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!
Monday, June 16, 2008
Concrete
Namibia has a distinctive building style. Nearly all the buildings are made of concrete blocks, often with a layer of cement on the outside and tile on the inside. Much of the construction we’ve witnessed makes it clear that there’s no fear of earthquakes: the blocks are not built up around rebar, but occasionally have a bit of wire mesh, sort of like a strip of fencing, placed horizontally between successive layers. When the lab building was constructed in April adjacent to the existing hatchery at the Salt Company, the new walls were attached by nailing a strip of aluminum to the old wall, then bending it to lie in the new mortar.
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….
Mother and Father in Namibia
Mother’s Day to Father’s Day: JR’s parents spent these holidays on day-long journeys from Bloomington, Indiana, USA to Windhoek, Namibia and back. Maybe that’s why this itinerary was still relatively cheap when they decided to take this opportunity to visit Africa for the first time. In between, 12-15 May in Windhoek; 15-24 May at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 25 May-3 June on a northward loop that included Etosha National Park; 3-6 June at the salt ponds in Swakopmund; 7-8 June at Gobabeb desert research center for their Open Day; 8-12 June on a loop south that included Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib-Rand Nature Reserve; 13-14 June back in Windhoek. They celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary in the middle of the Namib Desert, the oldest desert on earth, and the driest area of sub-Saharan Africa! Just a year or 2 shy of 70, Albert and Kathy nevertheless embraced African-style camping. For more than a month, they slept in a tent (okay, it was a pretty big tent [3x3 m, plenty of standing room], with cots and pads)! They packed and moved effortlessly from one campground to another, some more rustic than others: at one extreme, the pit toilet at the Salt Company was a half-mile away; at the other extreme, some of the camping sites had individual power and light, flush toilets and warm showers, and special rooms for doing dishes. Although we promised them laundry access at least once a week, in fact we never made it to a Laundromat, and they ended up washing most clothes by hand. And they didn’t bring any extra baggage – just one carry-on apiece, plus one small checked bag that mostly included books and clothes for Katie and some biology textbooks. They were wonderful traveling companions, and we will be forever grateful for this strong connection that they’ve forged through discovery with their granddaughter, and for this opportunity for us to explore parts of Namibia that we would otherwise have been too busy to visit.
Funniest things they said on the trip: Mom, en route from Windhoek to the salt ponds on the coast: “Is that a real giraffe?” Yes, indeed, 4 of them – the first of many that we watched over the next month. They really do look other-worldly, with their long necks sticking up above the bushy vegetation of this arid land. Probably, you’ve all seen pictures of giraffes spreading their front legs to be able to stretch down to drink water, but did you know that they hop their feet back together when they’re done? Dad, while on the dirt road circumference around Namibia’s tallest mountain, Brandberg: “Could you stop a minute? I think I just saw a Welwitschia.” In fact, along that stretch of desert road, there were hundreds of these curious plants, with their two leaves that grow perpetually from a low woody trunk, sporting small male or larger female cones. Apparently Namibia has NO native gymnosperms – is this weird, or what! Especially coming from the Pacific Northwest, which is chock-a-block full of conifers! – and Welwitschia is the closest it gets!
The trip was also book-ended by two critical meetings at the Polytechnic of Namibia. It is with a great deal of relief that we report that JR’s “baby”- the new Agriculture and Aquaculture programs- passed at the school-level on May 9 and passed at the university-level on June 13! Woo-hoo! Well, the curriculum development aspects of the Fulbright year are not entirely complete, as JR will now coordinate the development of a new BSc in Applied Biology across several schools, and AT continues to advise on the development of the Namibian Business Innovation Center.
