Jen and Alan in Namibia

Departure

2008-12-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

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

Himba village

2008-12-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

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.

Science in restricted territory

2008-12-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

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.

Go Sandboarding!

2008-11-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Chicken Run!

2008-10-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

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!

A change in the weather (and some more food comments)

2008-10-29T13:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Independence Day (a belated report)

2008-10-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Treesleeper

2008-08-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Goat head for breakfast

2008-08-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

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.

African elephant encounters

2008-06-16T03:26:00.000-07:00

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!

Concrete

2008-06-16T03:25:00.000-07:00

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….

Mother and Father in Namibia

2008-06-16T03:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Flu season

2008-05-02T02:02:00.000-07:00

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!

Katie update

2008-05-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Mercy’s fish cakes and further adventures with food in Namibia

2008-05-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

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!

April marine observations

2008-05-02T01:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Panther Bake Marine Lab

2008-05-02T01:58:00.001-07:00

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.

Namibian Business Innovation Center

2008-05-02T01:57:00.000-07:00

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!

Into a new decade

2008-03-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Sulfide eruption!

2008-03-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Month 3.1 trip to coast

2008-03-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

2/27-3/7 2008
We’re spending a lot of time with Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss these days, consequently primed with rhymes for many occasions. For those of you who haven’t read “If I ran the zoo” recently, I’ll remind you that young Gerald McGrew imagines a whole lot of improbable and wondrous animals to populate his zoo: 10-footed lions, elephant-cats, the world’s largest bird called the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, Joats, Gootches, Palooskis, Nerkles, even Nerds, and the “bustard, who only eats custard with sauce made of mustard.” But there really are bustards… and now we’ve seen them! The largest species, the kori bustard, could reach the back of an ostrich (and lives in much the same open semi-arid habitat), has a dandy crest, and can fly at the speed of an underpowered combi (VW van) (pers. obs.). We’re not sure if it eats mustard or custard. Some other amazing birds we feel lucky to have seen: hornbills, korhaans (2 species so far, just slightly smaller than bustards, also long-legged desert denizens), vultures, pied (black and white) hawks, and of course flamingos, hundreds of them every day at our study site. Did you know that flamingos have voices similar to geese?

On this trip to the coast, we again took the tar road until the dirt cut-off to Henties Bay that skirts the Spitzkoppe. Two months ago, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that a “desert” landscape could look so lush – it seems to continue to green with summer rains. The “ah-ha” moment was seeing the patches of ground along the road that had appeared as desolate as “war zones” in January: bushes and small trees had been mercilessly uprooted and piled together sort of like slash, leaving just bare dirt behind. But now, these clearings are knee-high in grasses and forbs, gently waving in the wind. There is a sweet smell in the air. And one grass is particularly beautiful, with silvery seed heads nodding.
Even eastern areas of the Namib desert, areas previously seen with tufts of brown grass, now show green. The cows are beginning to lose their angular, ribbed appearance; goats are filling out; and grazing donkeys seem very happy. Just a note about donkeys: It’s taken us a while to realize that donkey carts remain an important means of transportation, particularly in rural areas. Teams of 2, 3, or 4 (sometimes combined with horses) can be seen traveling on dirt roads or along the margins of the tar roads in parallel tracks. Some of the donkeys look a little raw, underfed, and overworked. But they definitely are powered by renewable energy!
Into the western Namib, however, the dominant color is sandy beige-red-brown. Although we have personally witnessed 3 precipitation events on the coast this year, it is still not enough (rain, soil, seed bank?) to make obvious changes. Much of the vegetation consists of sparsely-spaced dark clumps of sand-holding plants. I always initially see these shapes as potential animals! But the animals of the desert look like sand and shimmering heat and are cryptic until startled and in motion.
There has been fantastic weather to observe from afar while camping on the beach near The Salt Company: Semicircular double rainbows, from rain caught by the setting sun. Just past dark, the lightning begins inland, so far away that we rarely hear thunder, sometimes lighting up a sheet of rain, or billowing clouds, or just streaking down to the ground. This is a perfect storm for Katie, who enjoys the fireworks but is troubled by the rumble of thunder.
We had only one uncomfortable night camping this time: the night was still and hot, like a steamer inside the Combi. In the absence of an ocean breeze, flies of all shapes and sizes and speeds gathered on our food and found their way into our sleeping area. When a bit of wind did blow, it was from the east, putting us downwind of the guano platform and directly in the path of the scent of 10s of 1000s of cormorants. We now call this platform the “stinky bird place”, although the proprietor says you get used to it: it’s the scent of money. In the middle of the night, Alan opened the sliding door on the side of the van and spent two hours on the alert, occasionally flashing the headlamp into the eyes of circling hyenas. (Okay, they probably weren’t really circling. That was just for African effect. They were hanging out at the fence line, although we know from their tracks that they do sometimes pass within a few meters of the Combi at night.)

Over the weekend, we did a self-guided tour of all the salt ponds, ranging in salinity from seawater to salt. From those with any life in them, we collected algal and water samples. For those of you with some marine training, we can report finding Dunaliella, ciliates, rotifers, ostracods, Ulva (was Enteromorpha), and a monoseriate, branched green alga, possibly Cladophora. For those of you who read any comics as kids, you’ll be happy to know that we found sea monkeys in the wild: brine shrimp by the millions!

With a month of sampling and thinking about the salt ponds, we finally felt ready to write down observations and questions for the Kleins. That document initiated a 3-hour conversation and confirmed that we can do a variety of experiments in the oyster pond, camp near their hatchery, and use their amazing workshop, which is an enormous room filled with Swedish machinery, much of which was unrecognizable to JR, but AT says they could basically build a motor from scratch in there. We used their drill press to drill tiles and watched them build a clam rake to Alan’s specifications. They do a lot of their own machinery repair, plus make such things as stainless steel nails (the correct 316 type for the guano platform can’t be acquired locally). With access to this workshop and the first “real” hardware store we’ve found, we feel like we’ve almost made up for the absence of Jack’s Country Store at Willapa Bay.

Hooray! We set up our first research project, which will compare growth and resources used by oysters transplanted near the “ocean” and throughout 2 salt ponds. Here, we wonder how much nitrogen in the salt pond comes from birds vs. ocean. This is similar to work in Willapa, except at a much smaller spatial scale (30 ha pond). We epoxied 2 oyster species to 15x15 cm tiles (this size tile is used everywhere in conjunction with concrete for building). To deploy them throughout the pond, we borrowed a “research vessel” – small rowboat (the motorized boat used by the oyster workers seems to have a lawnmower motor attached to a horizontal 1 m rod with a propeller on the end – the propeller is lowered just barely into the shallow water). Alan stood waist-deep in water and calf-deep in anoxic sediment of biodeposits and mica, then used a mallet and steel rod to pound a small hole in the hard gypsum layer. Slip out the rod, slip in a mahogany pole, cable tie the tile to the pole, and one sample is done: we set out about 35. Oysters (Ostrea edulis) spawned on Mar. 7, making a cloud of sperm in the water – just like in all the pictures we’ve seen.

Deploying the tiles took the whole day, so the sun was setting by the time we set up camp, and we ate curry-in-a-bag in the dark. We had a visitor: a gerbil, distinguished by the dark tip to its tail (and the fact that there are no coastal mice). We’d seen lots of tracks, but this was the first individual in the flesh. Common, but interesting daytime visitors are Camponotus ants, about a cm long with 2 bright orange spots on their black velvet abdomen. These apparently can spray formic acid when irritated, so we’ve tried not to irritate them! At least one beetle takes advantage of the ants’ nasty reputation by being the same size and color, complete with 2 bright orange spots to mimic.

On Tuesday, Mar 4 we attended a Namibian Mariculture Association meeting and had a fun time comparing the markets, methods, and magnitudes of oyster culture in Walvis and Willapa Bays. Bottom line: there are really teeny tiny operations here, but they are all looking for access to the high-end oyster market (4-Rand oysters, worth slightly more than 50 cents apiece). No one sells shucked meat; lots sell frozen in the shell (we’re dubious). The Namibian growers have been focusing on selecting fast-growing oysters, so it was good to be able to pass along a broad consensus that selection for survival is much more important. On our way from the meeting in Walvis Bay to our “campsite” in Swakopmund, we saw evidence of a sulfide eruption: tropically-blue water just along the shore. What does this bode for their oysters? Only time will tell.

Week 7 trip to coast

2008-03-10T13:10:00.001-07:00

2/16-2/20 2008
On the drive to the coast by tar road, we again saw hundreds of wheeling kites – our bird book says this is a typical response to termite emergence. The kites appeared to be catching termites in their claws – each would periodically swing its legs forward and its head down, as if picking something off the talons. The talons certainly are not built for catching termites. We saw them up close because Alan picked up a stunned (and probably mortally wounded) bird that had been hit by a truck. The feet and claws reached well around his finger, with each talon more than a cm long and deadly pointed.

We exited the tar road to take the dirt “cut-off” to Henties Bay and stopped to campe at the community campsite at Spitzkoppe. Exactly our style. Very rustic campsites, spaced hundreds of m apart, nestled in spectacular rock formations. Up close, the Spitzkoppe rocks are conglomerates of small, rough pebbles, great for grip when you’re climbing upslope. Even Katie enjoyed the rock-climbing experience (and we saw no snakes, even though the adults fretted about them). We arrived just after a rain, and the air smelled of bay spice and moisture, birds were singing, and rock hyraxes – hundreds of them – whistled from caves and ledges. We fortuitously camped near an area with rock paintings – a lion, rhinoceros, and people were easily recognizable, but the technique of achieving red images on the rock face unclear. The most unexpected aspect of the camp was that “community” means it is indeed run by local people, rather than as a resort of relic colonialism. We stopped en route at one of the roadside stands where we selected a piece of aquamarine with black tourmaline to send to a rock-loving friend in the US. (Other options: garnet, sodalite, quartz, many more…) The stand included two additional pieces of architecture: a m-high hut made of branches angled to a point and daubed in manure (we assume, since sand clearly wouldn’t hold together, and clay is not available); and a slightly taller square cube with walls of soda and beer cans, strung in vertical columns.
On this trip, we went to the salt ponds on 2 days with Hilma and Magdalena (faculty and student at Poly, respectively), caught fish (tilapia, mullet), and discussed salt pond food webs and oyster production. Along the margins of the oyster pond, clams were gaping and dying – these are Manila clams introduced from Europe (but originally from Asia), also familiar to us because they are introduced in Washington. These clams bear some further study: their presence all around the pond indicates at least one successful recruitment event, but the strange size structure (no small clams) means that recruitment may not happen regularly. We suspect the clams were dying from unusually high temperatures and other stresses that contribute to “summer mortality”.

