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Andy's Travels
Chapter 1 - Arrived in Madagascar
May 11, 2009
Hey everybody,
I'm now sitting in my hotel room in Antananarivo and it's Tuesday afternoon here. Though it feels more like Monday morning. Due to my double red eye flights, I think I ended up sleeping through all of Monday.
My flights weren't too bad and I got a lot of sleep. I arrived in Mad about an hour early, but my bags didn't arrive at all. Before taking off from South Africa the pilot told us the plane was too heavy and some of our bags would be offloaded. It turns out that all of my bags and Teague's bags were orphaned in Johannesburg. They should arrive here in the next few days, so it looks like we'll be taking a trip to the airport each day to check for our bags.
Once we passed through customs, our driver was waiting for us and took us on a long drive through the heart of Antananarivo. Before we even left the airport we encountered the poverty of this 3rd world country. A shoeless boy came up to the van begging for money. On our drive I saw a mix of people on motorbikes or in cars, some pulling carts up steep hills, and some women with tall stacks of bricks piled on their heads (to be carried to some unknown location). The city is a patchwork of houses (some built, some being built, and some halfway torn down and abandoned), large rice paddies, dirt lots with dozens of kids playing soccer, and clay flats where people form bricks that dry out In the sun.
There are some small billboards and ads along the main streets, either in English, French, or the local Malagash, showing the multiple influences here. As our driver took us through the winding streets, along rice paddies and over hills, I completely lost my sense of direction. The road system here, clearly not pre-planned is a intertwined mess of curvy streets and traffic circles. Many intersections are more like traffic triangles with three roads coming together and no right of way.
Before the hotel, we stopped at the MICET office (an NGO that helps facilitate foreign researchers) and met all of the people there and planned out the rest of our stay in Tana. Another field assistant is coming in on Thursday, so we won't head down to the field site until Friday at the earliest (meaning I'll have Internet until then).
We went to our hotel (just down the road from MICET), checked in, got a local beer (Three Horses Beer, not bad) and now we're planning on doing some sightseeing and buying some local phones.
That's all for now. Stay tuned for my next update...
-Andy
Chapter 2 - Exploring Atananarivo
May 14, 2009
Hello and welcome to the next chapter of my adventures in Madagascar:
After settling in at the hotel (Le Saint Laurent), Teague and I decided to venture out and explore the local area. The hotel is situated along a three-pointed intersection near the top of a hill. Having no idea what lay down each road, we decided to head downhill. The streets don't have sidewalks, so we had to weave back and forth from the road to the drainage gutters along the side. The roadside is a constantly changing cityscape of houses built right up and down the hills and little shops and vendors. There are fruit and produce vendors, tailors, shoe repair stalls, booths selling homemade charcoal, meat vendors with all sorts of unknown red meats and speckled sausages hanging out raw (no refrigeration), and lots of would-be Seven-11 convenience marts, selling soda, candy and cakes, cell phone minutes, and so on. It started to get dark so we turned around for our journey back up the hill.
Today, we started the day bright and early with breakfast in the hotel cafe of baguette with a delightful orange marmalade, coffee, and what tasted like a watered-down guava puree.
We then headed the half-mile of so down the road towards the MICET office, where we got a driver to take us to the Jumbo store. The name is quite accurate, with this warehouse-sized store being a combination of a walmart (selling all manner of household items) and a large grocery store. We stocked up for three months in the field, which took about two hours and filled two shopping carts to the brim. For food, we bought 30 kilos of rice, 30 bags of beans, 48 bags of pasta, 90 cans of tomato paste, coffee, tea, cookies, a few chocolate bars, the local hot sauce with ginger in it, and of course some rum, gin, and tonic. (Fun fact: tonic water contains quinine, which helps prevent malaria. The gin and tonic was invented by the British when colonizing India in order to keep their soldiers from getting Malaria. Gin was added to the tonic water to help overcome the bitter taste of quinine and hence the gin and tonic was invented.)
After the epic shopping trip, it was time to head back to the airport to see if our bags arrived (spoiler alert: they didn't, hopefully tomorrow). On the way through Antananarivo (Tana) to the airport, I finally understood the layout of the city. Tana is comprised of many hills, with houses built all along the slopes, with seeming indifference to the grade. Between these hills are sometimes vast flats filled mostly with rice paddies. Cattle can be seen grazing through the rice fields or along the few roads connecting the hills. Many of the cattle here have a unique and characteristic hump along their back, just behind the neck. Along the side of the rice paddies, the reddish clay soil is dug out and formed into bricks. These bricks are left out in the sun to dry. Traveling through the city, these bricks are found everywhere, many buildings and walls are made of them, and often a truck full of bricks will be unloaded along the side of the street. At one point, I saw two young children carrying large bundles of these bricks wrapped in a thin cloth and piled on their head.
I enjoyed dinner in the hotel cafe, with a crab and cheese appetizer and a duck (mallard) entree. I'm staying away from salads and raw vegetables as they are washed in the local water, which has plenty of bacteria my system is not accustomed to and will wreak havoc on my gastrointestinal (GI) system. Mid-way through dinner, half of the lights in the hotel went out. After trying to fix the problem for a few minutes, the hotel staff brought out some candles so that we could finish our meal. Coming back up to the room, I was relieved to see we still had power for the lights, but as I'm writing this all of the remaining lights have gone out in the building and surrounding neighborhood.
Taking the hint from the current lack of power, I think it's time to turn in for the night. I hope you enjoyed the update and stay tuned for more tales to follow.
-Andy
PS: I've attached a few pictures, but also check my Picasa page for many more photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ibeandy
Chapter 3 - The Journey South
Hi everybody,
The last day in Tana was spent running all sorts of final errands. The day started with yet another trip across town to the airport, this time to pick up a second field assistant, Cathriona (Cat). We made brief stops at a grocery store and cellphone store before heading back to the MICET offices. Having about an hour to waste before heading back to the airport to check if our bags arrived,hopefully for the last time, the three of us20went to a little cafe down the street for a light lunch.I ordered a Croque Monsieur, a classic French sandwich of ham and cheese with a fried egg on top.
We arrived at the airport early and the plane carrying our luggage arrived late, so we wound up waiting at the airport for about three hours. We joked that it felt like purgatory, but a more colorful likeness would be to Tom Hanks in The Terminal, only without the goofy accent. In the last surge of bags streaming out on the luggage conveyor, we pulled our beloved belongings aside. My second bag, containing all of my lab supplies was the only thing missing and then with one final spurt, the belt ejected the last of my things.
It was now almost 8pm and exhausted from a long day, we made our way to customs. When the officer looked at our pile of 7 bags, large duffels and hardcases of various shapes and colors, he inquired as to the contents of the mysterious cases. Teague's mention of a small generator raised eyebrows. The customs manager was brought in and after a short wait and some official paperwork, we were finally allowed to leave the airport. We headed back to MICET to drop off the bags and then finally reached our hotel for a brief, late dinner before turning in.
The next morning brought us to MICET to pack up the truck. We would be driving down to the field site, Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, in a Toyota=2 0pickup with full crew cab and a covered bed. The epic amounts of luggage, supplies, and food were hauled out to the truck and four MICET employees went about packing and repacking the truck until every empty space was filled with our gear. Amazingly, everything fit inside the truck, with the exception of some buckets, which were securely strapped to the roof. We got in the car with our driver, Sam, filled up the gas tank, topped off the oil, and finally hit the road.
Before the story leaves Tana, I feel it's necessary to comment on the recent "coup" in Madagascar and what the political climate currently is. For those of you not following the situation closely, the trouble started about a month or two ago. The president, one of the wealthiest Maagasy citizens, was accused of profiting from a recent government land deal giving South Korea the agricultural rights to vast swaths of Madagascar.
His accuser was the second most influential government official, the mayor of Tana, who used to be a popular radio disc jockey. The mayor held frequent public rallies in Tana, attended by large numbers of the people, calling for justice over the apparent corruption of the president. The president's supporters had rallies of their own and as often happens when crowds of emotionally charged people gather, some small pockets of violence broke out. Several of the buildings owned by the president were burned down and around 100 died, either in the building fires or other isolated violence.
At this point, things were looking bad and the military and police refused to step in, saying they weren't taking sides. One day the mayor announced that he was now running the country and instructed government workers and school children to stay home the following day as a show of solidarity. They didn't.
A few weeks later, it was clear that the military had finally chosen a side. One of the residences of the president was stormed in the middle of the night by tanks (yes, Madagascar actually has tanks) and a garrison of soldiers loyal to the mayor's cause. With this move of agression, the president was forced to step down, leaving the rule of the country in the hands of the military, and flee the country for his safety. The military in turn handed power over to the mayor of Tana.
