The spotted ones are coming to dinner

Soon the fastest running mammal will be roaming Gorongosa National Park.  This will be a significant step in returning the region to a balanced system.   The grazers and browsers continue to build the lower part of the Gorongosa food pyramid for the soon to be released carnivores.

How did this animal become so fast?  It is good question to ask a beginning biology class.  The question prompts a variety of misconceptions around evolution by natural selection.  "The cheetahs learned to run faster over time" one student might respond.  Or "They ran faster because they needed to catch the small fast antelope."  Genetic variation is usually the concept that is overlooked.  The fact that some ancestral cheetahs might have had the ability to run slightly faster than others.  Then there is the adaptation and the fact that not all survive to reproduce.  Yes, the speed enhances the ability to get food and survive.  Finally, the genetic link to future cheetahs.  Those enhanced survivors pass on their genes for speed.   Of course it helps to conceptualize the timescale of millions of years and the fact that this increase in speed is not happening over several generations but hundreds of thousands of generations.   Hence, the cheetah is a fine model for introducing natural selection.  It is also a fine specimen for reintroducing top predators into this recovering ecosystem in order to bring it back to its previous balance. 

The cheetahs we observed in the enclosures near Explore Gorongosa had been transported from South Africa weeks prior.  There were two holding pens dividing the animals.  Two brothers were in the larger enclosure and were clearly very compatible.  We observed them sleeping together,  laying on top of each other, and frolicking together.   This is common between male cheetahs.  Males which are brought together from distant areas will often develop tight bonds together.  Brothers will typically remain together for their entire life.  

The female cheetahs are a different story.  The one we observed was clearly more aggressive and showed us her well developed teeth on our first encounter.  She then slowly strolled across her enclosure with a beautiful smooth gait with raised shoulders going for cover after giving us her warning.   Good to see the wild side - it is comforting for the pending release.  Best of luck to the local African hares, rodents and young impala.

A day in the Park

The morning light on the way to Mt. Gorongosa added a new dimension to the trees.  Every trip in the helicopter gives new perspective on the landscape.  The shadows in morning  made each tree appear more prominent in the forest.  

Our helicopter rose with the sun as Mr. Berthus was taking us to the location where we had previously conducted the rainforest survey with Ed.  My plan was to search within the rainforest floor for additional ant species and discover what other invertebrates were in and around the understory. 

On the approach to the mountain we passed over a layer of low clouds that skirted the base mountain.  Such varied topography leads to very interesting microclimates here which shapes a variety of ecosystems, resulting in the great biodiversity of the region.

The smoke from grass fires had been frequent down low in the Park, but here at 4700 feet the air was fresh and crisp.  Initially, I assisted Joel from National Geographic with the mist nets for bird collection.  We were joined by Ninda from Angola and Daniel, a biology intern from Portugal. On arrival we walked down to a stream bed where I had photographed a variable sunbird on the last expedition.  This ended up being a good collecting spot, netting 4 different birds. 

Once the nets were in place I decided to explore a new region of the rainforest.  I brought the machete and collecting gear on the upward slope of the meadow.   To access to the forest within I would have to clear with the machete. Most of the entry had thorn covered vines and some dense low trees.  I made a path just large enough so I exit easily with the bags of soil and leaf litter, shovel, and camera gear.

Before I really start collecting I found my eyes needed time to adjust to the dim light.  As I began searching through leaf litter I notice that there was an abundance of springtails (Collombola).  Ed was surprised that the previous sampling of leaf litter showed none.  He had discussed how the springtails are prey for a variety of predatory ants. Maybe this ground material will yield new ants.

I spent much of the time exploring the bark on fallen trees and logs.  The older material mostly had millipedes and earwigs. The newer wood had a variety of spiders, crickets, an unknown type of land snail, slugs, and the small white millipedes that Ed and I were finding in the leaf litter sample.  No ants were found.  The majority of the animals excluding the birds are incredibly cryptic.  In Ed’s report from the previous survey he commented that most of the invertebrates were quite small, which could be due to this rainforest being montane with extended cold weather.

The expedition seemed to go so fast.  Wish I could spend more time in this location.  I caught a very large Carpenter Bee on the return to the helicopter.  On the way back to Chitengo I handed off the collection to Joel for photography and then to Ed for identification at Harvard.