The trip was short because it was bookended by strategic planning meetings in Windhoek...

Transportation addendum

2008-03-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

In Namibia, lots of people walk. And people walk lots of places: school kids walk along the highway to get home; women walk with large sacks of grass on their head; people in blue pants and shirts – the characteristic sign of working class – make their way by foot (or packed into the back of pick-up trucks) from residence to job or return. The country has 2 million people and 70,000 cars, so lots of people go without. Given how much travel happens by foot, one might expect pedestrians to have the right of way, and drivers to be aware of foot traffic. Quite the contrary! It doesn’t matter your age, race, or how many small children you’re traveling with, if you’re on foot, you have to make sure you stay out of the way of cars and trucks, because they will not deviate from their path. Even crossing a street with a green light, the pedestrian has to yield to right or left hand turners, or risk being hit. Actually, some of our closest calls while driving have occurred when we tried to allow someone to cross the road in front of us on foot: pedestrians assume that cars will continue to move at a constant speed and direction, and they often judge their crossing to flow just behind a passing car – sort of like a deadly video game! When we slowed down or changed lanes, pedestrians became quite confused!

For people without cars, there are many options for transportation – but we haven’t experienced these directly, despite our thoughts prior to arrival of doing without a car. In Windhoek, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of taxis, with a similar proportion in smaller towns. When we’re walking around town, the taxis regularly honk (they all seem to have the same horn-tone) to inquire if we want a ride. People can get picked up and dropped off all along the way. Prices are uncertain: students at the Polytechnic who live in Katatura, a traditionally-black suburb of Windhoek, pay $N200 (US$30) for an entire term of daily transport, but other fares have to be negotiated, as there are no mileage or time counters in the taxis. Each taxi driver is his (haven’t seen any her) own company, usually simply indicated with some letters on the door stating name and address.

For longer distance transport, there are short buses that pull baggage trailers behind them. People gather at major intersections along the highway for pick-up. On dirt roads, people hitchhike – we’ve picked up several when the clutter of sleeping bags, oyster samples, and Katie’s books hasn’t been too excessive, and when traveling in pretty remote places where the next car could be some time coming. Very few people travel by rail in Namibia, in contrast to many other African nations (so we’ve heard). Our flat in Windhoek provides ample opportunity to observe trains – even more so because Katie’s ear is acutely tuned to the rumble, chug, and whistle, so she runs to the window to look at each one. An old blue engine or two, belching black smoke, generally pulls some yellow cylindrical tanker cars, maybe some open-top cars full of scrap metal, a few boxcars, and perhaps a passenger car or two. The trains often have just 5 cars total and rarely more than 20. We are on the main north-south route through Namibia, so it’s strange that most of the trains seem to be heading south (but we haven’t quantified this); there is also a rail spur to Swakopmund, but in many many hours of traveling this road back and forth to the coast, we’ve only seen one train on the tracks parallel to us. Which brings up one current reason for little train traffic – good roads for trucking from Walvis Bay, the country’s only deepwater port, to pretty much anywhere. The poor infrastructure for trains may also reflect a historical decision: Namibia’s railways are spaced at 3 and a half feet, rather than four feet and change elsewhere, a legacy of someone’s assessment that getting a narrow gauge railway through the mountains would be less work. We recently learned that the first railway in Namibia was near Cape Cross, running between the phosphate rock (old bird guano, nitrogen leached out) and the small harbor where sailing ships would anchor offshore.

Health and safety addendum

2008-03-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

I forgot to repeat some political analysis that we heard from embassy staff relevant to explaining the high variance in income in Namibia. I have always equated colonialism and bad: exploitation, oppression, conversion. But Namibia may actually be at a further disadvantage because it was not a colony (at least recently: German occupation ended after WWI). African colonies enjoyed some intellectual and human resource exchange with European countries, producing an educated leadership that could take over when occupation ended. In contrast, black Africans under apartheid were systematically denied access to opportunities for educational and economic advancement, and this has devastating carry-over to this generation. Very few black Namibians have higher degrees, mostly via education in the States – but they include prominent people such as the first and current (second) president of the country and rector of Poly. (When will the US elect a PhD as president?!?)

It's the wurst!

2008-03-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

Actually, the sausages are superb – even the Viennas (essentially hot dogs), but especially brats and “Windhoek grillers” that incorporate both pork and mutton, and also boerwors coiled like snakes for sale. These are undoubtedly a german legacy. (And another enticement to get JR's dad to visit... bratwurst like it was meant to be!) However, the local delicacy is biltong – beef or game meat dried and spiced for very long shelf life. There are chains of stores that sell only biltong, plus biltong available in unlabelled bags at nearly every gas station convenience store. We’ve now tried both types and have found them… well… chewy, but certainly flavorful. Given the country’s interest in preserved meat, one might perceive a market for smoked oysters, but, as far as we can tell, no one has attempted this niche, and the niche may not actually exist – oysters, after all, are seafood. However, we can now report on some further sampling of Namibian oysters: 3 preparations at the Lighthouse restaurant in Swakopmund – raw on the half shell, baked with cheese, and battered and fried and served in shells with a sort of golden boullion (this last, our favorite, was a special dish requested by our server when he found out we were oyster biologists, but we didn’t manage to get the same thing when we came back a few weeks later); raw oysters on the boat tour of Walvis Bay; baked oysters at the Raft restaurant in Walvis Bay; and freshly opened raw gigas from the Kleins’ salt pond (one never turns down a grower’s offer – especially since he’d opened them to check for spawning condition and found very little gonad). The standard procedure is to keep oysters in holding tanks prior to sale long enough for them to clear their guts – this is very different from our Washington experience, where the phytoplankton contribute some of the distinctive taste from particular growing areas. Generally, the oysters tend to be very small, which makes for easier one-bite slurping or tasting, and also allows for rapid grow-out times of 7 months! (One wonders what the equivalent crop cycle time would be in Willapa Bay if oysters were harvested at shell lengths less than 2 inches – but hey! we can find that out with a quick comparative study!) Some of the oysters we consumed were pretty “soft” – after all, it’s the southern summer, and water temperatures have been unusually high, so no wonder oysters are building up gonad. One grower has just started pumping ozone into his refrigerated building where he holds oysters as they clear their guts; the ozone is supposed to help firm up the oysters, although how this would work mechanistically is very unclear to us.

As we’ve been camping with just a tiny one-burner stove, we’ve been venturing into new culinary territory as we try a variety of ready-to-eat meals. Many of these seem to come in the form of curries (the east Indian influence is strong in South Africa, where the grocery chains are based): we’ve tried curry-in-a-can (and strongly recommend against the textured vegetable protein), and curry-in-a-bag (these are quite good, including separate lemon rice or biryani, although Katie pronounces some of them “too spicy”). In both cases, one places the container in boiling water for a few minutes, then simply pours out of the can/bag. Undoubtedly better when consumed on the beach while watching the waves.

It’s Namibian!
Good beer, brewed to German standards with imported ingredients. There are several Namibian breweries, and the “waste” grain is a potential source of feed for intensively-raised non-ruminants such as chickens and pigs. Some of the faculty at Poly are just embarking on a research project to examine feed quality.
Hot Cross Buns: all his life, Alan has been disappointed with the bland taste and texture of what nursery rhymes assure us should be a tasty treat. But here in Namibia, he’s found HCB’s that are truly delectable, not just stripes of sugar-water on top of a white roll.
Namibian whole milk curdles rapidly, we discovered when our cooler ran out of ice 12 hours before we reached a refrigerator. But curdled milk works great in biscuits.
Beetroot – available in all sorts of preparations off the shelf (grated, sliced, whole, pickled, spiced, etc.). Seems to be served as a side dish, along with other options such as feta, olives, and gherkins. Feta is particularly confusing to us, as we think of it as middle eastern, and the connection between that region and Namibia seems thin.
Ice cream: Despite Katie’s appreciation of “pink” soft-serve, ice cream in general is disappointing. 90% of what’s available in stores is from Nestle, and 100% has vegetable shortening as an ingredient, which must contribute to the foamy texture even when it’s melted.
Five Roses: this is THE black tea brand in southern Africa. And JR could drink it all day! We’ve learned that it’s easiest to order black tea by simply saying “Five roses, please”.

Garbage: We’re generating much more than we’re used to in the U.S., primarily because we have no access to a compost pile (or chickens, which are actually illegal in Windhoek), and Namibia’s recycling program is either non-existent or still opaque to us. We’ve heard that some recycling occurs when people sort through trash looking for anything usable, but we weren’t told what counts as usable. Fortunately, thanks to the amazing cloth diapers we brought with us (Fuzzi Bunz: happy to give personal testimonials), we’re not generating diaper waste. And, because Katie is daytime potty-trained, we’re not tied to doing laundry every other day.

Polytechnic strategic planning

2008-03-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

Only read this if you want to know the nitty-gritty details about the fact that we're doing more in Namibia than looking for oryxes, ostriches, and oysters, oh my!