The African Union, the US, and many other foreign authorities have designated this change of government a coup and as a result, have pulled much of their foreign funding. Madagascar is a democracy and according to their constitution, leaders must be elected by the people. Now in power, acting as the president of an 'interim authority' (whatever that is), the mayor has forbade public demonstrations in favor of the ousted president. Apparently the former president's supporters are allowed to gather in one designated spot away from the center of the city. The police allow these gatherings as long as they don't grow violent or too large.
At MICET, I ran into a film crew who had just captured footage from one of these rallies. The film crew were in Madagascar to document the impact the coup has had on the protected natural areas and species of the country. In one of the national parks in the north, valuable hardwood from rose trees was being illegally cut down. These loggers were taking advantage of the political chaos and lack of organi zed government and a small detachment of soldiers was brought in to close the park and clear out the loggers. While not being poached directly, this disturbance and loss of habitat threatens the endangered silky sifaka (a lemur closely related to one of the species I am studying, Verreaux's sifaka [pronounced shi-fa-ck]).
Currently, the violence associated with the takeover of the government has died down (no pun intended). When talking to people in Tana over the past few days, they expain that there are a great many people who do not approve of the new government. These people are very unhappy at the moment, but cannot take any action to speak out against the new regime without fear of reprisal or imprisonment. Some believe that this is the quiet before the storm and that those still in support of their former leader are regrouping to determine what can be done for their cause. Only time will tell where this political battle will go, but until then, daily life goes on.
Now the roadtrip begins!
Car packed, we headed south out of Tana. It didn't take long to get past the city and our road, the one and only road south, meandered through a wide valley. We followed the course of a river at the base of the valley, which supplies water to the endless rice paddies lining the bottom and sides of the valley. Seeing these massive fields of rice all around us saddened me as it brought back to mind that some 85-90% of the natural habitat of the country has been altered or destroyed. Surely this massive conversion of land to growing rice is one of the larger contributors to that destruction.
Our first day of driving took us through the highlands south of Tana. After dark and just over 7 hours of driving, we reached our stop for the night. We settled into a small, Chinese-run hotel in Fianar and were able to get some sleep before leaving early the next morning to continue the trip. I slept the entire night without waking (for the first time since I had arrived) and was so pleased with the accommodations that I offered to buy one of the plush hotel pillows. The woman at the reception desk gave me a look of confusion and disbelief, shook her head, and I was forced to continue without it.
We met Sam down at the car at 6am=2 0and headed back onto the road for day 2 of the trip to Beza. After a few hours of driving and a stop at a gas station to buy some biscuits (cookies) for breakfast, we emerged from the mountains to come down onto the central plateau. I've been told this area looks more like Kansas, only not nearly as flat. The central plateau is a vast grassland so reminiscent of a savannah that we half expected lions to appear over the next hill. The road cuts through one of the national parks and the approach to the border of the park is unmistakable. In the distance, we saw a dense forest, but just over the border from the park there are virtually no trees as they have all been cut down for human use. Next came a former sapphire mining town, similar to something out of the wild west.
Along the way, as we passed through small villages and larger towns, we came across police roadblocks with tire spikes across half of the road. We were stopped briefly, and only at about a third of these barricades. The guard would ask to see the driver's pap ers and on one occasion our passports as well. For the most part, these police were just interested in knowing who was coming through their town.
Around 1pm, we reached a town to get some quick lunch. Towards the end of town, there was a small restaurant run by a lanky ex-patriot Frenchman. We all ordered zebu (beef) and either rice or pomme frites (French fries). After we devoured the delicious food, the proprietor appeared suddenly with a juvenile ring-tailed lemur (the other species I'm studying) on a leash. By whatever means this young lemur had been taken away from its mother, it was now the rather inappropriate pet of this French restauranteur. The bill was paid, we stretched a final time, and then back to the car to continue to cover the kilometers ahead of us.
A few more hours of driving brought us to the turnoff towards Betioky (pronounced Bet-uke) and Beza. With this turn south, the road condition changed dramatically. While the road so far had been a surprisingly well maintained asphalt, the road ahead was only dirt and rocks. From here on, a 4-wheel-drive car is a must and even that cannot guarantee the vehicle will not get stuck. The road could be three cars wide in places, but our path was anything but straight. We often had to weave back and forth across this wide road finding the smoothest path, not that it was actually that smooth. It felt like being on the Indiana Jones ride at Disney... for 6 hours! Sleeping and reading in the back of the car was nearly impossible, so I passed the time looking out the window and keeping myself from smashing into the door of roof of the truck.
Just as the sun was setting, we reached Betioky. Sam ducked into a tiny restaurant for a quick plate of rice for dinner (Malagasy eat so much rice!) and we filled up some empty canisters with gasoline for the portable generator Teague brought. Now fully dark, we headed on to the part of the drive that is the most difficult to navigate. Starting with a narrow road out of town, just wide enough for one truck between the two steep banks of soil. Both sides of the road were lined by sharp, wildly growing cacti at the edges of people's property. The cacti had been introduced to Madagascar to act as natural fences, which they did with amazing success. As we would approach the cacti sticking into the road, we would all duck to avoid the spiny branches slapping us through the open windows.
We then came to our next obstacle in the road, a 20-meter-long stretch of water that needed to be crossed. We didn't know how deep it lay or what the bottom consisted of, but just as Sam got out of the truck to test the waters, a Malagasy man appeared out of the darkness at the=2 0side of the road. We payed him a few Ariary (the Malagasy currency, abbreviated Ar) and he forded the river in front of the truck, showing us the way. The water was only up to the man's knees at the deepest part, but there was a perilous mudflat that we needed to avoid, lest the truck get stuck.
The road eventually widened a bit, but only to confuse us further. As if the forest was playing a nasty trick on us, several roads appeared before us. The roads would be parallel at times and then cross each other and strike off through the trees in new, unknown directions. It became nearly impossible to know which road to take. We wound our way through the dark woods for what felt like hours. Whenever the road developed a deep rut, that was likely to catch the axle and stop us in our tracks, Sam found another path around, usually through tiny gaps in the thickly set trees. We weaved in and out of the trees, turning on a dime, as if driving straight for more than a few seconds was against the truck's nature. Our detour would meet back up with the road only to repeat the exercise a minute or two later.
We began cresting a small hill and the truck suddenly ground to a halt. Sam revved the engine, but the car only shook in place. He tried reverse, but to the same effect. We all knew this moment might arrive and now it was here; we would have to get out and try to push the truck back onto solid ground. Teague, Cat, and I lined up across the front of the car and, with a series of mighty heaves, we were able to free the car from its sandy prison.
This halt to our forward progress seemed an ominous sign tha t we were on the wrong enpath. Convinced we had taken a wrong turn at one of the numerous forks in the road behind us, we turned around. Retracing our path and then trying a different fork many times only led us back to the same path we had first turned away from. Eventually finding a new path, we continued on, but doubled back multiple times in uncertainty. At this point, my sense of direction was completely lost, which is quite a feat. I wasn't alone though as Sam stopped the car, turned off the lights, and got out to give us a bearing from looking at the stars. If you know what you're looking at, the millions of visible stars, like pinpricks on a black cloth thrown over the universe, could easily tell you which way to go. We headed south, but not for too long.
After much more wandering around through the dark forrest, on roads and non-roads, we came back to the sandy hill that stopped us over an hour before. Giving it a second go, we took the hill and continued on what we soon discovered was the correct road all along. Finally seeing signs confirming this, we all breathed out a giant sigh of relief and the truck rolled on with a fresh infusion of determination.
The road ultimately brought us to our final destination, Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, deep within the forests of southwestern Madagascar. It had been exactly a week since leaving Los Angeles, but now the journey here was finally complete. The truck pulled in and a few sleepy faces emerged from their tents and cabins to greet their new residents. Emerging from the truck after 15 hours of driving on anything but a smooth path, we stretched our phenomenally sore bodies, offered brief greetings to the others, and then went to work unloading the truck. We located Teague's largest tent, tall enough for his 6' 2" frame to stand up in, and set it up for the three of us to slep in that night. Two grad students from Arizona State University (ASU) joined us in the tent with a ceremonial bottle of run. We talked for a while and drank a little until sleep startd to set in and we all took to our respective=2 0sleeping bags. As my head hit the pillow, a deep sleep washed over me. When I would awake the next morning, I would be in my new home for the next three months.
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As a side note, I would like to give a brief mention to the frequency of upcoming posts. In our site (Beza), we have no reception of any kind (save a satellite phone for emergencies). The nearby town of Betioky has reception for both our Malagasy cell phones and a cellular modem Teague bought for his laptop. This is the equipment I’ll be using to send out these posts, but Betioky is a six hour walk from our ca mp. While I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be able to make that trip, I will continue to write these posts on a regular basis and send whatever I’ve written out when I get service.
