#spiky things

Today I would like to offer free (for personal/non-commercial use) natural history coloring pages. This one’s based on the Cambrian explosion. Let me know what you think. Top has gray background to help if you only want to color the critters, bottom has white background if you want to choose the color there.

It certainly has been an action-packed four (as of when I started writing this on Wednesday) days. I’ve been exposed to new organisms from plants to snakes to lemurs in their natural (or not, in a few cases) habitats. I’ve augmented my knowledge of killing animals for food, and I’ve discovered some new ways to detriment my own health.

On Sunday, we rendezvoused at the Hôtel Mahavoky (comme d’habitude) around 7 in the morning to head out for Ifotaka, the site for our lemur ecology studies. Much to everyone’s extreme delight, we traveled in 4x4s rather than a TATA bus, so the journey went quite a bit faster and everyone felt a bit less carsick and claustrophobic. I managed to get my first spiny forest/desert injury by getting some cactus needles stuck in my foot on a pee break, but it wasn’t a big deal to pull them back out. Ifotaka was wonderfully cool and dry (cold even at times), so we were thrilled to get started there. Our first cool site was a pair of spiders on the same web (one very large, one very small). The little one had tied up the bigger one and at first we thought it was going to eat it. It then dawned on us though that mating was actually a much more plausible explanation – male spiders are often quite a bit smaller than female spiders. So it appears that the little guy was just trying to mate with her. We don’t know for sure whether or not he was successful. At any rate, she escaped her bonds and he wasn’t there a while later, so either they mated and he booked it, they mated and then she ate him, or she just ate him. So it goes.

That night, we went on a walk through the forest to look for mouse lemurs (which we found without too much trouble). We would shine our lights in the trees and spot the reflections of their eyes. They’re very very little and incredibly cute (pictures on Facebook) and it was a blast watching them scurry around their respective trees. We also spotted some equally cute chameleons taking naps in various trees (one of them was very small, but not as small as the one that everyone keeps sending me links to), as well as some very large arthropods of various persuasions. When we walked back to our camp, we were in for another surprise, as there was a boa constrictor that had somehow made its way into one of the latrines. It later managed to escape, but it was a little ridiculous spotting something that large and incongruous in such a location.

On Monday morning, I woke up bright and early and after eating my breakfast of only slightly stale bread, I killed a chicken. It was a little sad to be sure, but it’s very refreshing knowing exactly where your food comes from and that you’re not a hypocrite about your meat-eating (specifically that you can face the truth about eating animals). After relinquishing the chicken to the locals for butchering, my group and I set out to perform a transect study of the lemur (Propithecus verrauxi verrauxi – AKA the sifaka AKA the lemur for which this blog is named) populations in the forest. In addition to the annoyance of a very uncooperative GPS, this was also when I began to be maimed by plants. They don’t call it the spiny forest for nothing and a particularly vicious fern-looking thing managed  to make my leg bleed a bit and to pull a good chunk of thread out of my socks.

That afternoon (after a chicken lunch), we set out to study the lemurs’ behavior. My individual jumped around for a little while and then managed to completely lose me so that I could only assume it was napping in the same tree as my friend’s lemur. After admitting defeat, heading back to camp, playing approximately one billion card games, and eating dinner, my friends and I lay down in the village square and looked at stars for a while (which was incredible because there’s absolutely zero light pollution so you can see thousands of them). Upon returning to my tent, I discovered that I was suffering from the plague of locusts i.e. tons of tiny little grasshoppers that had somehow found their way in and insisted on hopping all over me all night.

On Tuesday morning, after eating our considerably staler bread, we set out on a habitat study of the lemurs. Essentially, that just meant we got to measure and identify trees (but in a much better, more organized way than at Andohahela). After lunch that afternoon, I was witness to the sacrifice of both a goat and a sheep by the villagers for the fête later that evening. It was a little more disturbing than the chickens, but I still found it fascinating and worthwhile to know where my meat came from.  I do want to clarify that all of these animal killings have been very humane, resulting in a minimum of pain and suffering and a maximally quick ending. It also seems to me that people here are much less disconnected from both their food and the reality of death than people in the western world. While in the US, death (even of the animals that we eat) is something to be hidden from small children and the weak of heart, it’s very much a constant reality for the Malagasy. Small children are present for these ritual sacrifices from the very beginning up through the butchering and cooking of the meat.  There’s no hypocrisy about eating meat here: everybody knows it came from an animal and nobody’s especially bothered by that reality.

The meat wasn’t especially exciting, but the fête was a lot of fun. We did our best to follow the lead of the locals in their traditional dances. The core element of many of them is rhythmic stomping, so I can master that pretty effectively. The jazz hands and hip movements are a little more complicated and I'm sure we all looked plenty ridiculous, but that's half the fun, right? There was one little girl who just kept on leading the songs all night long with an incredibly powerful voice for someone so small. After I'd tired of dancing (which took quite a while), I sat down for a bit and some of the village children approached me and tried to talk to me. We had a pretty difficult time understanding each other, because their French was very rudimentary, as was my Malagasy, but making funny faces seems to be understood across all cultures, so that's what I relied on.

On Wednesday, we struck camp bright and early to head out for Berenty Reserve, which is pretty much the quintessential place that tourists go to see lemurs (ring-tails, sifakas, brown lemurs). The first thing we did once we got to Berenty was to visit the Museum of the Androy (the ethnic group that lives in Madagascar's desert south), which was interesting enough although very hot. I was actually lucky enough that I was running late getting there, having spent some quality time in the bathroom, so I was able to see some ring-tails by the path before we had our later group sightings. After the museum, we headed out for our guided tour of the reserve, whereupon I promptly fell and turned my ankle pretty badly. I was all set to bear with it but as we kept going on the path, I realized I was also feeling pretty woozy. So, about five minutes after that realization, my vision started getting blurry and I resigned myself to the notion that I'd have to be evacuated (in the mildest sense of the word) to a place where I could sit down and rehydrate.

So I missed the walk that everyone else went on, but I did get to cool down and rehydrate and thereby feel a lot better. As it turns out, I also didn't really miss anything great (except the giant bats, which I am a little sad about). Once the rest of teh group rejoined me in the cafeteria, we ate a huge, delicious lunch. After which a troop of maki (the Malagasy word for ring-tailed lemurs) invaded the cafeteria and stole some bread and generally put on a show for us (pictures on Facebook).

Unfortunately, Wednesday was also the day that the cold I'd felt coming on for a while fully manifested itself. I started to get pretty stuffy and my host parents immediately noticed once I got home. On the negative side, Papa José told me that especially, the fan is interdit (i.e. verboten) because the chills will make my cold worse. However, being sick in Madagascar does also apparently mean you get a lot of pampering. Both yesterday and Friday morning, Maman Dette has given me hot water in my shower (mundane at home, a big deal here because she has to boil it), as well as some sort of pound cake/cornbread for breakfast instead of the usual baguettes. 

On a largely but not completely unrelated note (since we're talking about health), yesterday we got to visit with an ombiasa (traditional plant-based healer) in a village about an hour out of the city. It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life, both in terms of understanding Malagasy conceptions of illness and in terms of understanding how some of the world's poorest people deal with health problems that would be a minor nuisance in wealthier corners of the world (cataracts were mentioned as one of the biggest problems in the village).