For better or worse, the Polytechnic is in the midst of strategic planning, their third such process since the institution was founded in 1995. We – especially Alan – find ourselves deeply involved in the process. It is an interesting higher-level perspective to accompany the program-building that we are doing within a single department. But first, a step back:

Namibia – a country of around 2 million with 40,000 high school graduates each year – has two institutions of higher learning. The University of Namibia is based in Windhoek and has satellite campuses (for instance, several agricultural campuses and an engineering campus in the works) throughout the country. UNAM was founded in 1992 but (I think) was mostly renamed from an existing institution. The chancellor of the university is the founding president of the country. And UNAM is widely recognized as being responsible for producing bachelor degrees. The Polytechnic of Namibia, in contrast, is responsible for training technicians. Its schools include Business (6000 of 8000 students), Engineering (where new programs are just starting in biomedical and environmental science, go figure), Communications (largely responsible for making sure all students have functional English skills), Information Technology, and Natural Resources and Tourism. Within the last, there are 4 departments: Agriculture, Nature conservation, Land management (including surveying), and Hotel and tourism management. We are in Agriculture, responsible for helping to develop a new program in Aquaculture and for teaching Non-ruminant Animal Husbandry next term. (Technically, it’s JR’s responsibility, but early on we got permission from the Rector of PoN to job-share, hence AT’s involvement in strategic planning.)

Agriculture currently has 6 faculty (plus a seventh whom we have not met: He was recently hired to teach agribusiness courses but has not arrived due to delays in work permits). Their entering class is about 30 students each year. They offer a 3-year diploma, and, with an additional year or two of distance courses and research project to receive a Bachelor of Technology – we remain pretty uncertain about what constitutes a BTech, which is okay, because it’s being phased out anyway. The faculty are largely trained in agribusiness but very committed to providing students with hands-on training that would allow them to become successful farmers. So the students take a course in building with concrete, electric fences, etc. They also spend one term (out of 6) working on a farm or with some other agriculture-production oriented business. What we are beginning to realize is that the department’s vision of their role in Namibia may be somewhat different than that of the administration (but isn’t that why strategic planning happens – to reconcile those views?). Driven by the administration, Poly is in the process of transforming from a technical college to a university: this involves more than a name change to University of Science and Technology, but also an accreditation process and direct competition with UNAM. Some might say that UNAM doesn’t present much competition, since, for instance, the Fulbright Fellow posted there hasn’t even been given an office after 2 months, and her teaching responsibilities will be guest lectures. Right now, nothing is happening at UNAM because the faculty are on strike for 12% raises. We have heard that BSc preparation out of UNAM does not provide students with equivalent skills as they could acquire at a South African university, where most of the best students in Namibia still go. However, the two institutions certainly compete for resources, and we have heard that Poly gets much less government support than UNAM.

Last year, the Department of Agriculture developed two new curricula, an update to their agriculture programs and a new curriculum in aquaculture. The curricula are matched explicitly to NQF/NQA criteria – these stand for Namibian Qualification something or other – which require that the degrees and each course within the degree contain specific learning objectives. The learning objectives are scored by level (sort of like Bloom’s taxonomy – a course where students learn to identify is at a lower level than one where they have to compare, apply, or evaluate) and by Notional Hours (which incorporate both contact hours and study time on their own). Then, specific numbers of notional hours at specific levels are required for certification as a National Diploma or Bachelor degree. Some of this is very familiar from similar attention to learning objectives at the University of Washington. However, other parts have taken some getting used to: for instance, the degrees proposed for Agriculture Management and Aquaculture Management have no electives – all students in a class take exactly the same 5 courses each term. Also, curricula are being built in the absence of faculty to teach the courses. This is particularly obvious in Aquaculture, where one inspired faculty member read a lot of books to put together a curriculum, which will need to be taught by at least 4 additional people trained in aquatic science or aquaculture.
The curricula proposed by the Department last year passed through the Board of Studies (essentially a “faculty meeting” of everyone in the School) but stalled at the Senate (which consists of upper administration), which requested that the Department develop BSc degrees, in addition to the Diploma. Now, if Poly is to become the University of Science and Technology, it definitely makes sense to have BSc’s. But, the department’s response was to add an additional year of courses to the diploma (courses in agribusiness, marketing, plant production, and animal production – even though students have already had 3 business courses, and 5 taxon-specific production courses) and call it a BSc. Our first contribution to program-building was therefore sort of negative (well, hopefully constructive criticism). We pointed out that the amount of math (accounting), chemistry (1 term), physics (none), and biology (some physiology and ecology in the context of agriculture species and rangeland) did not align well with any other BSc’s with which we were familiar. We suggested that it was not possible to build a BSc on top of a technical diploma (unless students wanted to take all of their physics, organic chemistry, and calculus in the final year, which sounded neither fun nor useful), but a BSc could be developed in parallel, with (gasp) electives, use of courses offered in engineering, and synthetic seminars to help students draw together, say, strands of preparation in genetics and farming. Resistance has been high, on a number of grounds: we have heard that Namibia doesn’t need scientists, that UNAM is charged with producing those sorts of graduates, and that graduates of an agribusiness program at Poly would still be better than UNAM graduates. Okay, well, it is sort of funny to be thinking about what distinguishes a farmer and a scientist (like, the scientist can’t actually grow food), since these are two paths that we’re personally interested in. But, we mostly wonder whether the disparity of vision between administration and department is as high as it now seems – what is the role of this institution, and how can it best contribute to economic development in the country? As scientists, we have seen opportunities for research at every turn, from tracking mountain zebras to understand their competition with cows, to growing salt pond Dunaliella in culture to extract beta-carotene, to more marine ecological issues of top-down vs. bottom-up controls on oyster production. But then again, we’re not asking to be paid to work on scientific questions – it’s a passion, not a 7:30-4:30 job (which reminds me, the culture at Poly definitely emphasizes “seat time” for faculty – definitely not the way we work!). Alan was up past midnight last night learning about boring polychaetes and summer mortality in oysters, which will allow us to avoid taking our research down well-trodden territory. I counted isopods until dark last week to get a first sample of the Paridotea population. But we do wonder how many scientists Namibia could support, with no national funding for research and industries struggling to break even, let alone support research.

Week 6 trip to coast

2008-03-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

2/11-2/14 2008
On this trip, we took a new road to the coast. On the map, it is labeled C26, but widely known as the Khomas-Hochland road. The “C” part means it is not paved (B is for tar-road). Half of the drive – by distance, and by far the majority by time – was through mountainous territory with sinuous roads, rather washboard, and periodically cut through by intermittent rivers. We drove much of it at 30 kph. Cattle and horses along the way indicate that the area is grazed, although the soil is so thin that rocks show through everywhere, in lines suggesting sedimentary layers turned on end. It was a fantastic drive for charismatic megafauna: when we stopped to look at a few oryx (whose dramatic coloring makes them stand out), we also startled a dozen kudu, totally invisible in their lightly banded brown coats until they moved. Charismatic birds included some really large and pied (black and white) ones – we’re marking dates and places in our bird book when we can identify species, and we added more than a half dozen on this trip.
The road emerges from the mountains almost directly into Namib-Naukluft park, where oryx, springbok, ostriches and zebras congregated in remarkable numbers on the eastern edge, which was beginning to green from recent rain. We saw Welwitschia mirabilis for the first time in the wild, looking just as scraggly and other-worldly as in the UW greenhouse. Apparently, its two leaves can grow for a millennium.
We camped for 3 nights around The Salt Company, making forays there each day to begin understanding how the water moves among the ponds and which species are present. We were surprised that the inlet canal, where seawater is first pumped, had no clams, mussels, or barnacles – we wondered if the pump was fatal to larvae, or if the flamingos were dancing them to death, but then learned that the canal periodically dries out when the pump is turned off. In any case, many species that appear not to be present in the inlet to the oyster salt pond, suddenly appear in the pond: barnacles on the rocks and floats, a reddish bryozoan, isopods in the Gracilaria, under rocks, and sometimes just swimming openly. We tentatively identified the isopods as Paridotea fucicola [later: nope – the uropod ramus dimensions became clearer with a better ‘scope], but it wasn’t easy without a dissecting kit or dissecting microscope: I had to pull out the mouthparts and uropods by hand and try to look at them under the compound ‘scope that Mr Klein uses to observe oyster larvae.

Our camping trip was a bit of a shake-down: we spent the first night at a commercial campground, which is good since the propane canisters recommended for our Bleuet stove didn’t actually fit, and we used the kitchen stoves available at the campground instead. On our second night, we opened cans of mutton and TVP curry with a knife (stainless steel beats aluminum) because our mess kit includes a cork/bottle opener but no can opener. By the third night, we felt that we were settling into more of a routine. All 3 of us pack into the back of the Combi to sleep even though it’s 4” too short for Alan (he gets the spot where one of the seat backs folds down.

During our stay, the winds began blowing from the SW for the first time in weeks: if this holds, upwelling should resume and the water temperatures cool and become less stressful for aquaculture.

Week 5 trip to coast

2008-02-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

The objective of this trip was to meet oyster growers. We had a spectacular drive from Windhoek to Henties Bay on Jan 30, newly ensconced in the Combi (VW van). We passed through a blizzard of butterflies – they seem to be bursting forth in droves just on the edge of where it’s rained. And we passed underneath a maelstrom of hawks, literally hundreds of them circling and zooming across the road, reason unknown. It was particularly surprising to find them all together since we’d commented so often on the striking absence of raptors – we’d seen less than a dozen in our travels of the previous month. We took the sand road “short cut” to bypass Swakopmund and go straight to Henties Bay, past the Spitzkoppe, a dramatic promontory that rises from the flat sandy plain in a series of sheer drops from rounded peaks. All along the road, tables were set out with rocks for sale, crystals of a variety of colors. (We have yet to visit the Crystal Museum in Swakopmund, which boasts the biggest crystal in the world, almost twice the height of a person. And of course we won’t visit the vast stretches of coast that are closed to entrance because of diamonds being collected from the sand.) On this road, we were also treated to our first experience of springbok “pronking”. They bounce, apparently straight-legged, a few meters straight up – a sign of vague unease that the Combi had stopped so the people inside could appreciate the two-dozen animals in the small herd. Springbok are excellent desert-dwellers because they never need to drink, getting sufficient water in the vegetation they eat.