-Andy
Chapter 4 - Life in Camp
Salama (hello in Malagasy),
I awoke to be greeted by a sunny morning in Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve. After a restful first night, it was time to get to work. I made my way over to the breakfast table in the main house, poured myself a bowl of muesli (oats with a few bits of dried fruit) with some powdered milk and hot water, had a bowl of instant coffee, and met the other researchers already residing in Beza.
There were two other American graduate students here when we arrived: Christy and Stephanie. Both women are Teague’s colleagues in the Physical Anthropology Department at Arizona State University. Christy, who arrived a few weeks ago and will only be here through the beginning of June, is studying the connection between locomotion type and the structural form of the pelvis in a variety of primate taxa. She has been looking at the Beza osteology (bone) collection of lemur skeletons that has collected dead animals found in the forest over the past few decades. After mounting the pelvis on a stand, Christy takes a 3D imager and creates a digital reproduction of the dimensions of the pelvis in her computer. She has collected data on over 400 primate pelvises so far. This is Christy’s last stop on an international tour of bone collections, including the Smithsonian in Washington DC, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Natural History Museums in London, Paris, and Cleveland.
Stephanie is a long-term resident here. She has lived in Beza for eight months now, and is staying through the end of the summer to finish collecting data. Most of the time Stephanie was here, she was the only researcher in camp; just her and the cook. Stephanie studies the development of sex differences in social behavior, by looking at adult and juvenile ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta). After living here so long and spending nearly every day following the lemurs through the forest, Stephanie is a great resource for identifying different individuals and learning the social dynamics of the multiple lemur groups over the past year. Out of all of the scientists currently in camp, she is also the most fluent in Malagasy.
After breakfast, we sorted out all of the gear and set up our individual tents. My tent is designed for four people (about 6’ square at the base), so it has enough space for my sleeping bag, duffel, backpacks, books, and toiletries, with some open space in the middle of the floor to stretch out (thanks Ny!). The tents are all set up in a cluster on one side of camp, underneath a large Tamarind tree. A few years ago, cement platforms filled with sand were put in so that the tents could be a few inches off of the ground during the wet season (November through May). Each of us has our own platform with our tent and a little stoop in front.
A short walk away from the tent area is the shower hut and the toilet hut, each with two stalls. There is no running water here, so we use solar showers (a black vinyl bag filled with water from the well and left out in the sun for a few hours to warm up). There are hooks in the shower stalls to hang the shower bag from and each solar shower has a hose emanating from the bottom, with a shower head at the end. The toilets are of an equally simple nature, with three and a half walls and a hole in the ground; no seat and no flush.
Despite the lack of running water, constant electricity, cell reception, or internet, Beza does have many solidly constructed buildings. Aside from the showers and toilets (and another set of each on the other side of camp), there is a central shade structure (what we’re now calling a palapa), a small house about 10’ square for Jacky (one of the Malagasy researchers), and a building with a few offices for the ANGAP park officials. There is also the main house, with a small kitchen, a dining room, and a few bedrooms for the Malagasy park officials, researchers, and staff. The kitchen in the house is not used for cooking the food, but rather for storage of all of the dishes, silverware, pots and pans. The food is cooked in a s mall three-walled hut just behind the kitchen, with fire as the only heat source for food preparation. Lastly, there is a lab/museum building. The museum portion is a large room full of skeletons and Malagasy artifacts. The lab portion is a much smaller room with a lab bench, a desk, and all of our analysis gear that we brought. There are solar panels on the roof of this building, along with more that Teague and Stephanie brought on the ground next to the building, which allows us enough power on a daily basis to recharge computers, cell phones, and other electronics.
Now that our personal tents were all setup, it was time to get the massive quantities of food squared away. Using large plastic bins and metal trunks, we separated out the bags of rice, beans, muesli, tomato paste, and the fresh produce we brought. With five of us here now, the amount of food has grown dramatically, with these bins lining the walls of the dining room. As long as we keep it dry, the raw potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and lemons bought in Tana stay good su rprisingly long, so the buckets containing this produce are brought into the sun to dry out every afternoon.
Teague had a number of things to get in order, so Cat and I went for a hike to try and spot some lemurs. Beza Mahafaly has been traditionally divided into two nonadjacent parcels. Parcel 2, which is farther south of camp, is the larger portion at around 300 hectares in area. Parcel 1 is only about 80 hectares in size, though it is right across the road from camp. Cat and I walked along the road which separates camp and Parcel 1 for a few meters before coming upon a gate through the fence into the parcel. Both parcels are surrounded by barbed-wire fence in order to keep local cattle from grazing within the forest. We headed north along the trails of Parcel 1 and kept our eyes peeled for lemurs. Beza was established as a reserve in 1976 and has been regularly studied by a group of researchers ever since. Aside from its rather pristine conditions and a high density of lemurs, Parcel 1 facilitates lots of research due to its well maintained and orderly trail system. There are seven east-west trails and twelve north-south trails and the individual grid-squares between the trails are 100 meters on a side. These systematic trails make it impossible to get lost and very easy to navigate within the forest.
It didn’t take long until we spotted a group of sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) just off of the trail. We almost missed them as they were perched in the trees, silently watching us go by. Not five minutes into our trek and we had already found lemurs, and only 15 feet away! If you don’t approach them or get too close, the sifaka tend to just sit there, clinging to a branch and watching you. After they get used to your presence, they will often return to what they were doing before you showed up, which is invariably munch ing on leaves. After heading north, into the middle of the parcel, we made a left turn and headed west.
We spotted several other groups of sifaka, which contained anywhere from 3 to 7 individuals, and then finally spotted our first ring-tailed lemurs. As we approached them, they gave their characteristic grunts when they are uncomfortable. We froze in place and stood there watching them for awhile. The group consisted of about 10 individuals with a small juvenile about eight months old. Most of these lemurs (of both species) are collared and tagged so that we can identify them. The collars are colored to match their groups, with yellow group having yellow collars and so on. The tags, which hang from their collars, are numbered with an individual combination for each animal. Unfortunately, the tags are only numbered on one side, so spotting the number can be difficult if the lemur is in the wrong position. In time we will learn to identify all of these individuals by face, behavior, tag number, or any other distinguishing feature.
Coming back into camp, we were surprised to find a few sifaka hanging out in the trees just next to our tents. Aside from the occasional sifaka that comes through camp, there are two large groups of ring-tailed lemurs that regularly come into camp in the afternoon. These groups (orange group and black group) appear silently and are suddenly everywhere. They aren’t shy, but will typically avoid getting too close to a group of humans. These lemurs appear in camp for two reasons: food and water. A regular stop is our trash heap, looking for scraps. We burn our trash here, as it would be far too difficult to get it trucked out, but not every morsel of food waste is always consumed by the fire. If we are eating when the lemurs arrive, they will sit at the windows to the dining room, hoping we will drop some food or maybe leave scraps lying around. The other resource the lemurs seek out is water. Usually there are little puddles of water around the well on the uneven cement. The lemurs will aggressively lap up these pools of refreshing water and even lick formerly wet spots. Both any food found in the trash heap and the patches of water by the well are hotly desired and often a lemur will have to chase off others in order to keep it for themselves.
Our meals here are prepared by a local cook. We have two women that switch off living in camp for 2-week intervals as the cook: Lala and Vavy. As can be inferred from the foods we brought with us, most meals are rice and beans. The occasional meal of pasta is a savored treat. Once the muesli runs out for breakfasts we will switch to what we call ‘breakfast rice,’ consisting of a large portion of rice with jam (and/or sugar) and milk mixed in. It’s not gourmet, but it fills you up.
With the appearance of many more researchers, the local villagers have begun dropping by camp with all sorts of foods to buy. Sweet potatoes, turkey and chicken eggs, and even a live chicken have been brought by and we happily bought these items at shockingly low prices. We also have a few cups of fresh goat’s milk (which is surprisingly scrumptious) delivered every day for our breakfast. These locally bought items make a great supplement to the otherwise delicious but monotonous rice and beans.
The routine has us going out into the forest for several hours in the morning and several more in the afternoon, but before and after lunch, there is usually a little downtime. I’ve filled these bits of time taking photos, showering, organizing my research, playing chess with Cat (the only other person here interested in playing), and reading. I’ve already gotten through many of the books I brought and Beza has a modest library=2 0to delve into once I finish all of my books. The library is an accumulation of the books left behind by researchers, so it’s quite an eclectic mix.
Once we’ve gotten into our routine and a regular schedule, it’s amazing how fast the days pass by. Since we don’t have light after the sun goes down (other than our headlamps), we live by the sun. We rise around 6am and go to sleep by 9pm at the latest. After a long day in the forest, there’s nothing better than curling up in your tent and getting a full night of sleep.
Veluma (goodbye in Malagasy).
