belonging to the Callicebus genus found in Mato Grosso on an expedition backed by WWF-Brazil

Via GuardianUK…

“A monkey sporting a ginger beard and matching fiery red tail, discovered in a threatened region of the Brazilian Amazon, is believed to be a species new to science.

The primate was found in relatively untouched pockets of forest in Mato Grosso, the region that has been worst-affected by illegal deforestation and land conflicts…

The expedition, backed by conservation group WWF, also found probable new fish and plant species, all of which are now being studied.”

News: Google Street View Takes Its Camera to the Amazon

Google Street View Heads to the Amazon, Enables Virtual River Excursions

Get ready to explore of one of the world’s most-remote regions with just a click of your mouse. No bug spray necessary.

Google is sending its street view camera around the Amazon River basin by boat and bike. It announced on its blog:

We’ll pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest. We’ll also mount it onto a boat to take photographs as the boat floats down the river. The tripod — which is the same system we use to capture imagery of business interiors — will also be used to give you a sense of what it’s like to live and work in places such as an Amazonian community center and school.

Let’s just start by saying that this is amazing. The Amazon is a place few will visit in their lifetimes. Of course Street View (or should it be renamed River View?) isn’t the same as being there. But what it may lack in quality it makes up for in quantity — the many millions of people who, right from their own homes, will be able to explore one of the most remote places on earth. That alone is cool, albeit in a way different than the experience of actually being there. (And the Amazon is just one example: Google Street View is opening up many of the coolest places on earth for people to see from home. You can easily spend hours “walking” around European capitals or huge swaths of Japan.)

The Amazon isn’t the only part of Brazil getting Google’s street-view treatment. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte are all available for exploring, lest the rest of the world think that the Amazon is the entirety of the country.

Read More, Via The Atlantic…

Protests Over Belo Monte Power Plant Construction

Sao Paulo Protests Against Belo Monte Dam

Global Voices reports that protests against Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam took place on Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo from August 19th thru August 22nd. While construction is already underway, the protesters sought to advocate for the rights of the indigenous Xingu population.

Police say about 800 people attended, which, in my opinion, isn’t particularly impressive. I don’t mean to belittle the cause, by any means, but it will be interesting to see if this grows into any sort of movement or if it is simply isolated protest events.

The protests did occur in numerous other cities as well, though Global Voices didn’t report any numbers. Some good pictures and videos on their site, though:

Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe Apparently Slayed By Peruvian Drug Gang

Really? This is so sad. I was shocked when I heard in the video that “the Peruvian government suggests that these tribes don’t exist at all.” Umm…well, here’s the proof, Peru. The fact that this tribe may have just been wiped out so inconsequentially makes me really worry for humanity.

‘Uncontacted’ Tribe May be Lost Forever

The video footage of an “uncontacted” tribe in the Amazon shows scenes that look as if they're from a long-lost world. Sadly, this may be all too true, as suspected Peruvian drug-smugglers are thought to have scared this tribe away, if not killed them outright.

Via Daily Maverick…

In January the BBC broadcast footage of an “uncontacted” Brazilian tribe as part of its “Human Planet” documentary series. The first photos of this tribe, which lives in the Javari Valley in the Amazon, about 20km from the Peruvian border, had been released in 2008, and a video clip is also available on the website of NGO Survival International.

José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, who works for Brazil’s Indian affairs department, has been studying the tribe for the last 20 years. The decision to allow the pictures and footage to be shot, and released to the wider public, was a strategic one. “Without proof they exist, the outside world won’t support them,” Meirelles said. “One image of them has more impact than 1,000 reports.”

The pictures were taken from 1km away, with powerful zoom lenses, so as not to intrude unduly. The tribe has been increasingly exposed to the danger of unwanted contact. “If illegal loggers or miners contact these people, they won’t shoot images … they’ll shoot guns,” said Meirelles. However, one threat he didn’t specifically mention was that of drug dealers…

Brazil’s ‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Attacked by Drug Gang

In what authorities in Brazil have deemed a “massacre,” a remote tribe in the Amazon jungle was reportedly attacked by Peruvian drug traffickers last month. The tribe was thought to never have made contact with the outside world.

The Brazilian indigenous protection service had been guarding the tribe, but their outpost was attacked by a heavily armed group from Peru. Since the raid, which was allegedly perpetrated by cocaine smugglers, there have been no sightings of the tribespeople anywhere.