One weekend morning this trip, we traveled north from Henties Bay for less than an hour to Cape Cross, which is famous for tens of thousands of Cape Fur Seals. Certainly, we’d had a fine look at them at Walvis Bay, but the Cape Cross colony was pretty amazing. The rocks were polished from generations of seals sliding across them, and the depressions in between boulders were filled with scat and carcasses, tiny skulls showing white through reddish-brown background. The smell was incredible – I actually took a shower that evening because I was convinced I could still smell seal in my hair! Also on the beach was an enormous dead sea turtle – Alan says its head was the size of a basketball and total length around 15 feet. I thought less but still impressive… and sad that such a giant is no longer roaming the oceans. The seals seemed a little more expendable, with pups rolling on and off the beach in the surfable waves – only the ones at the upper edge of the ribbon of seals along the shoreline seemed to stay put, mostly sleeping and covered in sand. The pups are darker than the adults (also, of course, smaller), so it seemed to us that most of the mothers must be off hunting for fish, or perhaps just sleeping offshore, flippers held out of the water, away from all the fuss. When mothers returned, they would bellow and haul themselves through the pack of seal bodies (adults snapping at them as they jostled and bumped), presumably looking for their own pup among the thousands there on the beach. We saw one mother very deliberately keep all pups away except one, which she let nurse.

The meetings with growers were great. We heard some familiar stories, hemispheric restatements of the problems experienced in Washington: difficult markets, mass mortalities of unknown cause, clients stolen away by other growers who undercut prices, nearby practices that exacerbate a pest problem…. The primary cultivated species is the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, which has been introduced to the US west coast, Namibia, and more than 60 other countries. As far as we have seen here, it has not established. We are puzzled by this, because the growers are complaining that the oysters are soft with gonad (spawn-y, or even spawned out), reflecting high summer water temperatures. The temperatures may be particularly high this year because, essentially since our arrival in Namibia, this high-upwelling coast has not been upwelling! The winds have blown from the northwest, pushing surface water onshore, keeping the deep cold water down deep, and allowing the warm Angola Current to push southwards to Namibia. Water temperatures have been recorded in Swakopmund and Walvis Bay around 25C (quick translation: 77F), perfectly suitable for oyster larvae to survive and grow. Yet, no spat have appeared – in Walvis Bay, the larvae may simply not be retained in this small indentation in the coast.

The methods for growing oysters differ between Namibia and Washington. The oldest oyster company (young by US standards: second generation) is actually a tiny arm of a much larger company that produces salt (and seabird guano). Seawater is pumped up several meters and then flows by gravity through a series of ponds where water evaporates, impurities (gypsum) are precipitated out, and finally sandy salt is removed in foot-cube chunks for further refining. In its initial path, the seawater is divided into two ponds: a 30-ha pond, mostly <1 m deep, has racks for growing oysters, and a slightly larger pond contains the platform to attract cormorants to breed (and defecate). Mr Klein produces his own cultchless spat by raising larvae in tiny upwellers with ambient seawater, then allowing them to recruit onto smooth plastic sheets and brushing spat off daily – both C. gigas and Ostrea edulis (the only grower on the Namibian coast to produce edulis). Larger oysters are planted into the pond in open-top mesh bags/trays, just below the water surface. Oysters are packed into the trays, but the salt pan soup of phytoplankton must be incredibly rich, fueled both by the ocean inputs and by recycled nutrients from birds. Because of the importance of these shallow-water (albeit salty) habitats for birds, the whole salt company is also a game preserve! Even with our ornithologically naïve eyes, we’ve seen 2 flamingo species, 2 cormorant species, grebes, African ducks, turnstones, at least 4 tern species, and long-legged stilt-like birds with both upturned and downturned bills.
Mr Klein described the following food web in the salt pond “chemostat” where he grows oysters: Flamingos remove most of the organisms in the sediment. Fishing birds such as terns and cormorants feed on the fish (which include “freshwater” tilapia at 40 ppm!). Fish feed on the red alga Gracilaria (deliberately introduced as a prospective aquaculture product, because it can be refined to produce agar), and perhaps also on goggas (Afrikaans, so make sure the “g’s” are raspy in your throat) – Paridotea isopods. Mr Klein observed that, coincident with his introduction of Gracilaria, a pest of his oysters disappeared: polychaete worms that bore through the shell and cause mortality and disfigurement. He wonders if the Gracilaria provided a refuge for the isopods, which then removed the worms. Is this a cool food web, or what?!??? We are likely to work on testing these interactions while we are here. Of course, there are problems, such as: 1) we haven’t been able to find the polychaete worm at all, so it may be locally extinct from the salt pond (perhaps was even introduced with oysters from Chile or the US) – not because of isopods, but because of high salinity. If the worms are no longer present, it will be difficult to test whether isopods control the worms. 2) Worldwide, boring polychaetes in oysters are controlled by dipping oysters in high-salt baths (hmmm, like a salt pond) or moving the oysters onto wooden racks off-bottom (hmmm, did some husbandry practices change at the same time the Gracilaria was introduced?). So the isopods might not be responsible for a rapid decline in worms.

Most of the oyster growers other than Mr Klein are based in Walvis Bay, where oysters are grown exclusively by suspended culture in water that tends to be less than 15 m deep. There are less than 20 companies, some of which are just a few years old. Originally, in Walvis Bay, bags were suspended from wooden platforms, but now the dominant method is “Spanish longlines”. Blue plastic 55-gallon drums are used as floats, and single (cultchless) oysters are placed in stacks of trays suspended from the floats and lines in between them. Two major sources of mortality for the oysters appear to be: low oxygen conditions lasting more than a week during sulfide eruptions – the water can be deoxygenated right up to the surface; and stressful summer conditions, involving unknown combinations of high temperatures and pathogens. Right now, as downwelling conditions persist, and the warm Angola Current pushes south, many mass mortality events have been reported, with up to 60% crop loss. Given the millions of dollars spent worldwide to understand “summer mortality”, and the general conclusion that the only remedy is to raise genetically tough oyster families, we probably won’t get deeply involved in research on this problem – no one approaches it from an ecological perspective. Fortunately, from the growers’ perspective, one company has a beautiful hatchery facility and produces millions of spat from local broodstock.

Health and safety

2008-02-16T00:58:00.000-08:00

According to the US government, Namibia’s crime rate is Critical. Indeed, security firms appear to have a thriving business: uniformed guards are at every ATM, electronics (=cell phone) store, and high-end retail (e.g. safari outfitting, glasses), not to mention the main entrance and every building on the Polytechnic campus, 24 hours a day. When you park a car, you’re often asked if you’d like it kept under surveillance – at $N1 as an average tip, this is a bargain (<0.15 US$). Many stores have locked gates at their entrance, and a salesperson “buzzes” suitable customers inside. Houses have tall cement walls with concertina wire or electric fence on top. Our door has 3 locks (US embassy requirement, checked out personally by their security officer). The problem is property crime and theft, not (thankfully) risk of bodily harm. Actually, the problem is economic inequity. Based on average income, Namibia is a developing middle-income country, but with one of the highest variances in income worldwide (even worse than the US in GINI index). In a place where many people have little to lose, they’ll use an opportunity to take from the rich. Unemployment is high (we’ve heard various “statistics”, but likely over 40%), and, as evident by the compensation for car guards, many positions are poorly paid. Visitors are urged not to be easy targets – don’t carry iPods in outer pockets of backpacks or walk with a purse late at night across dark bridges. Well – undoubtedly the same advice would apply to most US metropolitan areas!
Namibia also has an extraordinarily high per capita rate of auto accidents. A deadly combination of break-neck speed, poor vehicle maintenance, intoxication (“We drink beer in Namibia because water’s too expensive”), and large animals that can leap 2-m fences and cross the road. The Namibian newspaper regularly shows mangled remnants of vehicles that have burned, flipped, split, or otherwise reached a bitter end. Driving sober, slow, and in daylight, we hope to avoid this fate. We are also now driving a Combi – the southern African version of a VW van – which we purchased for dirt-roads, camping/ sleeping in the rear, and hauling anticipated visitors from the States. In Namibia, one drives on the left hand side of the road, with the driver’s seat on the right hand side of the car: the biggest initial problem was turning on the windshield wipers instead of the turn indicator!

Katie news

2008-02-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

Almost two and a half – often will answer the question of how old are you by putting up two fingers. Initially shy with new people, but also fascinated by people, especially kids.

Verbal changes: asks a lot of questions – Did you have fun on the boat? Can I sit up there? What does it smell like? Where is my house? Also prone to screaming and crying when thwarted.

Sings songs: Favorites are still ABC and Itsy bitsy spider. Also Where oh where is sweet little Katie? and Dem bones (The Katie bone’s connected to the daddy bone. The daddy bone’s connected to the mommy bone… Her knowledge of vertebrate anatomy still needs some refinement.) Sometimes she gets part of Magalena Hagalena Ookatoka Wokatoka Okamokapoka was her name. Usually more like Oka moka shmoka poka loka… was her name!

Can recognize most letters most of the time (sometimes too busy to bother). “Reads” boo, zoo, moo. Loves to hear stories – we only brought a few books with us, so we have repeatedly gone through the anthology of 13 Dr Seuss stories (Thanks, Brian and Carol!), and, just recently, she’s begun to appreciate Frog and Toad. We purchased a book of stories compiled for primary school students in Namibia, which apparently deal with universal themes, as Katie certainly appreciates them. One day, Katie asked for a sad story, and I realized that the stories were all a little sad initially, but then a problem is overcome – a universal questing theme. For instance: A red ball gets stuck in a tree. A bird pushes it back to the children. Or, another example: Two kids are sent to get water, but the full buckets are heavy. They solve their problem by putting a stick through the handle and carrying each bucket together. In all fairness, we should get her some more local books: after all, her parents just bought 10 field guides! Katie also often asks for “Kaffy’s book,” which means she wants you to hold your hands like a book and make up a story about a little girl named Kathy who has adventures much like Katie. (What does Kathy do before she goes to bed? “Pees! Brushes her teeth!” Often followed by an emphatic, “Don’t have to go pee-pee.”)

Loves the beach. Katie will literally spend hours digging holes, looking for interesting objects cast ashore in the wrack, sticking gull feathers in patterns, or picking up eye-catching orange and white smooth stones (like grandma, like granddaughter). She has discovered that, if she squeezes the dried floats of bluebottles (easier to wrap your tongue around than Portuguese man-of-war) in her fingers, they give a satisfying pop when they burst, sort of like bubble wrap. This trip, she was initially a little frightened of the waves – I asked if she would come jump in them, and she just clung for a little while, watching the water pass underneath. But then she became more excited, standing up to take waves up to her chest, and squealing when I lifted her up to avoid the larger ones. “Go in farther, Mom!”

