Herpetofauna of the eastern African forests - Biogeography and Ecology of the Rain Forests of Eastern Africa - page 177

Zimbabwe indicates that there may be as yet
undocumented connecions between the Easten
Arc and more southen mountain forests.
In contrast to the block-faulted mountains and
their very ancient forests are the higher mountains
of volcanic origin such as Kilimanjaro and Meru
in the north and Rungwe in the south (Sampson,
1965). After eruping and killing off whatever
vegetaion and animals were in the vicinity, these
cooled and then were eventually colonised by
plants and animals from surrounding areas.
Nyamweru (1980) has described these volcanoes
and recent erupions. Coe (1967) has discussed
the flora and fauna of the alpine zone of Mount
Kenya, and Hedberg (1951) the vegetaional belts
of the East African mountains. Various aspects of
the ecology of Mount Kilimanjaro are included in
a special publicaion (Tanganyika Sociey, 1965),
but there has been no recent herpetological work
done on the forests of the mountains of volcanic
origin.
Of the once great expanse of coastal forest of
easten Africa, only small fragments remain today.
In Kenya, the forests of the Tana River were
collected by Loveridge, while Schi0tz (1975)
listed treefrogs from some coastal forests. No
other work appears to have published on the
herpetofauna of the Kenya coastal forests, includ-
ing those of the Shimba and Mrima hills, Gedi
and Arabuko-Sokoke. In Tanzania, the
amphibians and repiles of only some of the for-
ests on Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia islands
(Moreau & Pakenham, 1941; Pakenham, 1983)
and at Pugu (Howell, 1981) have been documen-
ted. The natural vegetaion of several relic
patches of coastal forests near Tanga and much of
Vikundu near Dar es Salaam has been destroyed
since the 1960s, and illegal felling of rees in Pugu
Forest Reserve as well as removal of younger trees
for building poles has seriously reduced this
already small reserve.
Although no recent intensive collecing has
been carried out in the Rondo Plateau area, the
forests there are of great interest. These were,
before cuting in the 1940s and 1950s, the largest
Chlorophora forests in East Africa (Polhill, 1968)
and were collected by Loveridge (l942a, b). The

Rondo Plateau is the southemost end of a chain
of coastal forest fragments in Tanzania from the
Msumbugwa Forest near Pangani and including
Zaraninge Plateau (Kiono), Pugu, and Pande
forests.
No informaion is available to me on the coastal
forest herpetofauna of Mozambique, but the find-
ing by Broadley (1990) of new repile taxa in
patches of dune forest and dense evergreen
thicket on the islands off the coast of southen
Mozambique indicates the potenial importance
of these habitats.

The forest-dependent amphibians and
reples of the easten Africa orests

Table 9.1 lists the amphibian and repile species
regarded as dependent on forest and occurring in
the easten forests of Africa. Taxa which occur in
forest but which are also widely found in other
habitats (i.e. are not forest-dependent) have been
excluded as not useful in an examinaion of the
disribuional pattens of strictly forest-depende n t
animals (see Kingdon, 1971). Species are con-
sidered to be forest-dependent if they live in the
interior of the forest, or if they live on the forest
edge but appear to be dependent on the preserva-
ion of the forest habitat for their future survival
(see discussion in Stuart, 1983). The dificulies
of determining which species of animals are ruly
forest-dependent have been indicated by
Loveridge (1933, 1937) for amphibians and
repiles, Schi0tz (1967, 1975) for treerogs,
Hughes (1983) for snakes and by Moreau (1966)
and Stuart (1983) for birds. Kingdon (1971) and
Rodgers, Owen & Homewood (1982) discuss
mammals of the easten African forests.
Whenever possible, I have relied on personal
experience in assessing the forest dependence of
taxa as defined by Stuart (1983) above, and
despite the limitaions inherent in such a lising,
feel it provides a reasonable representaion of for-
est-dependent forms in easten Africa, which for
convenience are often referred to simply as 'for-
est' species.
While there is a general assumpion among bio-
logists of the eistence of forest-dependent and