We were delayed a little coming back to Chitengo due to taking the nets down along the forest edge.  Upon landing back at camp, Bob was there with his Land Rover to pick me up at the helo landing area.  He was with Candida Pinto a well-known Portuguese television news journalist.  She is here by way of Libya, Egypt and some other places to do a story on Gorongosa for Portuguese and Mozambique television.  

Bob’s next project is to shoot the elephants of Gorongosa for an elephant recovery story. Some of the animals may have still not recovered from the civil war and the slaughter that occurred here.  We went on a drive with a guide last week whose vehicle was thrown on its side by an elephant last year.  Everyone survived but the experience sounded pretty intense.  Bob will be here to document the work of this expert to calm them down so there behavior stays on the up and up.  He has survived a few himself. The instances I know of include a rhino attack that missed him by inches and a plane crash at Ndutu that killed the pilot. 

The day ended at the Hippo House, on the edge of Lake Urema.    This is an old restaurant and bar structure from the glory days of Gorongosa.  It sits on the edge of Lake Urema and is an incredible spot for birding.  On arriving to the area I watched a Black-headed Heron swallow a 14” snake. 

We used the site to shoot Ed for a couple of pieces for Life on Earth.   Beautiful scene on the marsh.  Interviews were also conducted with Mark Stahlmans and Greg Carr.

Just another day in the Park.

Follow the Hogs

You can never have enough cheetahs. The park will be introducing three imported cheetahs soon, after an acclimation period in the sanctuary area. Bailey and I worked up a scheme for improving the cheetah situation. One thing we have a ton of here are warthogs. The population of jungle pork is hugely out of balance. So we proposed to Greg that we could pile warthogs in a fleet of buses and head off to where the cheetahs are in southern Africa. Then we spread out warthogs behind us on the way home to create a population density gradient of warthogs that the cheetahs will follow to Gorongosa. The warthogs seem to be a cheerful and unfocussed bunch and I don't think we would need to make up an elaborate story for them. Then they would do what they are supposed to do, which is give it up for the cheetahs.

Grimly, it turns out that cheetahs would rather tangle with just about any smaller four-footer before they try a warthog. When the warthogs came plowing and schmuffling the cheetahs would go scampering back to Zimbabwe. So Bailey and I are back at the drawing board in the endowed chair we share at the Institute for Impractical Ecologists, which is what we shall call our second-row seat on the safari truck.

Reboot

There's an old story that if a biochemist wanted to figure out a locomotive, step one would be to blow it to smitherinos. The reductionist approach works pretty well for cells. Pulverize, separate, and do experiments to figure out which pieces fit together and how they help the metabolism of the cell hang together.

Gorongosa got pulverized during the civil war. Rebel and government armies surged back and forth over the park for years. Armies on the move are tough on herds, and soon enough there were no more herds, and finally almost nothing left standing. Crocs got through by hiding under water. There is nowhere for a water buffalo to hide from a hungry battalion of soldiers.

That grim time wasn't reductionism, it was just reduction. It was also a long time ago. And it turns out there is a lot to learn from studying the disassembly and revival of the hypervital living economy of Gorongosa. Life is surging here now and the metabolism of the park is putting itself back together again fast. But there is still a huge experiment to be done in Gorongosa as the reboot of the place progresses. That's going to be a big theme in Life on Earth. We're writing it up now and we're going to be following it for years in our future editions as we report on the progress of Greg Carr and his team as they reassemble Gorongosa National Park.

This week ecologist Marc Stalmans gave the textbook project aerial lectures on transition zones in the park--floodplain to copse to forest and so on. It's all about water. But it's also about succession. If grazers don't mow the grasses, browsers don't flourish. If browsers get befuddled, alien things like mimosa move in and grow too tall. The grazing grounds flinch and withdraw. Environmental change is as normal as the day, especially here, and that leaves park managers with countless decisions about how Gorongosa emerges from its recent history.

Human influence can be measured in units of mass and volume of waterborne material pouring into the park from the mountain and from a huge catchment in the northeast. The volumes are rising due to land-use changes outside the park. The sediment is filling in Lake Urema, the heart of Gorongosa's circulatory system. As the lake becomes too shallow, the hippos move elsewhere, taking with them massive activity that stirs up the lake. With their exodus, sediment settles and the lake bed rises.