Most adorable when: chasing butterflies (the plants at the marine station are festooned with at least a half-dozen species); correctly distinguishes between oysters, clams, and mussels; just wakes up – very snuggly.

Favorite foods: apple juice, pasta, pizza, eggs, pancakes, ice cream (especially pink). Today, Katie and Alan went out for second breakfast together, and I heard the report later: “They didn’t have pancakes.” (Oh? What did you eat?) “I had toast. And eggies.”

Favorite games: Matching cards (a memory game of spatial locations where the child can already beat the adult); “You are the ant. I am the anteater.” (chase), calling Abby and Teddy or Grandma and Grandpa on the “telephone” (anything with buttons – usually hopefully not our actual cell phone).

Very minor emergencies: Katie usually has scabs on her knees. She’s reached down to lower steps twice now, falling and cutting her lip. She got terribly bitten by mosquitos on the first night of our most recent stay in Henties Bay. This is outside the malaria zone, but still distressing, so she had to wear long sleeves, long pants, and socks thereafter. Any ill can pretty much be remedied with a bandaid.

Week 4 trip to the coast

2008-02-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

1/23-27/08: We stayed Wednesday and Thursday nights at the Seagull B&B in Swakopmund, Friday and Saturday nights at Kleines Nest in Walvis Bay. Trip objective – learn as much as we could about the coastal organisms by exploring multiple sites at low tide. To that end, we also purchased 8 field guides (actually, only one for marine organisms, called Two Oceans reflecting its focus on the eastern and western sides of South Africa). Altogether, we looked at about 3 places around Swakopmund, all rocky intertidal, 2 places in the Walvis Bay lagoon, and two sandy beaches on either side of the “mouth” (it’s a wide one) of Walvis Bay. On our final day, we joined a lot of tourists on a 4-hour speedboat tour of Walvis Bay by water, including the Cape Fur Seal colony, derelict/confiscated Russian fishing boat, lighthouse, close pass by two cargo ships waiting to go into port, hanging oyster culture, and “largest table in the world” built almost 100 years ago to collect guano. Along the way, we saw Benguela endemic dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, and a mola mola. Three rather tame (but still very large with sharp teeth!) seals leaped onto the boat to get a treat and a scratch, pelicans flew alongside to catch fish that were tossed to them, and gulls and cormorants took more fish out of hand. A lot of close encounters with charismatic megafauna, but not much environmental education or interpretation. The skipper served sparkling wine, juice, quiche, brotchen, and oysters on the half shell. By the way, Walvis is pronounced Valfish.

As temporary residents in Namibia, we are thankful for the low biodiversity of the coast. Two Oceans is a thick book of vertebrates, invertebrates, and algae, but most of the species are restricted to the eastern side of the Cape, reflecting oceanic connections to biodiverse regions of the south Pacific. Fewer species occupy the western side, and fewer still extend their range past the Orange River into Namibia. Why would this be? Possibly, the alternation of warm Angola and cold Benguela currents make conditions too variable, or sulfur “blooms” kill off many species, but likely there is a huge effect of substrate: the Namibian coastline is 60-80% sand (we’ve seen variable reports), with small pockets of sand-scoured rock interspersed. Sandy beaches are notoriously species-poor, so perhaps there is just not enough rock around to support many species. But, again, this low diversity is a happy occurrence for newly-arrived marine ecologists. It’s also interesting to hear that essentially no Tatoosh-type experimental research has been carried out on the rocky shores – the scientists here are too busy working on economic problems of fisheries and aquaculture. The only rocky intertidal “fisheries” (artisenal or otherwise) are for rock lobsters, which we saw being collected by guys wading out in wetsuits into the surf and reaching into crevices in the rock.
Standard rocky intertidal zonation in Namibia:
Highest = 1. Afrolittorina – definitely hides during hot days and low tides, but similar in size and shape to Washington’s littorine snails. Small grazers of epilithic scum.
2. Chthamalus – just one barnacle species that’s obvious. All the individuals we observed were similarly-sized, <5 mm, which suggests pulsed recruitment.
2. Siphonaria – a limpet-like grazer that can reach rather large size (3 cm). Small ones seemed to be spatially separate from the larger ones. Possibly they have cleared out some bare space among the barnacles by bull-dozing, and we wondered what would happen to the “bare” rock if Siphonaria were removed. This species apparently does well even in sand-scoured areas: we saw rock-tips poking up out of the sand that were covered with Siphonaria.
3. Semimytilus – mussel that does not often exceed 2 cm in length. In sandy areas, it grew into hummocks, catching sand between the byssal threads and the rock. This seems not to be a very stable existence, as large areas of the bed were sometimes obviously washed away, leaving only the border where mussels were actually connected directly to the rock.
3. Limpets – intermixed with Semimytilus. Some of the classic species of ecological fame in South Africa are missing here (arganvillea, cochlear), and as yet we have a hard time distinguishing the two large species of the Namibian coast (Scutellastra granularis, Cymbula granatina). Both have scalloped edges to the shell and occur at high density. A third species (Cymbula miniata) we have found as shells in beach drift but have not noticed live – probably a bit too low to be safely accessible given the week’s tides and waves.
4. Perna perna – a much larger mussel, probably the competitive dominant. Hey! There’s a competitively dominant mussel here, too! (But what is it outcompeting? There’s not much else.) (And is there a keystone predator that keeps mussels in check? Seastars are decidedly absent; the two common crabs (Pilumnoides rubus, Plagusia chabrus) are herbivorous; perhaps spiny lobsters could set the lower limit.)
In the mussel zone, we saw anemones with their columns pimpled with shell hash (Aulactinia reynaudi), a fuzzy red alga reminiscent of Endocladia on Washington’s shores, with the same ability to grow on rock or epiphytically on mussel shells, and occasional clumps of Gunnarea capensis, a tubeworm.
Interspersed among Semimytilus and Perna, which tend to be brown, are two species of black-shelled mussel, particularly interesting because one is native and one not. From Two Oceans, we understand that it might be possible to tell them apart based on whether there are pits (Mytilus galloprovincialis) or not (Choromytilus meridionalis) in the ligament near the hinge on the inside of the shell. Obviously, this characteristic does not make it possible to identify live individuals. We are still looking for reliable shape/ color trends. We have now picked up probably 3 dozen shells from beach drift, and they all seem to have pits. So, either M. galloprovincialis is more common than we’ve been led to believe, or we don’t really have a “pits” clue.
In our quest to find predators on this shore, we kept a close look out for predatory snails such as whelks. We found a few individuals at just one of the rocky sites we visited, and these appear to be Burnupena – they look a lot like Nucella on Washington’s coast but their diet does not involve barnacles or mussels; they’re scavengers. Washed up in the drift, we’ve seen shells of Nucella dubia, which is indeed a predator and supposedly broadly distributed in the intertidal zone. We’ll have to continue to keep an eye out for these in real life! The beach drift has been full of clumps of egg capsules that clearly derive from a neogastropod such as these snails. The capsules must pop off the rock after the young snails emerge, as they generally have 1-mm holes at the top that have served as an escape hatch. Given the number of egg capsules in the drift, whoever laid them must be very abundant. It’s odd and fun and challenging to be in a place where a question as simple as “who laid those?” is entirely unknown to us.
5. Below the mussels, red algae go crazy! A quick look at 2 Oceans shows why: whereas in most other taxa, there are just a handful of species that occur on the west coast, among reds, 43 species are likely to occur in Namibia, and just 23 are not. (I based my count on distribution maps included with each species in the book, and I assumed that anything shown to reach the Orange River, which serves as the South Africa-Nambia border, could also extend north. We’ve already found many such species on intertidal rocks in Namibia, and we’re not sure if the distribution maps are curtailed because sampling has been lower in Namibia, or because habitat is relatively rare.) We haven’t really even attempted to begin identifying them yet. Most sites were a rather jumbled mess of rocks and boulders, so zonation was a bit obscure. But one site had a shallow bench that showed a dramatic line between higher fleshy reds and lower erect pink coralline algae.
6. And, of course, Namibia’s only kelp species – Laminaria pallida – is anchored in the low intertidal with blades that float to the water surface so are obvious from a distance. It is legal to collect beach-drift Laminaria to use as a feed for abalone, but harvest of living kelp is unlikely ever to be allowed.
One more comment about the rocky intertidal zone: there is not very much bare space. Species interactions, therefore, look like they could be very strong. We were surprised at how much life covered the rocks, since a coastal hydrodynamics hypothesis might suggest that larvae are entrained in upwelled water that moves away from the coast, thus leading to recruitment limitation and very few new arrivals on the shore. What might account for the discrepancy? It is possible that many of the species do not have planktonic larvae but instead produce local offspring (but we know this is not true for barnacles and mussels). It appears that, over 100s of km, this stretch of coastline is a retention zone even under strong, persistent upwelling, perhaps because the upwelling occurs slightly farther offshore (is the continental shelf wider here?) This retention zone explains the high productivity that drops to the bottom, accumulating and decomposing until unknown forces lead to catastrophic release of hydrogen sulfide. It may also explain the high cover we observed on rocks.

Wave-exposed sandy beaches in Namibia:
On the outside of the sandy peninsula that constitutes the western side of Walvis Bay, we encountered surf clams (Donax serra) at incredible abundance. Anywhere we dug over a wide range from about lower high water to the waves, we found several clams in each 10x10 cm area. An incredibly detailed study of these clams was done as a PhD thesis, including mark-recapture for density, growth and recruitment at multiple sites, chemical composition, and condition index, so we can take this species off the To Do list! It has been fun to compare the western peninsula of Walvis Bay with the western peninsula of Willapa Bay – Willapa’s is longer (but not by much), taller and wider. Walvis’ has no trees (but of course not, it’s the desert) and only extends several meters above the water. The lighthouse appears to be sort of in the middle of the peninsula, which is extending north at a rate of about 20 m per year. (Willapa’s is not growing quite so fast.)