-Andy
Chapter 5 - A Trip to the Market
Salama,
I’ve mentioned previously that we have been buying some local produce, in addition to all of the dried goods we brought from Tana. Aside from an arrangement that has goat’s milk delivered every day, we can only buy local items when someone brings food into camp, looking to sell. The main exception to this is the nearby market in Beovoua. Every Thurday, local buyers and sellers from miles around pour into this small town. The market at Beovoua is the largest in the area and features a wide array of crops for sale. The researchers don’t often make the journey, but can request some items if someone from camp is already going.
This week, we decided to head to market as we had a number of things to buy and wanted to see the market firsthand. Stephanie arranged for one of the Malagasy field assistants at Beza to take us in his cherette. A cherette is a small two-wheeled wooden cart pulled by a pair of zebu (cows). Depending on the condition of the road, a cherette can be just as fast (or slow) as walking somewhere, but becomes the preferable mode of transit when you have any luggage, gear, or produce to carry.
Thursday morning arrived and during an earlier-than-usual breakfast, Teague, Cat, Stephanie, Christy, and I made a shopping list for our trip to the market at Beovoua. The cherette arrived a short while later, we all piled int o the back, and away we went. The road took us east and we emerged from the forest of Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve to cross the Sakamena River.
Since Madagascar is in the southern hemisphere, it is currently winter, with fewer hours of daylight as we approach the solstice on June 21. Winter is also the dry season here in southwestern Madagascar. Even this early into the dry season, the Sakamena River is bone dry. Rather than a rushing river up to five feet deep, we saw before us a wide band of sand where water used to be. The sand was rather deep, so we needed to dismount the cherette and walk across to prevent the cart from sinking in and getting stuck. Once everyone made it to the other side, we hopped back into the cherette and continued the trip.
The road took us winding past villages and sporadic fields of sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and cassava. The forest on this side of the river hasn’t been protected like that of Beza, so only small patches of trees remain here and there. Halfway through the trip, we crested a small hill and came upon a spot where local salt is pulled out of the soil. As opposed to the typical table salt of sodium chloride (NaCl), the salt found in the soil here was potassium chloride (KCl). Stephanie has bought some of this local salt in the past and we have been using it to season most of our meals. The salt’s appearance is slightly brown (reminiscent of Sugar in the Raw), but much more flavorful than traditional NaCl.
As we drew closer to Beovoua, the number of people heading to market along the road kept growing. I’ve already mentioned the length and difficulty of t he trip to this part of the country, so it should be no surprise that the local people rarely see any vazaha (Malagasy for foreigner, pronounced vaza). Even before we arrived at the market, a cherette packed with five vazaha was attracting lots of attention from everyone we drove by. We reached Beovoua in the late morning and left our cart and its driver at the edge of town in what was quickly becoming a cherette parking lot.
Shopping list in hand, we headed into the market. The market consists of several rows of open huts with various wares for sale. In the center of the market, under a large tamarind tree, much of the produce is laid out rows of empty rice sacs on the ground. After a quick stroll around the market, seeing what was sold in each hut, we needed a quick bite to eat. We stopped at a little hut where they serve spongy little rice cakes and coffee. As we sat there eating, we quickly drew an ever-expanding crowd around us. Most of the onlookers were all of the children at the market, but teens and a handful of adult s also joined in. For the rest of our time at the market, we never lost this curious crowd, always intrigued to see what we would do next.
Our bellies full, it was time for shopping. We started by heading past the main market area, through the courtyard of a house on the edge of town and coming to the Togogash House. Togogash is the local alcohol, made by certain government-approved villages from sugarcane. Togogash is clear in color, with an odor that could wake the dead, and a taste similar to good agave tequila. There were three grades of Togogash sold there, with varying strengths. We were given a sample to taste and ended up buying a few bottles of the second strength level.
On our way back into the market center, we passed by a hut containing a small gasoline generator, with a Malagasy tune playing through a large stereo. On the counter of the hut were several dozen phones, each plugged into a charger. It seems as if everyone in Madagascar has a cell phone. Quite possibly, more people have cell phones than electricity, which seems unlikely since electricity is required to recharge the phones. Using this ‘electricity hut’ at the market, people can charge their phones without needing their own supply of electricity.
Next on the list to buy: meat. We headed to one butcher and bought a few kilos of beef with the pieces tied into little bundles. A large needle was passed through each piece of meat, pulling a thin strip of grass with it and then the grass was tied off creating a neat little parcel. Another butcher across the way, with an entire decapitated goat on the counter provided some raw goat meat, but without the fancy packaging of the beef. Near this butcher was an empty patch of ground covered in ash. Systematically, several goats were slaughtered over this spot, covered over with a small pile of brush, and then set on fire. The fire burns the hair off of the goat, but can leave a very smoky flavor in the meat.
We headed into the aisles of vegetables under the tamarind tree. Bananas are a delightful treat here, but are miniscule in size compared to those you can find in the supermarkets of the US. About three or four inches long, we loaded up a basket with bunch after bunch of bananas, around 40 in total. We also bought some squash, raw peanuts, papaya, and sugar.
We started to get a little hungry, so it was time to try another snack. This time it was the corn. We each bit into an ear of previously cooked corn and were quite surprised to find a thick kernel of starch, with very little flavor. While the corn did help to fill our stomachs, it did nothing for the palate, so we moved on to a hut selling tiny fried fish. The fish had quite the opposite effect as the corn, providing taste alone.
Snacking done, it was time to load the groceries into the cart and head home. Because we bought so much, there wasn’t room in the cherette for all five of us, so we decided to walk the way home. Now around one in the afternoon, it was starting to get really hot so we did what we could to protect against the sun. Across from one of the villages along the road back to Beza we bought some more papaya and a delicious hard peanut brittle. We walked and walked and walked, often diverging from the road the cherette took to use a shortcut for foot traffic.
After two and a half hours of walking, we finally made it back to camp. Parched and soaked with sweat, I headed straight for water to drink and a refreshing shower. Over dinner, we totaled the cost for all of the produce and snacks from our trip to the market. It came out to about $7.50 US per person; not too shabby.
Veluma.
-Andy
Chapter 6 - The Research
Salama,
I am now over halfway through my time in Madagascar and I have yet to explain what I’m actually doing here. Why have I come halfway around the world, far from friends and family, to live in a small tent with the company of only a handful of English speakers? To sum it up in one word: poop. I came to Madagascar to collect the feces of two of the lemur species found here. This relatively brief expedition is a pilot study for my doctoral research. My proposed research is looking at the gut bacteria that help these lemurs digest their foods.
Let’s start at the beginning, with the lemurs. The two abundant lemur species at Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve are the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) and Verreaux’s sifaka(Propithecus verreauxi). Both of these species are diurnal (awake during the day) and they live sympatrically (occupying the same habitat). In fact, we will sometimes find both species sleeping or foraging in the same tree. There are multiple groups of each species within Parcel 1, sometimes with overlapping ranges to each other.
There has been heavy investigation into the diet of these lemurs (thanks to a large contribution by my advisor, Ny Yamashita). The ring-tailed lemurs have an extremely varied diet, consisting of a mix of leaves, fruits, flowers, insects, and even dirt. Sifaka (pronounced she-fah-kah) have a diet consisting mostly of leaves, though they also supplement with seeds and fruit when available. While both lemurs consume fruits and leaves from many of the same plant species, the contribution of these foods to their diet varies greatly. Ring-tailed lemurs consume a much larger amount of fruit, with Tamarind fruit alone contributing up to one third of their diet. The bulk of the diet of sifaka is leaves and they consume the leaves of many plant species untouched by the ring-tailed lemurs.
These lemurs forage among different plants and achieve a surprisingly balanced diet. Along with the major macronutrients (protein, sugar, and fat) acquired in their diet, these foods contain toxins and chemicals produced by the plant to deter herbivores from munching them up. There are thousands upon th ousands of different chemical defenses found in the plant kingdom. Many of these chemicals have been harvested for use by humans including caffeine, nicotine, tannins (such as those found in wine), morphine, cyanide, and quinine (the malarial prevention in your gin and tonic). Some of these chemicals are referred to as plant secondary compounds as they are metabolic waste products that have secondarily derived a function for the plant by acting as a deterrent to herbivores. Ny has studied the levels of these chemicals in the diets of the ring-tailed lemur and Verreaux’s sifaka here at Beza and they are consumed by the lemurs in significant amounts.
Some plants parts eaten by the lemurs are packed with large structural carbohydrates (such as cellulose), which are very difficult to digest. You have probably seen this inability to digest cellulose in your own diet, such as with corn passing through your body intact. Not only is this cellulose not digested, but in large amounts, it can reduce the performance of the digestive system as the animal tries to metabolize these large molecules. So plants can offer two types of chemical deterrents: toxins (that poison the animal) and structural carbohydrates (that interfe re with their digestion). My research focuses on how the lemurs are able to neutralize these chemicals that are intended to poison them and impair their digestion.