Funniest things they said on the trip: Mom, en route from Windhoek to the salt ponds on the coast: “Is that a real giraffe?” Yes, indeed, 4 of them – the first of many that we watched over the next month. They really do look other-worldly, with their long necks sticking up above the bushy vegetation of this arid land. Probably, you’ve all seen pictures of giraffes spreading their front legs to be able to stretch down to drink water, but did you know that they hop their feet back together when they’re done? Dad, while on the dirt road circumference around Namibia’s tallest mountain, Brandberg: “Could you stop a minute? I think I just saw a Welwitschia.” In fact, along that stretch of desert road, there were hundreds of these curious plants, with their two leaves that grow perpetually from a low woody trunk, sporting small male or larger female cones. Apparently Namibia has NO native gymnosperms – is this weird, or what! Especially coming from the Pacific Northwest, which is chock-a-block full of conifers! – and Welwitschia is the closest it gets!
The trip was also book-ended by two critical meetings at the Polytechnic of Namibia. It is with a great deal of relief that we report that JR’s “baby”- the new Agriculture and Aquaculture programs- passed at the school-level on May 9 and passed at the university-level on June 13! Woo-hoo! Well, the curriculum development aspects of the Fulbright year are not entirely complete, as JR will now coordinate the development of a new BSc in Applied Biology across several schools, and AT continues to advise on the development of the Namibian Business Innovation Center.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Flu season
Katie has been fighting some sort of disease for the past 2 weeks. Its progression went like this: first, a little diarrhea; then a runny nose; at its worst, a night of restless fever, followed by 3 evenings when she vomited immediately after dinner. One of these nights was also restless, including teeth-grinding. For about the last week, she has continued to have a hacking cough and banana slugs up her nose. Mucus is now turning green and crusty, a sign that the immune system has kicked in. Meanwhile, during the worst of this, I was simultaneously trying to complete three curriculum submissions for the department – this meant 1-on-1 meetings and advisory committee meetings most of each day, while writing and editing at night. Only it was particularly difficult for me to do any work at night, because I would help Katie get to sleep (conservatively a 20-minute process) and 5 minutes after I got back on my computer, she would be calling for me again. Well, it’s clear I wore myself down, so by the curriculum deadline (Apr 25), my nose was a torrent of phlegm and my patience worn down to a thin veneer. Alan was also grumpy: although he was least affected by disease (just one day of self-described incredible gaseous eruptions), he was fielding calls from the coast about how much we were needed there, plus running a lot of errands and forgetting to eat.
The good news/bad news was that the Friday afternoon meeting for administrative feedback on the curriculum submissions was canceled at the last minute. Instead, we left immediately for the coast. On the 4-hour drive, my scratchy throat transformed into earaches so intense that I couldn’t hear, totally precluding my normal Katie-entertainment duties. Then Katie said her ears were hurting too. I was ready to go to the emergency room at the Swakopmund hospital, but Alan correctly diagnosed our ills: My stuffy head had dis-equilibrated from the pressure differential between 5000 ft and sea level, cured in a matter of minutes after a dose of Panado (not available in the US, but Alan had heard of it before). Katie was simply trying to be a participant in everything and still just had a runny nose (well, she had vomited earlier…). Definitely the nadir of our trip!
A longer-term health concern has been Alan’s sore foot, probably plantar fasciatis, although not quite in same spot as in years past. It’s been exacerbated by several long barefoot walks on the beach, plus his first choice for shoes to be worn in the water – so many nylon straps across the top that they caught rocks top and bottom, causing blisters and sores as well. A couple of weeks ago Alan succumbed to family peer pressure and went searching for size 13 Crocs – Katie and I both wear these almost constantly, in and out of the water, and we’ve found them extraordinarily comfortable and functional. Fortunately, Alan was able to find a manly black pair of Crocs that fit him – shoes are a big deal in Namibia, and there were plenty of stores to check, although we still feel lucky that there were actually several styles in his size – and foot complaints have eased. Of course, Alan had to eliminate all the Crocs logos by drawing over them with a black sharpie!
