1 year in Africa
2 lines from squinting my eyes
3 year birthday for Katie
4 seasons of heat red, rain, green, dry yellow
5 months living in the back of the Kombi
105 chicks
Uncountable needs in this country, and still so much uncertainty about how to be constructively involved
A biologist’s paradise – this year we will remember because, wherever one stops and looks carefully, something wonderful in nature reveals itself
Monday, December 29, 2008
Himba village
Dec 15-17
Northern and southern Namibia are divided by a 3 m fence, designed to prevent Foot and Mouth Disease from moving with livestock or wild animals. In colonial times (20 years ago), when Namibia was still Southwest Africa, whites owned enormous cattle ranches in the arid southern region and were able to export cattle free of FMD; blacks had communal land where rainfall was higher north of the fence, but per capita land area was small. This pattern still largely holds, although the government is attempting redistribution of land through a “willing seller, willing buyer” program: the government buys farms when they are up for sale and selects new black owners. We’ve crossed the fence northward a couple of times en route to seeing elephants, crocs, and hippos in Chobe National Park (Botswana) with Alan’s older kids, and to pick up day-old chicks for our class experiment at the Polytechnic. But in mid-December we had an altogether different experience of the fence, as we spent several days living right next to it.
Uapindi Kazahe, one of our students at the Polytechnic, grew up literally just north of the fence as it wends its way westward through mountains to the edge of the Namib Desert. When his exams ended, he joined us for 3 weeks on the coast – he had never even seen the ocean before. Then we visited his home when we dropped him off. It was a profoundly interesting experience. Traveling with Uapindi gave us a much more intimate and authentic interaction with rural black Namibians than at any time during our year here. We had lunch with an older man who walked across a rugged rocky landscape on bare feet the size of dinner plates, and who had never before had a meal with a white person – he almost refused to join us, because his previous experience with whites involved beatings. Uapindi translated (the man spoke a home language and Afrikaans, but not English) and also indicated that he had some of the best natural history knowledge in the entire area.
To reach Uapindi’s mother’s house, we turned off the “main” dirt road onto a winding track that passed through the fence at a small border crossing, then entered a stunning valley of always-flowing water and giant makalani palms before branching back up the hill to the half-dozen stick-and-manure houses at our destination. The area is part of a locally-managed conservancy that stretches from the fence north along the western edge of Etosha National Park – Hobatere Lodge, where we traveled with my parents in June, sits in the middle, although we’re not sure if their concession is from the government or from the conservancy. Every km or so was another group of houses. Uapindi’s mother has some 40 cattle and 30 goats and lives in a Himba culture where a person’s wealth is measured in animals (primarily cattle) – by this metric, she is quite well-off and can sell some cows each year (albeit at a lower price because she’s north of the fence) for other purchases. Still, among the half-dozen adults and dozen kids, there was not a single writing instrument, book or ball. We had anticipated that this would be a place to make a difference while we lightened our load of luggage for the return to the U.S.: we left books, pens, balls, cots, camp chairs, sleeping bags, tent, and food. (Uapindi recommended flour, sugar, tea, macaroni, and biscuits [cookies], plus a bag of sweets to hand out to kids. Wherever we have traveled in rural Namibia, gifts of store-bought food have been really appreciated.) In return, a goat was slaughtered for our visit, Uapindi’s grandmother gave me a necklace that she had carved herself, with the distinctive orange color and earthy scent of traditional Himba women, who paint themselves with a concoction partly made of that wood, and we were offered a cow on departure!
The fence provides dramatic results of an unreplicated experiment: on the south side, where few people live close by, the grass is tall and starting to green with summer rain, and the shrubs are full and diverse. On the north side, the ground is rocky and bare, with just a slight wash of green as grasses germinate. It’s clear evidence of the importance of herbivores (from an ecologist’s perspective), and obvious overgrazing (from an agriculturalist’s). The goats and even cows slip through holes in the double fence and graze on the non-FMD side, herded back to their home kraals in the evening. But even with this semi-permeable barrier, the difference in vegetation between the two sides is perpetually evident. The cows also have easy access to the stream of running water – although older water diversions and tanks indicate that stock may have been watered differently in the past, presumably on a larger farm with more infrastructure investment. So the water is eutrophic and smelly. The Red Cross has installed several water pumps for people to use – for instance, every 2 or 3 days, water is fetched by hand at Uapindi’s mother’s house. On an afternoon donkey cart ride down the river, Katie and I drank water from one of these pumps and spent the next day with crummy tummies and diarrhea (fortunately, we were traveling back roads to our next stop at Etosha, so we could stop the car at a moment’s notice in relative privacy). Alan wisely avoided the water. I guess I had become too accustomed to clean water from Namibia’s taps, plus was assured that water was clean and abundant, and believed in the filtering power of soil – anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant result, but could have been a lot worse. The donkey cart ride itself was an experience, with a harness constructed of bits of tire and wire, some chain and metal poles. We had a flat tire on the way, where we learned the “African way” of fixing a flat – on the tube in the tubeless tire, take a handful around the puncture and wrap with a strip of rubber cut from another tube! The 3 small donkeys suffered from this rig, plus carrying 6 people in an unbalanced cart through gullies and over rocky ground. They were fast on the downhill, but I preferred to walk the last stretch.
We observed but didn’t understand the cultural quilt in this area: it’s Damaraland, so many Damara people, but some Himbas interspersed with more cattle than goats, and San people doing most of the work.
We left Uapindi with professorial admonitions to put his theoretical agriculture knowledge to work: this past year, he has learned to calculate stocking densities, build a chicken coop and balance rations to improve chicken production (the chickens roosted in trees at night and had a high rooster:hen ratio), and design a better donkey harness. All of these ideas, put into practice, should raise the health and well-being of the plants and animals in the region. But, of course, they also take some time and capital investment.
Northern and southern Namibia are divided by a 3 m fence, designed to prevent Foot and Mouth Disease from moving with livestock or wild animals. In colonial times (20 years ago), when Namibia was still Southwest Africa, whites owned enormous cattle ranches in the arid southern region and were able to export cattle free of FMD; blacks had communal land where rainfall was higher north of the fence, but per capita land area was small. This pattern still largely holds, although the government is attempting redistribution of land through a “willing seller, willing buyer” program: the government buys farms when they are up for sale and selects new black owners. We’ve crossed the fence northward a couple of times en route to seeing elephants, crocs, and hippos in Chobe National Park (Botswana) with Alan’s older kids, and to pick up day-old chicks for our class experiment at the Polytechnic. But in mid-December we had an altogether different experience of the fence, as we spent several days living right next to it.
Uapindi Kazahe, one of our students at the Polytechnic, grew up literally just north of the fence as it wends its way westward through mountains to the edge of the Namib Desert. When his exams ended, he joined us for 3 weeks on the coast – he had never even seen the ocean before. Then we visited his home when we dropped him off. It was a profoundly interesting experience. Traveling with Uapindi gave us a much more intimate and authentic interaction with rural black Namibians than at any time during our year here. We had lunch with an older man who walked across a rugged rocky landscape on bare feet the size of dinner plates, and who had never before had a meal with a white person – he almost refused to join us, because his previous experience with whites involved beatings. Uapindi translated (the man spoke a home language and Afrikaans, but not English) and also indicated that he had some of the best natural history knowledge in the entire area.
To reach Uapindi’s mother’s house, we turned off the “main” dirt road onto a winding track that passed through the fence at a small border crossing, then entered a stunning valley of always-flowing water and giant makalani palms before branching back up the hill to the half-dozen stick-and-manure houses at our destination. The area is part of a locally-managed conservancy that stretches from the fence north along the western edge of Etosha National Park – Hobatere Lodge, where we traveled with my parents in June, sits in the middle, although we’re not sure if their concession is from the government or from the conservancy. Every km or so was another group of houses. Uapindi’s mother has some 40 cattle and 30 goats and lives in a Himba culture where a person’s wealth is measured in animals (primarily cattle) – by this metric, she is quite well-off and can sell some cows each year (albeit at a lower price because she’s north of the fence) for other purchases. Still, among the half-dozen adults and dozen kids, there was not a single writing instrument, book or ball. We had anticipated that this would be a place to make a difference while we lightened our load of luggage for the return to the U.S.: we left books, pens, balls, cots, camp chairs, sleeping bags, tent, and food. (Uapindi recommended flour, sugar, tea, macaroni, and biscuits [cookies], plus a bag of sweets to hand out to kids. Wherever we have traveled in rural Namibia, gifts of store-bought food have been really appreciated.) In return, a goat was slaughtered for our visit, Uapindi’s grandmother gave me a necklace that she had carved herself, with the distinctive orange color and earthy scent of traditional Himba women, who paint themselves with a concoction partly made of that wood, and we were offered a cow on departure!
The fence provides dramatic results of an unreplicated experiment: on the south side, where few people live close by, the grass is tall and starting to green with summer rain, and the shrubs are full and diverse. On the north side, the ground is rocky and bare, with just a slight wash of green as grasses germinate. It’s clear evidence of the importance of herbivores (from an ecologist’s perspective), and obvious overgrazing (from an agriculturalist’s). The goats and even cows slip through holes in the double fence and graze on the non-FMD side, herded back to their home kraals in the evening. But even with this semi-permeable barrier, the difference in vegetation between the two sides is perpetually evident. The cows also have easy access to the stream of running water – although older water diversions and tanks indicate that stock may have been watered differently in the past, presumably on a larger farm with more infrastructure investment. So the water is eutrophic and smelly. The Red Cross has installed several water pumps for people to use – for instance, every 2 or 3 days, water is fetched by hand at Uapindi’s mother’s house. On an afternoon donkey cart ride down the river, Katie and I drank water from one of these pumps and spent the next day with crummy tummies and diarrhea (fortunately, we were traveling back roads to our next stop at Etosha, so we could stop the car at a moment’s notice in relative privacy). Alan wisely avoided the water. I guess I had become too accustomed to clean water from Namibia’s taps, plus was assured that water was clean and abundant, and believed in the filtering power of soil – anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant result, but could have been a lot worse. The donkey cart ride itself was an experience, with a harness constructed of bits of tire and wire, some chain and metal poles. We had a flat tire on the way, where we learned the “African way” of fixing a flat – on the tube in the tubeless tire, take a handful around the puncture and wrap with a strip of rubber cut from another tube! The 3 small donkeys suffered from this rig, plus carrying 6 people in an unbalanced cart through gullies and over rocky ground. They were fast on the downhill, but I preferred to walk the last stretch.
We observed but didn’t understand the cultural quilt in this area: it’s Damaraland, so many Damara people, but some Himbas interspersed with more cattle than goats, and San people doing most of the work.
We left Uapindi with professorial admonitions to put his theoretical agriculture knowledge to work: this past year, he has learned to calculate stocking densities, build a chicken coop and balance rations to improve chicken production (the chickens roosted in trees at night and had a high rooster:hen ratio), and design a better donkey harness. All of these ideas, put into practice, should raise the health and well-being of the plants and animals in the region. But, of course, they also take some time and capital investment.
Science in restricted territory
Dec 11-15
Sometimes, when people find out that I’m a scientist, they ask: “So, what have you discovered?” Usually, I’m at somewhat of a loss to answer this question. It’s not easy to compress the fine details of interaction strengths in a food web into a comment that is both intelligible and compelling. Or I sound vague and undecided in stating – truthfully – that one species can have both positive and negative effects on another, depending on time, place, and what is being measured. Now, however, there’s a clear answer for the “discovery” question: Alan and I discovered a new species, which has never been reported from Africa, but which has strong negative effects on bivalves. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the species is not a new introduction, but simply something that no one bothered to record previously. This ease of discovery is the silver lining of sabbatical in a country where you can count the marine biologists on one hand.
The species we discovered is a phoronid worm that burrows into shell. Phoronids are unsegmented worms, currently included in the same phylum as brachiopods, with which they share a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles for filter-feeding. Phoronis ovalis is the only phoronid reported to burrow in shell, and the other dozen or so species of phoronids make free-standing tubes. Very little published literature is available on Phoronis ovalis, but by piecing together papers and websites, it appears to have a temperate distribution that includes Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, east and west coasts of South America, and Japan. It has not been reported anywhere in Africa, including South Africa (where its absence may be genuine, since there is close scientific attention to marine species). But it’s definitely in Namibia. Here are some things we’ve learned about it (let’s call it Phoronis sp., since we can’t be sure it’s P. ovalis): The ring of tentacles is less than 200 microns across, and the total worm length is around 2 mm. The burrows come to the surface at densities of more than 100 per square cm. Shells that are seriously infested with phoronids become porous but thicker, because the host has to repair and re-apply shell on the inside. This takes so much energy that the host itself loses condition! Phoronids are not too picky about host species, as long as they are essentially always under water: we have found phoronid holes in Perna perna (brown mussel, our main study species), Choromytilus (native blue-black mussel), Mytilus galloprovincialis (introduced blue-black mussel), limpets, whelks, and even a barnacle. How could this species have gone unnoticed for so long? More than half the mussel shells on the beach are riddled with these holes! Maybe the answer is best summed up by the comment after our public talk at the Swakopmund aquarium in late November: The only mussel we’re really interested in is the “white mussel”, which scientists call a clam, and then only because we use it for fishing bait.
Well, to quote Dr Seuss again, “If you want to find beasts you don’t see everyday/ You have to go places quite out of the way./ You have to go places no others can get to./ You have to get cold and you have to get wet too.” Ever since we arrived in Namibia, we’ve wanted to see the full range of intertidal sites, but we’ve been limited to the area around Swakopmund because only this 200-km stretch of coast is publicly accessible. To the south, the coast is well protected by the great sand sea, and off limits to all but diamond miners. To the north, most of the Skeleton Coast Park is closed to public access. However, our discovery of Phoronis sp. in Namibia gave us a logical reason to face the administrative hoops and request a permit for beach access in the Skeleton Coast Park. (We have, alas, run out of time for southern sampling, but we have contacts in a few key coastal towns who may be able to report on the presence or absence of phoronid holes there.) After a few false leads, we finally had an in-person meeting with the Director of Parks and Wildlife Management, where we presented our case in a 2-page letter and – Eureka! – walked out with a Skeleton Coast Park permit! We were on our way into restricted territory with no roads, no people, but full of stories and legends to fuel our excitement!
The Skeleton Coast gathered its name and fame from a book by that name, written in the 1950s about events during WWII: a passenger ship ran aground at a point even farther north than our planned sampling, and rescues were attempted by land, sea, and air. Planes crashed, tugs grounded, trucks floundered in sand, but ultimately all but two of hundreds of people involved in the accident and rescue survived. By sea, the Namibian coast is nearly straight, with little in the way of protected harbors, and waves on shore that are large even in calm seas. The Namib desert is essentially devoid of freshwater, a forbidding barrier by land. The desert is breached at intervals by rivers, but these are generally dry, running to the coast only when inland rains are extreme, which happens every couple of decades. Mindful of the difficulties of negotiating such an area, we traveled with Mr Klein, our host at the Salt Company, who knew the coast by air and land from many years of prospecting and mining; we also traveled with one of our students from the Polytechnic, Uapindi Kazahe, who knows people wherever he goes. From Swakopmund (22.6 degrees S), we traveled north about 160 km to a campsite at Mile 108, then a further 200 km to Mowe Bay, where we camped for two nights at the end of the road. From there, on a day trip, we all got into Mr Klein’s Toyota Fortuner, which can ford rivers of sand, climb mountains, and stick to seaside cobble. We followed a track or the beach to our northern sampling site at Rocky Point (19 degrees S). On the return trip to the south, we camped at Torra Bay, totally outclassed by the summer holiday fishers who set up colorful castles of tents, windscreens, and caravans, with all the comforts of home powered by generators. We crossed the dry river mouths (in order from the south) of the Ugab, formed by Paleozoic glaciers; Huab; Koigab; the five mouths of the Uniab, including its current channel harboring reeds, gemsbok, and springbok; Hoanib, with a flamingoed lagoon bordered by a thick layer of snail egg cases; and avoided the quicksand that sometimes marks the mouth of the Hoarusib. Mr Klein had been stopped for weeks by these rivers in other years, so we were thankful for just minimal amounts of rain. (Actually, the weather was remarkably cooperative, particularly the absence of strong southwesterlies that can blow away campers, and rain just as we were packing to leave Mowe Bay).
