20 Time Table & Lectures of the Month – May 2009. Ecology, Outdoor Leadership, Camp, Guiding Skills & Spoken English.

PROTS has been very famous due to its Wildlife Ecology lectures. Then we acquired the Professional Standards for Tour Guiding & Leadership Skills. Outdoor Leadership comprising the essential Wilderness Survival Skills. Camp Management was last to arrive whereby students acquire skill of running a Camp. We have, therefore dedicated this page to our current TIME TABLE and summaries of the lectures that are currently going on at PROTS.

Time Table.
We have decided to publish our Time Table to give you an idea of how intensive it is. It is s Full day from 8.00am to 6.00pm. Our Core Curriculum is huge and males such a full day time table necessary. We will keep it up to date on a monthly basis.

Wildlife Ecology & Natural History lectures – Under P.
Prolonged Negotiations
Herbovires Pursuit of Food. Giraffe.

Watching the ponderous pas-de­-deux of necking giraffes, we cannot help but wonder at the extremes animals and plants go to get the job done. What job? Well, simply that of being good enough to leave offspring who are good enough to leave offspring who are good enough. . . So is that what these two young male giraffes are doing? In a roundabout way, yes. Their ancestors went, step by step, to the trouble of becoming elongated (see p. 58). They paid the price of anatomical modifications to support such extravagance; they took their chances in attempting to run from danger, like fire engines with the ladders up, through thick bush; and, as we have seen, they burst up into a nutritional salad bar occupied only by insects, tree hyraxes and the odd primate.

Prolific pastures

PRIMARY PRODUCTION BASIC FOOD SOURCES

Grass.

The primary production of the grassland in prolific, during the rain for example, every square metre of grass can produce almost a kilo of edible materials each month- some 1,000 tonnes to the square kilometre. This rapid conversion of materials into an edible, available form creates the opportunity for numerous herbivores to exist, and the very grazing of those animals stimulates the grass sward to produce even more than it would without animal mowing. In terms of kilos of large animal flesh per unit area (i.e. “biomass density”) the Mkomazi Game Reserved in Tanzania and the Qeen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, each supports something like 200 times as much as the forests we shall look at later.

Pouch fishing

CARNIVORES PURSUIT OF FOOD

Pelicans.

The bird whose beak can in fact hold more than its belly can is the most important African fish-eater. Both pelican species found in Africa – the larger white and the pink-backed – are floating fishnets. The sack of membrane slung between the rims of the lower jaw inflates to an enormous ten-litre capacity when dragged under water. How the bird can even swim with it distended and full of water is a mystery. But clearly the system works. Odd bills seem to run in the family: DNA affinity testing reveals that the pelican’s cousin is the shoebill stork.

The pink-backed pelican fishes alone: presumably it is able to see and strike at particular fish. Sometimes a fish might leap from the water in an attempt to escape, but the pelican’s net has been cast to sweep up the morsel as it falls back to the water.

Poisonous Catepillar

HERBIVORES AVOIDING PREDATORS

Monarch Butterfly.

The monarch butterfly has been poisoned, but with the skill of an alchemist has turned the deed to its own advantage. The food plants of the monarch larva are various members of a poisonous family of “milkweed” herbs and creepers. To discourage herbivore attacks, the milkweeds have evolved the production and retention of cardiac glycosides in their veins. The monarch, however, has countered by evolving immunity to these heart poisons. Since the monarch is the only herbivore known to eat milkweeds (with the exception of one of the ever-present beetles, see p. 256), the plant has not found it necessary to make another move in the evolutionary game.

Place to Mate

HERBIVORES REPRODUCTION

Tilapia.

In the warm alkaline waters and abundant food supply of the lakes, another cichlid fish, tilapia (Tilapia grahami) breeds all year round. The species is fiercely territorial – but only in the mornings. At sun-up the males prepare to defend the centres of their forty-centimetre-diameter territories (opposite). Other males who wander into the territories receive open-mouthed threats that feature the conspicuous white lips. Adjacent territorial males gape across the boundaries and probably bombard each other with invisible water pressure blows in an aquatic equivalent of huffing and puffing.

Place to Brood

HERBIVORES REPRODUCTION

Tilapia

We saw in the wooded grassland that some animals like the impala defend a space in order to protect a food supply. Tilapia grahami’s little territory clearly has some other function, since it is too small to provide enough algal food and is usually in a part of the lake where there is little algae growing, such as in clear water near a spring. The territories then, appear to serve mainly as a meeting and mating place. In Lake Malawi, males of related cichlid species have been observed to stay on the same territory for a year and a half, and they are able to find their way back even though displaced up to two kilometres away.

