TANGANYIKA NOTES AND RECORDS ONLINE

The first issue (1968 reprint)

I've no doubt that my interior life would have been much poorer without Tanganyika Notes and Records (renamed Tanzania Notes and Records after Independence), and it's no accident that I've given this blog a related name. I can't count the number of articles that I've enjoyed and used in my own research and writing, an eclectic mix of natural history, ethnobiology (avant la lettre), oral tradition, cultural history, ethnography, and much more besides. I wish I'd had the gumption to write something for TNR before it fizzled out in 1985 (rumour has it that some luckless contributors still have papers in press), and was thrilled to take part more recently in discussions about reviving it (alas these also seem to have fizzled out).

In the 1990s I bought a partial set of the journal from the street booksellers of Dar, including some handsomely-bound volumes as well as loose single issues. For some years I carried around a crumpled piece of paper listing the numbers that I was still after, until there was a crackdown on my favourite traders (whose sources, it must be said, weren't entirely above suspicion) and the supply of odd issues of TNR dried up. The patchy collection I ended up with has given me endless pleasure, as well as providing bouts of frustration every time a much-desired issue disappears or turns out to be one of the ones that I don't possess. I'm still looking for some rogue numbers. 

One of the later covers (with humidity-induced mottling)

Fortunately my days of having to drive to the nearest TNR-endowed library (at least I live near to one) have now ended: the entire run of TNR from 1936 has been uploaded to COS eLib, the digital library of COSTECH, the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology. If you have sufficient bandwidth -- some of the pdfs are very large -- individual articles can be downloaded with a simple click. When the TNR files were first posted almost two years ago, the site itself seemed to have insufficient capacity, and downloading was well-nigh impossible. I'm happy to report that this technical problem has since been resolved, and when I tried last week I was able to download all the articles that I wanted to (Oh bliss!).

As I wish you happy hunting (here's the TNR search page), let me end this post by reproducing Kim Howell's Introduction to the TNR archive:

Introduction and Acknowledgements

This PDF version of Tanzania Notes and Records was made possible through a grant from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) as part of the project Making Data Available on the Species and Sites of the Eastern Arc and Coastal Forest Hotspot in Tanzania to the Department of Zoology & Wildlife Conservation of the University of Dar es Salaam. CEPF is a joint initiative of l'Agence Française de Développement, Conservation International, the Global Environment Facility, the Government of Japan, the MacArthur Foundation and the World Bank. A fundamental goal is to ensure civil society is engaged in biodiversity conservation.

Dr. Alan Rodgers, a former staff member of the University of Dar es Salaam, and a member of the Tanzania Society and who served on the editorial board of Tanzania Notes & Records, had generously volunteered his complete set of the journal for scanning as PDF files. After his untimely death, the Joint Library of Nature Kenya and National Museums of Kenya allowed its series of the journal to be used. The East Africana Section of the University of Dar es Salaam main campus library provided copies missing from the Nature Kenya collection. Ms Sydna Kaitany and Ms. Ashah Owano tirelessly carried out the huge task of scanning and indexing all of the issues of the Journal. John Watkin and Kristina Razon of CEPF greatly facilitated funding arrangements that permitted the project and Mr. Paul Matiku, Executive Director of Nature Kenya and Dr. Cuthbert Nahonyo, Head of the Department of Zoology and Wildlife Conservation, University of Dar es Salaam, where the CEPF project was based, all ensured the success of the project.

It is hoped that making this information available will enable a new generation of researchers and interested individuals to be aware of the efforts of previous generations of contributors of knowledge about Tanzania and that it will facilitate the availability of the information to current workers and researchers.

Dedication

When I discussed the inception of this project with Alan Rodgers, who showed his usual enthusiasm and commitment, he had suggested that the PDF version be dedicated to all of those who contributed to the success of the Tanzania Society and its journal over the years, the authors, support staff and selfless editors.

However, in addition, it is the desire of all involved in this project that it honour the memory of Alan Rodgers, who worked tirelessly in his efforts not only to document Tanzania's flora and fauna, but also to work towards its conservation and towards the training of Tanzanians to improve the capability of the country to manage its unique cultural and natural heritage.

Kim M. Howell

Professor

Department of Zoology and Wildlife Conservation

University of Dar es Salaam

18th November 2009

OF FROGS AND FIELD GUIDES

Mitchell's reed frog (© Jonathan R. Walz 2002)

I was inspired to write this note about frogs and field guides after seeing the image of a frog posted online by my good friend Jonathan Walz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Florida. This striking photo was taken in 2002 in Amani Nature Reserve in the East Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, and gives a nice sense of the forested environment that Amani is famous for. Its subject was identified for Jonathan by Kim Howell (another friend, and Professor of Zoology in the University of Dar es Salaam) as an example of Mitchell's reed frog, Hyperolius mitchelli, a species that has also been recorded in Malawi and Mozambique. It might well occur elsewhere in Tanzania, but very little collection or sound recording of frogs has taken place in the country, and our knowledge of the distribution of many species like this is correspondingly sketchy.