What does a beach look like when human impacts are really low? The sand was littered with wood and whalebones. Vertebrae like coffee tables. Two-story ribs. The tough part of the back of the skull. A midden of charcoal and mussel shells, along with a ring of rocks, still was visible where native people had homesteaded perhaps a century ago, living in a hut of skins draped on whale ribs. We saw bits of old wooden fishing boats, the crashed airplane, and the top of the tug, swept by waves, along with several other wrecks. We saw the detritus of old mining operations, cleared areas where people had camped, piles of sand and stone, and rusty equipment for sorting beach gravel by size and density. Mr Klein said that Namibia’s large diamond mining company, Namdeb, sold its mining rights quite some time ago, which should have been an indication that prospecting on the Skeleton Coast was fruitless, but nevertheless some mining still goes on.
Most of the Skeleton Coast, and in fact Namibia’s coast in general, is sandy beach. Any species requiring hard substrate is restricted to a few outcrops (although what happens below low tide is something of a mystery: there must be rocks that we can’t see in some places, as indicated by kelp blades at the surface of the water). At the rocky sites we visited along the Skeleton Coast, the limpets and snails reached absolutely enormous sizes – 10 cm diameter, as big as a hand! Some familiar species disappeared: lobster molts and clam shells were not on the beach after Mile 108. New species amazed us: Ghost crabs popped out of their sand burrows by the hundreds and scattered across the beach. 1-cm moon snails with a comma umbilicus showed up on a few beaches and in jewelry for sale at the park entrance, but the comma necklace snail distribution is supposed to end at the southern tip of the continent. To the north, mussels became both smaller and less abundant, and some of the larger individuals were actually drilled – something we’d only seen in small clams and mussels in the Swakopmund area. Of course, we can’t know for certain how much of the variation in intertidal community structure that we witnessed on our trip was due to latitude, and how much to human access. The rock type varied as well: Rocky Point is made of rare red volcanic rock that only reaches the coast in one place. Other sites we sampled were a conglomerate, often eroded into steep intertidal mesas. At still others, layers of rock were turned on end. Most of the sites had been previously sampled by Spanish researchers, and the algal results reported in a monograph by Rull Lluch. But Alan’s extensive searching with Google Earth revealed one more rocky site, north of Terrace Bay in the restricted park area. It was particularly limpet-y, sort of like the bottom of a pink-red non-slip shoe, with lots of grippy bumps. The red and pink came from the apparently unpalatable algae, the bumps from the shells of limpets. Only where the cobble had recently receded could any green be seen on the rocks, more clear evidence of the importance of herbivores in regulating community structure, because the algae colonize these rocks faster than the limpets.
So what’s the story on phoronids? As we sampled north from Swakopmund, the prevalence first increased in mussels, and then as large mussels became less common on the beach, the frequency of phoronid holes also decreased. By the time we reached Rocky Point, we didn’t find any mussels with phoronid holes, although they showed up in a few snail shells. When we discussed our trip with Dr Bronwen Currie at NATMIRC in Swakopmund, she produced some large Perna shells that she had brought back from a rocky site near the Kunene River, the border with Angola: 1 of 10 had phoronid holes! And the marine biologists in South Africa are now sending photographs of snails with small holes in the shell: these may be phoronids, too! So it seems we haven’t quite finalized the entire range of the species, but we’ve found a 200-km stretch of coast where they are particularly common. We also found them buried in layers under about 3 m of silt, sand, and vegetation, now being eroded by waves at the base of a cliff – surely these must be quite old! But we are always warned that a 1-year snapshot of life on the beach is deceiving. That sand could have been deposited just a short while ago during a massive east wind blow. Like any proper “discovery”, ours still has a few mysteries remaining.
Sometimes, when people find out that I’m a scientist, they ask: “So, what have you discovered?” Usually, I’m at somewhat of a loss to answer this question. It’s not easy to compress the fine details of interaction strengths in a food web into a comment that is both intelligible and compelling. Or I sound vague and undecided in stating – truthfully – that one species can have both positive and negative effects on another, depending on time, place, and what is being measured. Now, however, there’s a clear answer for the “discovery” question: Alan and I discovered a new species, which has never been reported from Africa, but which has strong negative effects on bivalves. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the species is not a new introduction, but simply something that no one bothered to record previously. This ease of discovery is the silver lining of sabbatical in a country where you can count the marine biologists on one hand.
The species we discovered is a phoronid worm that burrows into shell. Phoronids are unsegmented worms, currently included in the same phylum as brachiopods, with which they share a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles for filter-feeding. Phoronis ovalis is the only phoronid reported to burrow in shell, and the other dozen or so species of phoronids make free-standing tubes. Very little published literature is available on Phoronis ovalis, but by piecing together papers and websites, it appears to have a temperate distribution that includes Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, east and west coasts of South America, and Japan. It has not been reported anywhere in Africa, including South Africa (where its absence may be genuine, since there is close scientific attention to marine species). But it’s definitely in Namibia. Here are some things we’ve learned about it (let’s call it Phoronis sp., since we can’t be sure it’s P. ovalis): The ring of tentacles is less than 200 microns across, and the total worm length is around 2 mm. The burrows come to the surface at densities of more than 100 per square cm. Shells that are seriously infested with phoronids become porous but thicker, because the host has to repair and re-apply shell on the inside. This takes so much energy that the host itself loses condition! Phoronids are not too picky about host species, as long as they are essentially always under water: we have found phoronid holes in Perna perna (brown mussel, our main study species), Choromytilus (native blue-black mussel), Mytilus galloprovincialis (introduced blue-black mussel), limpets, whelks, and even a barnacle. How could this species have gone unnoticed for so long? More than half the mussel shells on the beach are riddled with these holes! Maybe the answer is best summed up by the comment after our public talk at the Swakopmund aquarium in late November: The only mussel we’re really interested in is the “white mussel”, which scientists call a clam, and then only because we use it for fishing bait.
Well, to quote Dr Seuss again, “If you want to find beasts you don’t see everyday/ You have to go places quite out of the way./ You have to go places no others can get to./ You have to get cold and you have to get wet too.” Ever since we arrived in Namibia, we’ve wanted to see the full range of intertidal sites, but we’ve been limited to the area around Swakopmund because only this 200-km stretch of coast is publicly accessible. To the south, the coast is well protected by the great sand sea, and off limits to all but diamond miners. To the north, most of the Skeleton Coast Park is closed to public access. However, our discovery of Phoronis sp. in Namibia gave us a logical reason to face the administrative hoops and request a permit for beach access in the Skeleton Coast Park. (We have, alas, run out of time for southern sampling, but we have contacts in a few key coastal towns who may be able to report on the presence or absence of phoronid holes there.) After a few false leads, we finally had an in-person meeting with the Director of Parks and Wildlife Management, where we presented our case in a 2-page letter and – Eureka! – walked out with a Skeleton Coast Park permit! We were on our way into restricted territory with no roads, no people, but full of stories and legends to fuel our excitement!
The Skeleton Coast gathered its name and fame from a book by that name, written in the 1950s about events during WWII: a passenger ship ran aground at a point even farther north than our planned sampling, and rescues were attempted by land, sea, and air. Planes crashed, tugs grounded, trucks floundered in sand, but ultimately all but two of hundreds of people involved in the accident and rescue survived. By sea, the Namibian coast is nearly straight, with little in the way of protected harbors, and waves on shore that are large even in calm seas. The Namib desert is essentially devoid of freshwater, a forbidding barrier by land. The desert is breached at intervals by rivers, but these are generally dry, running to the coast only when inland rains are extreme, which happens every couple of decades. Mindful of the difficulties of negotiating such an area, we traveled with Mr Klein, our host at the Salt Company, who knew the coast by air and land from many years of prospecting and mining; we also traveled with one of our students from the Polytechnic, Uapindi Kazahe, who knows people wherever he goes. From Swakopmund (22.6 degrees S), we traveled north about 160 km to a campsite at Mile 108, then a further 200 km to Mowe Bay, where we camped for two nights at the end of the road. From there, on a day trip, we all got into Mr Klein’s Toyota Fortuner, which can ford rivers of sand, climb mountains, and stick to seaside cobble. We followed a track or the beach to our northern sampling site at Rocky Point (19 degrees S). On the return trip to the south, we camped at Torra Bay, totally outclassed by the summer holiday fishers who set up colorful castles of tents, windscreens, and caravans, with all the comforts of home powered by generators. We crossed the dry river mouths (in order from the south) of the Ugab, formed by Paleozoic glaciers; Huab; Koigab; the five mouths of the Uniab, including its current channel harboring reeds, gemsbok, and springbok; Hoanib, with a flamingoed lagoon bordered by a thick layer of snail egg cases; and avoided the quicksand that sometimes marks the mouth of the Hoarusib. Mr Klein had been stopped for weeks by these rivers in other years, so we were thankful for just minimal amounts of rain. (Actually, the weather was remarkably cooperative, particularly the absence of strong southwesterlies that can blow away campers, and rain just as we were packing to leave Mowe Bay).
What does a beach look like when human impacts are really low? The sand was littered with wood and whalebones. Vertebrae like coffee tables. Two-story ribs. The tough part of the back of the skull. A midden of charcoal and mussel shells, along with a ring of rocks, still was visible where native people had homesteaded perhaps a century ago, living in a hut of skins draped on whale ribs. We saw bits of old wooden fishing boats, the crashed airplane, and the top of the tug, swept by waves, along with several other wrecks. We saw the detritus of old mining operations, cleared areas where people had camped, piles of sand and stone, and rusty equipment for sorting beach gravel by size and density. Mr Klein said that Namibia’s large diamond mining company, Namdeb, sold its mining rights quite some time ago, which should have been an indication that prospecting on the Skeleton Coast was fruitless, but nevertheless some mining still goes on.
Most of the Skeleton Coast, and in fact Namibia’s coast in general, is sandy beach. Any species requiring hard substrate is restricted to a few outcrops (although what happens below low tide is something of a mystery: there must be rocks that we can’t see in some places, as indicated by kelp blades at the surface of the water). At the rocky sites we visited along the Skeleton Coast, the limpets and snails reached absolutely enormous sizes – 10 cm diameter, as big as a hand! Some familiar species disappeared: lobster molts and clam shells were not on the beach after Mile 108. New species amazed us: Ghost crabs popped out of their sand burrows by the hundreds and scattered across the beach. 1-cm moon snails with a comma umbilicus showed up on a few beaches and in jewelry for sale at the park entrance, but the comma necklace snail distribution is supposed to end at the southern tip of the continent. To the north, mussels became both smaller and less abundant, and some of the larger individuals were actually drilled – something we’d only seen in small clams and mussels in the Swakopmund area. Of course, we can’t know for certain how much of the variation in intertidal community structure that we witnessed on our trip was due to latitude, and how much to human access. The rock type varied as well: Rocky Point is made of rare red volcanic rock that only reaches the coast in one place. Other sites we sampled were a conglomerate, often eroded into steep intertidal mesas. At still others, layers of rock were turned on end. Most of the sites had been previously sampled by Spanish researchers, and the algal results reported in a monograph by Rull Lluch. But Alan’s extensive searching with Google Earth revealed one more rocky site, north of Terrace Bay in the restricted park area. It was particularly limpet-y, sort of like the bottom of a pink-red non-slip shoe, with lots of grippy bumps. The red and pink came from the apparently unpalatable algae, the bumps from the shells of limpets. Only where the cobble had recently receded could any green be seen on the rocks, more clear evidence of the importance of herbivores in regulating community structure, because the algae colonize these rocks faster than the limpets.
So what’s the story on phoronids? As we sampled north from Swakopmund, the prevalence first increased in mussels, and then as large mussels became less common on the beach, the frequency of phoronid holes also decreased. By the time we reached Rocky Point, we didn’t find any mussels with phoronid holes, although they showed up in a few snail shells. When we discussed our trip with Dr Bronwen Currie at NATMIRC in Swakopmund, she produced some large Perna shells that she had brought back from a rocky site near the Kunene River, the border with Angola: 1 of 10 had phoronid holes! And the marine biologists in South Africa are now sending photographs of snails with small holes in the shell: these may be phoronids, too! So it seems we haven’t quite finalized the entire range of the species, but we’ve found a 200-km stretch of coast where they are particularly common. We also found them buried in layers under about 3 m of silt, sand, and vegetation, now being eroded by waves at the base of a cliff – surely these must be quite old! But we are always warned that a 1-year snapshot of life on the beach is deceiving. That sand could have been deposited just a short while ago during a massive east wind blow. Like any proper “discovery”, ours still has a few mysteries remaining.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Go Sandboarding!
Katie’s favorite pastimes are still playing with kids and books. Puzzles rank a close third and often trump books if she’s really grumpy: there’s something about concentrating on which piece goes where that takes her mind off other troubles. Recently, we’ve had a lot of tea parties, although not your average china-and-pink-frilly-dress affairs. Our new favorite restaurant in Swakopmund is Napolitana, which we’ve been frequenting about once a week on our arrival from Windhoek to the coast (now that class is over, our flexible research schedule has returned). Katie stands on a wooden shelf and watches pizzas in construction: Roll the dough flat, cut it with a metal circle, sprinkle with flour and store in a pile. When a pizza order comes in, place the crust on a second counter, use a device a bit like a rolling meat tenderizer or massager to put tiny divets in the crust, then paint on a thin veneer of tomato sauce. Add toppings all the way to the edge. Katie prefers just plain Margherita (tomato and cheese, but she picks off the tomatoes even though she loves tomatoes and will eat them by the handful. Kids. Go figure.), but options include creamed chicken, spare ribs, springbok and more, stored in two dozen metal containers with lids, their contents precisely memorized by the pizza makers. After a thick layer of grated cheese, the pizza is popped into a cob oven (well, perhaps cob. Here in Namibia there’s the distinct possibility that it’s made of concrete – but it has the right round shape and turns out very tasty pizzas). The best part for Katie is when one of the pizza-makers gives her a ball of dough. First she slides under the table to try to get away with eating it raw. When her parents object, she rolls and pulls and tugs it into various shapes, lets it sit overnight to get its yeasty rising over with and lose a little water. Then we mold the dough into cups, saucers, spoons, sugar bowls, pitchers, and lids. They dry for a day and are ready to paint with finger paint. The result is clearly for pretending – something Katie has just gotten the hang of (“Don’t worry, Mama, I’m just a pretend lion.”). The dishes would droop with any liquid and in fact won’t handle much more than a week of playing (a perfect excuse to go get more dough…).
Katie’s language skills continue to amaze me. When there is too much adult conversation or science going on, she says, “I want someone to pay attention to ME!” (Either that or she yells and screams unintelligibly.) Bad smells such as tanneries along the road or rotting seals on the beach are pronounced “Disgusting!” She will often tell elaborate stories about animals chasing each other – usually the springbok escapes, and I haven’t yet been able to get her to see it from the perspective of the hyena, who goes hungry. Some of her statements really indicate what a sponge she is for language: “Dorothea [her much-loved doll who has 2 broken legs, a cracked head, and a face painted with blue pen to look like a hyena] is sleeping, but I am getting up to do some work.” “You go from the mussel shell to the gerbil hole, while I sit on the jackal bush.” She makes up songs – sometimes with an odd assortment of Mother Goose phrases – and at the end asks, “Was that a nice song?” Her tenses still get mixed up a bit, but it’s English, so no wonder: I goed. I falled. A shining moment was rhyming “pocket” with “chocolate.” Possibly a fluke…!
One of the earliest polysyllabic words Katie learned was “sandboarding.” We have a beautiful card game of Namib desert plants and animals – her fourth favorite thing to do, which we’ve been playing a bit like “Go Fish.” If you have a scorpion card and want to collect all 4 arachnids, you ask another player if they have an arachnid (At this point, with Katie, we put all our cards out on the table for everyone to see, and she usually won’t ask for an arachnid even if it’s obvious in my hand. And she definitely won’t give up a flamingo or ostrich to complete my bird set! Of course, we play by “Katie’s rules.”). If the other person doesn’t have what you want or won’t give it up, you “Go Sandboarding.” Go Fish didn’t seem to make sense, given that the backs of the cards show unending red sand dunes.