The lemurs produce enzymes in their digestive system that help breakdown some of these chemicals and carbohydrates, but they can’t do it alone. To help in this process, the lemurs have recruited a vast array of microorganisms to help detoxify these chemicals, sometimes changing them into nutrients that the lemur can use (the structural carbohydrates are composed of long chains of hundreds of sugar molecules, providing a potentially rich energy source for the lemur). These symbiotic microorganisms are often housed either in the stomach (such as the rumen in cows) or in a small sac-like compartment off of the large intestine, called the cecum. These pockets of the digestive system contain vast communities of microorganisms, sometimes with many species of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, and fungi present. Little is known about which microorganisms are present and how they help to breakdown the plant chemical defenses present in the diets of these lemurs. This is precisely what I intend to figure out with my research.
The ring-tailed lemur and Verreaux’s sifaka consume different amounts of plant chemical defenses and structural carbohydrates in their diets. By comparing these communities of gut microbes between the two lemur species, I will be able to see if these microbes differ due to the chemical defenses in the lemurs’ diets.
Now the question is how to study microbes found inside the intestines of wild lemurs in the middle of a forest in Madagascar. Ideally I would sample the gut directly, but this would involve darting the lemurs to sedate them, and then sticking a probe in one end or the other to get a sample of the gut microbial community. Unfortunately, darting requires much more paperwork and permits, along with a trained veterinarian on hand, so darting is out for me. Instead, I am collecting feces. The microorganisms in this gut community turnover rapidly, so many of them are pulled out of their section of the gut and carri ed out of the animal along with its feces. I can collect fresh feces from these lemurs, and then study the gut microbes that emerge with the lemur’s waste and undigested food.
The fecal collection involves following the lemurs around all day and collecting once they defecate. The lemurs usually defecate early in the morning, after first moving around from where they were sleeping. They also defecate unpredictably throughout the morning and afternoon, most often after a nice long nap and before more foraging. I try to get out to the forest and find the lemurs before this early-morning defecation, with me typically leaving camp around 7:30am. Once I find a group of lemurs, I need to identify the individuals, noting their sex, species, location, and their individual tag number if they have been collared in the past.
Collecting the feces themselves can be quite frustrating at times. Occasionally, a lemur20will lift its tail and squeeze out a few fecal pellets, forming a neat little pile on the ground for me to collect. Let me assure you, this is a very rare event. Just the other day, I was overjoyed when a lemur defecated from about a meter off of the ground, leaving a large clump of feces dangling from a vine below. Having such easy-to-find feces is a godsend compared to the typical scenario. Usually, a lemur will be 10-25 meters (that’s 30-75 feet) up in the canopy, amongst a group of very similar-looking lemurs. Once one of these lemurs defecates, I need to quickly identify which lemur it is while simultaneously watching where the feces scatter to on the forest floor. And scatter they do! When a lemur is 25 meters up, that means its feces are going to fall 25 meters before they reach the ground, ricocheting off of branches, leaves, and other obstructions along the way. This makes anything but a neat little pile of feces, forcing me to search an area several meters on a side for a handful of tiny fecal pellets.
The fecal pellets from the ring-tailed lemurs are about the size of marbles, and are typically brown in color, though green or reddish feces are not uncommon. Sifaka feces are much smaller, about the size and shape of a Tic-Tac and almost always green. Once I identify the lemur that defecated and form an approximate ‘drop zone,’ the search begins. Crouching down, working my way across the forest floor, I scan back and forth looking for what feels like a needle in a haystack. Imagine trying to find half a dozen green Tic-Tacs in a 3-meter square area of forest, among trees, spiny shrubs (that WILL stab you), sticks, dirt, and lots of fallen leaves. Some days it feels as it their feces were designed to blend into the ground cover in the forest! With difficult-to-find feces, it can easily take 20 minutes of digging around in the leaves and dirt to find enough fecal pellets to fill a sample.
Let me take a quick pause to describe the conditions in the field. While there is a wonderful and extensive trail system through Parcel 1, once the lemurs are spotted and start moving, they don’t stick to the trails. Bushwhacking through the forest, running after lemurs that leap gracefully from tree to tree 20 meters above my head, there is no time to pick out the path of least resistance. Squeezing between saplings, climbing over giant fallen tree s, and wrangling with resilient vines are common fare. Many of the plants in the forest have opted for a mechanical defense against herbivores rather than the chemical defenses I am studying. Their thorns and spines are precisely designed to stab, tear, and rip through anything brushing up against their stems. As you can imagine, when tearing through the forest after a pack of lemurs, this occurs with unpleasant frequency. Some of the spines break off and stick into your skin, while others feature curved thorns that dig into flesh and fabric and dig deeper the harder you push past them. It only takes a few encounters with these plants before you become very aware of avoiding them in your path, but there’s always one hiding from view, twisted together with a soft green vine or leafy tree.
The forest also offers dangers that seek you out, rather than waiting for you to walk into them. Mosquitoes are a constant annoyance, particularly in the wetter Eastern section of the forest. Apart from carrying malaria, a bite from a mosquito can infect you with West Nile virus or Dengue Fever. Wasps can also be a nasty threat in the forest. These wasps construct their nests along tree branches or hiding=0 Aunder low-hanging leaves. All it takes is a hard shove to their home and suddenly you’ve got a swarm of angry wasps chasing after you (and these guys don’t die after one sting, but can sting you repeated times). The forest is also full of spiders, though most of these are rather benign, such as the golden orb-weaver spider that creates gorgeous webs all across the forest. There have been black widow spiders spotted here, but I haven’t seen any yet.
Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression here and make it sound like I’m lucky to survive each day with such dangers around. In fact, I am lucky to have such a nice field site. The wasps and mosquitoes aren’t very bad right now (they do get quite nasty in the wet season though). I also don’t have leeches, centipedes, botflies, and a host of other insects to deal with like many of my colleagues do at their sites. There aren’t torrential afternoon monsoon rains and constantly high humidity. Despite the recent (peaceful) coup d’etat, I’m not in a war-torn country with violent civil wars and genocide. There are no researchers in Madagascar being kidnapped for ransom. So let me go on=2 0record saying that research in the forest here really ain’t so bad! Sure I’ll tear up my legs on thorns every few days and curse out mosquitoes smashing them against my skin AFTER they’ve already bitten me, but I remember it could be much much worse, it many ways.
Now then, when enough fecal pellets are scavenged from the cryptic forest floor, the sample is labeled and bagged, and then it’s on to the next animal. Once the early-morning defecation session is over, I may need to follow a group of lemurs around all morning before any of them defecate again. While I’m following them around, I can observe their behavior and keep tabs on what foods they are eating, giving me the full picture of what goes in and what comes out. At lunchtime, back in camp, I preserve the morning samples using a handful of methods.
Researchers in the past have had varying success=2 0with fecal preservation methods, and one of the main goals of my pilot study is to compare these methods on these particular lemur species. There are three preservation methods that I’m using, with the first being immersion in high quality ethanol. The second preservation method is drying the feces using a camping oven. The camping oven is a collapsible metal box (about one foot cubed) with a metal tray to hold the samples. The oven is heated by a combination of sources: sun and flame. After sitting in the tropical sun all morning, the oven can get pretty hot, but a few tealights added under the metal tray are usually required for a sustained temperature to fully dry out the feces. Once dried, the feces are ground to a fine powder and kept dry with packets of silica gel (similar to those you find in electronics boxes). The third method is a commercially available filter card impregnated with a chemical cocktail designed to lyse the microbial cells, bind their DNA, and prevent any degradation of this DNA. These filter cards are extremely easy and fast to use and can be stored for an extended amount of time at room temperature without any loss of quality.
The way to study the microbes pre sent in the lemur feces is to look at their DNA. When analyzed properly, this DNA can indicate which microbes are present, the relative amounts of the different microbes, and the metabolic functions they are providing to the lemur to aide in the digestion of those nasty plant chemical defenses. Once I bring the preserved feces back to the lab in Los Angeles, I will extract the DNA and get to work understanding how these microbes breakdown the plant defenses and who exactly is doing this.
So let’s summarize. Plants produce chemicals to prevent grazing by herbivores. Despite this, lemurs eat these plants. These chemicals fail to harm the lemurs due to the aide of microbes in the lemur gut, which breakdown the plant chemicals. To gain access to these microbes, I am collecting lemur feces. Once preserved and brought back to LA, I’ll extract the microbial DNA to see who’s there and how they’re breaking down these chemicals. So, like I said, I came halfway around the world to a remote corner of Madagascar for poop.
