Mikindani

Mikindani… not a kiswahili phrase for the blog post heading this time, but simply the name of the village where we are staying right now. I like the African sound of it!

We’re back in civilization now. Read as: we’ve got a room with a private bathroom and toilet next to it, complete with running fresh water and electricity (the lighting even consists of halogen lamps!). However, every upside comes with a drawback here: for a start, the electricity falls out every 30 minutes – not only in our hotel but also in the whole village. The manager’s explanation: “no wonder, the current comes all the way from Mtwara! [editor’s note: 50km down the road]”. You gotta give it to him, Mtwara’s power plant is brand new and still test running, as far as I understood. Another disadvantage: the hotel is located along a road. About every half an hour or so, a light (but heavily shaking) lorry drives by, and of course the hotel doesn’t have any windows (I mean, there are windows, but there’s no glass in there – and why should there be anyway. An insect screen and a shelter in front will do as far as temperature and rain are concerned). Coming from a completely deserted part of the area, that’s a hell of a lot of noise. Oh, and there’s a freaking rooster nearby…

Diving at 30m in coral canyons; Mikindani, Tanzania.

The diving, too, has its ups and downs. Let me start with the good part: the first dive we’ve done here was without a doubt the single most beautiful, spectacular dive ever to me! Vertical coral reef walls, forming intertwining canyons. Lapis lazuli water. Walhalla for tiny, hidden but beautiful, precious and special algae between the corals, a Giant pufferfish, ditto mantis shrimp and lion fish. In short, everything we needed except for Whale sharks. But the big downside of it all: our PADI dive leader. She turned out to be downright incompetent, inexperienced and rude. We’d hoped to be diving with the dive centre’s owner, a marine biologist, but he was on a leave. Especially her briefing was worthless – hardly mentioning any details and yelling at us afterwards about misunderstandings…

Anyway, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to hide my feelings about her. It looks like it’ll be only her and me for the next couple of days. Heroen is down by a combination of fever, vomiting, and all the other symptoms well known by tourists in the tropics. I just hope it doesn’t get as bad as last time in Oman, when I had to rush my colleague to the local “hospital”…

Scorpion hidden between the sheets of the dried algae; Mikindani, Tanzania.

Yesterday evening, I tried to focus on something different by refreshing all the press-dried algae we’d collected so far; in fact a boring job where little or no brain activity is required. It turned out not to be as relaxing as I thought: while turning one of the pages, I found… a scorpion waiting with his stinger raised. A small scorpion, but rumour has it that the smallest are the greatest [editor’s note: greatest killers] in the tropics. I immediately ran away… to fetch my camera and take a couple of nice close-ups. I can’t help it; small scorpions don’t have the particular evil looks of their bigger sisters, from which I probably would have run away fearing for my life. Lesson learnt: even refreshing dried algae is a dangerous job. Or: I should demand higher wages.

In the meantime, the sun has reappeared after days of overcast skies and rain… Looks promising for our next dives!

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!

“arrivals”

Baggage claim

Today, we officially left “civilization” behind us. My colleague Heroen remarked that nothing has changed in the landscape in 6 years, except for the mobile network antennas (as a shortcut to modern times – there never was a fixed telephone line). But let me start from the beginning. The flight towards Mtwara was on time according to Tanzanian norms (i.e., delayed by 45 minutes). The towering thunder clouds somewhat worried me, but the coastline was cloud-free and the view on the thunderstorm few kilometres inland was spectacular. The view on the deep-blue sea and brightly coloured coral islands also provided sufficient entertainment. I thought the landing was exceptionally rough, but while taxiing the runway back to the “terminal”, it became clear why: the tarmac looked decades old, and fixed with concrete a thousand times over. And about this “terminal”: it was nothing more than a wooden structure measuring 20m by 5m with a corrugated iron roof. The 40 passengers entered a tiny 5 by 5 room with an “arrivals” label above the doorway. Someone was sitting at a kitchen table, slowly scribbling names and addresses from everyone’s passport on a notepad. Right next to the “arrivals” doorway, there was an open window with a similar kitchen table in front, and a “baggage claim” label above. Shortly after, a noisy tractor came pulling the baggage train right in front of the window, and someone handed all the bags through the window onto the table, and that was it. We negotiated for a cab to take us to Mtwara city (featuring many huts, as opposed to a village), to buy old newspapers to dry the collected seaweeds. Ethanol, formalin, aftersun lotion and three more items we desperately needed were nowhere available. The driver then filled his tank, bought some engine oil and a second-hand spare tire to head off on the long dirt road to Msimbati.