There are interveners and leave-aloners here, and often after a couple of years working in the park they switch sides. The science is complicated. It was once thought that the lake was fed almost entirely by runoff from higher terrain. It now seems plain, based on isotope comparisons and other techniques, that the lake is sustained by water transfer across a porous stratum between the lake and the aquifer. The surprising discovery was made that more water arrives from the upper catchment than from the mountain. The lake could easily be remodeled by dredging parts of it, which might bring back the hippos, and one learns to trust the power of hippos to model their environment. Water pileups could be created at the outlet. Sediment could be captured on the higher ground by porous barriers. Or the entire scene could be left alone to shape itself according to the laws of nature, with "nature" here meaning a beautiful scene mangled not so long ago by war and now recovering while inhaling the smoke and tailings (goldmines in the buffer, fer criminy's sake) of escalating human impact on the surrounding region.

We're heading out in the truck this afternoon to finish Marc's aerial transition-zone lessons with shoots at the same sites on the ground. We'll cross-cut the shoots with maps and animations to make a lesson that will shock the children awake. One of these days, one of those kids is going to be making decisions about hydrology and hippos at Lake Urema.

Costliest potatoes on Earth

With the rise of the Green Movement and a sustainability-minded society, it is common to equate consumer products with the true cost of resources required to produce them. Consider the 625 gallons of water required to produce a cheeseburger or the tons of carbon emitted to make an automobile (never mind the cost to run it). When faced with the reality of slash and burn agriculture it is hard to put a cost on the rainforest lost to produce a crop. Sadly we have learned that in six years Mt. Gorongosa has lost nearly half of its rainforest, going from 67 to 39 square miles.

After the rainforest survey that was conducted on Mt. Gorongosa the other day, a few of us stayed on the mountain to do additional work. One objective was to document the recent deforestation high up the mountain. Mr. Berthus dropped us off not far across the mountain from where we had conducted the survey. The group included South African science consultant Marc Stalmans and National Geographic photographers Bob Poole and Joel Sartore.

As we circled the area to investigate we could see small huts in the middle of the recent clearings. These were the beginnings of farm houses. We could also see very well-worn paths connecting this area to other parts of the mountain. It was incredibly sad to see the devastation from the air and the network of well-worn paths. Easy to imagine that new surrounding forest would be destroyed in a short amount of time.

We landed in the late afternoon and were instructed by the pilot that we only had a certain amount of time to reach the clearings and make it back to fly out. We discussed our assignments. With Bob’s heavy video camera he wouldn’t be going as high but would cover the lower reaches. Joel and I with our smaller camera kits would try to make it to the top with Marc.

The tranquilty of the pristine stream we crossed at the bottom of the valley was quickly broken by massive fallen trees. Each had been felled by hand axes. My first thought was of a battlefield strewn with bodies. Some of the freshly cut stumps had pools of liquid on their surfaces. These trees were bleeding.

The going was tough climbing the large logs, wading through the slash, ducking under and over branches, walking the length of the trees stretched out across small ravines. Carnage and more carnage.

We paused occasionally to catch our breath and balance, and to document with our cameras. Then we pressed on at a crazy pace. I wondered how the locals managed to navigate this terrain.

All of the land we were walking across was within the national park. How could this destruction be occurring in a protected area?

I looked into one hut and saw some water jugs and old food supplies. Joel and Marc went into another that had a pot over a smoking fire and a partially skinned cane rat. Our approach had possibly flushed the inhabitants into the woods.

I placed a potato in my pocket to show Greg Carr back at Chitengo Camp. When presented with the potato he slowly shook his head side to side. I have come to realize that Greg is part sage, part magician and a true leader. He will find a way to work this out so both the people and the mountain will win.

Bad news tends to come in threes. Hopefully, the streak will end with the goldmines, poacher’s camps, and now the deforestation . The bushbaby is crying again in the night. Maybe he is sad too.

On the return to the helicopter I was thinking about the cost of a bag of potatoes in a local supermarket back home. How much is it? Maybe 6 or 7 dollars (US$) a bag. The cost on Mt. Gorongosa? Priceless.

Census Gorongosa

During this expedition we have practiced a variety of animal capture and release techniques  in order to monitor life in Gorongosa.  We have used mist nets for birds, butterfly nets for any flying,  ziplock bags for ants, and our cameras for anything else.  These are all providing good content for the Life on Earth project to show how biologists conduct animal surveys. 

Some collecting trips are planned and others are spontaneous.  A good example of the unplanned discovery occurred the other night when Liz came into the dining area and said “There is an enormous spider in my room and it is in my suitcase!”  Immediately, Ed stood up and commented “This is an entomologist’s dream!  Coming  to the aid of a lady in distress.”  After a brief search in her room, there it was.  A large baboon spider showed up in her clothes.   Ed deftly captured the beast near a pair of socks. The Lord of the Ants had saved the lady as I am sure he has many times before.