Veluma,
- Andy
Chapter 7 - My Day Job
Salama,
The previous message outlined the research that brought me to Madagascar, but that wasn’t the whole story. On top of the fecal collection for my pilot project, I am a field assistant for Teague, a graduate student at Arizona State University. Teague, who is most of the way through his degree, is here collecting the bulk of data for his thesis. As opposed to the three months for my pilot project, he will be here among the lemurs for a solid ten months.
I volunteered to help Teague collect data while I am here and in exchange I have access to his extensive primate field ecology experience. In addition, by being part of Teague’s crew, a lot of logistics and supplies for our two projects can be combined, reducing redundancy, cost, and piles of duplicate gear.
Teague’s doctoral thesis is studying the sex differences in feeding ecology in the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). In particular, he is curious about the effects of social and environmental stressors. At some point in their development, the diet and feeding ecology of male and female ring-tailed lemurs diverges. Teague wants to understand when and how this split happens. An additional goal is to investigate how lemur development is affected by human-degraded habitats. To discern the effect of habitat, lemurs will be studied both inside the protected forest of Parcel 1 (Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve) and just outside the reserve, where locals are free to cut down trees and graze livestock.
A typical day of collecting data goes as follows. Teague, Cat (another field assistant), and I gather our gear and head out to the forest in the early morning. The essential equipment for a day of data collection includes a backpack, binoculars, a mini laptop for data collection, a field notebook, a plastic bag with pre-torn sheets of aluminum foil for collecting feces, a baseball cap, a handheld GPS unit, two-way radios, a camera, a knife, and a full water bottle. There are eight collared ring-tailed lemur groups that Teague is focusing on, each with a unique home range. Some lemur groups are found in the Eastern side of Parcel 1, some in the center, and some are found both in the parcel and in the human-degraded forests adjacent to the reserve. We typically collect data on each group for two full days before rotating on to the next group. A full rotation takes about two week s.
Heading off in the direction of the lemur group of interest, we split up, taking parallel trails and snaking our way through the forest trying to locate the lemurs. Walking slowly and quietly down the trails, we keep out eyes peeled and our ears attuned to the sounds of the forest, trying to spot any trace of lemurs. If the lemurs are still resting, curled up along branches and bunched into fuzzy groups (entertainingly called lemur balls) near the tops of the trees they can be near impossible to find. We have, on occasion, walked right under a tree full of lemurs unaware of their presence and then gone on to search the rest of the forest for them. After an hour or two of failed searching, we finally found them back where we started, having barely moved since we first passed by. If a lemur makes a vocalization or moves around in the treetops, we can usually zero in on where the group is. If they remain silent, it can take us half of the morning just to find the lemurs we are looking for.
Once someone finds the desired lemur group, they call everyone else to them with the radios or a loud hoot. The binoculars come out and we try to identify all of the individuals. Thanks to t he diligent work of a few of the senior scientists that regularly work at Beza, most of the animals are collared and tagged. Each collared lemur group has a different color collar and each animal has an individually numbered round tag. There is some variation in the tag size and color, but most of them feature black numbers on a yellow background. There are a few transient males and young lemurs that don’t have collars. In order to distinguish these animals from each other, we have squirted some dye onto their fur in different locations. The dyeing process requires a steady hand as the animal could be harmed if dye lands on its face. When the lemurs are close to the ground, the dye is loaded into a large syringe. We creep as close as possible to an uncollared lemur, give a brief squirt from the syringe, and then the now dyed lemur jumps off in surprise.
If we find the lemurs early enough in the morning, we may be there for the typical morning bout of defecation. Teague is collecting their feces in order to measure the levels of stress hormones in different animals and at different times of the day and year. Finding the lemur feces can be just as difficult and frustrating as when I collect for my research, but having three spotters usually increases our chances. Once found, the fecal pellets are collected onto the center of one of the aluminum foil sheets (a 2” by 5” rectangle), and folded up to keep the sample inside. Some mornings are full of feces as lemur after lemur defecates nearby, with us rushing to keep track of where all of the feces landed. Once we return to camp, the foil packets are opened up and placed in a camping oven to dry. A combination of candles and solar heating is used to keep the oven hot, identical to the procedure in my research. Oven-drying is a proven field method for preserving stress hormones, so Teague doesn’t have to bother with other preservation methods.
The bulk of Teague’s data comes from our behavioral observations of the lemurs. Each of us will take a few specific lemurs and watch them all day, conducting focal observations. In twelve minute long bouts, we record social interactions, and feeding behaviors on a mini, 8” laptop. Loaded on the laptops is a simple behavioral data collection program called JWatcher���. This software allows us to assign a single keystroke to a suite of behaviors, including eat fruit, drink, lick, forage for food, aggression and submission, steal food, and approach another animal. We are also able to assign keystrokes to different plant species and other modifiers, coding the above behaviors with more detail. Every three minutes during this focal period, we also record the location of th e lemur within the canopy, what the lemur is doing, what the group is doing, the identity of the nearest lemur, and what this nearby lemur is doing. Between the three of us, we can collect hours of data on the lemurs in a single day, recording the behavior of nearly a dozen different animals in the group.
As we follow the lemurs around all day, collecting behavioral data and feces, we regularly record the longitude and latitude of the group using a GPS unit. This data can be used to show the home range of each group. With this data collected over ten months, Teague will be able to show both the total area that these lemurs venture into (home range) as well as their core area where they spend most of their time.
The lemurs are territorial and the home ranges of the groups overlap, leading to frequent quarrels. We keep track of these intergroup encounters and note where they occurred and which group eventually retreats. The level of aggression found in these encounters can vary. Sometimes the approach of another group is enough to cause the lemurs we are watching to turn tail and flee. Other times, there is an actual power struggle as a few lemurs from each group stare across at each other,20forming their ranks on either side of an invisible dividing line. After a few minutes of staring, there is usually some wild chasing of each other across the ground and through the trees. Occasionally there is even contact, when an unlucky lemur is not fast enough to escape the smack or bite of the approaching aggressor. The most entertaining part of many of these lemur battles is the half-time brake. With surprising regularity, just moments after a heated chase and the tension between the individuals in the standoff still palpable, all of the lemurs will stop fighting, relax their guard, and start foraging for food around the former battlefield. With both groups still present, there is a guarantee of more aggression, ultimately leaving one group heading for the hills (metaphorically speaking, as the terrain is completely flat) and the other group maintaining their control of that territory and the precious food resources within.
While the focal observations indicate what the lemurs are eating, an important consideration is what foods are available for them to eat in the forest at a particular time. To keep track of the food availability in the forest, we have setup 21 transects across Parcel 1 and outside of the reserve. These transects are a 30-meter long, 2-meter long strip of forest, where every tree is tagged and numbered. There are over 400 individual trees tagged in these transects! Once every two weeks, we take the morning off from observing lemurs and note the condition of the trees along these transects. We record the current amount of leaves (mature and immature), fruit (ripe and unripe), and flowers on each tree. Teague also takes photos of a 1-meter square section of ground in each transect, along with photos looking straight up, showing the canopy cover over the same area. All of this data will be combined to give a picture of the food availability in different parts of the forest throughout the year.
Spending all day observing the feeding habits of these lemurs is a great boon to my research, giving me a detailed account of what foods the lemurs are eating at each part of the day. Assisting Teague shows me firsthand the within-group power struggles that often leave one lemur munching away happily on whatever she wants, while another (usually low-ranking) lemur is left with no access to a particularly tasty food.
Veluma,
-Andy
Chapter 8 - Independence Day
Salama,
July fourth came early this year. Instead of celebrating America’ liberation from the ruling hand of the British, we joined the Malagasy people in celebrating their independence from being a French colony. While their celebrations don’t feature the typical American fireworks, there’s still quite a celebration.
But before I describe the festivities, let’s have a little history lesson. Pre-colonization, Madagascar had a series of ruling kings and queens (including the absurdly-long named King Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka). The earliest interaction with Europeans was with Britain, primarily to supply arms and military advice to King Radama I (son of the above long-named regional King). The contribution of the British to developing his military force, allowed King Radama I to continue his father’s work of uniting many of the tribes and regions of Madagascar into a single kingdom.
Along with the British investment of arms came a brief wave of Christian missionaries, w ho attempted to introduce a formal written language featuring the Roman alphabet and other aspects of Western technology to the island nation. Radama’s widow, Queen Ranavalona I despised the Western influence and often used brutal methods to rid her kingdom of these foreigners. Following the Queen’s long, 33-year reign, successive kings and queens were more open to European influence.
Despite the earlier relations with Britain, France maintained a claim to Madagascar. In 1883, the French navy attacked and occupied the major Malagasy ports, starting the Franco-Malagasy War. This war lasted for thirty months, finally resulting in the signing of a treaty declaring Madagascar a French protectorate. The Malagasy government resisted the imposed French control and in 1895 France invaded Madagascar. A year after the invasion, Madagascar officially became a French colony, along with the exile of Queen Ranavalona III and the destruction of the monarchy.