The good news/bad news was that the Friday afternoon meeting for administrative feedback on the curriculum submissions was canceled at the last minute. Instead, we left immediately for the coast. On the 4-hour drive, my scratchy throat transformed into earaches so intense that I couldn’t hear, totally precluding my normal Katie-entertainment duties. Then Katie said her ears were hurting too. I was ready to go to the emergency room at the Swakopmund hospital, but Alan correctly diagnosed our ills: My stuffy head had dis-equilibrated from the pressure differential between 5000 ft and sea level, cured in a matter of minutes after a dose of Panado (not available in the US, but Alan had heard of it before). Katie was simply trying to be a participant in everything and still just had a runny nose (well, she had vomited earlier…). Definitely the nadir of our trip!
A longer-term health concern has been Alan’s sore foot, probably plantar fasciatis, although not quite in same spot as in years past. It’s been exacerbated by several long barefoot walks on the beach, plus his first choice for shoes to be worn in the water – so many nylon straps across the top that they caught rocks top and bottom, causing blisters and sores as well. A couple of weeks ago Alan succumbed to family peer pressure and went searching for size 13 Crocs – Katie and I both wear these almost constantly, in and out of the water, and we’ve found them extraordinarily comfortable and functional. Fortunately, Alan was able to find a manly black pair of Crocs that fit him – shoes are a big deal in Namibia, and there were plenty of stores to check, although we still feel lucky that there were actually several styles in his size – and foot complaints have eased. Of course, Alan had to eliminate all the Crocs logos by drawing over them with a black sharpie!
Katie update
Anyone who has tried to talk with Katie over the phone, or who meets her for the first time, would never believe how much she talks with her parents and friends. She tells extended stories about going to the post office, or about the lives of cormorants (catching fish, feeding their babies, going to sleep), or about going to school with Abby and Teddy. Sometimes she tells us about how she can shoot birds, or about how someone shot back at her but she didn’t die: This shooting legacy is either from playing with Fulbright kids who are older boys, or from my training one day at the beach when Alan was giving me a hard time for pretending beach wrack was different family members – what are the options for playing on the beach? Interpersonal relationships among mussel shells and lobster legs, building towers out of rocks, digging holes, or shooting with kelp stipes! Actually, I have to say that learning how to shoot seems incrementally better than learning about barbies, which has been Katie’s experience with older girls: I’ve run interference to encourage barbies to go on sailing trips, instead of repetitively going on dates and getting married.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Katie does finally have her own doll, so she no longer needs to wrap up a hairbrush in a washcloth and rock it to sleep. She selected Abalone from among the hand-made doll options at the large craft shop in Windhoek – Abalone is wonderfully adventurous (although entirely cloth, so doesn’t go to the beach) and hardly ever cries or complains!
Once or twice a day, we get out the lightweight orange ball and play soccer (here football) on a sandy spot near the hatchery. Katie’s ball-handling skills have definitely improved: she can give the ball quite a boot, although only in the direction that she’s running, which means I often have to run it down before it enters the Salt Co canal or goes under the boundary fence. When the wind picks up, soccer is particularly challenging, because the wind drives the ball almost faster than I can run! Katie has also figured out the basics of catching a ball in her arms.
We spend a lot of time at the beach looking for tracks and skeletons. She is learning how to tell jackal from hyena tracks (hyenas have very large front feet; jackals tend to place their back feet exactly in the front tracks) and also tell their kills apart. She knows that a dead cormorant with a hole in its belly was killed by a jackal, whereas hyenas tend to dismember the entire bird. One particularly tragic kill included a cormorant let still tangled in fishing line and wire… and with older bones indicating that this gear had been ghost-fishing for some time. Clearly the extra load weighed down the bird and made it an easy target for the hyena. But, of course, as ecologists, we talk with Katie about how predators need to eat, so it’s sad for the cormorant but necessary for the hyena.
Katie is not a huge fan of hyenas – they are on her “scary animal” list along with lions, crocodiles, and hippos. I think this is because Alan responds to her screaming by telling her she should be quiet or she’ll call the hyenas!
