Slightly decadent

Contracts signed, advances paid, written exams… er, still to take, but that’ll be a piece of cake I hope

(I can’t actually believe 5 people, sailors as well as non-sailors, trust me enough to let me play skipper for a whole week, my first time as a skipper anyway… I guess they’re somewhat blinded by the mediterranean sun and sea.) But no worries…:

CROATIA, HERE WE COME!!!!! (almost)

A vekor 361, the 11.2m yacht we’ll be using to cleave the crystal blue waters.

Fertilizer plants for Dummies: update

I’m probably way out of line doing this, but I gave it a thought and decided to publish this anyway as I couldn’t just do as if nothing happens. Remember the giant whirlpool I told you about in my post on April 6? I now received the satellite image of the site under discussion I’d ordered for March 8. I literally jumped up when I downloaded the low resolution preview image and immediately noticed “some bubbles” were clearly visible on the image, 19 (!!) days before the safety engineer told us they had this problem going on for “the last few days” and asked us to get a few samples and express our opinion on the matter. Understatement suddenly gets a whole new meaning. I sincerely wonder about the amount of sediment stirred up by the violent air leak, not to mention the damage caused by the chlorine. In the worst case scenario, the increased sedimentation could lead to extinction of the extremely rare Fungid coral communities at the site (one of the only places in the Gulf of Oman and very sensitive to siltation as they only grow a few centimeters above the substrate, on the left in the picture) and further resuspension of nutrients into the water column causing more severe diatom blooms, further killing the already heavily overgrown gorgones (soft corals, right on the picture).

The pictures below show the air leak from a different perspective, facing the mooring jetty for fertilizer tankers, and the low resolution preview of the satellite imagery, indicating the viewpoint by a red arrow (picture taken at the head of the arrow, facing its direction) and the bubbles in a red circle (click to enlarge).

Snuff stuff: update

As I suspected, the post traumatic stress disorder in elephants was already known a year ago, published in February 2005 in Nature (available for a limited period here). It wasn’t until now the attention of the world press was drawn to the subject by an article in the New Scientist. And now, the story makes the headlines in every medium…

Snuff stuff

Every time another documentary on “our planet’s largest mammals” is broadcasted, I lately tended to tune to another station from the moment “the first rays of sun heat the Serengeti”. I’m just not interested anymore. It’s always the same cliches over and over again. I don’t know what kept me watching the Canvas documentary last night. It started off as any other hollywood-style documentary based solely on sensation. “With their 5 tons, elephants are extremely powerful. Recently, the number of elephants using their weight to attack and kill people for no obvious reason has dramatically increased. Why?” seemed to be repeated a 100 times with no answer as one case after another was shown, completely with military action movie-style subtitles mentioning place and time. These cases actually turned out to be true snuff movies: a sheer unendless series of people getting crushed, shown from all perspectives, in replay, using digital zoom. Finally, after about half an hour, they came up with hypotheses, of which the last one actually was very fascinating…

The Times, February 16, 2006
Elephants never forget . . . and cannot forgive

By Thair Shaikh

They say that elephants never forget, and it could be that they are using their memories to exact revenge on people who make their lives a misery.
A new study says that the usually gentle giants may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought on by frightening experiences at an early age.
In parts of Uganda they have raided villages, demolished huts and destroyed plots, not in an effort to get at food but to scare the people living there.
Such attacks have become more frequent in Bunyaruguru, western Uganda, where only two years ago villagers would think nothing of cycling to the nearby township of Katwe to meet friends and do business.
But they have to be more careful now because elephants regularly block the roads, and villagers are too afraid to cycle past.

According to the report in New Scientist, elephants across Africa seem to be turning on their human neighbours in ever-increasing numbers. In the past such attacks have always been seen as a side-effect of elephants competing for food and land, as a result of an expanding human population encroaching on elephant land.
Joyce Poole, research director at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, in Kenya, said: “They are certainly intelligent enough, and have good enough memories, to take revenge. Wildlife managers may feel it is easier to just shoot so-called ‘problem’ elephants than face people’s wrath.
“So an elephant is shot without realising the possible consequences on the remaining family members, and the very real possibility of stimulating a cycle of violence.”
Dr Poole and her colleagues claim that many elephants are suffering from PTSD brought on by experiencing stress at an early age, thought to be the first time it has been diagnosed in wild animals.
Experiments and observations of captive animals suggest that stress experienced during their early years can lead to neurological and behavioural changes that resemble PTSD in humans. Gay Bradshaw, a scientist at Oregon State University and lead author of the paper, said: “This could explain a suite of behaviours that have been common in captivity but sadly now are becoming part of wild elephant behaviour.”