On a weekend in early November, we actually did go sandboarding, joining the Lightfoot/Plummers for a morning of adrenaline-rushing, high-speed thrills with Alter Action on the red dunes near Swakopmund. They provided helmets, elbow pads, and gloves (none small enough for Katie, whom we dressed in a way that we hoped would at least protect her from the sun, our worst worry). They also provided rectangular boards of flexible masonite, about 1.2 x0.6 m, which were waxed on their smooth side. We marched up the sand dunes, lay down on our tummies on the rough side, held up the front of the board slightly, and tried to go head-first. Some of the group personally experienced what happens when you let down the front of the board (huge clouds of sand in your eyes, nose, ears and teeth) or spin to go side- or feet-first (the board digs in and flips you over on top of your passenger). These events were somewhat traumatic for the 5-10 year old girls experiencing them, but they made for the best video footage (the video, complete with soundtrack, was included in the price of the trip, along with lunch – not bad for N$200 per adult). Even the girls thought their wipeouts looked pretty exciting on screen – at least, if you’re going to crash your sandboard, it’s better if the photographer is actually around to capture the event! Katie, fortunately, weathered the day without anything worse than a faceplant, self-induced when she ran down a dune so steep and fast that her head got ahead of her feet. The rest of the time, she clung like a baby baboon to mom or dad’s back, smiling (we have it on video!), even occasionally whooping (can’t be heard over the soundtrack), at speeds up to 59 kph (our guides clocked us with a speed gun). Well, she also clung to our backs on the way back up, making the climb an extra good workout for her parents. We were very proud of Katie’s courage, excitement, and willingness to try new things – enabling us to have one of our most exhilarating experiences of Namibia. It’s true. Sandboarding is a blast!!! That day really felt like a vacation.
Katie’s language skills continue to amaze me. When there is too much adult conversation or science going on, she says, “I want someone to pay attention to ME!” (Either that or she yells and screams unintelligibly.) Bad smells such as tanneries along the road or rotting seals on the beach are pronounced “Disgusting!” She will often tell elaborate stories about animals chasing each other – usually the springbok escapes, and I haven’t yet been able to get her to see it from the perspective of the hyena, who goes hungry. Some of her statements really indicate what a sponge she is for language: “Dorothea [her much-loved doll who has 2 broken legs, a cracked head, and a face painted with blue pen to look like a hyena] is sleeping, but I am getting up to do some work.” “You go from the mussel shell to the gerbil hole, while I sit on the jackal bush.” She makes up songs – sometimes with an odd assortment of Mother Goose phrases – and at the end asks, “Was that a nice song?” Her tenses still get mixed up a bit, but it’s English, so no wonder: I goed. I falled. A shining moment was rhyming “pocket” with “chocolate.” Possibly a fluke…!
One of the earliest polysyllabic words Katie learned was “sandboarding.” We have a beautiful card game of Namib desert plants and animals – her fourth favorite thing to do, which we’ve been playing a bit like “Go Fish.” If you have a scorpion card and want to collect all 4 arachnids, you ask another player if they have an arachnid (At this point, with Katie, we put all our cards out on the table for everyone to see, and she usually won’t ask for an arachnid even if it’s obvious in my hand. And she definitely won’t give up a flamingo or ostrich to complete my bird set! Of course, we play by “Katie’s rules.”). If the other person doesn’t have what you want or won’t give it up, you “Go Sandboarding.” Go Fish didn’t seem to make sense, given that the backs of the cards show unending red sand dunes.
On a weekend in early November, we actually did go sandboarding, joining the Lightfoot/Plummers for a morning of adrenaline-rushing, high-speed thrills with Alter Action on the red dunes near Swakopmund. They provided helmets, elbow pads, and gloves (none small enough for Katie, whom we dressed in a way that we hoped would at least protect her from the sun, our worst worry). They also provided rectangular boards of flexible masonite, about 1.2 x0.6 m, which were waxed on their smooth side. We marched up the sand dunes, lay down on our tummies on the rough side, held up the front of the board slightly, and tried to go head-first. Some of the group personally experienced what happens when you let down the front of the board (huge clouds of sand in your eyes, nose, ears and teeth) or spin to go side- or feet-first (the board digs in and flips you over on top of your passenger). These events were somewhat traumatic for the 5-10 year old girls experiencing them, but they made for the best video footage (the video, complete with soundtrack, was included in the price of the trip, along with lunch – not bad for N$200 per adult). Even the girls thought their wipeouts looked pretty exciting on screen – at least, if you’re going to crash your sandboard, it’s better if the photographer is actually around to capture the event! Katie, fortunately, weathered the day without anything worse than a faceplant, self-induced when she ran down a dune so steep and fast that her head got ahead of her feet. The rest of the time, she clung like a baby baboon to mom or dad’s back, smiling (we have it on video!), even occasionally whooping (can’t be heard over the soundtrack), at speeds up to 59 kph (our guides clocked us with a speed gun). Well, she also clung to our backs on the way back up, making the climb an extra good workout for her parents. We were very proud of Katie’s courage, excitement, and willingness to try new things – enabling us to have one of our most exhilarating experiences of Namibia. It’s true. Sandboarding is a blast!!! That day really felt like a vacation.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Chicken Run!
JR is coordinating a weekly Poly-wide meeting on the development of a new program in Applied Biology. It’s been a fun but challenging and time-consuming opportunity to interact with the few scientists on campus and to talk about scientific skills that need to be cultivated in Namibia. This week’s topic was research, largely motivated by the fact that the new qualification will entail a research project, and there are more than 20 research-related courses already available at Poly to choose from. In a fortuitous turn of events, I also got a glimpse of scientific preparation by judging 7th and 12th grade chemistry entries in Namibia’s National Science Fair, which was held on the Poly campus in September. There’s an interesting dichotomy of perspective about whether training programs need courses in research (e.g. Research Methodology to define research and walk through the development of questions and research designs; no one debates the importance of separate, detailed statistics courses) or need research embedded in courses. For our part, we’re taking the latter approach with Non-ruminant Husbandry.
With the class, we’ve developed a 2-factor experiment to test how a change in agricultural practice would affect productivity and profit. The largest limitation to growing non-ruminants in Namibia is the feed cost – these feeds have to be nutritionally balanced (not just grass, as in ruminants), and the ingredients are almost all imported. So we asked the question of whether we could use cheaper, local feed ingredients and still get satisfactory performance. We chose to focus on chickens (rather than pigs, horses, or fish, our other non-ruminant options that would be impossible to house on campus) and to compare diets of commercial vs. hotel left-overs, with or without earthworms. A rule of thumb for chicken diets from scratch is 50% grains (bread crusts, rice, pasta, corn flakes), 25% protein sources (meat, egg, nuts, beans), and 25% greens (lettuce, chard, herbs), all chopped finely enough to make it down a small bird’s throat without chewing. The chicks get energy from the grains, proteins for building muscles, and vitamins and minerals from the greens.
There have been a few hurdles to overcome. First, chickens are illegal in Windhoek. Well, we’re only raising chicks, and they’ll be moved elsewhere when the experiment finishes at about 6 weeks. We didn’t even ask about whether it was okay to keep them for the first week in our apartment (we finally found a good use for our space heater!). Second, because the poultry industry is essentially non-existent in Namibia, there are few sources of large numbers of day-old chicks in the region. They must be imported from South Africa or purchased from Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, which is maintaining a line of Potchefstroom koekoek chickens after the end of a large trial comparing productivity of 4 breeds. Third, the veterinary fence was closed to all agricultural products from early August, when FMD broke out in the Kavango region. Chickens don’t carry FMD, but Veterinary Services doesn’t issue permits for anything when the fence is closed – until we called for weeks and finally went straight to the head vet in Namibia to get a special “red cross” permit to bring the chicks from Mashare, north of the red line, to Windhoek. This was our “chicken run.” We left Windhoek after class on Tuesday, traveled 5 hours to Roy’s Camp where we stayed the night, then pushed on to Rundu and Mashare, where we picked up the chicks, got the correct permit, and made the 8-hour drive back south to Windhoek by Wednesday evening. Roy’s Camp deserves a special note because it was one of the funkiest, most restful places we’ve stayed. JR went for a walk (!) in the bush (Roy’s camp doesn’t have any large predators) and was surprised by a LOUD barking snort that turned out to be a male kudu warning his group – I guess he was as surprised as I was! We had a wonderful dinner of kudu pockets (Okay, there are no kangaroos or other pocketed marsupials in Namibia, contrary to a variety of children’s books. These turned out to be pieces of kudu wrapped in bacon) and a half dozen different salads, most involving some sort of creamy dressing. We saw a whole herd of eland come to the waterhole at dusk, just as the “torches” made of wicks in glass bottles were being lit around the camp.
The chicks grew from 50 g at week 1 to 250 g at week 5, but faster on commercial feed than on urban leftovers. Worms helped their growth, too. We suspect that the leftovers were protein-deficient (it was a lot easier to get leftover pasta or porridge than leftover lamb or fish!) and missing some vitamins, because six of the birds began sitting on their haunches with curled toes a few days before the end of the experiment. We immediately took these birds out and put them on commercial feed with extra vitamins and minerals, and they were back to normal within a week! We’re having some feed samples analyzed chemically by the Ministry of Agriculture, so ultimately we’ll have data on what the birds actually received nutritionally.
The experiment has now ended and, despite our interest in giving 100 6-week-old chickens to a student interested in starting a chicken business, no one was able to write a business plan that actually showed a profit. The chickens moved instead to an organic farm in Okahandja – the garden city an hour north of Windhoek, where they’ll do a little grazing on cover crops, get some fishmeal from Walvis Bay, consume vegetable scraps and leftovers, and eat a bit of expensive organic nutritionally-balanced chicken food. We wish them happy (if not long) lives!
With the class, we’ve developed a 2-factor experiment to test how a change in agricultural practice would affect productivity and profit. The largest limitation to growing non-ruminants in Namibia is the feed cost – these feeds have to be nutritionally balanced (not just grass, as in ruminants), and the ingredients are almost all imported. So we asked the question of whether we could use cheaper, local feed ingredients and still get satisfactory performance. We chose to focus on chickens (rather than pigs, horses, or fish, our other non-ruminant options that would be impossible to house on campus) and to compare diets of commercial vs. hotel left-overs, with or without earthworms. A rule of thumb for chicken diets from scratch is 50% grains (bread crusts, rice, pasta, corn flakes), 25% protein sources (meat, egg, nuts, beans), and 25% greens (lettuce, chard, herbs), all chopped finely enough to make it down a small bird’s throat without chewing. The chicks get energy from the grains, proteins for building muscles, and vitamins and minerals from the greens.
There have been a few hurdles to overcome. First, chickens are illegal in Windhoek. Well, we’re only raising chicks, and they’ll be moved elsewhere when the experiment finishes at about 6 weeks. We didn’t even ask about whether it was okay to keep them for the first week in our apartment (we finally found a good use for our space heater!). Second, because the poultry industry is essentially non-existent in Namibia, there are few sources of large numbers of day-old chicks in the region. They must be imported from South Africa or purchased from Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, which is maintaining a line of Potchefstroom koekoek chickens after the end of a large trial comparing productivity of 4 breeds. Third, the veterinary fence was closed to all agricultural products from early August, when FMD broke out in the Kavango region. Chickens don’t carry FMD, but Veterinary Services doesn’t issue permits for anything when the fence is closed – until we called for weeks and finally went straight to the head vet in Namibia to get a special “red cross” permit to bring the chicks from Mashare, north of the red line, to Windhoek. This was our “chicken run.” We left Windhoek after class on Tuesday, traveled 5 hours to Roy’s Camp where we stayed the night, then pushed on to Rundu and Mashare, where we picked up the chicks, got the correct permit, and made the 8-hour drive back south to Windhoek by Wednesday evening. Roy’s Camp deserves a special note because it was one of the funkiest, most restful places we’ve stayed. JR went for a walk (!) in the bush (Roy’s camp doesn’t have any large predators) and was surprised by a LOUD barking snort that turned out to be a male kudu warning his group – I guess he was as surprised as I was! We had a wonderful dinner of kudu pockets (Okay, there are no kangaroos or other pocketed marsupials in Namibia, contrary to a variety of children’s books. These turned out to be pieces of kudu wrapped in bacon) and a half dozen different salads, most involving some sort of creamy dressing. We saw a whole herd of eland come to the waterhole at dusk, just as the “torches” made of wicks in glass bottles were being lit around the camp.
The chicks grew from 50 g at week 1 to 250 g at week 5, but faster on commercial feed than on urban leftovers. Worms helped their growth, too. We suspect that the leftovers were protein-deficient (it was a lot easier to get leftover pasta or porridge than leftover lamb or fish!) and missing some vitamins, because six of the birds began sitting on their haunches with curled toes a few days before the end of the experiment. We immediately took these birds out and put them on commercial feed with extra vitamins and minerals, and they were back to normal within a week! We’re having some feed samples analyzed chemically by the Ministry of Agriculture, so ultimately we’ll have data on what the birds actually received nutritionally.
The experiment has now ended and, despite our interest in giving 100 6-week-old chickens to a student interested in starting a chicken business, no one was able to write a business plan that actually showed a profit. The chickens moved instead to an organic farm in Okahandja – the garden city an hour north of Windhoek, where they’ll do a little grazing on cover crops, get some fishmeal from Walvis Bay, consume vegetable scraps and leftovers, and eat a bit of expensive organic nutritionally-balanced chicken food. We wish them happy (if not long) lives!
A change in the weather (and some more food comments)
Latitudinally, much of Namibia is tropical – we’ve passed the Tropic of Capricorn on a few trips to the south. Still, we’ve definitely experienced seasonal changes. In 2008, the summer rainy season was shifted later than normal, beginning in late-January and lasting until May. We personally experienced these late rains around 7 May at Swakopmund and 26 May at Etosha. Flamingos breed in the Etosha “pan”, a large saline body of water whose level fluctuates dramatically with precipitation and evaporation. The literature indicates that flamingos leave the coast in December to breed and return in April. This year, we watched flocks of honking pink birds fly north from Walvis Bay and the Saltworks in March, tracking the late start of the rains. They were inland until at least September, but probably didn’t breed successfully, as the pan had too much water: flamingos need a stable level so they can build mud nests rising out of the water, providing some protection from water-wary predators. The late rains were nonetheless torrential, and the northern part of the country flooded, resulting in poor crop production and emergency food deliveries.
By mid-April in Namibia, a sense of sadness is pervasive as the landscape changes from vibrant lush green to its drier hues. Stipagrostis bushmens grass has long nodding seed heads with feathery plumes, so abundant that the landscape turns silver, and the plumes accumulate before the wind in piles like small snowdrifts. Many of the desert plants seem not to be tied to the duration of the rainy season. They germinate with rain; they complete their life cycle with fog; and they fruit and dry up. So the landscape changed color even before the rainy season ended this year. Still, there were enough plants still flowering in May to keep JR’s parents busy with species identification while they visited!
Some of the plants that grow during the rainy season were worth sampling – given the history of hunter-gatherer societies in this region, we know there must be things to eat (in addition to the spiny, toxic ones that have evolved means of protecting their hard-won growth against herbivory). We saw fields of wild watermelons throughout the country, from the highlands around Windhoek to the wild lands of Etosha to the border of the Namib Desert. These melons grow slightly larger than softball-sized, and they look simply luscious as the landscape dries up, like green and gold packages of life-saving moisture. They lasted much longer than we would have expected, and in our travels we asked about their natural history: We heard that the melons can be very bitter, but that kudu and gemsbok will bite into them as other resources become scarce. At Namib-Rand, Mr. Klein collected several on our tour of the reserve and said that some plants produce bitter fruit, but others taste quite nice. The ones he selected were on the “nice-tasting” end of the spectrum, a cucumber taste crossed with watermelon consistency, harboring enormous seeds that are probably also edible if prepared correctly. At Treesleeper, with the Bushmen, we ate sweet berries, which tasted like tamarind but were mostly husk, seed, and a little fruity essence.
We missed one natural Namibian delicacy – not a plant, but a fungus. In February and March, as we drove the B-roads between Windhoek and the coast, we regularly saw people standing by the side of the road with white mushrooms as big as their heads. We were still a little dubious about food safety at this point, so never stopped, but in late April we learned from several Namibian friends that the mushrooms taste amazing as steaks sauted in butter. We should have stopped and paid no more than N$30 for one, as long as it was treated properly and not held upside down, which causes dirt to fall into the gills. In such a dry country, mushrooms are pretty rare, but these grow on termite mounds because these mound-building termites farm fungus. The mycelia send up fruiting bodies when there’s rain.