Alan has been through heroics to acquire some basic research equipment that we take for granted in the US, specifically iButtons, which log temperature remotely, and a YSI dissolved oxygen, temperature, and salinity meter. He is still working to acquire material for plankton nets. In retrospect, of course, we could have brought these things with us, but we really had no idea just how large a role anoxia plays in Namibia’s marine environment, nor that we would be working in a reverse estuary – the salt ponds just keep getting saltier! I mention this in the context of Katie because we now have temperature records for a variety of locations around the Salt Co, and the records are dramatic – up to 10C degree swings daily, probably as a response to solar heating of shallow water in the day and black-body radiation to a clear sky at night. Katie happily paddled around in shallow 30C water, just where the canal exits into the oyster pond and the water is warmest in the afternoon – it was just the right depth for her to support her body on her hands, and to enjoy the soft sinking sensation of anoxic sediment on the bottom (Apr 5)!
Katie has just exceeded the 20-freckle threshold – and yes, we are keeping her in sunscreen! She is in the phase of perpetual “Why?” And she has begun to add “eee” on the end of words. Sleep-ie, Bike-ie, Juice-ie. No one around her talks like this, as far as we know, so where does this come from?
On 2 occasions in Windhoek, our time there has overlapped with a lunchtime dance in the parking lot. A group of Oshivambo women occasionally gathers, sometimes with a single drum, but also just with clapping and their voices, in a circle. One by one or in pairs, the women dance into the center. The rhythms have been too complicated for me to pick up yet (let alone the words), but I have learned that the steps they use are very particular for each song, not free-form dance. The style involves flat-footed stomping, skipping, jumping. Katie has been transfixed by the music and dancing, but unwilling to join in, even though the women say that they began learning these songs when they were Katie’s age.
Mercy’s fish cakes and further adventures with food in Namibia
We have discovered what are quite likely the best fish cakes on the planet, served at Mercy’s take-away and catering near the northern road out of Swakopmund. It’s a difficult decision whether to have potato salad or French fries (here “chips”) on the side, as both are exceptionally tasty. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss from the Sleep Book, “Mercy’s is grand for having a bite/ if you happen to be there with your appetite.” Mercy herself reports that she will look for a location closer to town, because most of the people walking by cannot afford to eat out. This was yet another reminder of the economic gap between visiting Americans and most Namibians, as we find it quite incredible that we can feed the two-and-a-half of us for about $US8.
We have been learning more southern African terms for food: Pawpaws are papayas, Peppadew is a slightly spicy red pepper, Naartjies are small Satsuma oranges (it’s citrus season here), Mahango is millet, a staple in parts of the north that we have not yet eaten, and maize of course is corn (we have had mixed experiences with fresh sweet corn, but continue to try it because the best ears are really good – again, it’s the late-summer/ fall season for it). Rusks are like biscotti, available in a variety of flavors (buttermilk, muesli) and chocolate-dipped for holidays. According to the Ouma Rusks package, they are “a unique crunchy snack,… a truly South African icon, sought after in many countries around the world. The ideal treat, they can be served any time of the day or night and are equally delicious with tea or coffee.” After passing by entire aisles of rusks in the grocery stores for the past several months, we made an impulse buy to try them… and we’ll buy more! Katie is in a phase where she loves to dip food, and JR (as mentioned before) is happy with any excuse to have more 5 Roses tea. Alan was excited to learn that the basic rusk recipe includes some coconut!
At least one mystery still remains with respect to Namibian food: Monkey gland sauce!