Walvis Bay lagoon:
Imagine a north-facing bay, red sand dunes on the east side, low-lying sand peninsula on the west, divided into three parts. The northern third holds the port, with a channel dredged for 7 km through a shallow bay (20-30 m depth). The middle third is a functional lagoon that dries almost entirely at low tide. Water has to move in and out on the western edge, near the port, because a sand spit extends from the peninsula on the west. The southern third is cut off by an extensive network of salt ponds. The Kuiseb River historically entered here, in the one-in-10 years that enough water fell in Namibia to reach the ocean. This delta is now cut off from the lagoon by the salt ponds and road. We spent most of our time walking out in the middle section, and the boat ride occurred in the northern section. The southern section looked and smelled terrible – foam and feathers and salt and sulfurous stench and black goo under the feathery crust wherever a disturbance went through. The most amazing part of the middle section is… FLAMINGOS. Thousands of them, both the pale Greater Flamingos, which show bright pink and black on their wings when they fly, and the more dramatically pink all over Lesser Flamingos. The Walvis Bay population is supposed to represent 60-80% (respectively?) of the whole number in southern Africa. I think we were lucky that the rains were late, because they should all fly inland to breed as soon as sufficient freshwater is available in pans. The greater flamingos do an amazing dance to feed: they alternately pick up their feet, stomping in a circle with their head submerged upside down. The sediments that they suspend are filtered for small invertebrates and algae. They leave donut-shaped depressions about a half-meter wide, and the tideflats are packed with these donuts. Of course, we don’t know how long an individual donut lasts once it’s been stomped out, but the overall sense is one of extraordinary disturbance by birds. Indeed, 2 Oceans says that the presence of flamingos dramatically reduces the abundance of infaunal organisms. (But it would still be fun to do a flamingo exclosure: the swimming beach, perhaps an unreplicated flamingo “exclosure” where we saw no donuts, had a high abundance of tube-building worms and heart clams.) The lesser flamingos filter feed cyanobacteria (giving them their pink color), so are not responsible for sediment disturbance. Flamingos seem to feed in water that is about mid-calf deep. Consequently, as the tide ebbs and flows, the flamingos also seem to flow like water back and forth across the lagoon. At low tide, we were able to see many birds quite close on the eastern side of the lagoon, but at high tide, most had congregated in a vast pink horizon on the other side of the water.

At one point, after I’d just seen a pigeon, I exclaimed, “Wow, we haven’t seen very many birds in Walvis Bay!” And then I laughed. Land-birds are indeed uncommon, particularly compared to the busy, melodic tufts of fluff we’ve seen inland. (Many of the birds in Windhoek look strangely familiar – because they include the masked weaverbirds and longtailed grey capped mousebirds housed in the African Savannah aviary at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. I guess they do just fine in close proximity to humans! English sparrows are also in Namibia.) But Walvis Bay is also full of birds: cormorants, pelicans, grey herons, small waders such as stilts, avocets, curlews, large and small gulls, large and small terns, even some ducks. But the flamingos are definitely the highlight. They would still be pink and beautiful in a zoo, but not nearly so ecologically interesting!

Rainy season

2008-01-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

On the coast of Washington, a popular topic of conversation is the weather – when will the rain stop? Here in Namibia, the question is when will they start? The common weather pattern is for intermittent rain showers to begin in November, with fairly steady rains between January and March. In 2006, the summer rains were apparently quite heavy: There is an amazing set of pictures displayed in the Post Office, showing flooded roads, parks, houses, vehicles. “Rivers” that most years are literally streams of sand were cascading water. And of course lovely shots of clouds and rainbows. In contrast, 2007 was a drought year (the first drought of the millennium), and 2008 is also unfolding rather drily. We experienced our first rainstorm Jan. 5 – an easily-visible discrete patch of torrential downpour, straight grey lines between clouds and brown hills. We watched it come miles away, as we splashed in the Olympia swimming pool. First, the clouds gather together. Then, the wind picks up to a howl, as the air is forced away from distant rain. Then, large drops begin to fall, and finally the curtain arrives. Or not. The rain is remarkably patchy, pouring in one neighborhood while leaving another dry. The rains tend to fall in the evening, and the lightning after dark can be spectacular from our high perch, for instance crackling down in a jagged bolt or illuminating the grey rain against the black sky. Katie has declared that she doesn’t like lightning, But she knows that her parents find it fascinating!

In this dry country, the rains serve as the limiting resource for production, so their arrival is very important. In the past several weeks, we have witnessed the power of moisture. Recall, in week 2, that our drive to the coast was gauntleted by warthogs and baboons. Less than half of the trees had any leaves on them. Last week, on the same drive at the same time of day, we observed zero warthogs and baboons (no statistics needed). On our return trip (1/27), almost all trees had leaves, and the highway was gauntleted by flowers – yellow ones like buttercups, purple ones like lupine, and white ones like lilies. Pools of standing water have accumulated. Presumably, the animals have plenty of food and forage deep into the bush and no longer need to take advantage of roadside vegetation. Even the rocky, sandy piles around our apartment building have sprouted small acacias, blooming and fruiting so fast that we already know this particular species produces very prickly fruits!

The country looks green. Okay, you say, you’ve been away from rainy western Washington so long that your “green meter” has re-set. Anything that’s not simply red sand looks positively verdant. This is probably somewhat true, but we also have enough semi-quantitative evidence to know that we’re witnessing a change in season. The dripping 34C heat of our arrival has moderated to the mid-20s (but wet clothes still dry on the line in a matter of hours!). Similarly, our first days here were entirely cloud-free, just a brilliant blue day-sky and incredible stars at night. We’ve hardly seen any stars recently. Bare trees are leafing out and flowering; seeds are germinating in previously bare patches of ground. Where we were accustomed to patches of tall brown clumps of grass, we now see green new growth (and so do the cows, who will undoubtedly fill out a bit). To top it all off, we awoke Friday morning on the coast to the sound of water dripping through the roof! The coast typically gets 2 mm of rain annually, and this one rain shower must have exceeded the average – not to mention the capacity of the roof. (We were at a B&B, just waking up to go explore some rocky intertidal sites.)

Daan Viljoen nature reserve

2008-01-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

1/19/08: The area around Windhoek is dotted with game reserves demarcated by fences – double-high if there is actually interest in keeping many of the antelope inside (or predators such as leopards and cheetahs outside). Most of the game reserves are private, although perfectly happy to have tourists visit, but our first excursion was to a reserve run by NWR (Namibian Wildlife Refuges?). On a bumpy, rocky, steep road precariously navigated by Corolla, we saw zebra ( a whole herd, plus one grazing right by the road), kudu (twisted horns), oryx (straight horns), hartebeest (ringed horns), wildebeest (and calves), warthog (and piglets), 7 giraffes so close that each one exceeded the field of view of our binoculars, banded mongooses (mongeese?), and several birds. Alan said: “Pinch me. I guess I’m in Africa.” But the reserve is proof that even native animals can overgraze an area (despite its size): the fence-line was clear because of the hazy green ground cover of new grass outside.

Week 2 trip to the coast

2008-01-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

Jan 8-13 2008 (Tuesday-Sunday):
We traveled by car from Windhoek to Henties Bay on the west coast, which took about 5 hours with just two brief stops (for gas and for Katie to pee in the desert) along the way. Alan drove slower than all but two large trucks (one carrying cows), but was still averaging over 100 kph on “tar roads” (paved) and slightly slower on the “salt road” along the coast.
The drive shows a gradient from semi-arid savannah to almost pure sand. We began in a now-familiar landscape dominated by acacia trees. The grasses in the ground cover seem entirely dry, but nevertheless were being collected in huge bags by groups of people along the road. We suspected they were using the grass as animal forage. We saw some goats, and a tannery/stock pens. Farther from Windhoek, we began to see “wild” animals as well, a few springbok, several troops of baboons, termite mounds, and warthogs. The distribution of termite mounds and warthogs seemed almost perfectly correlated, with a center around the “garden city” of Okahandjo, which must have a reliable water source to be able to grow olives and tomatoes. As we drove farther west, the grass in the understory turned to short brown tufts, and the acacia trees became smaller and sparser. Along the whole drive, we saw distant mountains, each set seemingly different in geology, based on color (from grey to red) and shape (from mounded to spikey). There were only two more sizable settlements along the way to the coast, at Karibib and Usakos, nestled in a large depression that must bring some water. After Usakos, the fences that had lined the highway throughout the rest of the trip dropped out, and we saw no more animals. Although the “rest” signs still showed a picnic table under a tree, instead these rest areas had a permanent awning – no trees available anywhere. As we approached Swakopmund, I finally understood how huge the landscape of Namibia appears, with an arcing blue sky and vast panorama of arid ground to the distant mountains: the ocean looked small in comparison! Probably the close curtain of fog over the ocean contributes. We turned north from Swakopmund, leaving behind us the enormous red dunes just to the south. On the beach side, we saw many restrooms, but the coast was quite deserted except for a few fishers with poles so long that they attach them for transport to the front bumper, sticking up in the air. On the far side of the road, which was still hard and flat despite no asphalt, we saw only one type of low-lying bush that accumulates sand into mounds. When we saw them up close later in the evening, the accumulated sand is riddled with animal burrows. The plants could be huge Salicornia, by the round succulent shape of stems and leaves. We also passed an area of salt-lichen, closed to off-road traffic. It appeared red-brown and quite large, maybe 10-20 cm aggregations, at least as we passed at speed and distance in the car.