This year’s winter was not as cold as we’d been warned to expect, even at elevation in Windhoek. We never used our heaters in the apartment and never awoke to frost, although we did pass many people bundled in puffy jackets, or selling gloves on the street. Winter usually brings east winds on the coast. These hot winds are caused by freezing temperatures in the mountains, which set up a pressure differential with the coast. As the air moves from high (cold) to low (warm) pressure, it also drops in elevation, and the air heats up from this adiabatic change. When the air reaches the coast, it can be 40C, driving desert sand before it at such velocity that it sand-blasts paint off cars and knocks small children off cliffs (this latter in theory – we never tested it). The hot air is also essential for drying out the guano on the big platform constructed above one of the salt pans. Usually, the guano is “harvested” in June, but this year the process didn’t start until September. Once again, it’s proving to be a weird year - the east winds were late and infrequent.
In Namibia, the country burns in August. In general, we’ve tried to avoid driving at night in a country where the wildlife is larger than our Kombi, and the wildlife habitat comes up to the edge of the (dark, narrow, 2-lane) road. But on a couple of August nights, we were traveling after sunset through scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Pitch black. Red flames licking through low bush. Lines of fire stretching into the air as they moved up hillsides. Thick smoke. We have heard that some of these fires are set on purpose, because they flush game, eliminate accumulated grass litter, and open up space for new vegetation growth. Indeed, we have seen green blades appear in burned-over areas. Some of the fires are probably natural or unintentional: the landscape is so dry by late winter that it seems poised to combust.
In Namibia, spring arrives in September. Despite the ongoing dry weather, some of the Acacia trees flower, and there’s a heady sweetness in the air. From our 7th floor apartment, Windhoek looks like a patchwork of purple, because all the introduced (from Australia/NZ?) Jacaranda trees are covered in purple blossoms. Historically, spring was the “little rainy season,” but the recent trend has been that Namibia receives less and less of its annual rainfall during this season. We have heard October called “suicide month”, the hottest month of the year, when clouds start gathering after months of blue-sky, dry weather. The farmers think that these clouds might drop some rain and end the seasonal drought, filling their catchments and growing a bit of new vegetation for their stock. But usually all they get is clouds, not rain. This year, however, we’ve witnessed a little rain as October ends, including unprecedented sprinkles at Swakopmund and 40 mm in a night in Windhoek. We wonder what this signals for the ocean, which is roiling around with odd winds and high production, and there may be another sulfide eruption in store…. This time, if the toxic ocean materializes, we hope to be out on the water of Walvis Bay to study it intensively first hand.
By mid-April in Namibia, a sense of sadness is pervasive as the landscape changes from vibrant lush green to its drier hues. Stipagrostis bushmens grass has long nodding seed heads with feathery plumes, so abundant that the landscape turns silver, and the plumes accumulate before the wind in piles like small snowdrifts. Many of the desert plants seem not to be tied to the duration of the rainy season. They germinate with rain; they complete their life cycle with fog; and they fruit and dry up. So the landscape changed color even before the rainy season ended this year. Still, there were enough plants still flowering in May to keep JR’s parents busy with species identification while they visited!
Some of the plants that grow during the rainy season were worth sampling – given the history of hunter-gatherer societies in this region, we know there must be things to eat (in addition to the spiny, toxic ones that have evolved means of protecting their hard-won growth against herbivory). We saw fields of wild watermelons throughout the country, from the highlands around Windhoek to the wild lands of Etosha to the border of the Namib Desert. These melons grow slightly larger than softball-sized, and they look simply luscious as the landscape dries up, like green and gold packages of life-saving moisture. They lasted much longer than we would have expected, and in our travels we asked about their natural history: We heard that the melons can be very bitter, but that kudu and gemsbok will bite into them as other resources become scarce. At Namib-Rand, Mr. Klein collected several on our tour of the reserve and said that some plants produce bitter fruit, but others taste quite nice. The ones he selected were on the “nice-tasting” end of the spectrum, a cucumber taste crossed with watermelon consistency, harboring enormous seeds that are probably also edible if prepared correctly. At Treesleeper, with the Bushmen, we ate sweet berries, which tasted like tamarind but were mostly husk, seed, and a little fruity essence.
We missed one natural Namibian delicacy – not a plant, but a fungus. In February and March, as we drove the B-roads between Windhoek and the coast, we regularly saw people standing by the side of the road with white mushrooms as big as their heads. We were still a little dubious about food safety at this point, so never stopped, but in late April we learned from several Namibian friends that the mushrooms taste amazing as steaks sauted in butter. We should have stopped and paid no more than N$30 for one, as long as it was treated properly and not held upside down, which causes dirt to fall into the gills. In such a dry country, mushrooms are pretty rare, but these grow on termite mounds because these mound-building termites farm fungus. The mycelia send up fruiting bodies when there’s rain.
This year’s winter was not as cold as we’d been warned to expect, even at elevation in Windhoek. We never used our heaters in the apartment and never awoke to frost, although we did pass many people bundled in puffy jackets, or selling gloves on the street. Winter usually brings east winds on the coast. These hot winds are caused by freezing temperatures in the mountains, which set up a pressure differential with the coast. As the air moves from high (cold) to low (warm) pressure, it also drops in elevation, and the air heats up from this adiabatic change. When the air reaches the coast, it can be 40C, driving desert sand before it at such velocity that it sand-blasts paint off cars and knocks small children off cliffs (this latter in theory – we never tested it). The hot air is also essential for drying out the guano on the big platform constructed above one of the salt pans. Usually, the guano is “harvested” in June, but this year the process didn’t start until September. Once again, it’s proving to be a weird year - the east winds were late and infrequent.
In Namibia, the country burns in August. In general, we’ve tried to avoid driving at night in a country where the wildlife is larger than our Kombi, and the wildlife habitat comes up to the edge of the (dark, narrow, 2-lane) road. But on a couple of August nights, we were traveling after sunset through scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Pitch black. Red flames licking through low bush. Lines of fire stretching into the air as they moved up hillsides. Thick smoke. We have heard that some of these fires are set on purpose, because they flush game, eliminate accumulated grass litter, and open up space for new vegetation growth. Indeed, we have seen green blades appear in burned-over areas. Some of the fires are probably natural or unintentional: the landscape is so dry by late winter that it seems poised to combust.
In Namibia, spring arrives in September. Despite the ongoing dry weather, some of the Acacia trees flower, and there’s a heady sweetness in the air. From our 7th floor apartment, Windhoek looks like a patchwork of purple, because all the introduced (from Australia/NZ?) Jacaranda trees are covered in purple blossoms. Historically, spring was the “little rainy season,” but the recent trend has been that Namibia receives less and less of its annual rainfall during this season. We have heard October called “suicide month”, the hottest month of the year, when clouds start gathering after months of blue-sky, dry weather. The farmers think that these clouds might drop some rain and end the seasonal drought, filling their catchments and growing a bit of new vegetation for their stock. But usually all they get is clouds, not rain. This year, however, we’ve witnessed a little rain as October ends, including unprecedented sprinkles at Swakopmund and 40 mm in a night in Windhoek. We wonder what this signals for the ocean, which is roiling around with odd winds and high production, and there may be another sulfide eruption in store…. This time, if the toxic ocean materializes, we hope to be out on the water of Walvis Bay to study it intensively first hand.
Independence Day (a belated report)
On July 4, the US ambassador invited more than 500 people to her party (our invitation was number 517). Over a buffet lunch, JR mingled with politicians, heads of university departments, press, and a few other Americans. An a capella group sang national anthems of the US and Namibia, and after speeches, the group toasted each country and its president. For a stiff protocol-ridden event, it was a surprisingly moving experience. There’s nothing like being next door to Zimbabwe to make you think a little more fully and practically about democracy. Have you kept up with this saga of southern African news? Robert Mugabe is a liberation hero of Zimbabwe, a land-locked country just northeast of Namibia and bordering the mile-wide Victoria Falls. Mugabe has a street named after him in Windhoek (so do Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, and many national heros). After leading his country for (hmmm, I forget exactly) some 30 years, he stood for reelection this year. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, with ideal climate and soil for rain-fed crops – we’ve heard the country was food-independent and exported substantial amounts, for instance to Namibia where the land is generally too arid for successful crop production. Today, Zimbabwe’s agricultural production has ground to a standstill, and, with inflation at triple digits annually, the treasury just issued a billion-dollar bill (and now may just remove 7 zeros from each denomination). Needless to say, people in the country were dissatisfied with their conditions and were prepared to vote for an opposition candidate. Two elections were held: In the first, no candidate received a majority vote (and Mugabe was overall 2nd), so Mugabe declared it void and kept himself in power, although finally agreed to a second run-off election. In the meantime, opposition supporters were harassed, tortured, and even killed, and the opposition candidate actually withdrew from the run-off, presumably to prevent escalation to civil war. On July 4, the ambassador reminded the gathering of some of the principles of democracy: free and open elections, the ability to disagree civilly, an organized transfer of power. Both the UN and African Union have noted that Mugabe is no longer a rightfully elected leader (although the heads of southern African countries have been rather quiet – deep connections from liberation struggles make it hard to criticize a fellow freedom fighter). The ambassador went on to use the US as an example: when parties lose, they go back to their constituents and try to figure out what would allow them to win next time. Without naming Barack Obama directly, she impressed upon the crowd that democracy cultivates leaders, and the strong African-American candidate indicated the on-going development of democracy in America. (The cynical part of me noted that she didn’t mention the contested outcome of the Bush-Gore presidential race, nor the role of corporate interests in determining election results, nor the relatively small spectrum of party platforms that are competitive – democracy everywhere can still use improvement.)
Meanwhile, Katie played with the kids of a fellow Fulbrighter, and we returned after the reception to chalk paintings of the American flag, complete with all Stars and Stripes. Alan spent the weekend at the “farm” of Detlef Klein, one of the Salt Company owners. This farm is on the edge of the Namib desert, so just productive enough in its 10s of 1000s of hectares to support the required minimum number of cows and goats. Over the past two decades or so that Detlef has owned the farm, the numbers of wild animals have increased dramatically – that’s what happens when they’re only hunted occasionally, rather than to remove competition with stock or to provide regular recreation for Spanish ship captains (as happens nearby). Nevertheless, Alan got to go hunting, which he’s really been longing to do in Africa, even though the last time he hunted was with his grandfather as a teenager. According to his report, two shots, two animals: a springbok from 150 m through the head (otherwise the meat is ruined, because the body size is relatively small), and a gemsbok at 250 m through the heart. The latter was so big it had to be winched into the back of the truck. Most of the next day was spent turning these animals into mince, steaks, and biltong, and we’ve been happily eating game ever since.
Meanwhile, Katie played with the kids of a fellow Fulbrighter, and we returned after the reception to chalk paintings of the American flag, complete with all Stars and Stripes. Alan spent the weekend at the “farm” of Detlef Klein, one of the Salt Company owners. This farm is on the edge of the Namib desert, so just productive enough in its 10s of 1000s of hectares to support the required minimum number of cows and goats. Over the past two decades or so that Detlef has owned the farm, the numbers of wild animals have increased dramatically – that’s what happens when they’re only hunted occasionally, rather than to remove competition with stock or to provide regular recreation for Spanish ship captains (as happens nearby). Nevertheless, Alan got to go hunting, which he’s really been longing to do in Africa, even though the last time he hunted was with his grandfather as a teenager. According to his report, two shots, two animals: a springbok from 150 m through the head (otherwise the meat is ruined, because the body size is relatively small), and a gemsbok at 250 m through the heart. The latter was so big it had to be winched into the back of the truck. Most of the next day was spent turning these animals into mince, steaks, and biltong, and we’ve been happily eating game ever since.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Treesleeper
Here’s the story I wrote for Katie’s cousin Tess, who turns 3 one week later than Katie. One day, Katie drove with her family down a long road through dust and heat. At last they reached the forest of the Treesleepers. There, everyone walked quietly, listening to the news of the wind and sucking on dry sweet berries picked from the bushes. In the dark, kids danced and clapped and sang around a leaping fire. Katie’s family slept in a tree that night, just as the Bushmen had done to protect their hunt from lions so long ago. The next morning, 2 girls appeared out of the bush: we bought a hat as a birthday present and gave them each an apple. From an old carver, we bought a family of elephants. The orange one is of Tamboti, the Treesleepers’ tree.
The real story is almost that magical: Treesleeper now ranks at the top of our list of places to stay in Namibia. Check out www.treesleeper.org if you’re ever going to be in that neck of the woods with a tent – or even if you’re not, because the pictures are evocative.
It came as a surprise to me to learn that the !Kung are not the only Bushmen in Africa, contrary to what I’d learned from National Geographic and the like. In fact, there are at least 5 San (Bushmen) ethnic groups in Namibia, each speaking a click language so distinct that the groups often cannot understand each other. These groups traditionally differed in their distribution and also their degree of nomadism. All, however, had adapted culturally to survive in areas of incredibly low rainfall, knowing not just natural water points and edible succulents, but remembering where ostrich eggs filled with water had been buried, or reading the news of water in paintings left on rocks by previous travelers. They hunted with small bows that were effective primarily because of poison arrows – the array of poisonous plant species offers a wealth of possibilities. The Hei//omn group lived in northern Namibia, where Tamboti trees are sparsely distributed: these are relatively tall, with no lower branches and a Y-split in the trunk big enough to hold a person out of reach of predators. If a hunter killed game late in the day or far from camp, he could haul it into a tamboti tree and himself afterwards. Sometimes the hunters would prop poles with pegs against the trunk for easier climbing. Somewhat safer in the tree, they could sleep, or at least survive through the night: Hei//omn means Treesleeper. Just beyond living memory, San hunters walked 150 km from Okaukuejo to Namutoni, areas that are now resorts within Etosha National Park. The eviction letter for the San came when the park was established in 1907. For a hundred years, their hunting and gathering existence slowly eroded – when land is off-limits or private, a nomadic culture is squeezed out. Some San were hired on farms (we heard stories of farmers promising food and income to willing workers, then bringing them to a new place from which they could not easily return home, and not following through). Some worked as exceptional trackers for the South African army during the 1980s independence struggle (which may explain current discrimination from other ethnic groups). Some have been jailed for poaching on private land (killing a cow is apparently a much more serious offence than killing a kudu, regardless of whose land). At independence in 1990, the village of Tsintsabis, perhaps 100 km east of Etosha, was opened for “resettlement” of people with no land of their own and so is largely composed of San inhabitants. Housing construction has been borrowed from ethnic groups to the north – San people never used to make thatch roofs or reinforce walls with cowdung/ termite mound clay. So has basketry – palm fronds from the Makalani are woven for laundry containers or food storage. Each year, maize seeds are distributed for planting – at this time of year, it was difficult to judge the success, although the harvest was reported to be high. There were village chickens, but not laying (chickens are non-ruminants, so we immediately began trying to diagnose the egg problem, or at least trying to dispel the myth that a rooster was required to get eggs). A program of providing 2 goats per family to start herds had a short-term result of increasing goat meat in the village diet, but a similar program for cows (starting with fewer families, and requiring “repayment” in the form of passing along cows to the next family) seemed to be a bit more successful. Still, the older people in the village wondered what was the point of agriculture when the bush still held so much food that was simply there for the taking.
We took advantage of every opportunity offered at Treesleeper to learn about history and culture: We walked to the village with a guide, bringing some food as a thank-you present to the families that met with us. We walked through the bush with a guide, learning some of the plants that were traditionally used and watching in amazement as a twirling stick turned into fire in a matter of minutes. We saw a set of dances performed by teenagers who are part of the Traditional Dance group at their school in town – we only wished there had been a CD available of their clapping and singing, because it was some of the best music we’ve heard in Namibia. Maybe it helps if you’ve walked down a long, winding trail in the dark and into a clearing of firelight, huts, and smiling faces. We slept in trees. Okay, well, Abby and Teddy pitched their tent on the 10-foot platform built against a strangler fig. Katie, Alan and I still slept in the Kombi. Also in contrast to the original Treesleepers, we had a private flush (!) toilet and hot shower (solar heater thoughtfully donated by the US ambassador).