The dirt road from Mtwara airport to Ruvula

You couldn’t think of a more African road. Winding through densely vegetated areas with acacias, mango trees, palm trees, baobabs, banana trees and mangrove forests, with little villages dispersed between the trees, and brightly clothed women and children along the road, carrying water buckets on their heads. Scenes that are very familiar from TV, but strange to see in real life. Twice, we had to demand the driver to drive more carefully along the narrow dirt roads through the densely populated villages, the second time threatening we wouldn’t pay if he didn’t slow down from 100 to 50 in the villages (we’d actually read the speed from our GPS, his excuse being the broken speed indicator). He once had to stop to tie his door to he rear one and the broken windscreen using a couple of ropes, as his door kept falling open and threatened to break off. I kid you not!

Our “lodge” at the beach, not unlike the surrounding villages in the wider area, consists of huts made from loam with straw roofs, without electricity or running water. We can shower and have a toilet in a separate, public hut, using seawater. But our sleeping hut does feature beds equipped with insect nets (not only against mosquitoes – there are a lot of other bugs you don’t want crawling around in your bed), and it looks idyllic in the light of the kerosene lamps at night. So does the whole setting under palm trees right at the beach. For those of you who like Google Earth, our hut is at S10.3054, E40.39515. We were welcomed very friendly by our hostess, the Congolese wife of the Belgian owner (who currently is back in Belgium to avoid the hottest season) and their daughter, and were immediately served one of their infamously delicious fish dishes (which we were told would be the only food for the next 5 days, albeit in different forms) on the beach. I won’t be able to post every day, because I only have my mobile phone to type messages (fortunately we do have coverage!), and besides the fact that it’s a little awkward, I need to save some battery because we cannot load our batteries here. But hakuna matata as you all know and see you later!

Day 3

By far the toughest day so far! This morning we got up at 6.30, dragged our complete field lab equipment to the dive centre, loaded all of it on a boat and we were dropped off on Mbudya, a nearby island located in a marine protected area, one of the few in this country. We wandered for two hours on the rocky tidal reef flat around low water, and collected a hell of a lot of seaweeds under the burning sun (although this time we did it in a fully closed wetsuit – one learns quickly). We sorted it all out for preservation under an idyllic beach shelter for 1,5h, noting all our observations. The dive centre boat came to pick us back up at noon. By then we’d lost a few litres by sweating, we had no time for lunch, but when you’re on a speedboat gliding over smooth azure water, halt somewhere in the blue, put on your diving equipment, plunge into the water and make a free fall to 30m, you couldn’t think of a cooler job anywhere in the world. We “landed” on a huge reef, table corals as far as you could look, and it appeared unreal. We swam past the reef, and entered a beautiful “garden” of seaweeds of all kinds, in every shape and colour. It hadn’t been the first time for the dive instructor to take biologists out in the reserve on request, and he knew exactly what we were looking for…

Afterwards, we sorted everything out in open air under shelter at the dive centre. We’d finished by 5pm, but we felt tired to death. Mostly the pain from our sunburns from yesterday was unbearable, especially when we had to take or diving gear on or off and had to carry it all – it seemed like being tortured jointly by the CIA and KGB. I have honestly never in my life been so badly burned on my back, arms and legs… and all that because of twenty minutes exposure to a cloud-shrouded sun on our first diving day. I had little or no sleep last night, being waked up by the pain every time I’d fallen asleep and tried to turn over, with no relief from the litres and litres of aftersun lotion I’d applied. Being a marine biologist on field trip is by far the coolest job on earth, but also the single most painful (it reminded me of the time I’d got bitten by a Moray eel in Oman, only now I had the same pain all over my body instead of my hand).

Tomorrow we pack everything here and leave for Mtwara, first to Ruvula “Sea Safari Lodge”. I don’t know if there will be mobile coverage, so don’t panic if I’m not able to post on the blog!

Take care!

