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The Bui Lake is now about 25% full and the hippo population has not moved from the park; hippos in the lake area are occupying the shallow tributaries which are not yet inundated. The new lake has been providing extremely good fishing, but the old policy of letting fisherman catch and smoke fish in the southern part of the park has been discontinued.  The fishing community of Akanyakrom who previously  lived on the banks of the river, have been relocated to a site almost 4km from the river. Consequently fishermen must paddle to the Bole area to fish – fishermen claim this takes two hours. The new lake is very dangerous to navigate and four fishermen have drowned in recent months. 

Download Polillo Butaan Project Final Report 1999-2010(2MB)
Download Appendix II and III (2MB)
Download entire document (4MB)

Monitor lizards (Varanus species) include the largest lizards in the world and are of considerable ecomonic value in some of the poorest countries in the world. There are many unresolved and serious conservation and welfare issues connected with the trade in monitor lizards.

Click here for the Monitor Lizard site 

Conducting bat surveys isn't easy and the bats of Madagascar are the least known mammals in Madagascar. Bats hate scientists and are very good at avoiding them. Identifying the bats has often required microscopic examinations of skull morphology and other characteristics. So first you had to catch the bat, and then you had to kill it. No wonder nobody wanted to study them!  We've tried to change this by producing a fieldguide that will allow identification of free flying Malagasy bats with an ultrasound detector. 

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To mark the export of half a million savannah monitors from Africa for the pet trade in the 21st century “The Truth about Varanus exanthematicus has been released as an ebook.  Just £3 worldwide!

Since 1999 the Butaan Project has been studying the rare, endangered, and unique fruit-eating monitor lizards of the Philippines.  Butaan is just one of several races of frugivorous monitor lizards in the Philippines ("Pandan Biawak"), all of which are of at least as great a conservation concern as the Komodo dragon, but receive virtually none of the attention. Pandan Biawak occur only in lowland dipterocarp forest. The first species (Butaan) was discovered in 1845 and not seen alive by a scientist until the late 1970s. The next species (Mabitang) was discovered in 2001. Other species remain undescribed, and some may have gone extinct without ever having been recognised.

Varanus bitatawa is the third species of  monitor lizard to be recognised by science that belongs to the "Pandan Biawak" group,  all of which are of at least as great a conservation concern as the Komodo dragon, but receive virtually none of the attention. Pandan Biawak occur only in lowland dipterocarp forest. The first species (Varanus olivaceus or Butaan) was discovered in 1845 and not seen alive by a scientist until the late 1970s. The next species (Varanus mabitang or Mabitang) was discovered in 2001 and in 2010 Varanus bitatawa (Butikaw or Bitatawa) was described. Other species of frugivorous monitor lizards may remain undescribed, but many may have  gone extinct without ever having been recognised.

According to many authoritative atlases and maps, Bui National Park is already underwater! But the dam first planned in the 1920s was not started until August 24th 2007. 

When Mampam Conservation were banned from working in Bui National Park, Ghana,  in 2001, it marked the end of independent biological reseach in the area. Now work has begun on a controversial hydroelectric dam that will destroy the riverine habitat of the park and, we believe, lead to the local extinction of many animal species including the hippopotamus.The destruction of Bui National Park has gone almost unremarked. This site aims to provide a record of Bui National Park  prior to its innundation

The mampam website has been running for 16 years and aims to provide full details of projects at no charge. All out of print books and multimedia guides are provided here and full image archives are being developed for each project. This will complete the website's mission.

The Mampam/Viper Press library is a collection of documents, reports, books, multimedia guides and other publications relevant to these projects.The library is entirely free for use by bona fide researchers and students in Africa and Asia. Other users are asked to make a contribution for some documents. Passwords are available on application.

Bennett, D. 1995. A Little Book of Monitor Lizards. Viper Press, Aberdeen. PDF version of the limited colour edition. (this file is password protected, please contribute at least $5 for the password).

Bennett, D. 1999. Field Techniques Manual: Reptiles and Amphibians. EAC, Royal Geographical Society, London. (this file is password protected, please contribute at least $3 for the password).

Save Your Monitors!
Monitor lizards are heavily exploited for their meat and leather and for the international wildlife trade. There have been very few investigations into the ecology and conservation status of monitor lizards, and, as far as I am aware, no funds from the trade in monitor lizards has ever been used to fund  research.

This project aims to improve this situation in the following way.
1.     People who keep monitor lizards donate their dead animals to a national Save Your Monitors  group.
2.     Members of the national group make products from the dead monitor lizards (e.g. leather goods, skeletal preparations) and sell them on ebay
3.     The profits generated are distributed as small grants to students in countries where monitor lizards live, allowing them to make basic investigations into local monitor lizard populations.