People and Forests

PRIMARY PRODUCTION MODIFYING FACTORS

It is unfortunate for both elephants and people that they like to gather in the same places, where there is perennial water, lots of vegetation for food and shelter and an equitable temperature. Those places are often forests. One scenario has our pre-human ancestors leaving the trees and creeping out of the forest to hunt abundant game meat on the hoof, 7 to 10 million years ago when savannas were replacing forests in Africa. This helped accelerate the development of a Big Brain to better avoid predators and, paradoxically, get along socially and make war. With the typical restlessness of opportunistic omnivores, some then moved back into the cool, rich “green mansions”. There they could, amongst other things, put their newfound agricultural skills to even more productive ends, including supplementing the rather carbohydrate-poor fare found in forests. In conventional wisdom, this sets the stage for classic pillaging of natural resources, and we have all seen the images of ravaged forests until we grow weary.

The Path of Water

PRIMARY PRODUCTION CONTROLLING FACTORS

Life’s solvent, water, determines precisely where the forests grow; and the manner in which it is present determines the type of forest formed. There are three main types: montane, groundwater and coastal. All are products of local geography and climate. In each case these two factors have combined to increase the amount of water available to plants. If the rainfall is greater than about a hundred centimetres a year, one of the most serious constraints to the growth of large trees is relaxed.

Parasite in the Nest

CARNIVORES REPRODUCTION

Red-chested Cuckoo.

There are birds that shirk the parental duty and let others raise their young. Obviously only a few species can enjoy this rather extravagant lifestyle. The red-chested cuckoo is a classic nest parasite. With the cunning and stealth of an illicit oologist, the cuckoo has to identify birds who are nesting and then locate their nest. The wandering female watches for a diligent parent like the robinchat to leave the nest, perhaps to feed or to collect some nest material. Sometimes a male cuckoo will brazenly advertise its presence with the characteristic “it-will-rain…” call. This is thought to be a distraction to invite mobbing by the defence-minded nesting birds in the neighbourhood. The robinchat boldly chases the cuckoo, not because the chat knows about nest parasitism but because it considers most large birds to be potential predators of eggs or young

Lectures of the Month – Ecology – May 2009.

Omnivorous opportunist:CARNIVORES PURSUIT OF FOOD – Man.

From the heights of our mental evolution we sometimes forget that we are animals too: primates, with distant cousins amongst the lemurs and monkeys, and much closer relations among chimpanzees with whom we share a common lineage no further back than one thousandth of the earth’s lifespan. Even though we consider ourselves to be the paragon of animals, we are governed by natural laws, just as much as every other living organism. We and all our works are no less part of the Earth’s finite collection of materials than a termite and its mound

One Good Turn: HERBIVORES SOCIAL ORGANISATION. Baboon.

If we were pressed for one word to sum up – in human terms, of course – the nature of the glue that holds together primate groups, it would be friendship. Literally hundreds of human years of incredibly patient and diligent observations of the behaviour and ecology of chimpanzees and baboons in particular have shown that coalition-building tactics preoccupy these primates almost as much as they do us.

One Man’s Fish:CARNIVORES PURSUIT OF FOOD. Nile Perch.

Depending how you look at it, the story of lake Victoria is a tale either of biological vandalisms or of significant management success. Worried biologists quite rightly point to the pre-1950s, when the lake ­ like other Rift Valley lakes after a mere 15,000 years of existence ­harboured thousands of endemic invertebrates and vertebrates. Indeed, it is claimed that lakes Victoria, Nyasa and Tanzania support the world’s richest assemblage of vertebrates per square kilometre in the form of hundreds of species of colourful little fish, most of them perch-like cichlids, belonging to one much-studied sub-family, Oreochrominae, the “half-coloured ones”. There are probably more species in either Nyasa or Tanzania ­over 1,000 in each, it seems – than in the rest of the world combined.

One prey – many predators: CARNIVORES PURSUIT OF FOOD. Tilapia.

The most conspicuous predators of lake produce are the two dozen species of fish-eating birds, all of whom may be dependent on one or, at best, a couple of species of fish. Tilapia were introduced into lake Nakuru in the 1960s and their success provided the basis for a blossoming of the numbers of fish­-eating birds. The birds are fussy eaters, plucking morsels of meat out of the algal vegetable soup. Their main tool for the job is the beak, strikingly similar – long, robust, sharp – in birds as different from one another as the kingfisher and the stork. Methods are varied. Kingfishers dive through the surface, storks wade and stab. Cormorants and darters “fly” underwater in pursuit of fish, and then have to hang their wings out to dry.