Day 2

I’ll start by presenting our current lodge and our dive centre today:

http://www.jangwani.org/hotel/home.asp

and http://www.hotelwhitesands.com/Entertainment.html

And now let me continue from where I stopped yesterday. We crashed in bed around 9.30pm, terribly tired by the travelling. The room was hot and little air blows through the insect nets, but I was way too tired to notice. We got up at 7.30 this morning, so don’t think we’re playing tourist around here! We had some issues finding diving tanks and an apt boat. We’d hoped to take tanks from the dive centre and go off alone on a fisherman’s boat, but in the end it turned out to be cheaper to just join in with the dive centre, and a lot less trouble. They understand what we want and allowed us to sample seaweeds on the reef. They even agreed to drop us separately on an island tomorrow and to come and pick us up for a dive in the afternoon.

So today we had our first dive! Though the bottom was visible from the surface, we dropped 30m along the reef, then coming back up slowly to the reef flat at 15m. The water was a comfortable 27°C, and the dive was very rewarding considering I already found an algal species which may be new to science. Beautiful coral too! I gotta say we encountered far less fish than you’d expect on a reef like that, and there was a lot of soft coral too instead of reef-building coral. We suspect it was due to the combination of sewage discharge from the nearby capital and blast fishing which, although illegal, is still practiced in the wider area… we definitely heard blasts under water!

The dive went without any issues, something we can’t say from the boat ride to and from the dive. The skies were overcast this morning when we embarked, but gradually the sun came out during our boat ride, and the high clouds could not prevent us from getting sun-burnt like lobsters. Lesson to learn: white guys ALWAYS need sunscreen in Africa, even on an overcast day…

During the afternoon we sorted out and preserved our algal collection, readily 40 species from the one single dive. That’s promising! Tomorrow is our last day here before heading off south. Hakuna matata!

Karubi

Africa! It’s even more typical as I thought it would be. We’ve flown here in Boeings that were clearly bought second-hand from an American airline and were a bit out-of-date on the inside, but all in all we’ve had steady flights. Still, 6 take-offs and landings each separated by 1,5 to 7 hours, it’s more than I wanted. We were very relieved to find all our baggage perfectly transferred with us to Dar-Es-Salaam. Immediately upon exiting the airport, several cab drivers tried to convince us to go with them – we chose one who finally settled on our terms and conditions. Next thing we knew, we were taking part in a Need-For-Seed-style drive to the nearby coastal town of Kunduchi, on a road with more craters than the moon, with an estimated 5 lanes on each side (estimated because of the lack of marks), switching from left (the normal side) to right more efficiently than shown in an Austrian giant slalom championship, accompanied by a loud feel-good hakuna matata tune from the speakers in the Toyota which felt as if it was constantly running off its wheels, with colourful fruit sellers along the road, biking along palm trees with huge piles tied on the rear of their bikes – in short: AFRICA!

We selected the cheapest beach hotel, which provided very comfortable rooms. Apparently, we were only one of the very few non-African tourists staying in the hotel. The joy of life, that’s what I find most remarkable about Tanzanians on my first day here. During an evening stroll on the beach, we encountered any form of entertainment engaged in by local people only, from tug of war games to hip-hop contests. We also enjoyed a delicious meal of chicken with coconut sauce and rice on the beach at dusk, with still a lovely 25-30°C and a lovely breeze.

We found someone willing to take us out diving on a nearby island, but we’ll have to see tomorrow if he really lives up to his promise – that’s kind of doubtful here, but let’s hope we can already start diving tomorrow. I’ve already taken loads of pictures and movie clips, but I’m unable to upload many due to lack of broadband connection here, and I’m not eager to wait a for a long time at this computer… It’s already dark, and since the computer desk is located in open air, I am swarmed by (malaria) mosquitos :-p  Anyway, I’ll do my best to send you some!

Sweet memories

From left to right: standing: Miro, Steven (modeling teacher), Richard (principal teacher), Susi, Dick, Chrissy, Karl, Kathryn, Tom, Dolly, Kevin (GIS teacher), Holly, Klaas; kneeling: Andres, Ana Paula, Ashley, Jessica.

Especially the last picture shows how hard it will be to leave this place. Next to it, there was also an outdoor ping-pong table where I spent a couple of great hours
Tomorrow evening, I start the whole journey back to “Europe” again!