Banded rubber frog in one of my notebooks

Despite having lived in environments with a superabundance of cacophanous anurans (most notably amidst the seasonally-flooded wetlands of Usangu and the verdant rice valleys of Pemba island), I don't own a single photo of a toad or frog, and regret now that for many years I didn't have a camera capable of taking one. My notebooks, though, do feature the occasional frog that attracted my attention, like the Banded rubber frog (now Phrynomantis bifasciatus, formerly Phrynomerus) that I stumbled upon one day in 1992 in our garden in Nyali, on the north coast of Mombasa. I identified this with the aid of the only guide that I had at the time, Norman Hedges' Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (1983), which includes fuzzy and poorly reproduced colour photographs of fewer than a tenth of the frogs known to occur in the region. Needless to say, the Banded rubber frog is quite distinctive, with two vermillion (or orange, or red) stripes along its black back, and that's why it had caught my eye in the first place. For the same reason it's well known in the pet trade. What I didn't know when I scooped it up was that this bright colour scheme signals the presence of skin toxins that can be fatal to predators and result in a raft of distressing symptoms when they enter the human bloodstream. You'll be glad to hear that we didn't exchange body fluids.

I had less success in identifying other frogs. The 'one that got away' was a delicate yellow tree frog that I saw one evening in the foliage next to our outdoor table at the Jambo Inn in Kilimani in Zanzibar town. It was bright and glossy yellow all over its smooth and tiny body, and I noted it as a curiosity before continuing with the meal. This was in July 1996: much later I asked Kim Howell what it might have been and he merely shrugged. Perhaps this was the juvenile or colour morph of an otherwise well-known tree or reed frog, but I still haven't been able to identify it. Lack of a good field guide also scuppered my sundry efforts to make sense of indigenous knowledge about frogs. When living on Pemba in 1994-96 I recorded bits and pieces of information about the island's amphibians, and in 1997 drafted a short article about the local classification of frogs and toads. But I gave up on this when I realised that my preliminary attempt to map Pemban names onto scientific taxonomy was deeply flawed, and based on little more than unsubstantiated guesswork. I had Pakenham's (1983) checklist of the island's amphibians (which he knew was incomplete), but no illustrated field guide with which to compare local descriptions.

Things began to look up at the turn of the millennium, when I was based in Iringa and became aware of the work of Alan Channing (Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology in the University of the Western Cape) and colleagues. Indeed my sole (and admittedly feeble) claim to frog fame is to have been consulted over the specific name of the newly discovered Red sand frog, Tomopterna luganga, first collected by another of my friends, David Moyer, from Kigwembimbi, 14 km east of Iringa town (Channing et al. 2004). This is in the heart of Uhehe, and the name that I was asked to check, luganga, is one of the Hehe words for 'sand'. I bought a copy of Alan Channing's Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa (2001), and at last had a field guide that provided better guidance than Hedges' slim section on frogs. Channing and Howell's Amphibians of East Africa (2006) came out after I'd left East Africa, and I still haven't got my hands on it, though I do have the boiled-down version that was published in the same year in the Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (Spawls et al. 2006).

When he was working on the main guide, Kim Howell sent me a list of local names of frogs that he and his colleagues had collected, together with older records by the herpetologist Arthur Loveridge. While many dictionaries and vocabularies only give a single word for frogs, it is evident that finer discriminations are made in a number of East African languages. Ethnotaxonomies of frogs have been even less studied than the frogs themselves, and it is not impossible that complex systems of knowledge like those of the Kalam (Karam) of highland Papua New Guinea (Bulmer and Tyler 1968) are waiting to be described. At least we now have better guides to work with, together with an increasing number of images online, and if I ever identify that tiny yellow frog, or figure out those Pemban classifications, I'll write another frog blog.

Acknowledgements
As should be clear, I couldn't have written this post without the friendship of Jonathan Walz, Kim Howell and David Moyer. I'm especially grateful to Jonathan, who generously provided a copy of his photograph of Mitchell's reed frog and gave me permission to edit and reproduce it.

References

Bulmer, R. N. H. and M. J. Tyler 1968. Karam classification of frogs. Journal of the Polynesian Society 77 (4): 333-385.

Channing, Alan 2001. Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Channing, Alan and Kim M. Howell 2006. Amphibians of East Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Channing, Alan, David C. Moyer and Abeda Dawood 2004. A new sand frog from central Tanzania (Anura: Ranidae: Tomopterna). African Journal of Herpetology 53 (1): 21-28.

Hedges, Norman G. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.

Pakenham, R. H. W. 1983. The reptiles and amphibians of Zanzibar and Pemba islands (with a note on the freshwater fishes). Journal of the East Africa Natural History Society and National Museum 177: 1-40.

Spawls, Stephen, Kim M. Howell and Robert C. Drewes 2006. Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. London: A&C Black.