Treesleeper is entirely run by San – most seem in their mid-20s and are computer-savvy and exceptionally good with tourists. We enjoyed the staff immensely. The design and implementation of the camp were apparently facilitated by a visiting graduate student (wow!) in anthropology, who helped turn an idea into a business plan worthy of financial support from the Dutch government. Large groups of young people from overseas (we’ve encountered several that we’d never heard of before: Raleigh International, World Challenge…) helped build the campsites. The camp had about 600 visitors in 2007, which looks to be doubling this year. In general, Namibia is recognized as a world leader in Community-based Natural Resources Management, which has empowered local groups to diversify their activities and therefore strengthen the economic return from their (otherwise arid, pretty unproductive) land. Community rest camps or campsites are a prime example, because they attract tourists. Tourists go places where they can see wildlife and striking natural features. So, communities shift emphasis towards conservation of natural resources, rather than just using land to grow sheep, cows, and goats. Treesleeper Camp has carved out a different sort of niche: this has been necessary because, in fact, this community has not been granted conservancy land, but only a lease on 10 ha. Against all odds, Treesleeper has emerged as a luxury camp with this tourist attraction: the opportunity to visit a cultural group, not as a voyeur or spectator, but as a participant in their development.
The real story is almost that magical: Treesleeper now ranks at the top of our list of places to stay in Namibia. Check out www.treesleeper.org if you’re ever going to be in that neck of the woods with a tent – or even if you’re not, because the pictures are evocative.
It came as a surprise to me to learn that the !Kung are not the only Bushmen in Africa, contrary to what I’d learned from National Geographic and the like. In fact, there are at least 5 San (Bushmen) ethnic groups in Namibia, each speaking a click language so distinct that the groups often cannot understand each other. These groups traditionally differed in their distribution and also their degree of nomadism. All, however, had adapted culturally to survive in areas of incredibly low rainfall, knowing not just natural water points and edible succulents, but remembering where ostrich eggs filled with water had been buried, or reading the news of water in paintings left on rocks by previous travelers. They hunted with small bows that were effective primarily because of poison arrows – the array of poisonous plant species offers a wealth of possibilities. The Hei//omn group lived in northern Namibia, where Tamboti trees are sparsely distributed: these are relatively tall, with no lower branches and a Y-split in the trunk big enough to hold a person out of reach of predators. If a hunter killed game late in the day or far from camp, he could haul it into a tamboti tree and himself afterwards. Sometimes the hunters would prop poles with pegs against the trunk for easier climbing. Somewhat safer in the tree, they could sleep, or at least survive through the night: Hei//omn means Treesleeper. Just beyond living memory, San hunters walked 150 km from Okaukuejo to Namutoni, areas that are now resorts within Etosha National Park. The eviction letter for the San came when the park was established in 1907. For a hundred years, their hunting and gathering existence slowly eroded – when land is off-limits or private, a nomadic culture is squeezed out. Some San were hired on farms (we heard stories of farmers promising food and income to willing workers, then bringing them to a new place from which they could not easily return home, and not following through). Some worked as exceptional trackers for the South African army during the 1980s independence struggle (which may explain current discrimination from other ethnic groups). Some have been jailed for poaching on private land (killing a cow is apparently a much more serious offence than killing a kudu, regardless of whose land). At independence in 1990, the village of Tsintsabis, perhaps 100 km east of Etosha, was opened for “resettlement” of people with no land of their own and so is largely composed of San inhabitants. Housing construction has been borrowed from ethnic groups to the north – San people never used to make thatch roofs or reinforce walls with cowdung/ termite mound clay. So has basketry – palm fronds from the Makalani are woven for laundry containers or food storage. Each year, maize seeds are distributed for planting – at this time of year, it was difficult to judge the success, although the harvest was reported to be high. There were village chickens, but not laying (chickens are non-ruminants, so we immediately began trying to diagnose the egg problem, or at least trying to dispel the myth that a rooster was required to get eggs). A program of providing 2 goats per family to start herds had a short-term result of increasing goat meat in the village diet, but a similar program for cows (starting with fewer families, and requiring “repayment” in the form of passing along cows to the next family) seemed to be a bit more successful. Still, the older people in the village wondered what was the point of agriculture when the bush still held so much food that was simply there for the taking.
We took advantage of every opportunity offered at Treesleeper to learn about history and culture: We walked to the village with a guide, bringing some food as a thank-you present to the families that met with us. We walked through the bush with a guide, learning some of the plants that were traditionally used and watching in amazement as a twirling stick turned into fire in a matter of minutes. We saw a set of dances performed by teenagers who are part of the Traditional Dance group at their school in town – we only wished there had been a CD available of their clapping and singing, because it was some of the best music we’ve heard in Namibia. Maybe it helps if you’ve walked down a long, winding trail in the dark and into a clearing of firelight, huts, and smiling faces. We slept in trees. Okay, well, Abby and Teddy pitched their tent on the 10-foot platform built against a strangler fig. Katie, Alan and I still slept in the Kombi. Also in contrast to the original Treesleepers, we had a private flush (!) toilet and hot shower (solar heater thoughtfully donated by the US ambassador).
Treesleeper is entirely run by San – most seem in their mid-20s and are computer-savvy and exceptionally good with tourists. We enjoyed the staff immensely. The design and implementation of the camp were apparently facilitated by a visiting graduate student (wow!) in anthropology, who helped turn an idea into a business plan worthy of financial support from the Dutch government. Large groups of young people from overseas (we’ve encountered several that we’d never heard of before: Raleigh International, World Challenge…) helped build the campsites. The camp had about 600 visitors in 2007, which looks to be doubling this year. In general, Namibia is recognized as a world leader in Community-based Natural Resources Management, which has empowered local groups to diversify their activities and therefore strengthen the economic return from their (otherwise arid, pretty unproductive) land. Community rest camps or campsites are a prime example, because they attract tourists. Tourists go places where they can see wildlife and striking natural features. So, communities shift emphasis towards conservation of natural resources, rather than just using land to grow sheep, cows, and goats. Treesleeper Camp has carved out a different sort of niche: this has been necessary because, in fact, this community has not been granted conservancy land, but only a lease on 10 ha. Against all odds, Treesleeper has emerged as a luxury camp with this tourist attraction: the opportunity to visit a cultural group, not as a voyeur or spectator, but as a participant in their development.
Goat head for breakfast
Classes have resumed for second semester at the Polytechnic. We are co-teaching non-ruminant husbandry, trying to communicate the joy and fascination and content of biology, but also not cramp our travel style too much, especially while Abby and Teddy are here for a month. Fortunately, a large part of each class involves week-long excursions to farms in Namibia, and the students were off working on agro-ecology and agricultural land management while we traveled elsewhere. But we met up for a day at Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, directly north of Windhoek at the Angolan border. The dinner menu for the night was goat, and the goat was standing in the back of a pick-up when we arrived. Now, these agriculture students have struggled with my emphasis on graphing and modeling skills, but I have to give them enormous credit for their hands-on agriculture. Katie and I went off to watch the goat be slaughtered, while Alan cooked the dinner we had brought along, having heard of stiff competition for food on these excursions (and also desiring a few more vegetables than the standard Namibian fare). A side note about our newest traveling meal investment: We now carry a 3-legged cast iron pot with us. In the US, it’s a dutch oven, but here it’s a … hmmm, well, the label said “potjie” at the store, but the Kleins seem to say “poikie”. You build a nice fire, let it burn down to hot coals, and meanwhile fill the pot with an assemblage of vegetables (potatoes, carrots, maybe a pepper if you have one), a can of tomatoes (African-style spicy is my favorite, but not necessary), a can of corn (not baby corn, though: Katie just eats those plain), and a can of beans or some sausage or meat chunks for protein. Put the pot over the coals, and soon there is a happy bubbling sound. A half hour later or so, Voila! Dinner. If you have a little extra juice and time and coals at the end of the evening, mix up a batch of biscuits and cook them in the poikie too. Yum! The poikie has also proved to be a great community-builder: it’s easy to invite someone to dinner if it just involves putting in another potato or 2 to stretch the poikie stew.
Okay, back to the goat. While some of the students around camp curiously wondered what Alan was cooking (or perhaps why Alan was cooking), the goat was quickly dispatched and bled, head removed, then hung from a hind leg while the entire hide was peeled off. The lower legs came off with the hide, cracked just at kneeline. Katie watched with fascination and absolutely no squeamishness. Zipppp- cut down the midline, and out came an enormous stomach (it’s not a non-ruminant!). The stomach was later emptied and washed – its absorptive surface is incredible, like a shag carpet! In the absence of a pot, the rumen apparently makes a good cooking vessel, but in this case it was cut and cooked. It was great to have Katie along, as a foil to learn a little more ruminant anatomy. “Look Katie, I wonder what that is? Hey guys [yes, all guys], what’s still hanging out of the abdomen?” A uterus. Someone didn’t make the best choice for slaughtering: she was pregnant. Then we got to see liver, kidneys encased in fat, pink lungs, small heart, pancreas, uh-oh, where’s the gall bladder – if it leaks, the meat tastes bad, so don’t simply let it go in the bag with intestine, saved for cooking. After the carcass was gutted, the goat was cut in half down one side of the spine and carried into the kitchen. That’s the last we saw of the goat except for the head and lower legs, which were roasted over the fire that evening, carefully tended and turned by one of the students at the campsite. Katie and I stopped by to ask about the process: roast on a grate – entirely intact, eyes, hair, horns give a good grip for turning – then cover with water in a pot, which is set over the fire overnight. The goat is done the next morning, and the student wouldn’t have to share breakfast with everyone else. But he said he’d let us try some if we wanted. Well, the next morning, we happened to be sitting by the fire when the goat head and ankles were removed from the pot, and, after they cooled, we were offered half a lower jaw with tongue. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing this is the prime piece, as one of the chef’s friends came by a little later and asked “Where’s the tongue?” Katie had already eaten half of it. Additionally, she downed a substantial portion of goat cheek, really cooked to perfection: very tender, with a lovely roasted flavor. That’s my girl! She turned 3 the next day.
Okay, back to the goat. While some of the students around camp curiously wondered what Alan was cooking (or perhaps why Alan was cooking), the goat was quickly dispatched and bled, head removed, then hung from a hind leg while the entire hide was peeled off. The lower legs came off with the hide, cracked just at kneeline. Katie watched with fascination and absolutely no squeamishness. Zipppp- cut down the midline, and out came an enormous stomach (it’s not a non-ruminant!). The stomach was later emptied and washed – its absorptive surface is incredible, like a shag carpet! In the absence of a pot, the rumen apparently makes a good cooking vessel, but in this case it was cut and cooked. It was great to have Katie along, as a foil to learn a little more ruminant anatomy. “Look Katie, I wonder what that is? Hey guys [yes, all guys], what’s still hanging out of the abdomen?” A uterus. Someone didn’t make the best choice for slaughtering: she was pregnant. Then we got to see liver, kidneys encased in fat, pink lungs, small heart, pancreas, uh-oh, where’s the gall bladder – if it leaks, the meat tastes bad, so don’t simply let it go in the bag with intestine, saved for cooking. After the carcass was gutted, the goat was cut in half down one side of the spine and carried into the kitchen. That’s the last we saw of the goat except for the head and lower legs, which were roasted over the fire that evening, carefully tended and turned by one of the students at the campsite. Katie and I stopped by to ask about the process: roast on a grate – entirely intact, eyes, hair, horns give a good grip for turning – then cover with water in a pot, which is set over the fire overnight. The goat is done the next morning, and the student wouldn’t have to share breakfast with everyone else. But he said he’d let us try some if we wanted. Well, the next morning, we happened to be sitting by the fire when the goat head and ankles were removed from the pot, and, after they cooled, we were offered half a lower jaw with tongue. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing this is the prime piece, as one of the chef’s friends came by a little later and asked “Where’s the tongue?” Katie had already eaten half of it. Additionally, she downed a substantial portion of goat cheek, really cooked to perfection: very tender, with a lovely roasted flavor. That’s my girl! She turned 3 the next day.
Monday, June 16, 2008
African elephant encounters
The morning had been filled with wildlife – Etosha National Park was certainly living up to its reputation. We’d seen herds of zebra, hordes of springbok, countless oryx/gemsbok, wildebeest, and some of the less common antelope – steenbok, impala, hartebeest, dik-dik. We saw a male kudu with two full twists to its horns send mud flying into the air, probably trying to reduce its insect issues at a small pothole. The birds had also raised our admiration: iridescent blue and violet rollers, stately bustards, a pale chanting goshawk with unbelievably orange legs and beak. Nevertheless, my dad commented, “I’m ready to see an elephant.”
So, when some of the dark shapes that we spotted across a broad grassy/dusty plain looked like they had ears and trunks, we all got pretty excited. Looking at the map, we could guess that our paths might intersect.
Indeed, a few km down the road, after a deliberate right turn, we saw a large elephant ahead of us on the road. (Okay, “large” is an adjective that doesn’t really need to be associated with elephant – it sort of goes without saying.) Alan said, “I’ll just shut off the Kombi here and we’ll watch it.” Well, an elephant has a slow walking cadence, but it covers a lot of distance fast. In just a short time, we could begin picking out the details – missing most of both tusks, a hole in the top of the left ear, slightly incontinent dribbling pee as it walked. The zebras in the foreground hustled out of the way. And still the elephant strided towards us down the road. Every so often, it snuffled its trunk on the ground, picking up dust and blowing it onto its sides or underneath, bothered by bugs. Apparently it wasn’t aware of Namibian traffic laws, as it was on our side of the road. The footsteps of an elephant crunch sonorously on gravel, measured and inexorable. About 20 feet in front of us, it stopped. We had long since started to get a little nervous. My mom rolled up the window on the passenger side. The elephant waved its ears a little, but perhaps not as much as I had been led to believe signaled threat. Then it shifted its position to pass us on our right – no one moved except to close the windows on that side as well. It stopped even with Alan in the driver’s seat, its eye level above the roof rack. Some time recently I had paged through the mammal field guide and exclaimed about the weight of a large bull. Alan had done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that it was 17 times more massive than the Kombi! I remembered that now. I also began wondering how I could best protect Katie, who was unusually quiet in my lap, in the event of a roll-over: no one had their seatbelts on. I had the impression of an enormous curtain of deep grey wrinkles right outside the window. It wound its trunk around and fanned its ears. Then it continued on. Whew! We let out a collective sigh of relief and giggled a little. But the adrenalin rush wasn’t over yet: I looked around behind to find that the elephant had turned and stopped, facing the Kombi directly behind us. Again, we waited, barely daring to breathe. Was it looking at us with irritation or perplexity? Had we posed a challenge, parked in its way, or was it simply trying to figure out the dimensions of this large new rock? It reached out its trunk and touched the back of the vehicle, then turned and walked away.
When we checked later, we found dried dust mixed with nose snot, in a 6-inch line on the back window.
Other notable events of the day: 4 other dusty elephants, taking a well-worn path through the savannah; 2 lions by the road, including a young male who climbed out of the culvert to pee right in front of us; jackals in camp, waiting for something to happen at the waterholes, in yipping choruses of high wails all around; lightning to the north the night we stayed at Numatomi, and more unseasonable rain; surprising diversity of vegetation types, from grassland to thick thorn to almost aspen-like copses of small trees; Etosha pan simply full of water, appearing as vast as the ocean in a 180 degree arc from some viewpoints.
Our 2nd elephant encounter occurred when a tuskless male (but not the one near our Kombi – different distinguishing marks!) visited the Okaukuejo waterhole one evening when we were there. He spent a lot of time fanning himself with his ears and standing with his bottom facing the crowd!
Our 3rd elephant encounter was en route from Palmwag to Brandberg: Desert elephants!!! 8 on one side of the road, uprooting bushes and making low rumbling sounds; 4 on the other side, who eventually ran down a gully and across, trumpeting at the other group. There were elephants of all sizes- but, of course, all very large!
So, when some of the dark shapes that we spotted across a broad grassy/dusty plain looked like they had ears and trunks, we all got pretty excited. Looking at the map, we could guess that our paths might intersect.
