Title: Mambas, Malaria and Militias: 21st Century Herpetology in Democratic Republic of Congo

The talk will explain the challenges for fieldwork in Central Africa, including poor infrastructure, tropical disease, and armed militias.  Evolutionary genetics studies of toads in the Congo Basin reveal that the lowland rainforests are surprisingly rich in unrecognized species, many of which are endemic to tiny areas sandwiched between rivers.  I also tell the story of a fortuitous observation by an undergraduate leading to the world’s first known example of a frog mimicking a venomous snake.

Eli Greenbaum is an associate professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where he teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses in Genetics, Herpetology, and Biodiversity. He also serves as director of the UTEP Biodiversity Collections, which are the university’s plant and animal natural history collections. Greenbaum began working as a biodiversity scientist in Africa in 2001 with two expeditions to Mali and Guinea. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Villanova University in 2006, he worked with professor Aaron Bauer (world authority on geckos) on expeditions to South Africa and the Seychelles. Since 2007, he has led ten expeditions to Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he has worked with an all-Congolese team of herpetologists to survey the amphibian and reptile biodiversity of Central Africa. Other recent Greenbaum expeditions conducted similar work in Burundi and Uganda. Greenbaum has published over one hundred articles in refereed science journals, which have been cited over 3,400 times. His work has been covered in NBC News, Newsweek, National Geographic Daily News, Africa Geographic Magazine, Reptiles Magazine, Smithsonian.com, Nature.com, and The Huffington Post. His book Emerald Labyrinth: A Scientist’s Adventures in the Jungles of the Congo (ForeEdge, University Press of New England) was honored as one of the Top 10 Biology Books of 2017 by Forbes Magazine.  Additional information can be found at:  http://eligreenbaum.utep.edu/