Thanks to my alma mater!

Had a truly incredible day today. Well, this morning we still had classes (but very interesting classes :-p ), and this afternoon we went with 10 of us to Chiricahua National Monument (“monument” being a certain status of a nature park, comparable to national park). A breath-taking place, I can tell you, so I leave it to the pictures to give you an idea.
By the way, the road to Chiricahua was a narrow graded mountain road leading over a 2300m peak. I was driving so I don’t have any pictures of that yet, but already the drive up there was extremely spectacular! I love this place! Soooo glad I took the Arizona course instead of the one in Poland! And the work is going great. The discussions in the group are very stimulating and inspiring, and the atmosphere is just right! Time’s flying when you’re having fun

Sweet home Arizona

I know, I should never have quit updating my blog… I know, I should have written about my travels to Sweden and the Bay of Biskay, accompanied by many cool pictures. I know, I should have kept on giving my opinion on some remarkable news facts and news about my personal life, and so on and so on. But I didn’t, and for the sake of argument let’s say that I didn’t just because of lack of time. Nothing actually changed since, I still haven’t got the time, but I’m currently in a position where I just HAVE to write again Too many cool things are happening, and too many people want to know. So here goes.

Science is slow. It’s been 9 months since I first said on my blog that we were breeding on an idea to get geography into phylogeny, in other words to model the evolution of niches of certain seaweeds, in other words to calculate where certain algae can grow and where they have done so in the past and where species have evolved (in other words, where the diversity hotspots were). Interesting? I have to admit this is quite fundamental research, but in terms of future application this insight in previous speciation events may help us understand where diversification hotspots may be located in the light of climate change, and how significant they would be. Anyway, I’m not about to tell about all the science here.

9 months is exactly the time for an embryo to grow out and to come into the world as a viable baby. It’s exactly the same with our idea. Preliminary thinking and work has been done, and now we’re actually working on it. Starting with taking a course series, as I am familiar with the geographic techniques involved in it but not with the modelling process as a whole. So I googled “ecological niche modelling training course” and ended up with a course in Portal, Arizona, of all places. To cut a long story, I got accepted after writing a motivation (only 15 people were accepted worldwide!), and booked my tickets and a rental car. The irony is that only a week after, a new ecological niche modelling course in Poland was announced Anyway, Arizona was a lot more appealing to me (my first time to the US, Grand Canyon State!) and anyway the Arizona contents were slightly more useful to me.

I must admit that, although I was looking forward to being here, I hated the trip itself in advance. Righteously so. When I came to the airport, I was informed that my flight to Chicago had 2,5 hours delay, which was kind of problematic because I would miss my connection to Tucson. I was rebooked onto the next connection, but that meant 5,5 hours delay from the beginning, with a night-time 3 hours drive to the research station still to come! Honestly, when I heard the staff at the check-in desk discuss on what flight they could get me, I was hoping for a free upgrade to business of first Alace, that kind fortune is only meant for very few among us. Another misfortune was my place on the airplane. Right in the middle seat all the way to Chicago… No pictures of beautiful Greenland, Canada or the Chicago skyline at all, only a glimpse over the shoulder of a few rather obese American people. Same story for the connection to Tucson, where I was unable to photograph the most beautiful isolated yet violent heat thunderstorm over the desert by nighttime (seen from a safe distance). Anyway, it was good to finally arrive at Tucson. I finally met Andres from Australia and Susi from Denmark, who I previously only knew from e-mail. The easy and funny e-mail contact I had with them was completely representative of how they were in real: we immediately felt tuned. Arranging the rental car took a long administration car, but the midsize car turned out to be a huge hatchback Pontiac with cruise-control, so no complains from my part After a midnight visit to the supermarket, we went of all the way through the dark, based on the route description provided by the research station. Very challenging and captivating, I can tell you So we pitched our tent on a campground in the Chiricahua mountains around the research station at 3.30 a.m., at about 2°C. By the time that was done, we had a little breakfast and we chased a skunk a little to get some pictures (hoping it wouldn’t begin… stinking), it was 5 a.m. and we went to sleep, after a 32 hour long day. We had 4 hours of sleep Not that someone woke us up, the curiosity about the environments did. I’ve never had such an experience. Going to sleep in a completely unknown landscape, and then being completely surprised when you wake up and open the tent! Dramatic rock formations, colourful and unknown birds, ground squirrels, dear, cristal blue skies, 20 degrees… we ignored our jetlag broke up the tents and had breakfast again, and began a hike to the top of Silver Peak mountain, indicated as “4,5 miles”. And about a 1000m up… As you can guess, we had to give up about a kilometre from the top, after 3 hours of hiking… We were a bit frustrated, but we didn’t want to take any risk getting trapped in the dark. And anyway we were getting exhausted. But the views we had seen by then, the change in vegetation from Cactuses and flowering Agaves to oak and pine forest, the bear and mountain lion faeces (I know, I know, but one must be pleased with small things), and the sighting of a wild cat made us feel that we’d seen it all anyway. I took 1 GB of pictures and movies in 6 hours time! I am truly deeply sorry not to show any pictures yet, but anyway now that the courses are busy, we don’t have time to explore the surroundings anymore, so no that I’ve spent the time to tell what happened since Saturday, I’ll take time tomorrow to post the according pictures!