Indeed, a few km down the road, after a deliberate right turn, we saw a large elephant ahead of us on the road. (Okay, “large” is an adjective that doesn’t really need to be associated with elephant – it sort of goes without saying.) Alan said, “I’ll just shut off the Kombi here and we’ll watch it.” Well, an elephant has a slow walking cadence, but it covers a lot of distance fast. In just a short time, we could begin picking out the details – missing most of both tusks, a hole in the top of the left ear, slightly incontinent dribbling pee as it walked. The zebras in the foreground hustled out of the way. And still the elephant strided towards us down the road. Every so often, it snuffled its trunk on the ground, picking up dust and blowing it onto its sides or underneath, bothered by bugs. Apparently it wasn’t aware of Namibian traffic laws, as it was on our side of the road. The footsteps of an elephant crunch sonorously on gravel, measured and inexorable. About 20 feet in front of us, it stopped. We had long since started to get a little nervous. My mom rolled up the window on the passenger side. The elephant waved its ears a little, but perhaps not as much as I had been led to believe signaled threat. Then it shifted its position to pass us on our right – no one moved except to close the windows on that side as well. It stopped even with Alan in the driver’s seat, its eye level above the roof rack. Some time recently I had paged through the mammal field guide and exclaimed about the weight of a large bull. Alan had done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that it was 17 times more massive than the Kombi! I remembered that now. I also began wondering how I could best protect Katie, who was unusually quiet in my lap, in the event of a roll-over: no one had their seatbelts on. I had the impression of an enormous curtain of deep grey wrinkles right outside the window. It wound its trunk around and fanned its ears. Then it continued on. Whew! We let out a collective sigh of relief and giggled a little. But the adrenalin rush wasn’t over yet: I looked around behind to find that the elephant had turned and stopped, facing the Kombi directly behind us. Again, we waited, barely daring to breathe. Was it looking at us with irritation or perplexity? Had we posed a challenge, parked in its way, or was it simply trying to figure out the dimensions of this large new rock? It reached out its trunk and touched the back of the vehicle, then turned and walked away.
When we checked later, we found dried dust mixed with nose snot, in a 6-inch line on the back window.
Other notable events of the day: 4 other dusty elephants, taking a well-worn path through the savannah; 2 lions by the road, including a young male who climbed out of the culvert to pee right in front of us; jackals in camp, waiting for something to happen at the waterholes, in yipping choruses of high wails all around; lightning to the north the night we stayed at Numatomi, and more unseasonable rain; surprising diversity of vegetation types, from grassland to thick thorn to almost aspen-like copses of small trees; Etosha pan simply full of water, appearing as vast as the ocean in a 180 degree arc from some viewpoints.
Our 2nd elephant encounter occurred when a tuskless male (but not the one near our Kombi – different distinguishing marks!) visited the Okaukuejo waterhole one evening when we were there. He spent a lot of time fanning himself with his ears and standing with his bottom facing the crowd!
Our 3rd elephant encounter was en route from Palmwag to Brandberg: Desert elephants!!! 8 on one side of the road, uprooting bushes and making low rumbling sounds; 4 on the other side, who eventually ran down a gully and across, trumpeting at the other group. There were elephants of all sizes- but, of course, all very large!
Concrete
Namibia has a distinctive building style. Nearly all the buildings are made of concrete blocks, often with a layer of cement on the outside and tile on the inside. Much of the construction we’ve witnessed makes it clear that there’s no fear of earthquakes: the blocks are not built up around rebar, but occasionally have a bit of wire mesh, sort of like a strip of fencing, placed horizontally between successive layers. When the lab building was constructed in April adjacent to the existing hatchery at the Salt Company, the new walls were attached by nailing a strip of aluminum to the old wall, then bending it to lie in the new mortar.
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….
Mother and Father in Namibia
Mother’s Day to Father’s Day: JR’s parents spent these holidays on day-long journeys from Bloomington, Indiana, USA to Windhoek, Namibia and back. Maybe that’s why this itinerary was still relatively cheap when they decided to take this opportunity to visit Africa for the first time. In between, 12-15 May in Windhoek; 15-24 May at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 25 May-3 June on a northward loop that included Etosha National Park; 3-6 June at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 7-8 June at Gobabeb desert research center for their Open Day; 8-12 June on a loop south that included Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib-Rand Nature Reserve; 13-14 June back in Windhoek. They celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary in the middle of the Namib Desert, the oldest desert on earth, and the driest area of sub-Saharan Africa! Just a year or 2 shy of 70, Albert and Kathy nevertheless embraced African-style camping. For more than a month, they slept in a tent (okay, it was a pretty big tent [3x3 m, plenty of standing room], with cots and pads)! They packed and moved effortlessly from one campground to another, some more rustic than others: at one extreme, the pit toilet at the Salt Company was a half-mile away; at the other extreme, some of the camping sites had individual power and light, flush toilets and warm showers, and special rooms for doing dishes. Although we promised them laundry access at least once a week, in fact we never made it to a Laundromat, and they ended up washing most clothes by hand. And they didn’t bring any extra baggage – just one carry-on apiece, plus one small checked bag that mostly included books and clothes for Katie and some biology textbooks. They were wonderful traveling companions, and we will be forever grateful for this strong connection that they’ve forged through discovery with their granddaughter, and for this opportunity for us to explore parts of Namibia that we would otherwise have been too busy to visit.
Funniest things they said on the trip: Mom, en route from Windhoek to the salt ponds on the coast: “Is that a real giraffe?” Yes, indeed, 4 of them – the first of many that we watched over the next month. They really do look other-worldly, with their long necks sticking up above the bushy vegetation of this arid land. Probably, you’ve all seen pictures of giraffes spreading their front legs to be able to stretch down to drink water, but did you know that they hop their feet back together when they’re done? Dad, while on the dirt road circumference around Namibia’s tallest mountain, Brandberg: “Could you stop a minute? I think I just saw a Welwitschia.” In fact, along that stretch of desert road, there were hundreds of these curious plants, with their two leaves that grow perpetually from a low woody trunk, sporting small male or larger female cones. Apparently Namibia has NO native gymnosperms – is this weird, or what! Especially coming from the Pacific Northwest, which is chock-a-block full of conifers! – and Welwitschia is the closest it gets!
The trip was also book-ended by two critical meetings at the Polytechnic of Namibia. It is with a great deal of relief that we report that JR’s “baby”- the new Agriculture and Aquaculture programs- passed at the school-level on May 9 and passed at the university-level on June 13! Woo-hoo! Well, the curriculum development aspects of the Fulbright year are not entirely complete, as JR will now coordinate the development of a new BSc in Applied Biology across several schools, and AT continues to advise on the development of the Namibian Business Innovation Center.
Funniest things they said on the trip: Mom, en route from Windhoek to the salt ponds on the coast: “Is that a real giraffe?” Yes, indeed, 4 of them – the first of many that we watched over the next month. They really do look other-worldly, with their long necks sticking up above the bushy vegetation of this arid land. Probably, you’ve all seen pictures of giraffes spreading their front legs to be able to stretch down to drink water, but did you know that they hop their feet back together when they’re done? Dad, while on the dirt road circumference around Namibia’s tallest mountain, Brandberg: “Could you stop a minute? I think I just saw a Welwitschia.” In fact, along that stretch of desert road, there were hundreds of these curious plants, with their two leaves that grow perpetually from a low woody trunk, sporting small male or larger female cones. Apparently Namibia has NO native gymnosperms – is this weird, or what! Especially coming from the Pacific Northwest, which is chock-a-block full of conifers! – and Welwitschia is the closest it gets!
The trip was also book-ended by two critical meetings at the Polytechnic of Namibia. It is with a great deal of relief that we report that JR’s “baby”- the new Agriculture and Aquaculture programs- passed at the school-level on May 9 and passed at the university-level on June 13! Woo-hoo! Well, the curriculum development aspects of the Fulbright year are not entirely complete, as JR will now coordinate the development of a new BSc in Applied Biology across several schools, and AT continues to advise on the development of the Namibian Business Innovation Center.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Flu season
Katie has been fighting some sort of disease for the past 2 weeks. Its progression went like this: first, a little diarrhea; then a runny nose; at its worst, a night of restless fever, followed by 3 evenings when she vomited immediately after dinner. One of these nights was also restless, including teeth-grinding. For about the last week, she has continued to have a hacking cough and banana slugs up her nose. Mucus is now turning green and crusty, a sign that the immune system has kicked in. Meanwhile, during the worst of this, I was simultaneously trying to complete three curriculum submissions for the department – this meant 1-on-1 meetings and advisory committee meetings most of each day, while writing and editing at night. Only it was particularly difficult for me to do any work at night, because I would help Katie get to sleep (conservatively a 20-minute process) and 5 minutes after I got back on my computer, she would be calling for me again. Well, it’s clear I wore myself down, so by the curriculum deadline (Apr 25), my nose was a torrent of phlegm and my patience worn down to a thin veneer. Alan was also grumpy: although he was least affected by disease (just one day of self-described incredible gaseous eruptions), he was fielding calls from the coast about how much we were needed there, plus running a lot of errands and forgetting to eat.
The good news/bad news was that the Friday afternoon meeting for administrative feedback on the curriculum submissions was canceled at the last minute. Instead, we left immediately for the coast. On the 4-hour drive, my scratchy throat transformed into earaches so intense that I couldn’t hear, totally precluding my normal Katie-entertainment duties. Then Katie said her ears were hurting too. I was ready to go to the emergency room at the Swakopmund hospital, but Alan correctly diagnosed our ills: My stuffy head had dis-equilibrated from the pressure differential between 5000 ft and sea level, cured in a matter of minutes after a dose of Panado (not available in the US, but Alan had heard of it before). Katie was simply trying to be a participant in everything and still just had a runny nose (well, she had vomited earlier…). Definitely the nadir of our trip!
A longer-term health concern has been Alan’s sore foot, probably plantar fasciatis, although not quite in same spot as in years past. It’s been exacerbated by several long barefoot walks on the beach, plus his first choice for shoes to be worn in the water – so many nylon straps across the top that they caught rocks top and bottom, causing blisters and sores as well. A couple of weeks ago Alan succumbed to family peer pressure and went searching for size 13 Crocs – Katie and I both wear these almost constantly, in and out of the water, and we’ve found them extraordinarily comfortable and functional. Fortunately, Alan was able to find a manly black pair of Crocs that fit him – shoes are a big deal in Namibia, and there were plenty of stores to check, although we still feel lucky that there were actually several styles in his size – and foot complaints have eased. Of course, Alan had to eliminate all the Crocs logos by drawing over them with a black sharpie!
The good news/bad news was that the Friday afternoon meeting for administrative feedback on the curriculum submissions was canceled at the last minute. Instead, we left immediately for the coast. On the 4-hour drive, my scratchy throat transformed into earaches so intense that I couldn’t hear, totally precluding my normal Katie-entertainment duties. Then Katie said her ears were hurting too. I was ready to go to the emergency room at the Swakopmund hospital, but Alan correctly diagnosed our ills: My stuffy head had dis-equilibrated from the pressure differential between 5000 ft and sea level, cured in a matter of minutes after a dose of Panado (not available in the US, but Alan had heard of it before). Katie was simply trying to be a participant in everything and still just had a runny nose (well, she had vomited earlier…). Definitely the nadir of our trip!
A longer-term health concern has been Alan’s sore foot, probably plantar fasciatis, although not quite in same spot as in years past. It’s been exacerbated by several long barefoot walks on the beach, plus his first choice for shoes to be worn in the water – so many nylon straps across the top that they caught rocks top and bottom, causing blisters and sores as well. A couple of weeks ago Alan succumbed to family peer pressure and went searching for size 13 Crocs – Katie and I both wear these almost constantly, in and out of the water, and we’ve found them extraordinarily comfortable and functional. Fortunately, Alan was able to find a manly black pair of Crocs that fit him – shoes are a big deal in Namibia, and there were plenty of stores to check, although we still feel lucky that there were actually several styles in his size – and foot complaints have eased. Of course, Alan had to eliminate all the Crocs logos by drawing over them with a black sharpie!
Katie update
Anyone who has tried to talk with Katie over the phone, or who meets her for the first time, would never believe how much she talks with her parents and friends. She tells extended stories about going to the post office, or about the lives of cormorants (catching fish, feeding their babies, going to sleep), or about going to school with Abby and Teddy. Sometimes she tells us about how she can shoot birds, or about how someone shot back at her but she didn’t die: This shooting legacy is either from playing with Fulbright kids who are older boys, or from my training one day at the beach when Alan was giving me a hard time for pretending beach wrack was different family members – what are the options for playing on the beach? Interpersonal relationships among mussel shells and lobster legs, building towers out of rocks, digging holes, or shooting with kelp stipes! Actually, I have to say that learning how to shoot seems incrementally better than learning about barbies, which has been Katie’s experience with older girls: I’ve run interference to encourage barbies to go on sailing trips, instead of repetitively going on dates and getting married.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Mercy’s fish cakes and further adventures with food in Namibia
We have discovered what are quite likely the best fish cakes on the planet, served at Mercy’s take-away and catering near the northern road out of Swakopmund. It’s a difficult decision whether to have potato salad or French fries (here “chips”) on the side, as both are exceptionally tasty. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss from the Sleep Book, “Mercy’s is grand for having a bite/ if you happen to be there with your appetite.” Mercy herself reports that she will look for a location closer to town, because most of the people walking by cannot afford to eat out. This was yet another reminder of the economic gap between visiting Americans and most Namibians, as we find it quite incredible that we can feed the two-and-a-half of us for about $US8.
We have been learning more southern African terms for food: Pawpaws are papayas, Peppadew is a slightly spicy red pepper, Naartjies are small Satsuma oranges (it’s citrus season here), Mahango is millet, a staple in parts of the north that we have not yet eaten, and maize of course is corn (we have had mixed experiences with fresh sweet corn, but continue to try it because the best ears are really good – again, it’s the late-summer/ fall season for it). Rusks are like biscotti, available in a variety of flavors (buttermilk, muesli) and chocolate-dipped for holidays. According to the Ouma Rusks package, they are “a unique crunchy snack,… a truly South African icon, sought after in many countries around the world. The ideal treat, they can be served any time of the day or night and are equally delicious with tea or coffee.” After passing by entire aisles of rusks in the grocery stores for the past several months, we made an impulse buy to try them… and we’ll buy more! Katie is in a phase where she loves to dip food, and JR (as mentioned before) is happy with any excuse to have more 5 Roses tea. Alan was excited to learn that the basic rusk recipe includes some coconut!
At least one mystery still remains with respect to Namibian food: Monkey gland sauce!
We have been learning more southern African terms for food: Pawpaws are papayas, Peppadew is a slightly spicy red pepper, Naartjies are small Satsuma oranges (it’s citrus season here), Mahango is millet, a staple in parts of the north that we have not yet eaten, and maize of course is corn (we have had mixed experiences with fresh sweet corn, but continue to try it because the best ears are really good – again, it’s the late-summer/ fall season for it). Rusks are like biscotti, available in a variety of flavors (buttermilk, muesli) and chocolate-dipped for holidays. According to the Ouma Rusks package, they are “a unique crunchy snack,… a truly South African icon, sought after in many countries around the world. The ideal treat, they can be served any time of the day or night and are equally delicious with tea or coffee.” After passing by entire aisles of rusks in the grocery stores for the past several months, we made an impulse buy to try them… and we’ll buy more! Katie is in a phase where she loves to dip food, and JR (as mentioned before) is happy with any excuse to have more 5 Roses tea. Alan was excited to learn that the basic rusk recipe includes some coconut!
At least one mystery still remains with respect to Namibian food: Monkey gland sauce!
April marine observations
We continue to have a superb time living on the beach and feeling a part of each day’s natural history. In the morning, we can tell which way the wind is blowing based on the location of the steady stream of cormorants traveling from guano platform to ocean. A million of them in a long line, they tend to fly into the wind. We have not yet determined the cues that cause them, on some days, to gather as a huge black blanket on the beach before heading out to sea. One day last week, we witnessed semelparous reproduction: A particular type of flying insect has been accumulating in ever greater numbers – Mr Klein calls them midges, and they are mosquito-sized, with no bite or sting, but a very dark lipid stain when smushed, highly attracted to light. One morning we found thousands of them stuck to the windows of Hotel California, interspersed with spiral egg cases about a cm long, surrounded in gelatinous mucus. By the end of the day, it was clear the insects had made the wrong choice for egg-laying: midges and mucus had all dried up. And we haven’t had to be nearly as vigilant about closing doors before turning on lights since then. Seasonal changes are also evident in the colors on the beach at low tide. When we arrived, the intertidal zone was red with Gracilariopsis (this identification tentative, but coincides with the monograph on Namibian algae published in the 90s). Now much of this has been reduced to perennial holdfasts, with a few female plants bumpy with carposporangia, and the intertidal zone is green with a flush of ulvoids. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that we have not yet determined the identity of the less than half dozen species of terrestrial plants living alongside us in the coastal desert. But, we know a bit about their natural history: Many of them accumulate mounds of wind-blown sand, where gerbils and ants then tunnel for security (and presumably food). Since our arrival here, many of these plants have been subtly flowering, more so on the down-wind (N) side. We can also see the dried remnants of annual plants that apparently completed their whole life cycle in the spring before we arrived.
