The Great Primate Handshake – Volunteer in Africa, working to conserve monkeys and apes through film and educational content production

On Sunday 24th January 2010 at 9pm, BBC TWO aired the first episode of a documentary series titled Great Rift: Africa’s wild heart.

Visible from space, the Great Rift runs for over four thousand miles. It creates, connects and defines one of the wildest and most charismatic landscapes in the world. The first episode titled Fire, not surprisingly, featured many of the Great Rift’s volcanoes. Approximately 80% of Africa’s volcanoes are situated alongside or within the Great Rift, and within the past 150 years, more than 110 eruptions have been reported from 18 locations, while another 112 volcanoes have been diagnosed as potentially active.

Such a visually and physically dramatic landscape no doubt warrants study however it wasn’t until 2003 that an entirely new species of Old World monkey was discovered in the highland forests on the slope of Mount Rungwe in Tanzania. The kipunji (rungwecebus kipunji) is not only unique in having evaded classification for so long, but the kipunji is also an oddity in evolutionary terms.

Initially assumed to be a species of mangabey, it wasn’t until a DNA sample was analysed that biologists realised the kipunji wasn’t just a new species, in fact it was so different from anything else that it has now been reclassified into a genus of its own – the first new genus of primate described in 83 years. To complicate things further, the kipunji are thought to be more similar to baboons than anything else, perhaps having readapted to life in the trees, or the population itself being cut off from other relatives due to a volcanic eruption (prior to baboons evolving to live on the grasslands of Africa). The kipunji also posseses a unique call, described as a ‘honk-bark’, which distinguishes it from its ‘assumed’ relatives, the grey-cheeked mangabey and the black crested mangabey, whose calls are described as ‘whoop-gobbles’.

Approximately 1,100 kipunji’s are resident in the Ndundulu Forest Reserve, an unprotected forest, and in Kitulo National Park on Mount Rungwe. The forest on the slopes of Rungwe is highly degraded, and fragmentation of the remaining forest threatens to split that population into three smaller populations. The monkey is classified as a critically endangered species by the IUCN. Furthermore, a recent Wildlife Conservation Society team found that the monkey’s range is restricted to just 6.82 square miles of forest in the two isolated regions.

With a trade-mark quiff and charismatic demeanor, the kipunji will no doubt have gained a few fans since their appearance in the BBC documentary and with this wider exposure will hopefully come the protection of the Kitulo National Park and the Ndundulu Forest Reserve, so that despite their mysterious past, their future existence may be ensured.

For more information on the kipunji’s discovery and the experience of filming the kipunji at Mount Rungwe, click on the link below to read Felicity Egerton’s article for the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/expeditions/tanzaniashighlife/stories/kipunji