Pauly’s finches

Pauly's finches

There are downsides to this place… One of them being the fact that the intense heat causes isolated thunderstorms nearly every day, which isn’t a big deal as long as these occur at night. But lately, we’ve had to wait for a little less rain and wind during the day to go out diving. We now have some time to edit our field notes, or just hang around and stare in the distance. For instance, it occurred to me that there are two small finch-like bird species here; let’s call them the local Robin and Bluethroat. The Robin is even smaller than the Bluethroat, but otherwise their morphology appears to be the same. Since they always come out in pairs, I suspect the Bluethoat is sexually isomorphic, while probably the female Robin is brown. Both species seem to forage on the same resources; moreover, they do so little more than a couple of meters away from each other. Two species in the same niche: did sympatrical speciation occur?? If I would have visited this place roughly 160 years ago, I would have taken my notebook and scribbled, “I think… ”, followed by an evolutionary tree. I would have beaten Darwin and my PhD would be in the pocket by now

Another downside: the more western visitors come here to show off their wealth (or just come here, the rest is self-evident), the more theft becomes a daily phenomenon, and “security” becomes an issue. The solution of the firm searching for natural gas wells for the nearby power plant consists of hiring multinational security subcontractors. Their employees are all former marines who served at least once in Afghanistan and once in Iraq. They came around in our lodge for a couple of drinks last night… let me just describe them by saying they are “weird”.

The owners of our lodge took a different approach to protection: they hired two Masai warriors. They are much taller than all the local people, and they look very strong and athletic. With their impeccable brightly coloured clothes and their ever-focused eyes, they appear incredibly charismatic.

Our hosts think they are not prone to corruption because they have no affairs with local people (and are allegedly the most reliable people on earth anyway), while at the same time they make a far les threatening, colonial impression compared to the white mercenaries. Unfortunately, we can’t talk to the Masai, as they do not speak a single word of French or English, and we don’t speak Swahili.

Once an evolutionary biologist, always an evolutionary biologist, so we started wondering why Masai are so tall. An evolutionary advantage to look out above the savannah grass, combined with reproductive isolation, was our guess. The hostess, however, saw it differently: “It’s because of their nutrition! We eat only a lot of fruit and batatas, which is hard to digest, so we stay little. They, and Tutsi people, eat mostly meat and continue to drink milk up to the age of 15, just like Dutch people, you see!”.

My colleague Heroen wading up the mangrove channel. Where's the crocodile??

Contrary to what these rainy-day-philosophic-chats might suggest, we do work out here . Yesterday evening, we went out diving during dusk; right in front of our lodge, steeply down to 30m. Floating weightlessly around in half darkness, suddenly encountering gigantic fan corals, looking for special algae, staying focused on compass, clock and air gauges for an hour, closely watching the currents, nothing compares to it. Before that, we went out snorkelling and wandering through the nearby mangrove forest, which was like sauna: steaming hot, a very high humidity, the smell of coal fires in nearby villages, and the herbal scent of the trees. We waded up against the current in the main mangrove channel while searching head under water for algae, and floated all the way back through the rapids. When we arrived back at the lodge, the hostess had prepared coconuts to take a rest from the field work. This gotta be The Coolest Job on earth!  The day before that, we wandered 12km² of tidal reef flat for 3,5 hours looking for algal species hidden in tidal pools. So far, we collected 250 specimens, each preserved in three different ways. We’ve been collecting so many algae, we are risking to run short of supplies already.

Tomorrow, we head off to a lodge equipped with electricity, so maybe my next post will be from a computer instead of mobile phone.

See you!