We have been learning more southern African terms for food: Pawpaws are papayas, Peppadew is a slightly spicy red pepper, Naartjies are small Satsuma oranges (it’s citrus season here), Mahango is millet, a staple in parts of the north that we have not yet eaten, and maize of course is corn (we have had mixed experiences with fresh sweet corn, but continue to try it because the best ears are really good – again, it’s the late-summer/ fall season for it). Rusks are like biscotti, available in a variety of flavors (buttermilk, muesli) and chocolate-dipped for holidays. According to the Ouma Rusks package, they are “a unique crunchy snack,… a truly South African icon, sought after in many countries around the world. The ideal treat, they can be served any time of the day or night and are equally delicious with tea or coffee.” After passing by entire aisles of rusks in the grocery stores for the past several months, we made an impulse buy to try them… and we’ll buy more! Katie is in a phase where she loves to dip food, and JR (as mentioned before) is happy with any excuse to have more 5 Roses tea. Alan was excited to learn that the basic rusk recipe includes some coconut!
At least one mystery still remains with respect to Namibian food: Monkey gland sauce!
April marine observations
We continue to have a superb time living on the beach and feeling a part of each day’s natural history. In the morning, we can tell which way the wind is blowing based on the location of the steady stream of cormorants traveling from guano platform to ocean. A million of them in a long line, they tend to fly into the wind. We have not yet determined the cues that cause them, on some days, to gather as a huge black blanket on the beach before heading out to sea. One day last week, we witnessed semelparous reproduction: A particular type of flying insect has been accumulating in ever greater numbers – Mr Klein calls them midges, and they are mosquito-sized, with no bite or sting, but a very dark lipid stain when smushed, highly attracted to light. One morning we found thousands of them stuck to the windows of Hotel California, interspersed with spiral egg cases about a cm long, surrounded in gelatinous mucus. By the end of the day, it was clear the insects had made the wrong choice for egg-laying: midges and mucus had all dried up. And we haven’t had to be nearly as vigilant about closing doors before turning on lights since then. Seasonal changes are also evident in the colors on the beach at low tide. When we arrived, the intertidal zone was red with Gracilariopsis (this identification tentative, but coincides with the monograph on Namibian algae published in the 90s). Now much of this has been reduced to perennial holdfasts, with a few female plants bumpy with carposporangia, and the intertidal zone is green with a flush of ulvoids. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that we have not yet determined the identity of the less than half dozen species of terrestrial plants living alongside us in the coastal desert. But, we know a bit about their natural history: Many of them accumulate mounds of wind-blown sand, where gerbils and ants then tunnel for security (and presumably food). Since our arrival here, many of these plants have been subtly flowering, more so on the down-wind (N) side. We can also see the dried remnants of annual plants that apparently completed their whole life cycle in the spring before we arrived.
We know that the tide has dropped, leaving dislodged mussels stranded on the beach, when we see the gulls flying up, dropping a large Perna, then following it to the ground to see if it has broken. The introduced clam in the salt pond, Ruditapes decussata (from the Channel Islands), was recently decimated by birds – hundreds of large shells lay broken around along the road. Alan has not been particularly impressed by gulls with such dysfunctional bills that they can’t even get into a dislodged bivalve, but Mr Klein says they’re actually quite smart: along areas of the coast with no hard substrate for dropping and cracking bivalves, they simply place Donax clams on the sand dunes until they gape from the heat and desiccation. While the gulls go for the large Perna mussels, turnstones seem to love the small Semimytilus. These have been washing up in clumps on the beach recently, probably dislodged by waves as the mussel beds have become thick, no longer attached to rock but to an accumulated layer of sand of several cm. It’s easy to see the pattern of patches within the mussel beds at low tide, and we suspect that, given the fast growth and small size of this mussel species, it would be possible to watch patch dynamics over months, rather than the years required by Paine and Levin on the Washington coast!
On the subject of mussels, I spent one illuminating afternoon looking for boring organisms in Perna. The idea came from our desire to begin testing top-down control of Polydora in the salt pond: what really caused the polychaete to essentially disappear in 2004? Was it isopods? Nemerteans? Since we have found so few Polydora in oyster shells – an infection rate of about 2% - we wondered if we could use spionids in mussel shells as a surrogate, then test to see if either isopods or nemerteans caused mortality. We know from walking along the beach that the wrack is full of bored mussels (you know, riddled with holes. You can’t be the other kind of bored when you’re dead!).