During World War II, Madgascar was controlled by the Vichy French. Fearing that the Japanese could use the ports of Madagascar to a tactical advantage, the British invaded and maintained control of the island, until being returned to a Free French government in 1943. Having had a taste20of freedom from the French during the war, the Malagasy mounted a massive uprising in 1947. Despite more than 80,000 Malagasy dying in the struggle, the French were able to maintain control over Madagascar. On June 26, 1960, with the spirit of Malagasy nationalism still in the hearts of the people, Madagascar finally achieved full independence, after 64 years of colonization by the French.
As June 26, 2009 approached, Beza started seeing some little changes, hinting at the upcoming celebration. One day, after Andry (the man in change of Beza Mahfaly Special Reserve for Madagacar National Parks, formerly the mysteriously acronymed ANGAP) returned to camp, every building was festooned with the Madagascar flag (wide horizontal bars of red and green, with a vertical bar of white on the left). The long unused flagpole installed in camp just a few years ago finally served its purpose, with a bright flag standing at full mast.
The main building also received some new decorations. The books filling the two tall bookcases in the dining room were rearranged to make room for nearly two dozen wooden, hand-carved masks. The masks reminded me in a strange way of the tragedy and comedy masks commonly seen in theaters, as some o f these masks had unmistakably upturned smiles, while others featured deep frowns. The masks of various sizes lined shelf after shelf, with a row of intricately-carved, hollow wooden barrels (also of various sizes) on a shelf below.
Initially we were unsure whether there would be any local celebration of Independence Day as any festivities would require funds from the government. On June 25th, Munza (another employee of Madagascar National Parks and in charge while Andry is in the ‘nearby’ village of Betioky) told us researchers that the people of Beza (including us) were invited to an Independence Day party in Beovoua thrown by their mayor. As you may recall, Beovoua is the town that has the large market held every Thursday. Despite this generosity, we turned down the invitation as it would be a long trip and one less day of data collection. While Munza made a brief appearance at the all-day party in Beovoua as a representative of Beza, we also decided to have a little party here in camp. With a small monetary donation from Teague and Stephanie, someone was sent to the market to buy a goat (that’s an entire, live goat that would be slaughtered and butchered at camp) and some alcohol for the party.
On Friday, after a standard day of data collection out in the forest, Teague, Stephanie, Cat, and I headed back into camp a little earlier than usual to get ready for the party. At 5pm sharp, the dinner bell rung and everyone gathered in the main house. Extra tables and chairs had been added to the typical ones and needed to be arranged in an L-shape to fit in the room. As guests in their land and financial backers of the party, the four researchers were seated along the short-side of the L, at what felt like the head of the table. Everyone took their seats, with a quick shuffle to find more chairs to fit everyone, and the celebration got under way. There were about 20 people crowded around the outside of the L-shaped table arrangement, with a couple of the young kids sitting on a wicker mat on the floor (the Malagasy version of a kid’s table). Munza stood up and gave a brief speech (mostly in Malagasy, but partly translated into an English-French blend for us) about the historic occasion.
The speech was followed by introductions as Munza went around the table saying everyone’s name and how they were affiliated with Beza or who’s husband, child, or 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd wife they were. In an uncharacteristic, yet entertaining move, as Munza went around the table, he drew a blank with nearly every name. Havi ng worked with these people at Beza for some time and being a local all of his life, Munza knew these people, but simply could not conjure their names out of his head. After a pause for a second or two in coming up with their names, Stephanie would fill in the name for him, knowing everyone at the table very well after living here with them for the past eight months. With each name Munza would forget, Stephanie would fill in and everyone would give a cheerful laugh (Munza included). This process repeated until we got through the entire guest list.
Introductions complete, it was time for dinner to begin. A few of the women went off to the kitchen to get the food and someone headed to the boombox to start the Malagasy music that would blast all night. The meal started off with goat meat served four different ways. The first and my favorite of these four was dried goat meat, which was reminiscent of a moist jerky and had a nice smoky flavor. Next up was goat ribs, which were also delicious, but the meat was very tough and with no knives in sight it was just fingers and teeth to get the meat off of the bone. Third was goat liver. The liver was okay. It tasted like��� well��� liver. Not the delicious chopped liver I’m accustomed to getting in my New York-style delis, but just cooked liver. Compared to most of the other goat meat preparations, the liver did have the distinct advantage of having no bones or thick ribbons of fat and connective tissue to eat around.
Fourth and by far the most ‘interesting’ form of goat was its intestines. The bowl was filled with small chunks of intestine, neatly tied up, looking like the knot you’d see on the top of a gift-wrapped present. Always willing to try any new food at least once, I placed one of the bundles of digestive tract gingerly on my plate. After a few bites of the dried meat to setup my palate, I dug in and took a large bite of intestine��� at least I eventually did. Chewy and tough only begin to describe the texture so it took me quite a bit of wrestling to get a bite-sized chunk off. The flavor was peculiar. It wasn’t a horrible, off-putting taste, yet it wasn’t all too enjoyable either. The odd taste, combined with the rubbery, partially grainy texture, and it only took me another bite to decide that goat intestines (at least prepared this way) were not for me.
After the meat course, we moved on to something a little lighter, with small sticks of sugar cane and slices of papaya laid before us. For those of yo u who haven’t had the pleasure of eating sugar cane, it is intensely fibrous. In fact, it’s pretty much all fiber, with some sugary sweetness nestled between the fibers. The way to eat sugarcane is to bite off a chunk, suck all of the sugar out of it and then spit out the wadge of fiber. Having never tried sugarcane before, I was delightfully surprised by the pleasant, yet not too harsh sweetness. I could get used to this as a snack, but the pile of chewed fiber sitting on the side of your plate is not exactly attractive.
After a slice or two of beautifully soft and ripe papaya, it was time for the staple of any Malagasy meal: rice. Large bowls of rice were placed all along the table, along with a fifth (that’s right fifth!) type of goat. This goat was stewed, so that it was nice and tender and had a little bit of sauce which soaked into the rice below. This meat was very delicious, but the juice-permeated rice was the real homerun of this course.
To finish off the meal, boiled sweet potato was brought out. The sweet potatoes here have a white flesh, as opposed to the bright-orange colored yams we typically call sweet potatoes in the US. Now anyone who knows me20well knows I love sweet potatoes (and love how readily available they are in California, allowing every restaurant to offer sweet potato fries, yum!), but I have also developed a taste for these local sweet potatoes with their more subtle flavor. When available, we’ve been lucky enough to have these sweet potatoes with our standard meals of rice and beans. We’ve had them roasted next to the open fire (my favorite) and cut into slices or rounds and fried (though nothing at all like sweet potato fries at home), but never before boiled. The boiled potatoes have a nice, almost mushy consistency, but the skin is barely there, contributing no flavor (which is what I love about the roasted preparation).
The end of the meal also featured an amber-colored hot liquid called ranupangu. This is something we have been enjoying at our lunches and dinners for weeks and makes for a nice beverage after a filling meal, much like tea or coffee at the end of a meal in the West. When cooking the rice for a meal, a small amount is left in the pot and allowed to burn slightly (more browned than an ashy burn). Water (ranu in Malagash) is then added to the pot and boiled for several minutes infusing with the taste of the burned rice (this burned rice is called pangu). When I first tried ranupangu (literally meaning burned rice water.) only a week or t wo after arriving at Beza, I thought it disgusting. After trying it again a few days later, I found it rather pleasant and now drink it with every rice meal we have (but not breakfast).
Throughout the meal, there was rum and togogash (the local liquor made from sugar-cane) readily available to help wash down all of the goat meat. Rum is more expensive and universally more preferred than togogash, so the few small bottles of it disappeared well before the rice ever arrived on the table. After that it was on to togogash, which is a liquor best sipped, not gulped. Compared to the sweet, smooth rum, togogash gives that chest-warming feeling often associated with a strong whiskey. Weeks before, on our trip to the market in Beovoua, we had opted to buy mostly bottles of the 2nd quality togogash, which has less of a bite. Being an important celebration, the togogash this time was premiere (1st) quality.
No party is complete without a little dancing and this one was no exception. Starting midway through the meal, people would get up from the table, make their way onto the impromptu dance floor bordered by the tables, and dance for a little while. When they were finished with their little solo, everyone would=2 0clap and they’d sit back down. Once we were done eating, more people made their way to the dance floor (including all of us researchers) and we danced for hours and hours, trying to emulate the Malagasy style of dancing. I won’t try to describe the dancing, but if you ask me under the right circumstances I may give you a demonstration.