When we arrived at the Sam Nujoma Marine Resources Research Center, we were welcomed into the Director’s suite, as the director had quit and left the day before. The center is 4 years old, and directors apparently have a difficult time dealing with its infrastructure challenges, low usage, and remote location. It’s actually quite a remarkable place: the architect designed the buildings at odd angles so they appear already to be crumbling off the sand cliff into the sea (perhaps that was not his intention), and an underground river has its mouth here, so freshwater is easily accessible from wells (there are small green lawns and numerous horticultural projects). In fact, the freshwater flow is so large that it leaves a small 2-m lens of saltwater on the surface, where all the marine organisms live. And the remainder of the water column along this stretch of coast is fresh and often anoxic. SaNuMaRC has delighted, surprised, and puzzled us. It was established with an elaborate plan of “closing the loop” to achieve sustainability, but the solar hot water heater is broken and water runs continuously, the biogas digester apparently doesn’t work because the septic truck came twice for pump-out, the horticultural plants include two notorious invaders of arid land (Opuntia and tamarisk), and the chicken, geese and ducks brought in for pest control have been caged (against hyenas and because they ate plants instead). We were also puzzled by the placement of the center: no thoughtful ecologist would have selected the place because of the low diversity on the exposed beach. No thoughtful lab scientist would have selected the place because there is no running seawater – despite 4 years of trying, it has been a recent breakthrough to establish a permanent pipe to fill carbuoys with “good” seawater at the bottom of the dune, then truck it to the top. Communication with the outside world is through UNAM’s network, which makes email decidedly slow (many minutes simply to load a web page) especially during weekdays when others are also on the network. Alan removed a bulb from a dissecting ‘scope with no plug to replace the burned-out bulb in the second ‘scope, allowing us to examine algae. The library mostly contains material about UNAM, with just a handful of reference books – although, given how little we know about natural history, the perfect number to get us started. We wondered what political decision was made to place the center in this remote location and invest so much in buildings rather than equipment to expedite science: then we found out that Sam Nujoma has a house just down the street in Henties Bay! Scientists and staff at the center bought fish for Nujoma and entourage; and Saturday near sundown the same vehicle returned with two loads of boxes that were put into the common room – possibly the empty, unplugged walk-in freezer (Alan had checked it out from curiosity earlier in the day). Mystery!

We have been impressed by many of the horticultural projects, especially growing different varieties of squashes and melons to look for resistance to salt spray (imagine! Watermelons growing out of sand!), and successful production of oyster mushrooms (these grow out of the end of plastic bags in a special room). Even with limited seawater, there are also projects to raise marine fish in tanks.

SaNuMaRC, like much of Henties Bay, perches above a restless ocean on a red-sand dune: the beach sand is gray, and the old river sand purple in places. This beach has some similarities to the one we left on the outer coast of Washington: extensive sand (for hundreds of miles, rather than tens) that people drive on (with Land Rovers and quad bikes rather than pick-ups). Signs all indicate that it is illegal to drive on beaches, but the enforcement is apparently lax. People drive 4x4 vehicles to set up elaborate day-camps for fishing and kite-flying; and they drive quad bikes up and down the steep sand cliffs that plunge 20-30 m to the beach. We observed that almost everyone driving on the beach was white, and we’ve heard people come from all over Africa because these beaches are some of the last remaining where it is possible to drive. Some of the roadside trash suggests that fireworks were set off over New Years as well.

We’re beginning to learn about the Namibian coast by walking the beaches at low tide. The beaches themselves are quite barren, reflecting the dynamic movement of sand – 1 m per week northward movement, and perpetual rearrangement of berms and slopes. One day, water was trapped in a high intertidal pool and Katie went swimming in comfortably warm water up to her thighs. The next day the pool simply drained away. We found just two species in the sand: sand-colored isopods up to nearly 1 cm in length, which nibbled on toes but burrowed rapidly in the sand, presumably food for the few shorebirds we’ve seen. And Donax surf clams – Pismo clams in California – that work their way up and down the beach in the swash. Alan traded a local fisherman some beach-cast tackle for information that the clams are quite rare near the marine station, but become more abundant a few km N and S where the sand quality changes. We found a few shells, some recently opened for bait, and two moribund individuals that allowed us to see internal anatomy: a large digger foot and two siphons, too small to make anything but bait or chowder.
The wrack on the beach is slightly richer, dominated by Laminaria kelp and a small 1-2 cm native mussel. Elsewhere, this Laminaria is collected for cultured abalone food, but it is probably too rare to grow much of a business: there’s just not sufficient hard substrate along the coast to support vast kelp forests. We also heard that the small native mussel is such an effective fouling organism that is preventing the expansion of Mytilus galloprovincialis from S. Africa north along this stretch of coastline. In the wrack we found two morphological types of larger mussels: one is quite elongate and brown, with an outer edge that is almost square in shape; the other is jet-black with a white-to-blue abraded umbo and sharp angle on the shell edge near the hinge – perhaps gallo. At the low, large patches of mussel shell rolled around in the surf, almost flowing like water up and down the beach. The wrack also included smaller numbers of: limpets, a translucent brown circular shell, snails, Venerupis clam shells, sea cucumbers, bryozoans – primarily one that forms long, narrow, flat colonial blades, crab carapaces, and parts of spiny lobsters. We have begun to look at some of the algae and have found, in addition to Laminaria pallida, ulvoids and Cladophora for greens, and numerous reds. Some look familiar, such as Plocamium and Ceramium, but some were really impossible to tell. We had two books at our disposal: some color plates and descriptions in the Seaweeds of southwest Africa, and line drawings in Branch and Branch’s guide to seashores. But the reds included some fascinating types, for instance one that appeared to have no holdfast but instead twined around Cladophora filaments, and another with dramatic flower-like reproductive structures emerging in patches from a flat blade. We did find one deadly species - Physalia (Portugese man-o-war), which blew in droves onto the beach as the wind shifted from NW to SW one afternoon. Alan collected a whole bucketful, along with the similarly-blue Velella velella (By-the-wind sailor), which is common on the beaches of Washington.

We’re also learning about the Namibian coast by talking with scientists: Larry Oellermann, who is on a multi-year contract at SaNuMaRC to improve mariculture, and several people at NatMIRC (National Marine something research center) in Swakopmund, the major research site for the Ministry of fisheries and marine resources. The Benguela system is one of permanent upwelling, not intermittent. Generally there are strong winds from the southwest (although mostly northwest during this stay), with occasional shifts to the east that bring terrible (to people) but dune-nourishing sand. Plus flies. The water was soupy green, even in the tidepool caught by sand, and the high-tide waves were frothy with diatoms. This sounds tremendous for marine production: Even here, however, wild finfisheries are collapsing (we heard that sardines are essentially gone, although the fish identification book in the library indicates they are now carefully managed and sustainably harvested! Offshore, orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish, both long-lived, slow-to-mature deepwater species, began to be exploited around 1995, and in just a few years catch per unit effort plummeted.) And last year 60% of the oyster crop was lost to sulfur “blooms”. The fishery and mariculture troubles probably have different causes, and interestingly sulfur appears entirely natural. High production in the coastal ocean contributes to a rain of organic material reaching the bottom, where it accumulates and is decomposed by such things as the largest bacterium ever discovered (1 mm cells!). Decomposition creates pockets of hydrogen sulfide that, for reasons yet unknown (at least 15 hypotheses have been suggested), occasionally bubble out over the course of a week or so: the hydrogen sulfide reacts with oxygen in the water column to create water and elemental sulfur. This elemental sulfur is visible in satellite imagery as an enormous patch of light-blue off of the coast. And locally it appears as anoxic water all the way to the surface: immediately bad for many fish and crabs, and intolerable by Pacific and European oysters after about a week (whether from the sulfide or anoxia is not clear). Some of the native species (a goby, mussels, clams) apparently last longer.

Minor emergency

2008-01-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

Monday evening Jan 7: Katie suffered a radial dislocation as Alan picked her up by her arms onto his lap. My worst nightmare: a medical emergency before we’ve made any medical connections. While I tried to calm Katie down by nursing and reading, Alan consulted the internet to look for cures to “nursemaid’s elbow”. I would have been terribly panicked except that I knew it should be possible to pop it back in, but how? Cousin Emma had suffered a similar injury at the same age, and her doctor had fixed it while out on a jog. What a terrible time for the whole Polytechnic internet to be down! Alan finally had to go all the way across campus to the Conroys to use their internet connection. When he returned (seemed like forever), he rotated her hand out and then bent her elbow up – Voila! instantly no more pain, and Katie could use her arm. Score one more for the internet. (And for listening to one's sister...)

Namibian locavores?

2008-01-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

In keeping with the Ruesink family tradition, no log-book would be complete without some details about FOOD!
Food that fits the climate:
1. Stale tortilla chips that we brought from Seattle are now crispy.
2. Katie has discovered ice cream cones, best consumed in the heat of the day with big licks, a face covered in stickiness, and always just barely ahead of the drips.
3. Water: we are drinking perpetually (except for Katie, who has her own opinion about these things). Water throughout the country is potable if it comes from a tap (so we’ve heard, and it certainly seems true in Windhoek – no GI distress at all to report). Still, we appreciate the filter that we brought from the US, as it improves the taste of municipal water: we’re just not the sort to spring for bottled water.
4. Tea (and coffee): Namibians do not drink iced tea or coffee. It’s hot hot hot, even though the air is as well. In fact, if we ask for “hot tea,” we get strange looks – is that something special? different? The standard tea is 5 Roses brand, very well steeped. Rooibos, native to south Africa, is also common. As Katie has attended meetings and briefings with us, she has had many opportunities to try her practiced skills at “tea parties” with real china (under close supervision). She particularly enjoys putting in A LOT of sugar, stirring, and snitching any sugar that misses the cup and falls on the saucer.