Dr Felicity de Zulueta, a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, who specialises in trauma therapy and grew up in Uganda with an orphaned elephant as a pet, believes the theories have a good basis of truth.
She said that one cause of PTSD in humans is the failure of a child to bond or “attach” properly with its primary carer.
“Prematurely separating an elephant from the family tribe will have very powerful effects in terms of the attachment system. One of these effects would be aggression,” she said.
Poaching has ravaged elephant numbers in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, which borders Bunyaruguru, by 90 per cent over the past 30 years. Now only 400 remain — a third of them under five years old and many of them orphans. Across the continent many herds have lost their matriarchs and have had to make do with a succession of inexperienced “teenage mothers” who have raised a generation of juvenile delinquents.
Dr Poole’s study showed a lack of older bulls had led to gangs of hyper-aggressive young males with a penchant for violence towards each other and other species.
Richard Lair, a researcher of Asian elephants at Thailand’s National Elephant Institute, said that the same problems are being seen in India, where villagers, particularly in West Bengal, live in constant fear of bull elephants that the villagers claim attack the village to kill people.

So there we are: getting revenge for something we did horribly wrong to elephants, in much the same way humans would react to comparable situations.

Oh, one more thing: if the media would show the death of every soldier in Iraq in such detailed footage as the documentary showed the death of the elephant attack victims, there’d be a lot less motivated rookies to go to Iraq in the first place… resulting in a lot less PTSD’s and homicides back home, if you ask me…

Update

Some video fragments have been posted to http://users.ugent.be/~kpauly/Vids/!
I’ve added some more pictures in the relevant posts as well – just view the archives to see them all.

My desk after an Oman trip…

Huh?

For those who want to visit Oman: this might be a good hint

Wadi Tiwi

A few tropical piccies to end the Oman2006-series…

The white pick-up in the lower left of the first picture is ours. We didn’t want to take risks by getting up the incredibly steep tracks any more than necessary, but we quickly found out that it’s far more easy letting a 2,7 l engine take you up in an airconditioned seat than pushing your legs to the limit. Taking a walk for an hour here is very much the same as running 20 km.

We tried to have lunch in the shaddow of the idyllic oasis, but a freaky hornet changed our mind…

Science above all

WARNING: the pictures below are hyperlinks because they’re not a pretty sight. Access at own risk.

Even on a tourist day like the one shown below, we spent time in the water taking samples. Jan’s face was already reading scepticism when I presented him a fresh dish of rotten seaweeds from the very beginning, and after one month of sorting out algae, this is what might happen…

Sightseaing @ Sur (and Ras Al Hadd)

Postal card picture; maritime museum in the local football canteen; boat building fun; Sur Safari; sunset over the cliffs; dusk over the bay; Sultanesk fireworks, probably organized by the Golden Cage Wedding services.

Fertilizer plants for Dummies

Already 4 days back at home, already 7 days since my last post and promised sequel with pictures! Time to do something about it! (Okay, I admit, I could have done something about it earlier, but celebrating my birthday and my return in a proper way had priority over blogging…)

So I was about to tell you my reasons for willingly cooperating with the environment and safety engineer. In order to get permission from this guy to access their site, I needed to show him some progress reports and some results of the previous samplings over there. He was quite upset about the fact that we’d visited the site several times in the past and he didn’t see any output. So I decided to give him most of the progress reports I produce for the ministry of environment, that would save me hours of work and would at the same time demonstrate a close cooperation with a higher institution. However, I decided to leave one out because it contained sensitive information on alleged impacts of the plant on the macroalgae. Having agreed that, we went to the city first to make photocopies and print-outs of the necessary documents. By the way, getting the copies was a challenge in its own. The first office (“Typing, Photostats and documents clearing”) only provided photocopies (one by one!), no printing. The second office we went to could print our thirty pages within half an hour (!), but was manned by three young ladies who had no problems gossiping about us and laughing with us, right in front of us, after assuring themselves we didn’t understand what the heck they were talking about.

With this load of papers, something had to go wrong… When I was at the engineer’s office, his tough questions got me nervous as hell and I managed to let an important article out and include the “secret” report when I handed over the output evidence of our research. I didn’t realize my mistake until back at the hotel… So the plan was to keep him busy and away from reading the papers by cooperating very closely with him, until our next meeting two days later when I could easily take the secret paper back by saying it was a draft, not meant for publication. In the end it worked, but it seemed as if he made me a personal assistant in the meantime. Not only did I have to provide him with pictures (shown in the previous post) and ideas on an exhibition he planned in the reception hall of the fertilizer plant, he also wanted me to document and comment on the construction debris, and to take samples of the surface water at the cooling outfall, for something was going wrong with it as “some bubbles were coming up”. “Some bubbles” turned out to be a giant whirlpool, more like a geyser, to the extent that we didn’t want to dive anywhere near and it really seemed unsafe to drive the boat right over the air coming up. A strong chlorine smell left no doubt on the origin of the air, as chlorine is injected at the intake of the cooling system to prevent fouling…

Anyway, it sometimes surprises me that there are still some nice coral and algal communities left, but I wonder how long this can last. Certainly worth to keep a close eye at…