So, on a fair to middling low tide, JR walked down to the rocks by the Salt works, dressed in my normal Namibian field gear: bathing suit, wrap-around skirt, Crocs, wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves (it’s either that or a lot of sunscreen). The first thing I noticed was that the upper limit of Perna was just barely above the waves, which is not unusual given the rather small tidal amplitude, just a bit over 1 m. The second thing I noticed was that Perna at its upper limit is not bored, but instead seems to be sand-scoured except at its growing edge, sometimes to the point of having a concave outer shell surface. Finally, I found a few large mussels rolling around in a tidepool that had apparently been dislodged from lower down: they were covered with erect bryozoan epiphytes, red tufts of algae, and obviously bored. I put these in a bit of water in my bucket and carried them off hopefully to the ‘scopes at the hatchery, then spent the next 3 hours noticing a third thing: Most of the eroded burrows in Perna are full of phoronids!
For those of you not completely versed in marine biodiversity, I’ll simply state that Polydora is a polychaete annelid, a segmented worm, in a family characterized by the presence of two long palps on the head. I think I saw 2 long palps once in 15 shells, but was unable to extract any more – and in any case it may not even have been a boring spionid, but rather one that builds its tube in sediment. In contrast, phoronids are in an entirely separate invertebrate phylum. They are soft-bodied, unsegmented worms, with a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles on their head – this headdress made them quite unmistakable as soon as I found a shell that still contained live individuals. But then the next question: Did the phoronids make the tubes, or just occupy someone else’s burrow? Our satellite internet access at the beach came in handy once again, as I was able to search on “shell-boring phoronid” and learn that one of the 17 species of phoronids IN THE WORLD – and the smallest one, at that – makes burrows in mollusc shells. All the evidence points towards Namibian subtidal Perna perna full of Phoronis ovalis. It has been reported from a different Perna species in New Zealand, as well as from abalone in Chile. As far as we can tell from beach wrack, only one of the 4 mussel species on this coast hosts Phoronis ovalis, and we gather they are not a problem in aquaculture here. I guess that is good news for the oyster growers, but it puts another hold on our quest to discover the mystery of the missing Polydora.
Another quest we have set ourselves is a better understanding of Venerupis corrugatus, the native littleneck or steamer clam on this coast. We heard early on that this clam was ubiquitous, and indeed we’ve found it in mussel beds, intermixed with intertidal polychaetes, and washed up next to the Walvis Bay yacht club. Most impressively, we saw tiny (1-2 mm) individuals at incredible densities fouling the oyster culture gear in Walvis Bay, apparently a recent recruitment event at exactly the same time that so many oysters were dying in March! Two weeks later, the oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay had clams around a cm long. This suggested to us that the native clam might be particularly well-adapted to survive low oxygen conditions and grow rapidly, perhaps an untapped aquaculture option! So, we tasted some “big” clams (they seem to get not much larger than 3 cm) with one of our oyster-growing friends and can now pronounce them delicious. How about a new market for Benguela clams?
