Restore Habitat for Cao Vit Gibbons

On the occasion of the International Gibbon Day 2024, Shanghai Roots & Shoots continues to cooperate with Shanghai Zoo to carry out a series of activities entitled "Toys for Gibbons". We take this opportunity to call for public attention and protection of the endangered gibbon species. It's the fourth year Shanghai Zoo and Shanghai Roots & Shoots held this event together since 2021. On October 19th at Shanghai Zoo, more than 2,000 visitors were attracted to take part in colorful gibbon-themed activities including enrichment toy exhibition, interactive Q&A, expert lecture and so on. In September, the students formed their own team, and participated in a training to learn about enrichment of gibbons and observed them at Shanghai Zoo. They completed the design and production of enrichment toys by themselves during a month. A total of 15 teams made 18 enrichment toys for gibbons. Nearly 100 students displayed their toys on the front lawn of Shanghai Zoo Science Education Center on October 19th, inviting visitors to vote for their toys and conducting fun interactive games to help the visitors to learn about gibbons. According to the combined result of visitors' votes and scores given by the gibbon keeper, Shanghai Guanghua Cambridge International School won the first prize, Shanghai Luhang Middle School North School came the second, and Shanghai Wenlai Experimental School took the third place. While the "Toys for Gibbons" exhibition was in full swing, interactive games and the expert lecture on gibbons also attracted many visitors. They have learnt more about gibbons through participating in all kinds of interactive games such as identifying the differences between gibbons and monkeys, finding out gibbons' habitat, gibbon-themed Q&A, and primate behavior mimicry challenge etc. In the Science Education Center, Doctor Ma, from Sun Yat-Sen University told the stories of three generations ' scientists studying on Cao Vit Gibbon, how they conducted the research and what it was like doing research on the field. Dr. Ma then introduced his focus, studying the vocal structure and sequence of Cao Vit Gibbon, as well as how these findings will be related to music forms, and the origin and evolution of human language. The scientists are keep trying to reveal the secrets of gibbons to more, and thus involve more to protect the gibbons together. With the joint efforts from every school group and their one-month-long learning and preparing , the event was brought to a successful end. The teams created a number of eye-catching toys for us and gibbons on the occasion of the International Gibbon Day 2024, which won the applause of the visitors and experts. We sincerely thank Shanghai Zoo for supporting this event! And we deeply appreciate that all the school teams actively participated in this campaign event and all the volunteers assisted at the event too!

Links:

• http://www.mtpchina.org/blog/2024-toys-for-gibbons-2024-international-gibbon

Because the restored land is typical Karst Landscape, the fast-growing grass always takes over the growing space of the newly planted saplings. Once the saplings were planted, follow-up weeding should be carried out on a regular basis.

To reach the planting site on time, the local farmers had to take off from the village before 7 am, walked all the way to the site for nearly two hours. The roads were extremely rugged and difficult in the mountains, which could only be managed by the locals who grew up there. They had to hurried on the way back before sunset, leaving only five to six hours per day for the on-site field work.

During the spring forest work, we found out that both the fig trees and plum trees planted earlier were growing strong. The survey showed the survival rate of the trees was 57%.

The farmers also did insect proof and fertilizing work for the saplings to help them keep growing. For the dead trees, we plan to plant some other local species to replenish, such as Ficus glaberrima, Ficus hookeriana and other fig trees. These species were recommended by the experts who attended the seminar in January. To achieve this, we will motivate the local farmers to build a new tree nursery and run it by themselves in the village.

Links:

• Cao Vit Gibbon Habitat Restoration Expert Seminar