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Ethiopia news

Long-distance running

Just what is there about the Ethiopian long-distance runners that makes them so successful in world competition? Hardly a month goes by without yet more successes being announced for Ethiopia's amazing athletes.

The Miami marathon

Tesfaye Sendeku Alemayehu’s gap-toothed grin grew wider by the second. After all, the 5-8, 123-pound Ethiopian had a lot to smile about on a glorious Sunday in downtown Miami. He was so much faster than the other runners in the ING Miami Marathon that they didn’t know he existed – that is, until he cruised to the finish in 2 hours 12 minutes 57 seconds.

Alemayehu, part of a combined marathon and half marathon field of 17,022 starters (out of an event-record 21,116 entrants), missed the course record by 35 seconds.

“The first-place guy, I thought he was a half marathon guy,’’ said Michael Wardian, the 2010 ING Miami victor who was placed third on Sunday in 2:23:41. Wardian raced the whole way with runner-up Benazzouz Slimani of Morocco (2:18:23), thinking, along with Slimani, that the two of them were fighting for the victory. “He was so far ahead,’’ Wardian said of Alemayehu. “He was crushing everybody."

The Houston marathon

Bekana Daba, an Ethiopian national, won the Houston Marathon held on Sunday in record time, according to The Associated Press and other media reports.

Daba ran the just-over 26-mile-long race in 2 hours, 7 minutes and 4 seconds, breaking the previous record of 2:07:37, held by compatriot Teshome Gelana, who didn’t run this year.

“I was a little bit in need of going to the restroom,” Daba said through a translator, according to the AP report. “Somehow, I managed it.”

Mamitu Daska, also from Ethiopia, won the women’s marathon in Houston at a time of 2:26:33, becoming the fifth Ethiopian woman to win the race.

Daba added that he “could have ran faster” if there was no rain, according to Runnersweb.com, a site dedicated to running news. For finishing the race, he won $35,000.

Daska also won $35,000 for finishing first.

Africa's lone wolf: New species found in Ethiopia

Genetic evidence shows that 'Egyptian jackal' isn't really a jackal at all.

During a field expedition to Ethiopia, a team of scientists noticed something odd: The golden jackals there looked more slender with a whiter coat than they do elsewhere. Now, genetic analyses suggest these oddities are not jackals at all but instead more closely related to gray wolves.

In fact, until now these "highland jackals" were referred to as Egyptian jackals (Canis aureus lupaster), and had long been considered a rare subspecies to the golden jackal (C. aureus).

With new genetic evidence in hand, the team suggested the animal be called the African wolf to reflect its true identity.

"It seems as if the Egyptian jackal is urgently set for a name change," said study researcher Claudio Sillero of Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). "And its unique status as the only member of the gray wolf complex in Africa suggests that it should be renamed 'the African wolf,’" said Sillero, who has worked in Ethiopia for more than two decades.

(The gray wolf population now extends to the Sinai Peninsula but doesn't exist on mainland Africa.)

"We originally set out to study the jackals in Northern Ethiopia, and discovered this new species by chance through the genetic analyses," said study team member Nils Christian Stenseth, a research professor and chairman of the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo in Norway.

Stenseth, Sillero and their colleagues, including scientists from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, analyzed the DNA from the faeces of five individuals of the mysterious animal, one of which they had filmed defecating so they could link for certain this creature with its DNA sample. They got another tissue sample, for DNA analysis, from a road kill in Arsi in southeast Ethiopia. And DNA samples were also obtained from golden jackals in Serbia.