Lake Tele

Lake Tele
Basin countries	Republic of the Congo

Lake Tele (French Lac Télé) is a freshwater lake located in the north-east of the Republic of the Congo. It is located at .

Lake Tele has often been mentioned as the home of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé (purportedly a large, unidentified reptilian creature), and is also supposedly the spot where pygmies killed and ate one of the creatures in about 1959. The lake is surrounded by swamp forests that have not yet been exhaustively explored.

The 1996 book Congo Journey, by British travel writer Redmond O'Hanlon, describes in some detail his journey through Congo to Lake Tele in search of Mokèlé-mbèmbé, as well as giving a rich description of local fauna, flora and Congolese cultural practices and relations with the indigenous Pygmy peoples.

Surveys conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2006 and 2007 found more than 100,000 previously unreported gorillas have been living in the swamp forests of Lake Tele Community Reserve and in neighbouring Marantaceae (dryland) forests in the Republic of the Congo.^[1]

References

^ CNN (2008-08-05). "More than 100,000 rare gorillas found in Congo". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/08/05/congo.gorillas/index.html. Retrieved 2009-09-22.

Alain Laraque, Bernard Pouyaud, Isabelle Chaffaut, Jean-Marie Moutsambote, Bienvenu Maziezoula, Claude Censier, Yves Albouy, Hilaire Elenga, Henri Etchebe, Mireille Delaune, Francis Sondag and Françoise Gasse (1997). "Reconnaissance scientifique du lac Télé (Nord-Congo) —Premiers résultats et interprétations". Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences - Series IIA - Earth and Planetary Science 325 (1): 49–56. doi:10.1016/S1251-8050(97)83272-7.
Alain Laraque, Bernard Pouyaud, Robert Rocchia, Eric Robin, Isabelle Chaffaut, Jean Marie Moutsambote, Bienvenu Maziezoula, Claude Censier, Yves Albouy, Hilaire Elenga, Henri Etcheber, Mireille Delaune, Francis Sondag and Françoise Gasse (1998). "Origin and function of a closed depression in equatorial humid zones: The Lake Télé in North Congo". Journal of Hydrology 207 (3–4): 236–253. doi:10.1016/S0022-1694(98)00137-1.