We know that the tide has dropped, leaving dislodged mussels stranded on the beach, when we see the gulls flying up, dropping a large Perna, then following it to the ground to see if it has broken. The introduced clam in the salt pond, Ruditapes decussata (from the Channel Islands), was recently decimated by birds – hundreds of large shells lay broken around along the road. Alan has not been particularly impressed by gulls with such dysfunctional bills that they can’t even get into a dislodged bivalve, but Mr Klein says they’re actually quite smart: along areas of the coast with no hard substrate for dropping and cracking bivalves, they simply place Donax clams on the sand dunes until they gape from the heat and desiccation. While the gulls go for the large Perna mussels, turnstones seem to love the small Semimytilus. These have been washing up in clumps on the beach recently, probably dislodged by waves as the mussel beds have become thick, no longer attached to rock but to an accumulated layer of sand of several cm. It’s easy to see the pattern of patches within the mussel beds at low tide, and we suspect that, given the fast growth and small size of this mussel species, it would be possible to watch patch dynamics over months, rather than the years required by Paine and Levin on the Washington coast!
On the subject of mussels, I spent one illuminating afternoon looking for boring organisms in Perna. The idea came from our desire to begin testing top-down control of Polydora in the salt pond: what really caused the polychaete to essentially disappear in 2004? Was it isopods? Nemerteans? Since we have found so few Polydora in oyster shells – an infection rate of about 2% - we wondered if we could use spionids in mussel shells as a surrogate, then test to see if either isopods or nemerteans caused mortality. We know from walking along the beach that the wrack is full of bored mussels (you know, riddled with holes. You can’t be the other kind of bored when you’re dead!).
So, on a fair to middling low tide, JR walked down to the rocks by the Salt works, dressed in my normal Namibian field gear: bathing suit, wrap-around skirt, Crocs, wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves (it’s either that or a lot of sunscreen). The first thing I noticed was that the upper limit of Perna was just barely above the waves, which is not unusual given the rather small tidal amplitude, just a bit over 1 m. The second thing I noticed was that Perna at its upper limit is not bored, but instead seems to be sand-scoured except at its growing edge, sometimes to the point of having a concave outer shell surface. Finally, I found a few large mussels rolling around in a tidepool that had apparently been dislodged from lower down: they were covered with erect bryozoan epiphytes, red tufts of algae, and obviously bored. I put these in a bit of water in my bucket and carried them off hopefully to the ‘scopes at the hatchery, then spent the next 3 hours noticing a third thing: Most of the eroded burrows in Perna are full of phoronids!
For those of you not completely versed in marine biodiversity, I’ll simply state that Polydora is a polychaete annelid, a segmented worm, in a family characterized by the presence of two long palps on the head. I think I saw 2 long palps once in 15 shells, but was unable to extract any more – and in any case it may not even have been a boring spionid, but rather one that builds its tube in sediment. In contrast, phoronids are in an entirely separate invertebrate phylum. They are soft-bodied, unsegmented worms, with a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles on their head – this headdress made them quite unmistakable as soon as I found a shell that still contained live individuals. But then the next question: Did the phoronids make the tubes, or just occupy someone else’s burrow? Our satellite internet access at the beach came in handy once again, as I was able to search on “shell-boring phoronid” and learn that one of the 17 species of phoronids IN THE WORLD – and the smallest one, at that – makes burrows in mollusc shells. All the evidence points towards Namibian subtidal Perna perna full of Phoronis ovalis. It has been reported from a different Perna species in New Zealand, as well as from abalone in Chile. As far as we can tell from beach wrack, only one of the 4 mussel species on this coast hosts Phoronis ovalis, and we gather they are not a problem in aquaculture here. I guess that is good news for the oyster growers, but it puts another hold on our quest to discover the mystery of the missing Polydora.
Another quest we have set ourselves is a better understanding of Venerupis corrugatus, the native littleneck or steamer clam on this coast. We heard early on that this clam was ubiquitous, and indeed we’ve found it in mussel beds, intermixed with intertidal polychaetes, and washed up next to the Walvis Bay yacht club. Most impressively, we saw tiny (1-2 mm) individuals at incredible densities fouling the oyster culture gear in Walvis Bay, apparently a recent recruitment event at exactly the same time that so many oysters were dying in March! Two weeks later, the oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay had clams around a cm long. This suggested to us that the native clam might be particularly well-adapted to survive low oxygen conditions and grow rapidly, perhaps an untapped aquaculture option! So, we tasted some “big” clams (they seem to get not much larger than 3 cm) with one of our oyster-growing friends and can now pronounce them delicious. How about a new market for Benguela clams?
Well, even though Venerupis corrugatus seems to weather much of what nature dishes out to it, it’s not very resistant to science… or perhaps to the blunders of curious scientists. We collected around 3000 of them in late March from oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay. They probably got a little bit of initial mistreatment that was not our fault: a freshwater rinse, and a 1-hour car ride in a small tub of water. Then, we distributed the clams into 3 sand or gravel-filled trays and watched them burrow in – at least most of them. We had to leave for Windhoek soon after that, so anchored the trays in a salt pond canal… that reached nearly 30C due to a series of bright, hot days. Half of the clams died. When we returned from Windhoek, we placed the trays back in the hatchery tanks, where another 50% died over several days. Then, we anchored the trays in a different, cooler part of the salt pond canal, just where the water is pumped in from the ocean. Over the next few days, the trays silted up and sank, with another half of the clams dying. However, by this time the surviving clams averaged 15 mm, and we had found live clams throughout the canal that had recruited and grown on their own. This gave us the perfect opportunity to set up our first experiment (as opposed to simply measuring conditions in different locations): we planted out the surviving clams into PVC rings embedded in the sediment, then put bird/fish exclosures around half and cage “controls” (just 2 sides) around the others. Because greater flamingos feed on invertebrates in the sediment, and a variety of waders (curlews, stilts, sandpipers, lapwings) probe for food, we think that these cages may allow us to document their ecological impact on infaunal communities. It’s so exciting to do a flamingo exclosure! And so nice not to have to accommodate 3-meter tides (as in any tideflat exclosure experiment in Willapa Bay) – in fact, the water barely goes up and down depending on how vigorously the pumps are working at the inlet.This experiment went up about 3 weeks ago as a “pilot” to see what would happen to structures – 2 exclosures were apparently trampled by birds, perhaps invisible to them on a dark night; and 1 exclosure (so far) has been gnawed by a hyena! Perfect evidence of the importance of replication.
We know that the tide has dropped, leaving dislodged mussels stranded on the beach, when we see the gulls flying up, dropping a large Perna, then following it to the ground to see if it has broken. The introduced clam in the salt pond, Ruditapes decussata (from the Channel Islands), was recently decimated by birds – hundreds of large shells lay broken around along the road. Alan has not been particularly impressed by gulls with such dysfunctional bills that they can’t even get into a dislodged bivalve, but Mr Klein says they’re actually quite smart: along areas of the coast with no hard substrate for dropping and cracking bivalves, they simply place Donax clams on the sand dunes until they gape from the heat and desiccation. While the gulls go for the large Perna mussels, turnstones seem to love the small Semimytilus. These have been washing up in clumps on the beach recently, probably dislodged by waves as the mussel beds have become thick, no longer attached to rock but to an accumulated layer of sand of several cm. It’s easy to see the pattern of patches within the mussel beds at low tide, and we suspect that, given the fast growth and small size of this mussel species, it would be possible to watch patch dynamics over months, rather than the years required by Paine and Levin on the Washington coast!
On the subject of mussels, I spent one illuminating afternoon looking for boring organisms in Perna. The idea came from our desire to begin testing top-down control of Polydora in the salt pond: what really caused the polychaete to essentially disappear in 2004? Was it isopods? Nemerteans? Since we have found so few Polydora in oyster shells – an infection rate of about 2% - we wondered if we could use spionids in mussel shells as a surrogate, then test to see if either isopods or nemerteans caused mortality. We know from walking along the beach that the wrack is full of bored mussels (you know, riddled with holes. You can’t be the other kind of bored when you’re dead!).
So, on a fair to middling low tide, JR walked down to the rocks by the Salt works, dressed in my normal Namibian field gear: bathing suit, wrap-around skirt, Crocs, wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves (it’s either that or a lot of sunscreen). The first thing I noticed was that the upper limit of Perna was just barely above the waves, which is not unusual given the rather small tidal amplitude, just a bit over 1 m. The second thing I noticed was that Perna at its upper limit is not bored, but instead seems to be sand-scoured except at its growing edge, sometimes to the point of having a concave outer shell surface. Finally, I found a few large mussels rolling around in a tidepool that had apparently been dislodged from lower down: they were covered with erect bryozoan epiphytes, red tufts of algae, and obviously bored. I put these in a bit of water in my bucket and carried them off hopefully to the ‘scopes at the hatchery, then spent the next 3 hours noticing a third thing: Most of the eroded burrows in Perna are full of phoronids!
For those of you not completely versed in marine biodiversity, I’ll simply state that Polydora is a polychaete annelid, a segmented worm, in a family characterized by the presence of two long palps on the head. I think I saw 2 long palps once in 15 shells, but was unable to extract any more – and in any case it may not even have been a boring spionid, but rather one that builds its tube in sediment. In contrast, phoronids are in an entirely separate invertebrate phylum. They are soft-bodied, unsegmented worms, with a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles on their head – this headdress made them quite unmistakable as soon as I found a shell that still contained live individuals. But then the next question: Did the phoronids make the tubes, or just occupy someone else’s burrow? Our satellite internet access at the beach came in handy once again, as I was able to search on “shell-boring phoronid” and learn that one of the 17 species of phoronids IN THE WORLD – and the smallest one, at that – makes burrows in mollusc shells. All the evidence points towards Namibian subtidal Perna perna full of Phoronis ovalis. It has been reported from a different Perna species in New Zealand, as well as from abalone in Chile. As far as we can tell from beach wrack, only one of the 4 mussel species on this coast hosts Phoronis ovalis, and we gather they are not a problem in aquaculture here. I guess that is good news for the oyster growers, but it puts another hold on our quest to discover the mystery of the missing Polydora.
Another quest we have set ourselves is a better understanding of Venerupis corrugatus, the native littleneck or steamer clam on this coast. We heard early on that this clam was ubiquitous, and indeed we’ve found it in mussel beds, intermixed with intertidal polychaetes, and washed up next to the Walvis Bay yacht club. Most impressively, we saw tiny (1-2 mm) individuals at incredible densities fouling the oyster culture gear in Walvis Bay, apparently a recent recruitment event at exactly the same time that so many oysters were dying in March! Two weeks later, the oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay had clams around a cm long. This suggested to us that the native clam might be particularly well-adapted to survive low oxygen conditions and grow rapidly, perhaps an untapped aquaculture option! So, we tasted some “big” clams (they seem to get not much larger than 3 cm) with one of our oyster-growing friends and can now pronounce them delicious. How about a new market for Benguela clams?
Well, even though Venerupis corrugatus seems to weather much of what nature dishes out to it, it’s not very resistant to science… or perhaps to the blunders of curious scientists. We collected around 3000 of them in late March from oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay. They probably got a little bit of initial mistreatment that was not our fault: a freshwater rinse, and a 1-hour car ride in a small tub of water. Then, we distributed the clams into 3 sand or gravel-filled trays and watched them burrow in – at least most of them. We had to leave for Windhoek soon after that, so anchored the trays in a salt pond canal… that reached nearly 30C due to a series of bright, hot days. Half of the clams died. When we returned from Windhoek, we placed the trays back in the hatchery tanks, where another 50% died over several days. Then, we anchored the trays in a different, cooler part of the salt pond canal, just where the water is pumped in from the ocean. Over the next few days, the trays silted up and sank, with another half of the clams dying. However, by this time the surviving clams averaged 15 mm, and we had found live clams throughout the canal that had recruited and grown on their own. This gave us the perfect opportunity to set up our first experiment (as opposed to simply measuring conditions in different locations): we planted out the surviving clams into PVC rings embedded in the sediment, then put bird/fish exclosures around half and cage “controls” (just 2 sides) around the others. Because greater flamingos feed on invertebrates in the sediment, and a variety of waders (curlews, stilts, sandpipers, lapwings) probe for food, we think that these cages may allow us to document their ecological impact on infaunal communities. It’s so exciting to do a flamingo exclosure! And so nice not to have to accommodate 3-meter tides (as in any tideflat exclosure experiment in Willapa Bay) – in fact, the water barely goes up and down depending on how vigorously the pumps are working at the inlet.This experiment went up about 3 weeks ago as a “pilot” to see what would happen to structures – 2 exclosures were apparently trampled by birds, perhaps invisible to them on a dark night; and 1 exclosure (so far) has been gnawed by a hyena! Perfect evidence of the importance of replication.
Panther Bake Marine Lab
In our 2nd letter to the Kleins/ Salt Company, we asked about the possibility of putting a trailer (here “caravan”) at our camping spot near the oyster hatchery. As the weather has grown cooler and damper, we have moved increasingly into the hatchery, especially for meals and, sigh, long stints on our computers. The hatchery is certainly warmer – a combination of wind protection and heated water – but also humid and a little cramped due to tanks, filters, raceways, and odds and ends of production and research equipment. Since April 6, the tanks have been full of Ostrea edulis larvae: one of the oysters that Alan collected from the salt pond must have been brooding, and he has since been father to 10s of thousands – feeding them microalgae from the guano pond, adjusting their temperature, and changing their water regularly. But the hatchery is not really a place to hang out during the winter. The Kleins were happy to allow some more permanent camping structures, so we started looking at a variety of options: The few used trailers that Alan priced were around $N70,000, out of our range. We were excited for a while about products offered by the Container Company, which provides shipping containers for all sorts of purposes, complete with doors and windows if you wish. But they too were a bit expensive. Meanwhile, the Kleins were also looking around for housing options, and they have been much more successful! First, they found a contractor to build a 5x4 m room on one side of the hatchery – as an extreme example of how cheap some materials and labor are, the entire concrete block building cost $N7000. About 7 people worked on it for nearly a week. Okay, so it’s not exactly square, and mortar was used generously to get the window and door to fit…. The Kleins have outfitted it with spare parts from their properties – a bay window with a bay view, work table and sink, and desk. It will be a fantastic place to use microscopes (less rusty than the hatchery sauna), work on papers, and watch the winter weather on the coast, while keeping an eye on any larvae that we can foster overwinter. So – there is now a new marine lab with running seawater on the Namibian coast, just meters away from some exceptional rocky intertidal areas, close to the salt ponds and bird sanctuary! We can easily see that there is a lifetime of questions to be answered here.
The Kleins also rescued a vintage 70s caravan from a neighbor’s backyard, painted the outside, cleaned the spiders out of the inside, and have provided us with a dining and living room. It’s about 2x3 m. The windows at each end prop open, and a bit of the top pops up, which allows Alan to look outside (and stand up straight!). The 2-burner stove seems heavenly after cooking on the Bluet (hunched over one burner), as does sitting at a table to eat. I guess after a month and a half and a little cold wind, camping has lost some of its luster. Katie has already fallen in love with the caravan (dubbed Hotel California by the Kleins), literally crying when it was hauled away to a safer storage place while we were in Windhoek. We owe the Kleins for many things – stimulating conversations, access to field sites, several fresh fish to grill on the braai (=barbecue in Namibia), the key to the hot shower near the Seabird Guano (Pty) building, and now these truly generous acts to help us be comfortable and productive. Well, the only drawback to the new lab is that it is possible to get locked inside the hatchery – this happened one night when I went back in to work on curriculum documents. I kept thinking that Alan would come rescue me as soon as Katie awoke and needed her mom to get back to sleep, which always happens by 10 pm… or at least by midnight… although sometimes she can sleep through until 2 am… and apparently Alan can pat her back to sleep until 3:30 am, when he at last opened the door and wondered when I was coming to bed. I was only too glad to do so.
So there it is: Panther Bake Marine Lab. Panther Bake should be pronounced in German, and Panther was the name of the German ship that placed a light (bake) at that site many decades ago. The light is now gone, but the name remains to grace the salt “mining” area and other activities on that stretch of coast.