The tribal village sat in the jungle near the Peruvian border on the western edge of Brazil. State agencies, who initially left the indigenous people alone, are now searching for any survivors.

“We decided to come back here because we believed that these guys may be massacring the isolated [tribe],” Carlos Travassos, the head of Brazil’s department for isolated indigenous peoples, told the Brazilian news Web site IG.

“We are more worried than ever,” he said. “The situation could be one of the greatest blows we have seen to the work to protect isolated Indians in decades. A catastrophe … genocide!”

Guards reportedly found a backpack punctured with broken arrows on the tribe’s now-empty land. The bag is assumed to have belonged to one of the armed men who stormed the area with rifles and machine guns. Police have detained a Portuguese man with a criminal record in connection with the event.

“Arrows are like the identity card of uncontacted Indians. We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee. Now we have good proof,” Travassos added.

According to some accounts coming from Brazil, the Peruvian gang may still be present in the area, protecting the land with machine guns. It is assumed that the gang wants to use the territory to establish a trafficking route to Acre, Brazil, or to harvest the coca plant, used to make cocaine.

Read More Via IBTimes…

Areal Footage of Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil

Here Are Two Videos Showing Areal Footage of The Uncontacted Community in Brazil, One From The Website UncontactedTribes.Org and The Other From BBC One…VERY INTERESTING!

News: Science: Brazilian Government Identifies Uncontacted Tribe

a closeup of uncontacted native peoples. "really? that exists?"

The Brazilian government confirmed this week the existence of an uncontacted tribe in a southwestern area of the Amazon rain forest.

Three large clearings in the area had been identified by satellite, but the population’s existence was only verified after airplane expeditions in April gathered more data, the National Indian Foundation said in a news release Monday.

The government agency, known by its Portuguese acronym Funai, uses airplanes to avoid disrupting isolated groups. Brazil has a policy of not contacting such tribes but working to prevent the invasion of their land to preserve their autonomy. Funai estimates 68 isolated populations live in the Amazon.

The most recently identified tribe, estimated at around 200 individuals, live in four large, straw-roofed buildings and grow corn, bananas, peanuts and other crops. According to Funai, preliminary observation indicates the population likely belongs to the pano language group, which extends from the Brazilian Amazon into the Peruvian and Bolivian jungle.

The community is near the border with Peru in the massive Vale do Javari reservation, which is nearly the size of Portugal and is home to at least 14 uncontacted tribes.

“The work of identifying and protecting isolated groups is part of Brazilian public policy,” said the Funai coordinator for Vale do Javari, Fabricio Amorim, in a statement. “To confirm something like this takes years of methodical work.”

The region has a constellation of uncontacted peoples considered the largest in the world, said Amorim. In addition to the 14 known groups, Funai has identified through satellite images or land excursions up to eight more tribes.

That adds up to a population of about 2,000 individuals in the reservation, Amorim said.

Their culture, and even their survival, is threatened by illegal fishing, hunting, logging and mining in the area, along with deforestation by farmers, missionary activity and drug trafficking along Brazil’s borders, Amorim said.

Oil exploration in the Peruvian Amazon could also destabilize the region, he said.

In spite of the threats, most of Brazil’s indigenous groups maintain their languages and traditions.

Many have long fought for control of land in which they’ve traditionally lived on. They won legal rights to reclaim that territory in Brazil’s 1988 constitution, which declared that all indigenous ancestral lands be demarcated and turned over to tribes within five years.

So far, 11 percent of Brazilian territory and nearly 22 percent of the Amazon has been turned over to such groups.

Aerial view of the Amazon rainforest: satellite pictures revealed small clearings where an uncontacted community is living. Photograph: Gerd Ludwig/ Gerd Ludwig/Corbis

*Sources: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=13897599; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/22/new-tribe-discovered-amazon

 

Environmental News: Brazil Sends Troops to Amazon to Protect Rural Workers on Loggers’ Death List

This past weekend, Brazil’s  National Public Security Force agents escorted a group of nine people (four adults and five children) from a model farming community settlement in Nova Ipixuna to the city of Marabá in the state of Pará.

The National Force was created in 2004 during the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration as part of an attempt to dealwith security on a national scale, as opposed to the local or regional focus of the Polícia Militar.

The ranks of the Force are filled by specially trained members of the Military Police and firemen and is subordinated to the Ministry of Justice’s National Secretariat of Public Security.

The model farming community at Nova Ipixuna has been targeted by loggers. The community practices sustainable use of natural forest resources. Last month, a married couple was assassinated there.

