Life Sciences Commons^™

Kenya — Starvation And Food Insecurity In The Land Of Plenty, Gigi Berardi

Gigi Berardi

My last month in Kenya has been sobering. Ten million Kenyans were reportedly facing starvation. There were daily reports on affected districts, those most vulnerable, and the government’s mishandling of the disaster. Newspapers reported heavily on the incompetency of the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB), which is responsible, under the guidance of Trustees, in maintaining a Strategic Grain Reserve of about 6 million bags of maize cereal. How best to do this? An obvious way is through purchase of local grain supplies. Despite drought and resultant famine, poor infrastructure, high farm input costs, serious planting disruption after last year’s …

A Note On The Thermal Ecology And Foraging Behaviour Of The Egyptian Fruit Bat, Rousettus Aegyptiacus, At Mt. Elgon, Kenya, Donald A. Mcfarlane, Joyce Lundberg

WM Keck Science Faculty Papers

The Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, is an abundant and widely distributed African pteropid (Nowak, 1999). The species is unusual amongst pteropids in being an obligate cave-dweller (Kwiecinski & Griffiths, 1999), sometimes reaching colony sizes in the thousands (Kingdon, 1974). In the caves of Mt. Elgon National Park, western Kenya (1° 08′N, 34° 39′E), precision temperature loggers placed in major Rousettus roosts and intervening passages have allowed us to precisely monitor bat emergence and return times.

The major caves of Mt. Elgon National Park consist of geophagically modified tunnels and collapse chambers cut into Miocene-aged pyroclastic strata (Lundberg & …