The Kleins also rescued a vintage 70s caravan from a neighbor’s backyard, painted the outside, cleaned the spiders out of the inside, and have provided us with a dining and living room. It’s about 2x3 m. The windows at each end prop open, and a bit of the top pops up, which allows Alan to look outside (and stand up straight!). The 2-burner stove seems heavenly after cooking on the Bluet (hunched over one burner), as does sitting at a table to eat. I guess after a month and a half and a little cold wind, camping has lost some of its luster. Katie has already fallen in love with the caravan (dubbed Hotel California by the Kleins), literally crying when it was hauled away to a safer storage place while we were in Windhoek. We owe the Kleins for many things – stimulating conversations, access to field sites, several fresh fish to grill on the braai (=barbecue in Namibia), the key to the hot shower near the Seabird Guano (Pty) building, and now these truly generous acts to help us be comfortable and productive. Well, the only drawback to the new lab is that it is possible to get locked inside the hatchery – this happened one night when I went back in to work on curriculum documents. I kept thinking that Alan would come rescue me as soon as Katie awoke and needed her mom to get back to sleep, which always happens by 10 pm… or at least by midnight… although sometimes she can sleep through until 2 am… and apparently Alan can pat her back to sleep until 3:30 am, when he at last opened the door and wondered when I was coming to bed. I was only too glad to do so.
So there it is: Panther Bake Marine Lab. Panther Bake should be pronounced in German, and Panther was the name of the German ship that placed a light (bake) at that site many decades ago. The light is now gone, but the name remains to grace the salt “mining” area and other activities on that stretch of coast.
Namibian Business Innovation Center
AT is one of 2 advisors for NBIC, which the Finnish government may fund for Polytechnic to foster… business innovation! He participated in a 3-day brainstorming session Apr 2-4 (while K and J played with the local kids and spent an enjoyable morning at the craft center selecting handmade gifts to send to cousin Emma for her 6th birthday). And found it somewhat frustrating for the same reasons that have puzzled us about development of other programs here as well: The plans emphasize buildings and outcomes, not the people who actually have to carry out the plans. Our epiphany was this: we are essentially a business innovation center ourselves. Alan’s analysis of the high mortality of oysters in Walvis Bay has had the growers buzzing for weeks, considering ways to “harden” oysters. After all, wrote Alan, Crassostrea gigas is essentially an intertidal species, and hardening the spat is an essential step in its culture everywhere in the world. In Japan where it is native, scallop shells are hung in Sendai Bay for recruitment, then moved to intertidal racks in a small cove over winter, then moved back to Sendai Bay where the oysters grow in clusters to harvest size. In Washington, oyster shells are packed in mesh bags to receive recruits, and these bags are stacked in piles in the intertidal zone over winter, before being broken apart and scattered for the oysters to grow on bottom. In contrast, hardening has not been part of oyster culture in Walvis Bay. There, oysters remain submerged from the time of settlement, removed for perhaps a day every 6 weeks for cleaning, which chips the thin, subtidal, fast-growing shell. These chipped individuals certainly cannot close up against toxic conditions, and even the intact ones have poor abilities to close. Hardening could help these oysters through some periods like those experienced in March. The oyster growers here are getting other help and advice as well, about triploids, clams, phytoplankton, … and all out of the back of our Kombi! The point is, you don’t get a business innovation center (or a marine lab, or a degree program) through a building and a plan on paper. You get it with qualified people.
It’s funny to me that I regularly give Alan a hard time about not writing up his scientific papers, which on average 7 people ever read (a scientific fact!). But, many more than 7 people have read his oyster mortality report, and they’re actually experimenting with some new practices as a result!
It’s funny to me that I regularly give Alan a hard time about not writing up his scientific papers, which on average 7 people ever read (a scientific fact!). But, many more than 7 people have read his oyster mortality report, and they’re actually experimenting with some new practices as a result!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Into a new decade
JR turned 40 on March 20. She celebrated at Spitzkoppe by climbing rocks, hunting bugs, and swimming in a pool of water caught in a granite crack. (Meanwhile, there was a second sulfide eruption on the coast…) We also ate our first real Namibian meal prepared at the community rest camp – very tough goat, rice, creamy white/pink beans, canned peas with some sort of mayo-like topping, sliced cucumber and tomatoes, and pink gravy. I got a great gift of a hand-crafted mussel shell necklace (hmm, how many of those shells are from introduced Mytilus galloprovincialis? It’s great to be an invasion biologist wearing that mystery all the time.), and – best gift of all – had time to complete and submit a manuscript.
At 40 years and 1 day, I walked outside at night barefoot, stubbed my toe on some cement, and took my toenail clean off. Now, why is it that one says “clean off”? It was not clean, especially cutting the last skin that held the dangling nail, and watching the wound ooze for days. Ouch! Minor emergency. Alan assured me I should be grateful I didn’t step on a scorpion and require medical treatment on a holiday weekend.
At 40 years and 1 day, I walked outside at night barefoot, stubbed my toe on some cement, and took my toenail clean off. Now, why is it that one says “clean off”? It was not clean, especially cutting the last skin that held the dangling nail, and watching the wound ooze for days. Ouch! Minor emergency. Alan assured me I should be grateful I didn’t step on a scorpion and require medical treatment on a holiday weekend.
Sulfide eruption!
The past three weeks have been devastating for the oyster growers on Namibia’s coast at Walvis Bay. A large phytoplankton bloom, which turned the water into a thick chocolate of spiky dinoflagellates, was followed by a sulfide eruption, when the toxic gas that accumulates in the sediment as a by-product of anaerobic decomposition bubbled up. Hydrogen sulfide is itself toxic, and it reacts with oxygen in seawater, causing hypoxia. The color of the water turns an almost tropical aquamarine, but accompanied by the stench of rotting eggs. Close on the heels of this sulfide eruption came another phytoplankton bloom. Growers are reporting losses of literally millions of oysters, from 25% to more than 70% of their crops. They have little buffer for these losses, since many of the companies are just 2 or 3 years old, and people were counting on the next harvest to pay off debts from start-up costs. Some companies will probably fold altogether.
Oysters are not the only organisms that suffered from the toxic environmental conditions of the past few weeks. From 3/9 to 3/11 we visited rocky intertidal sites around Swakopmund during reasonably good low tides. Initially, we were so excited by what we saw: spiny lobsters, hundreds of them, wiggling their antennae from under any available intertidal ledge, or just hiding in the algae. “Wow”, I thought, “I’ve never seen so many intertidal predators in one place. This must be what it’s like to visit a “pristine” beach!” To the contrary: The lobsters had gathered there in hordes to escape the low-oxygen conditions of deeper water. And the beaches were hardly pristine, as people descended from above to strip as many of the easily-accessible lobsters as they were able to fit into mesh bags, lunch boxes, or plastic shopping bags. We saw some seasoned lobster-hunters in wet suits and gloves, but also some unusual suspects – businessmen in collar shirts and loafers, squabbling couples – all taking advantage of the coincidence of low tides and low oxygen. All sorts of regulations were violated – including catch limits (people would collect some, then stand in a parking lot to sell what they’d collected, then collect more) and size limits (lobsters are not supposed to be kept below 65 mm carapace length, but few people were bothering to measure, justifying that these lobsters were going to die anyway). Any rock small enough to be lifted had been overturned and not turned back. Solitary antennae washed back and forth in the waves and accumulated in the wrack on the beach, as people latched on to the most obvious, but frail, parts of the lobsters to catch them. Watching the interaction between people and these beautiful, vulnerable, probably keystone creatures sickened me.
Meanwhile, many other organisms were also suffering, but primarily from the environmental conditions, not from humans. Mobile species tended to move into the intertidal zone, notably small sharks and large octopus. Sessile species often succumbed: the first to go were the soft-bodied “red bait” (large Pyura ascidians), which I initially thought were horse dung on the beach; many of the lower mussels also died, and then dragged their epiphytes on shore, including kelp and bryozoans. On the oyster longlines in Walvis Bay, epiphytic hydroids had died and discolored, but interestingly the newly-settled native clams were still alive amongst the hydroid strands, even if just a few mm long. On the beach south of Swakopmund, it was clear that many fish had also been unable to escape the low-oxygen conditions: species included the serpent eel (pencil thin and more than a foot long with a beaky snout), clingfish known as rocksuckers, and many more that we didn’t take the time to identify. Death and devastation, the beach littered with bodies – we had never seen such a tangle of the ocean’s denizens cast up on shore like this.
This year’s environmental conditions have been strange. Of course, we have no grounds for personal comparison, but we read the newspapers and we ask around. Even though the inland rains started late (late January rather than November), they have been torrential: reservoirs are overflowing, rivers are flooding, and agricultural land and human infrastructure are under water. The ocean has been warmer than normal for 4 months, with temperatures well above 20C, compared to rare excursions above 18C in most years. Based on reading ahead of time, we expected strong and persistent southwest winds on the coast, but we have only experienced a scattered few days of these winds, with the more common pattern to be W or NW or simply weak winds. We do not know – in fact, no one knows, although there are many hypotheses – any clear relationship between this year’s weather and the devastation for coastal organisms. However, 2006 and 2008 were high-rain years for Namibia and also brought large sulfide eruptions. The weather patterns that bring rain could also trigger sulfide (directly from freshwater inflow to the coast, or from some joint meteorological conditions). We do know that the unusually warm ocean temperatures stem from the lack of upwelling, because little deep cold water comes to the surface, and the warm Angola current pushes south. Earlier this year, these warm water conditions were also associated with oyster mortalities, even before the blooms and eruptions. We also know that the winds determine the severity of sulfide eruptions in Walvis Bay, and the absence of SW winds to push the water offshore allowed phytoplankton or sulfide to accumulate within the bay.
Today, we participated in an emergency meeting of the oyster growers to discuss combined responses to their losses. This was an opportunity to collate information about the spatial and temporal patterns of mortality. Did oysters die in response to toxic phytoplankton, Vibrio bacteria after the phytoplankton crashed, or due to sulfide and low oxygen? (Unfortunately, this seems impossible to resolve because so many environmental changes happened simultaneously, and oysters can buffer themselves somewhat by closing up for a while.) Were oysters closer to the ocean/ mouth of Walvis Bay buffered from mortality because they received some clean water advected with tides? (From what we have heard, this appears to be the case.) Did oysters deeper in the water suffer higher mortality? (This also seems to be the case, consistent with a decline in oxygen concentration from the surface to depth.) We heard that oysters suffered higher mortality if recently cleaned of fouling organisms, and we suspect that this is because cleaning these fast-growing subtidal oysters chips their shells, so they cannot protect themselves by closing up against poor environmental conditions. So what could be done to toughen them up? Did the native clams survive as epibionts on the baskets throughout the bay, and if so, why not cultivate them? (They taste fine steamed in butter and garlic; personal observation).
The oysters growing onshore in the salt ponds at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund have weathered the recent ocean conditions with little trouble, except perhaps mortality of oyster larvae in the hatchery associated with the initial phytoplankton bloom. Because ocean water is pumped vigorously up into the salt ponds, it is well aerated by the time it reaches the oysters.
This has been an awful, but awesome event to witness as an ecologist – as a farmer, it would just be awful. I wonder if living in Africa for a year is a bit like having a terminal illness. Each seasonal event, each visited scene will never be experienced again.
Oysters are not the only organisms that suffered from the toxic environmental conditions of the past few weeks. From 3/9 to 3/11 we visited rocky intertidal sites around Swakopmund during reasonably good low tides. Initially, we were so excited by what we saw: spiny lobsters, hundreds of them, wiggling their antennae from under any available intertidal ledge, or just hiding in the algae. “Wow”, I thought, “I’ve never seen so many intertidal predators in one place. This must be what it’s like to visit a “pristine” beach!” To the contrary: The lobsters had gathered there in hordes to escape the low-oxygen conditions of deeper water. And the beaches were hardly pristine, as people descended from above to strip as many of the easily-accessible lobsters as they were able to fit into mesh bags, lunch boxes, or plastic shopping bags. We saw some seasoned lobster-hunters in wet suits and gloves, but also some unusual suspects – businessmen in collar shirts and loafers, squabbling couples – all taking advantage of the coincidence of low tides and low oxygen. All sorts of regulations were violated – including catch limits (people would collect some, then stand in a parking lot to sell what they’d collected, then collect more) and size limits (lobsters are not supposed to be kept below 65 mm carapace length, but few people were bothering to measure, justifying that these lobsters were going to die anyway). Any rock small enough to be lifted had been overturned and not turned back. Solitary antennae washed back and forth in the waves and accumulated in the wrack on the beach, as people latched on to the most obvious, but frail, parts of the lobsters to catch them. Watching the interaction between people and these beautiful, vulnerable, probably keystone creatures sickened me.
Meanwhile, many other organisms were also suffering, but primarily from the environmental conditions, not from humans. Mobile species tended to move into the intertidal zone, notably small sharks and large octopus. Sessile species often succumbed: the first to go were the soft-bodied “red bait” (large Pyura ascidians), which I initially thought were horse dung on the beach; many of the lower mussels also died, and then dragged their epiphytes on shore, including kelp and bryozoans. On the oyster longlines in Walvis Bay, epiphytic hydroids had died and discolored, but interestingly the newly-settled native clams were still alive amongst the hydroid strands, even if just a few mm long. On the beach south of Swakopmund, it was clear that many fish had also been unable to escape the low-oxygen conditions: species included the serpent eel (pencil thin and more than a foot long with a beaky snout), clingfish known as rocksuckers, and many more that we didn’t take the time to identify. Death and devastation, the beach littered with bodies – we had never seen such a tangle of the ocean’s denizens cast up on shore like this.
This year’s environmental conditions have been strange. Of course, we have no grounds for personal comparison, but we read the newspapers and we ask around. Even though the inland rains started late (late January rather than November), they have been torrential: reservoirs are overflowing, rivers are flooding, and agricultural land and human infrastructure are under water. The ocean has been warmer than normal for 4 months, with temperatures well above 20C, compared to rare excursions above 18C in most years. Based on reading ahead of time, we expected strong and persistent southwest winds on the coast, but we have only experienced a scattered few days of these winds, with the more common pattern to be W or NW or simply weak winds. We do not know – in fact, no one knows, although there are many hypotheses – any clear relationship between this year’s weather and the devastation for coastal organisms. However, 2006 and 2008 were high-rain years for Namibia and also brought large sulfide eruptions. The weather patterns that bring rain could also trigger sulfide (directly from freshwater inflow to the coast, or from some joint meteorological conditions). We do know that the unusually warm ocean temperatures stem from the lack of upwelling, because little deep cold water comes to the surface, and the warm Angola current pushes south. Earlier this year, these warm water conditions were also associated with oyster mortalities, even before the blooms and eruptions. We also know that the winds determine the severity of sulfide eruptions in Walvis Bay, and the absence of SW winds to push the water offshore allowed phytoplankton or sulfide to accumulate within the bay.
Today, we participated in an emergency meeting of the oyster growers to discuss combined responses to their losses. This was an opportunity to collate information about the spatial and temporal patterns of mortality. Did oysters die in response to toxic phytoplankton, Vibrio bacteria after the phytoplankton crashed, or due to sulfide and low oxygen? (Unfortunately, this seems impossible to resolve because so many environmental changes happened simultaneously, and oysters can buffer themselves somewhat by closing up for a while.) Were oysters closer to the ocean/ mouth of Walvis Bay buffered from mortality because they received some clean water advected with tides? (From what we have heard, this appears to be the case.) Did oysters deeper in the water suffer higher mortality? (This also seems to be the case, consistent with a decline in oxygen concentration from the surface to depth.) We heard that oysters suffered higher mortality if recently cleaned of fouling organisms, and we suspect that this is because cleaning these fast-growing subtidal oysters chips their shells, so they cannot protect themselves by closing up against poor environmental conditions. So what could be done to toughen them up? Did the native clams survive as epibionts on the baskets throughout the bay, and if so, why not cultivate them? (They taste fine steamed in butter and garlic; personal observation).
The oysters growing onshore in the salt ponds at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund have weathered the recent ocean conditions with little trouble, except perhaps mortality of oyster larvae in the hatchery associated with the initial phytoplankton bloom. Because ocean water is pumped vigorously up into the salt ponds, it is well aerated by the time it reaches the oysters.
This has been an awful, but awesome event to witness as an ecologist – as a farmer, it would just be awful. I wonder if living in Africa for a year is a bit like having a terminal illness. Each seasonal event, each visited scene will never be experienced again.
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