So yesterday night we arrived at the research station. People declared us officially fools after hearing about our slightly twisted travel schedule, but it was definitely worth it. But is good fun at the course at well. Americans are, although barbaric when it comes to food, definitely very social. The computer room provides completely silent dual core desktops with DVD writer and all desirable software and 19” screen for everyone, including open web access and the possibility to plug in laptops. It surely looks like space flight control centre: everyone sitting at a giant desktop flatscreen with a laptop aside, creating colourful distribution maps on every screen. The main teacher is maybe five years older than I am, with an unbelievable publication record, yet a great sense to make difficult models crystal clear to everyone. And he’s British, which is a great relief among all the Texas and NY-style American accents

I’ll leave it to that right now… Really I promise to post pictures tomorrow And I’ll try to keep you all updated on what happens here

The deep blue *boo!* effect

It was on the news the day before yesterday: a “prehistoric” shark normally living hidden away in the depths of the ocean off Japan came up to the surface and, unfortunately, died. Scientists recognized the species, although from 80 million year-old fossils instead of live specimens. A schoolbook example of a “live fossil”: If the environment doesn’t change (and it almost doesn’t, at that depth), there’s no need for obvious evolution. Anyway, the footage looks terrifying (just as one would imagine a prehistoric marine monster), and frankly I wouldn’t have had the guts to almost put the camera in its mouth, as the maker of this videotape did… To list the freakiest close encounters I experienced diving in Oman:

3. Giant Green Turtle emerging from tons of accumulated dead macroalgae at the bottom. It’s usually quite turbid and a bit dark above the dense algal packs at about 10m depth due to the decomposition, and turtles hide in there completely for shelter and feeding. When you’re swimming right above the algae, sometimes turtles emerge because they’re scared and swim away. Although you know what a turtle is and that it’s completely harmless, it scares the hell out of you when a creature the size of you suddenly and unexpectedly appears right in front of you. They swim away so quickly I never had the chance to capture such a moment on camera.

2. A Teira of almost 1m height pops up right in front of your face out of quite turbid waters. It was very inquisitive and followed us for quite some time. At that time I had no idea at all what it was and I didn’t know it was harmless. The picture was taken after I’d drawn my knife in a reflex and I’d put it away when I was at ease a few minutes later. The thing is, as with the turtle, under water you see everything one third bigger than it is (due to the optical properties of water), so I had the impression of looking at a fish that was 133cm high.

1. Fantail Stingrays of about 180cm disc diameter (already more than I am tall!) and 300cm overall length – no need to explain how one perceives that size under water. There’s one bay in the south of Oman we visit each time where you’re guaranteed to see several of those at any given time. Already the first time, 3,5 years ago, I didn’t dare to approach these “monsters” closer than 10m. Over time, I got used to them, but it still frightens me when they suddenly arise from the sand where you didn’t see anything before. And when you did, it’s probably because you saw the eyes or the tail first, and it always takes a few moments before you’d find the other end and realize its full size. Last time I saw them was actually exactly two weeks after Steve Irwin, the famous Australian “crocodile hunter”, got the venomous spine right through his heart while swimming above a stingray like this to film it; he was killed almost instantly…