Local food:
The bare fact of the matter is that this country is dry. All the introductory ecology textbooks are borne out here: low evapotranspiration leads to low productivity. Low productivity means it’s challenging to grow local food. You need 15 hectares of land to support a single beef cow; goats and sheep can be stocked at six times the density, but (we calculated) the space of the Rutabaga Ranch near Willapa Bay would only allow us to keep a half a goat. More intensive animal production, such as broilers, eggs, pigs, dairy cows, all require feeds, and these require more soil and irrigation than is possible in much of Namibia. Eating local, therefore, takes on a somewhat different challenge here. From ecology and history and (we’ve heard) some perverse subsidies, much of the food in Namibia is imported from South Africa. Ecology: there’s more productive land there. History: Namibia was a protectorate of South Africa, and it’s still considered a sign of status to purchase South African products. On our first evening here, Alan went to a South African chain general store, described as “a bit like Walmart”. All the items he brought home had been imported. Since then, we have looked carefully for Namibian products: we can buy Nammilk milk (only whole; South African milk comes in different fat contents and is usually irradiated so needs no refrigeration) and yogurt (Katie particularly enjoys the sweetened fruit versions). We can buy Waldschmidt eggs from near Windhoek, and, as we’ll be teaching about chickens in a few months, we hope to visit their farm. We can buy Namibian fish, but this is apparently an unusual product for consumption in the country: only 2% of the extensive fisheries of the Benguela current are consumed within Namibia, and most of that by tourists. So, we’ve begun to try the local beef (ground, it matched the low fat content of Bud Goulter’s grass-fed beef near Willapa Bay – and all the cattle we’ve seen have been very rangy), sausage, kudu, and oryx (stuffed inside a pepper for JR’s tasty lunch today). We’ve become fans of “Fruit and Veg City” just down the street, where we buy apples, oranges, nectarines (all smaller and tangy-er than in the US), papayas (called paw-paws?), grapes, plums. F&V City prides itself on fresh local produce but includes all of southern Africa as “local”.

On Saturday 1/19 we attended our first Green Market, or Bio-Market, a sort of farmers’ market equivalent. The good part: fresh, organic, and mostly local food (exception: dried nuts and fruits, purchased from S Africa and beyond [probably, given the dried cranberries!] and packaged for sale here). The ambivalent part: 99% white for both sellers and buyers, our first time to experience this slice of Windhoek life. Booths included: homebaked bread, rusks, and crunchies (granola bars); eggs and home-slaughtered chickens and geese; vegetables such as lettuce, spinach (Namibian type), aubergine (eggplant), zucchini, patty-pan squash, maize (corn), parsley; sausage and cheeses; dried herbs; ground beef and ground game. One booth had vegetables purchased from a variety of nearby locations, including Khomasdal, which we understand is a suburb where some non-whites were resettled in the 1950s. We bought honey with comb from the only bee-keeper in Windhoek, who had suffered quite a few stings even though he reported that African honeybees are not particularly aggressive in summer when lots of flowers, especially acacia, are available. The honey is dark and pungent. We also bought prickly pear fruits, because we heard that, like Washington cherries, they are only available for a short time each year. Peel the fruits and slice the sweet, seedy inside to eat raw.

Oysters: In a way, we’re in Nambia due to oysters. There’s not much to report so far, except we first encountered them raw on the half shell at the Kalahari Sands Hotel (and casino) for Sunday brunch. They tended towards the “east coast” style (“watery”, we say on the West coast), with nothing in their guts. Alan refused to try them: I found them to be quite pleasant, slightly briny and sweet, even with a little lime squeezed over them. The brunch also included green-lipped mussels (Apparently from NZ, as their introduction has not been allowed in S. Africa or Namibia), available on the “salad bar” cooked in a sort of vinaigrette, and as an addition to a “choose your own” stirfry. The oysters must have been popular, because by the time I got to the iced section, there were only a few left.

Namibia does have an excellent combination of characteristics to produce salt: a marine coastline with tremendous evaporative solar power. The Salt Company (I kid you not) can be seen from the Salt Road between Swakopmund and Henties Bay: a conveyor belt drops salt in an outdoor pile that is several stories tall – this must be the first separation of salt from the other materials picked up from salt ponds.

It’s different!
1. Namibian pizza: soft crust with tomato sauce, mushroom and baloney pieces, cheese on top. It’s good! 2 out of 4 of our first lunches.
2. “Natural” products are difficult to find: Peanut butter and many juices contain added sugar. Soaps are full of chemical scents, and (we gasped) laundry detergent still has phosphate. The lowest amount we found at Pick and Pay was 3%, and the highest 30-40%!
3. Spinach: in southern Africa, refers to something that is much more like our chard, eaten raw in salads or cooked. Cheap and delicious! JR’s idea of heaven. For AT and little KCR, potatoes are also easily available. And a potato is still a potato.
4. Bread: There are essentially no name brands (not even Wonder bread!) Instead, each grocery/bakery has generally 3 types of sliced bread, all in very square loaves: white, brown, and wheat. Personally, I was hoping for a little more German influence – crisp crust, chewy inside. Even though the crusts are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the loaf, Katie still wants them cut off!
5. Another type of bread that’s characteristic of Namibia is brotchen (with a double dot over the “o”). These are 4-5” white rolls, sliced in half and topped with a variety of savory options open-faced. So far we’ve tasted: egg salad, cheese and tomato, and thinly-sliced smoked game with tomato and pepper. We’re pretty sure brotchen are indicative of german influence!

Exploring Windhoek

2008-01-05T01:38:00.000-08:00

I find it amusing that we so recently moved out of our apartment in Seattle, wiping our hands of that phase of our life for a time. And now we’re back in an apartment that is strangely similar: kitchen, dining room, and living room combined, 2 bedrooms, 2 baths (sort of: one has a bathtub, the other has a toilet, both have sinks), and a balcony. The views are better here, as we have an end-apartment that allows us to see both north and south, and to some extent east. We have to walk up a flight of stairs for unobstructed sunsets.

Someone else chose the furniture – thankfully, as it surely saves us both time and money. But I chuckle each time I look at the glass-fronted china cupboard that we will never use: only 2 50-lb checked bags for the 3 of us, so we brought only clothes and electronics, not our best china.

The apartment has an amazing number of appliances: toaster, coffee maker, tea kettle, beaters, television, even a clothes washer, but no clock. I’m not actually sure if the time is 3 in the afternoon or 2, as I write this. I wonder if this is a subtle hint to be aware of African time. Regardless, the days are long – in hours and because we’re still exhausted from travel and from unfamiliar heat.

This morning we spent about 4 hours walking north into a busy urban shopping area, where we began to pick up the few essential items that were too heavy to pack: sunscreen, antibiotic cream, dish soap, hand soap. Katie played for a while in the Zoo-park, which hasn’t had a zoo for decades, but has a fine playground. We had been warned that they’re a bit dangerous: all we discovered is that the metal parts are very hot in the sun (especially as Katie had bare legs), and some of the wooden boards are missing. It was more than made up for by the children there, who asked Katie to “come and play,” then picked her up and had her join in their adventures with a galloping 5-seated horse. Yesterday, we spent some time with 12-year-old Lisa, who is visiting next door. She was totally excited about a gift of stickers, fascinated by the animal flashcards, and amazed at how many toys Katie has (in fact, we only brought out a fraction of Katie’s full complement, which is dwarfed by the toys we left in Washington): this was my first truly eye-opening cultural experience. The second came when I realized Lisa didn’t know the term “mammal” and didn’t know continents on a map – although this may simply reflect language barriers. (A day later: the kids at Poly Heights, where we have our 7th floor apartment, have been equally welcoming to Katie. She is in heaven playing with them, much happier than when she's with mom and dad running errands.) I am beginning to think that, although English is the official language of the country, it is no one’s preferred or default language except for us. And, by the way, every storekeeper recognized us as tourists (clothes? accent?). We stand out enough that the guards at the Polytechnic didn’t even ask to see our ID cards when we returned from our walk.

Walking is easy for almost everything we can imagine needing (except a car seat). We are still wondering why the embassy employees took Alan by car to a distant shop for a few groceries last night - but we suspect it may have to do with what's "acceptable" for whites. We still have a lot to learn about race relations. But our logistics will actually be much easier simply by walking: within 4 blocks is a Pick and Carry for staples and household items, and a Fruit and Veg City for fresh produce, meat and fish, and some preserved fruit and nuts. The clientele is diverse. Walking has seemed safe, though we tried very hard to have nothing accessible, and Alan has been very particular about our path. We've been warned about some locations to avoid at night, because of property theft. But the days are long, and we have plenty of time to accomplish our initial goals of simply settling in.

Arrival

2008-01-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

It is a long way from Seattle to Namibia... and yet short. On the last day of 2007, we left the damp chill rain that never seems to dry, and we arrived a year later, having weathered 3 plane flights by dint of Katie playing with other kids on the first leg, sleeping on the second and third.

On the last leg from Johannesburg to Windhoek, we encountered a dry landscape of gigantic proportions. Initially, we flew over rich neighborhoods of Jburg where nearly every house had a private swimming pool. On the outskirts, the proportions shrunk, and the colors shifted from green to redbrown: neighborhoods of dirt roads, smaller houses, little vegetation to overcome the aerial sense of stark poverty. From above, it is clear that there are still two classes of people living in different ways in different places. The dirt underlying sparse vegetation shows red-brown especially as a mark of humans. The roads are red, running arrow-straight to the horizon, or coming together like a few spokes of a wheel around a red town, where light glints off some roofs. The fields are red, often solitary patches in the natural landscape, and even though we expected them to be green from mid-summer production. Close to Johannesburg, we saw crop circles that were obvious evidence of irrigation, but further away most fields appeared empty. By the time we reached Namibia, crop fields were not apparent at all, instead large fenced pastures. The fence borders are also red, probably from vehicle patrol rather than animals. Much of the flight took us over the Kalahari desert in Botswana, where evidence of humans is particularly sparse. Instead, the landscape is marked by irregular round grey depressions, some reaching the size of villages we saw along the way. At least they looked like depressions from above. Initially I thought meteorites, but the marks are much too common for that to be likely. Alan thinks the marks are water holes, small depressions that collect water. He is usually correct about these sorts of things, but most of the areas currently contain neither water nor vegetation, and they do not have obvious “game” trails around them (although in retrospect, I think we were too high to see paths of that size).

On the drive from the airport into Windhoek, we saw baboons, ostrich, kudu, warthogs, ant mounds, weaverbird nests. Crickets sing at night. Everything about the natural landscape looks different - we are continually wondering what things are and why the land looks as it does. And looking forward to learning more.

Pre-departure

2007-12-09T23:04:00.000-08:00

1 apartment's worth of worldly goods to condense and move into storage.
2 more immunizations.
3 VISAs to obtain.
4 inches (10 cm) of grading.
Undoubtedly more address changes to complete.
And one weblog to begin - a huge experiment, subject to adaptive management once I discover how this actually looks onscreen (assuming it works at all).