The couple, José Claudio and Maria do Espírito Santo, made a living mainly by harvesting nuts and were environmental activists who stood up to logging interests.

One of the people in the group escorted by Força Nacional troops was the sister of Jose Claudio, who is also on a death threat list. The escort operation was part of Operation Defense of Life, which is intended to combat land conflict assassinations in the states of Pará, Rondônia and Amazonas.

According to the Ministry of Justice, the Pará state Human Rights Center will begin to examine the Nova Ipixuna murders  this Monday, June 20. Meanwhile, the National Force will protect other people who have received death threats.

Besides the National Force, Operation Defense of Life is supported by the Federal Police, the Highway Police and representatives of the federal government: the Secretariat of Human Rights, the Presidency’s General Secretariat and the ministries of Agrarian Development, Defense, Environment, along with representatives of national councils of Justice and government attorneys.

At least 200,000 people make a living by using natural resources in the state of Amazonas. They fish, they gather nuts, vegetable oils or fibers. Others harvest fruit, such as açaí, or make handicrafts from wood.

Some are rubber tappers. In Portuguese, they are engaged in extrativisimo – sustainable exploitation of the forest, without destroying it. Many of them live in what are supposed to be protected areas known as “reservas extrativistas.”

Célia Regina das Neves, who lives in the Reserva Extrativista Mãe Grande, in Curuçá, in the state of Pará, says there are serious problems in the communities due to a lack of government presence.

“There is a huge demand for services. There are questions about production, family life, community organization and use of natural resources. But the biggest problem is certainly land ownership,” she declared.

The president of the National Council of Extrativistas, Manoel Silva da Cunha, says the problem is longstanding. He points out that people were given incentives to migrate during the rubber boom (at the beginning of the 20th century) and wound up occupying lands that had owners.

“This problem has not been resolved and just gets worse. Today there are ownership disputes even in areas that the federal or state governments have decreed to be conservation units,” he says.

At the ministry of Environment, the director of the Forest Department, João de Deus Medeiros, says the idea is to stimulate harmonious relations between people and the forest. “We support production, work with producers to obtain higher aggregated value and price guarantees. We assist producers place their goods on the market. All this has had interesting results,” he declared.

The director-general of the Brazilian Forest Service, Carlos Hummel, says his organization works to show people that conserving the forest (for exploitation) can generate income.

Meanwhile, the new government program, Brazil Without Misery, will distribute a Green Subsidy (“Bolsa Verde”) of 300 reais (US$ 188) for families that conserve the environment where they work.

*Sources: http://www.brazzilmag.com/component/content/article/99-june-2011/12605-brazil-sends-troops-to-amazon-to-protect-rural-workers-on-loggers-death-list.html

Environmental News: Brazil to Create ‘Botanical Wikipedia’ to Catalogue the Amazon

Alberto Vincentini, a scientist at the National Institute of Amazon Research, said the species logged so far represented only a fifth of the total area of the Amazon

The website, which will be called Wikiflora.org, is intended to allow high-school students and other internet users to get involved in mapping the country’s vast biodiversity.

They will be able to compare plants that they come across with the existing database and submit potential new entries for inclusion to an expert committee that will be asked to validate them.

Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology has reached an agreement with IBM to develop the website through the use of ‘citizen science’.

The website will offer descriptions of plants, geographical mapping of distribution and social networking tools.

Aloizio Mercadente, minister of science and technology, said that the idea came from a visit he made to the Adolpho Ducke forestry reserve in the Amazon earlier this year and the realisation that better systems of classification were needed.

“If we do not create a new methodology, then in a hundred years it will not be possible to know all of the Amazon,” he said.

“We must mobilise the community to know the protocols, the requirements, the rules, how to make classifications and how to manage this process.”

He said he believed the website would help promote sustainability by showing the importance of biodiversity in the development of drugs and in food supply.

The intention is to launch the site, with details of the 2,500 species already catalogued at the Adolpho Ducke reserve, to coincide with the United Nations’ Rio +20 conference on sustainable development in June 2012

Alberto Vincentini, a scientist at the National Institute of Amazon Research, said the species logged so far represented only a fifth of the total area of the Amazon.

He praised the idea of Wikiflora.org as a “giant step to revolutionise the way of acquiring knowledge.”

*Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/8588013/Brazil-to-create-botanical-Wikipedia-to-catalogue-the-Amazon.html