Well, even though Venerupis corrugatus seems to weather much of what nature dishes out to it, it’s not very resistant to science… or perhaps to the blunders of curious scientists. We collected around 3000 of them in late March from oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay. They probably got a little bit of initial mistreatment that was not our fault: a freshwater rinse, and a 1-hour car ride in a small tub of water. Then, we distributed the clams into 3 sand or gravel-filled trays and watched them burrow in – at least most of them. We had to leave for Windhoek soon after that, so anchored the trays in a salt pond canal… that reached nearly 30C due to a series of bright, hot days. Half of the clams died. When we returned from Windhoek, we placed the trays back in the hatchery tanks, where another 50% died over several days. Then, we anchored the trays in a different, cooler part of the salt pond canal, just where the water is pumped in from the ocean. Over the next few days, the trays silted up and sank, with another half of the clams dying. However, by this time the surviving clams averaged 15 mm, and we had found live clams throughout the canal that had recruited and grown on their own. This gave us the perfect opportunity to set up our first experiment (as opposed to simply measuring conditions in different locations): we planted out the surviving clams into PVC rings embedded in the sediment, then put bird/fish exclosures around half and cage “controls” (just 2 sides) around the others. Because greater flamingos feed on invertebrates in the sediment, and a variety of waders (curlews, stilts, sandpipers, lapwings) probe for food, we think that these cages may allow us to document their ecological impact on infaunal communities. It’s so exciting to do a flamingo exclosure! And so nice not to have to accommodate 3-meter tides (as in any tideflat exclosure experiment in Willapa Bay) – in fact, the water barely goes up and down depending on how vigorously the pumps are working at the inlet.This experiment went up about 3 weeks ago as a “pilot” to see what would happen to structures – 2 exclosures were apparently trampled by birds, perhaps invisible to them on a dark night; and 1 exclosure (so far) has been gnawed by a hyena! Perfect evidence of the importance of replication.
We know that the tide has dropped, leaving dislodged mussels stranded on the beach, when we see the gulls flying up, dropping a large Perna, then following it to the ground to see if it has broken. The introduced clam in the salt pond, Ruditapes decussata (from the Channel Islands), was recently decimated by birds – hundreds of large shells lay broken around along the road. Alan has not been particularly impressed by gulls with such dysfunctional bills that they can’t even get into a dislodged bivalve, but Mr Klein says they’re actually quite smart: along areas of the coast with no hard substrate for dropping and cracking bivalves, they simply place Donax clams on the sand dunes until they gape from the heat and desiccation. While the gulls go for the large Perna mussels, turnstones seem to love the small Semimytilus. These have been washing up in clumps on the beach recently, probably dislodged by waves as the mussel beds have become thick, no longer attached to rock but to an accumulated layer of sand of several cm. It’s easy to see the pattern of patches within the mussel beds at low tide, and we suspect that, given the fast growth and small size of this mussel species, it would be possible to watch patch dynamics over months, rather than the years required by Paine and Levin on the Washington coast!
On the subject of mussels, I spent one illuminating afternoon looking for boring organisms in Perna. The idea came from our desire to begin testing top-down control of Polydora in the salt pond: what really caused the polychaete to essentially disappear in 2004? Was it isopods? Nemerteans? Since we have found so few Polydora in oyster shells – an infection rate of about 2% - we wondered if we could use spionids in mussel shells as a surrogate, then test to see if either isopods or nemerteans caused mortality. We know from walking along the beach that the wrack is full of bored mussels (you know, riddled with holes. You can’t be the other kind of bored when you’re dead!).
So, on a fair to middling low tide, JR walked down to the rocks by the Salt works, dressed in my normal Namibian field gear: bathing suit, wrap-around skirt, Crocs, wide-brimmed hat, long sleeves (it’s either that or a lot of sunscreen). The first thing I noticed was that the upper limit of Perna was just barely above the waves, which is not unusual given the rather small tidal amplitude, just a bit over 1 m. The second thing I noticed was that Perna at its upper limit is not bored, but instead seems to be sand-scoured except at its growing edge, sometimes to the point of having a concave outer shell surface. Finally, I found a few large mussels rolling around in a tidepool that had apparently been dislodged from lower down: they were covered with erect bryozoan epiphytes, red tufts of algae, and obviously bored. I put these in a bit of water in my bucket and carried them off hopefully to the ‘scopes at the hatchery, then spent the next 3 hours noticing a third thing: Most of the eroded burrows in Perna are full of phoronids!