The music was a rotation of about half-a-dozen cassettes played through an ancient, silver, one-speaker, 80’s boombox. We would only listen to one or two songs on each cassette, while someone would rewind the other tapes by hand. My previous thoughts on Malagasy music, based on a song or two heard on the drive south, were that it all sounds the same. After a night of dancing and listening to this handful of songs over and over, I have refined my opinion. A lot of the songs have the same instrumentation (drums, electric guitar, and synthesizer) and a similar, fast beat, but there are certainly distinctions among the songs. A few of the more popular songs (the ones that were played every other song all night) have actually grown on me and hopefully I’ll be able to find a recording of these in Tana to bring back home.
After a long night of eating, drinking, and dancing following a full day of work in the forest, it was time for bed. Though the party stopped for us researchers, the Malagasy kept the party going well into the night. Being an important day for their national pride, I can’t say I blame them. There may not have been hot dogs, barbeques, and fireworks like I typically experience around this time of year, but it was nice to get to see how the locals celebrate their independence from those colonizing Europeans and of course everyone always loves a party.
Veluma,
- Andy
Chapter 9 - New Arrivals to Camp
Salama,
Throughout the year, the population of Beza expands and contracts. Tourists arrive sporadically throughout the year, but the few that spend the night rarely remain more than a couple of days. Researchers come and go seasonally and are the more common foreigners to find at such a remote site. Flooding into the country during their summer and winter academic breaks, researchers collect as much data as possible before returning to their teaching duties the following semester. Graduate students, with classes out of the way, are typically the only ones able to schedule yearlong field seasons.
Early July brought some new residents to camp. Late one night, while I was getting ready for bed, a truck full of researchers pulled into camp with the roof rack piled high with luggage and equipment. I grabbed my headlamp, stumbled out of my tent, and went to meet the new arrivals. Out of the car poured Frank, Michelle, Scott, Amy, and Jacky. Frank and Michelle are professors at the University of North Dakota and the University of Colorado respectively. They come to Beza each year to study the ring-tailed lemurs, conducting a long-term study of their population demographics. Michelle has been studying the lemurs here since the mid-eighties and Frank has joined her for the past several years. Scott is a research veterinarian from the University of California Davis and the Sacramento Zoo. Scott has been on the team for three years now and is on hand to monitor the health and status of the ring-tailed lemurs in the study. Amy is one of his veterinary students at UC Davis, acting as an assistant to Scott, as well as conducting her own small study looking at the diseases present in the lemurs.
Last to emerge from the car was Jacky, a little Malagasy man with a kind smile who lives at Beza several months each year. Jacky is a man with several jobs here. Firstly, he works (and has worked for years) for ESSA, the Madagascar Forestry Department. Jacky and a handful of other ESSA employees from nearby villages survey much of the wildlife in the forest year-round. Elahavelo surveys the ring-tailed lemurs, Enafa the sifaka, and Efitaria the tortoises. Upon first meeting this team of friendly surveyors, it was difficult to remember who was whom (and all of their names beginning with the letter E helped very little). Having now been here several months, I have gotten to know each of the men well. They are always cheerful and have been helpful in sharing their deep knowledge of the forest as well as the occasional translation between English and Malagasy.
Jacky's second job is as a graduate student at the University of Tulear (in southwestern Madagascar). He is currently writing up his doctoral thesis, studying the ecological overlap in mouse lemurs and rats at Beza. The nocturnal mouse lemur is the world's smallest primate and, as the name suggests, is the size of a teeny mouse. The few rats I have seen scurrying around camp (which are miniscule compared to frightening city rats) are noticably larger than mouse lemurs. We have been able to spot mouse lemurs on night hikes through the forest. Their eyes glow like two little fires when lit by our headlamps. For such small creatures, they are amazingly agile and fast, jumping around in the trees and thickets to scurry away into the darkness or come closer and investigate the lights and people.
One of the side effects to the political tension earlier this summer with the coup is that the influx of foreigners (both for tourism and
research) has declied sharply. My departure date for Madagascar was pushed back a couple of weeks and Frank and Michelle experienced a similar delay, with everyone nervous to see if the political controversy would tear the country in two. It hasn't. Daily life has continued as before, apart from a few days of demonstrations in the cities at the climax of the power struggle. So Frank and Michelle are left with less than a month to conduct their research before heading back to the States for the fall semester.
When Michelle first came to work on the ring-tailed lemurs, they followed nine groups. Animals were captured, collared, tagged, and released back to their group. In the years since, new animals have been given collars and tags and a selection of previous animals were also captured to track their health. Frank and Michelle arrived this summer with a long list of animals to capture across the groups and less time than originally thought. After a single day of setup at camp, Frank, Michelle, Scott, Amy, Jacky and crew headed out to the forest to begin their work.
The final members of the team are Enafa and Elahavelo, who locate the lemurs each morning and dart the individuals of interest. Scott mixes together a cocktail of drugs to sedate the lemur and loads them into a slim syrringe-like dart. The needle-tipped dart has a sliding collar near it's tip. Once injected into the animal, this collar is pushed back, exposing a small hole that releases the pressurized anesthesia within. Enafa, the primary darter, uses a 6'-long plastic tube to project the darts. Rather than dartguns that use pressurized carbon dioxide as an accelerant, Enafa relies on a brisk exhalation into the blowgun. By creating the motive force himself, Enafa has complete control over the velocity of the dart. Depending upon the distance and height of the lemur, more or less force may be required. Darting the lemur requires a skilled hand (and mouth), and it is important that Enafa sends the dart into the lemur at a particular spot. Being careful to avoid the face and vital organs, Enafa aims to land the dart deep into a large muscle in the lemur's calf.
With the dart successfully into the muscle tissue and the drugs released, now the team must wait for the anesthesia to take effect. The lemur becomes groggy and ultimately falls asleep. The lemur then plummets from its perch in the tree into an opened blanket held below, reminiscent of firefighters catching people leaping from a burning building. It's this catching part of the capture that dictates that they only dart animals below a certain height. Many of the lemur groups habitually spend much of their day 20 or more meters up in the trees and a falling lemur from this height would be hazardous to the health of both the falling lemur and the researchers trying to catch it.
With a knocked out lemur in custody, the team marches back to camp to collect their data. Scott hooks the animal up to a monitor via a blood pressure cuff at the base of the tail and an infrared pulse oxygen sensor on it's foot. He regularly notes its heartrate and blood pressure and the animal's body temperature via a rectal thermometer. If any of these vitals rise or fall past normal levels, Scott and Amy have injections ready to return the animal's stats to normal. Ring- tailed lemurs are not very good at regulating their body temperature, which explains their characteristic sunning pose. Early in the morning, when it is still chilly, they can often be seen sitting up in a nice sunny spot, arms face up along their sides, as if deep in mediatation. While the sedated lemur is on the table, its body temperature regularly drops. This is easily remedied by moving the animal into the sun where they continue to measure it.
Alart from monitoring the animals vitals, Scott and Amy give the animal a full physical, noting any abnormalities, absesses, injuries, diseases, and even upcoming pregnancies. Blood, feces, and various orifice swabs are collected for analysis in the lab. Michelle measures standard limb dimensions of a suite of body parts on the animal. Appearing like a lemur tailor, Michelle uses a flexible tape measure to determine the length and girth of the lemur's legs, arms, and chest. Before being hooked up to the health monitor, the animal is weighed from a hanging basket scale.
Frank is studying the dental condition of the lemurs and is particularly interested in the microwear patterns in the tooth enamel. Much like your last visit to the dentist, Frank fills molds with a quick-drying non-toxic blue paste to take impressions of the lemur's
teeth. He takes molds of each quadrant of the mouth, being careful to hold the long tongue out of the way of the paste. The casts he takes of the bottom teeth are of particular interest as they record the size and condition of the tooth comb. A tooth comb is a modified structure found in the lower teeth of some primates. The bottom four inscisors (the front teeth, before the canines) become elongated and point forward, rather than up, resembling the teeth of a comb. Lemurs use these teeth to groom themselves and each other, picking out debris from their fur. It is this function that has lead to the tooth comb also being called a grooming comb. Frank will take these molds back to his lab, create hard resin casts of the teeth, and then study the microscopic surface of these teeth. By coorelating the tooth condition with the diet of these animals, Frank can understand if particular hard foods lead to early degradation of the teeth. Several of the older ring-tailed lemurs at Beza have their teeth worn down so far that they are unable to chew the leaves and hard fruit casings in their diet.
All measurements complete, the animal is given a saline drip and if necessary, drugs to reverse the anesthesia. Before waking up, Michelle latches a collar and tag aroud the neck of previously uncollared individuals. Over the years, the tags and collars of some lemurs become worn through or chewed off. These lemur miscreants revieve fresh tags and collars and the opportunity to chew at their new jewelery for the next several years. The lemurs are housed in standard pet carriers and kept overnight to monitor their recovery. The following morning, the lemurs are returned to their group no worse for wear.
-Andy