For those of you not completely versed in marine biodiversity, I’ll simply state that Polydora is a polychaete annelid, a segmented worm, in a family characterized by the presence of two long palps on the head. I think I saw 2 long palps once in 15 shells, but was unable to extract any more – and in any case it may not even have been a boring spionid, but rather one that builds its tube in sediment. In contrast, phoronids are in an entirely separate invertebrate phylum. They are soft-bodied, unsegmented worms, with a horseshoe-shaped ring of tentacles on their head – this headdress made them quite unmistakable as soon as I found a shell that still contained live individuals. But then the next question: Did the phoronids make the tubes, or just occupy someone else’s burrow? Our satellite internet access at the beach came in handy once again, as I was able to search on “shell-boring phoronid” and learn that one of the 17 species of phoronids IN THE WORLD – and the smallest one, at that – makes burrows in mollusc shells. All the evidence points towards Namibian subtidal Perna perna full of Phoronis ovalis. It has been reported from a different Perna species in New Zealand, as well as from abalone in Chile. As far as we can tell from beach wrack, only one of the 4 mussel species on this coast hosts Phoronis ovalis, and we gather they are not a problem in aquaculture here. I guess that is good news for the oyster growers, but it puts another hold on our quest to discover the mystery of the missing Polydora.
Another quest we have set ourselves is a better understanding of Venerupis corrugatus, the native littleneck or steamer clam on this coast. We heard early on that this clam was ubiquitous, and indeed we’ve found it in mussel beds, intermixed with intertidal polychaetes, and washed up next to the Walvis Bay yacht club. Most impressively, we saw tiny (1-2 mm) individuals at incredible densities fouling the oyster culture gear in Walvis Bay, apparently a recent recruitment event at exactly the same time that so many oysters were dying in March! Two weeks later, the oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay had clams around a cm long. This suggested to us that the native clam might be particularly well-adapted to survive low oxygen conditions and grow rapidly, perhaps an untapped aquaculture option! So, we tasted some “big” clams (they seem to get not much larger than 3 cm) with one of our oyster-growing friends and can now pronounce them delicious. How about a new market for Benguela clams?
Well, even though Venerupis corrugatus seems to weather much of what nature dishes out to it, it’s not very resistant to science… or perhaps to the blunders of curious scientists. We collected around 3000 of them in late March from oyster gear coming out of Walvis Bay. They probably got a little bit of initial mistreatment that was not our fault: a freshwater rinse, and a 1-hour car ride in a small tub of water. Then, we distributed the clams into 3 sand or gravel-filled trays and watched them burrow in – at least most of them. We had to leave for Windhoek soon after that, so anchored the trays in a salt pond canal… that reached nearly 30C due to a series of bright, hot days. Half of the clams died. When we returned from Windhoek, we placed the trays back in the hatchery tanks, where another 50% died over several days. Then, we anchored the trays in a different, cooler part of the salt pond canal, just where the water is pumped in from the ocean. Over the next few days, the trays silted up and sank, with another half of the clams dying. However, by this time the surviving clams averaged 15 mm, and we had found live clams throughout the canal that had recruited and grown on their own. This gave us the perfect opportunity to set up our first experiment (as opposed to simply measuring conditions in different locations): we planted out the surviving clams into PVC rings embedded in the sediment, then put bird/fish exclosures around half and cage “controls” (just 2 sides) around the others. Because greater flamingos feed on invertebrates in the sediment, and a variety of waders (curlews, stilts, sandpipers, lapwings) probe for food, we think that these cages may allow us to document their ecological impact on infaunal communities. It’s so exciting to do a flamingo exclosure! And so nice not to have to accommodate 3-meter tides (as in any tideflat exclosure experiment in Willapa Bay) – in fact, the water barely goes up and down depending on how vigorously the pumps are working at the inlet.This experiment went up about 3 weeks ago as a “pilot” to see what would happen to structures – 2 exclosures were apparently trampled by birds, perhaps invisible to them on a dark night; and 1 exclosure (so far) has been gnawed by a hyena! Perfect evidence of the importance of replication.
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