I just caught myself about to write “The highlight of the trip so far….”, but realized I may have written that too many times already.  Is that such a bad thing?  If it isn’t already apparent,  Gorongosa is filled with “highlights.”  For those who love to explore and discover the beauty, complexity, and processes of the natural world, it is a dream. 

Yesterday, we had the incredible opportunity to collect specimens within virgin rainforest in upper reaches of Mt. Gorongosa.  This was prime habitat for collecting undescribed species.  It was a biological explorer’s dream.  Coming out of the high plateau grassland into the dense canopy of the rainforest was overwhelming.  Everything seemed to be covered by mosses and other bryophytes.   The air was still and wet.   I arrived on the second helicopter run with Morgan, Liz, Greg and Bailey.  As we entered the forest we heard findings had been slim.    A reward of “2 Fantas” was announced by Ed.   Samples of soil were gently  turned and fallen branches moved and replaced.  I kneeled down and started removing some bark from a fallen moss-covered limb.  After a short while I started finding a variety of insects including two pseudoscorpions.  I had previously only found these in the far away habitat of the San Diego Bay intertidal.   Peeling away more bark I encountered some spiders  I had never seen before.  As I reached for a spider, it raced for the edge of the bark and I saw something lunge for it.  I peeled back the bark and found a small, dark tree frog.  This could a species that has never been seen before.

Within the same region I found a dead ant under the log.  Could I truly earn the Fantas?  Few things have been more stimulating for me as biologist than collecting ants with Ed.  As I approached him with the dead ant I held my arm out and noticed a different species crawling to my hand.  Was it being drawn in to the Lord of the Ants?   It had possibly fallen from the canopy as Ed said it compared closely to other arboreal ants.   The real thrill came when I pried some wood off the surface of the same log and located a small colony of ants.  They immediately disappeared under some liverworts and into the wood.  Ed had commented on the very cryptic nature of many of the ant species found in a rainforest habitat.  These small reddish cryptic ants could be another new species.

Morgan and Ed arranged a great piece on island biogeography within the forest.  The setting was ideal.  Each of us filming the piece for Life on Earth or assisting in the shoot had to pinch ourselves as we listened to Ed articulate the fundamental concepts of the concept the basic concepts of island biogeography, much of which he is responsible for.  The soft green light coming through the canopy and the subtle sounds of sunbirds and surrounding insects in the undergrowth created incredible ambience.

Today in camp Ed spent several hours searching for ants in the leaf litter he returned from  Mt. Gorongosa.  I assisted him for a while and found it very interesting.  This is something I look forward to incorporating in future classes.  Overall, he concluded it was relatively barren for a rainforest.  However, this may be due to its altitude and cold weather.

A bush baby just called in the night.  It sounds like a dying infant who is crying out in the bush.  Why would such a small, relatively defenseless primate have such a loud obnoxious call?

Another recent collecting outing I had with Ed was look over some rock rubble on the edge of Camp Chitengo.  I told him I had seen some incredibly fast ants while I was filming some ant hills nearby.   After several attempts at grabbing these speedy ants I located a plant there were interested in and was able to collect several.   Ed speculated these were Cataglyphis ants.  They are typically found in desert biomes.  Known as the worlds’s fastest ant.  This reveals again something of the great biodiversity in this geographically diverse place.

Each morning, there has also been a bird survey team deigned to begin sampling birds with a mist net.  This is a black, finely-woven net designed to be invisible for passing birds.  There has been success but the birds seem to learn quickly.   Such is the nature of life.

Another capture technique I took part in was the darting of a warthog with the veterinarian  Carlos for a relocation project.   This warthog was not responding to the proper tranquilizers and eventually

Additionally, some specimens are collected by other scientists who have heard of our work in Gorongosa.  This reed frog was collected by the Vegetation Team.  With the help of some additional experts soon we will be able to identify all of these species.  

We will soon demonstrate a variety of means for sampling biodiversity within the Life on Earth Project.    One of the fundamental aspects of maintaining a healthy ecosystem is to maintain species richness.  If it is measured in soon in Gorongosa then it will be possibly to measure the impact of restoration efforts into the future with regular biodiversity measurements.

Now different  bushbaby is crying in the night on the opposite side of camp from the first.  Another informal survey.  Another species on the primate list for Chitengo Camp.   Maybe he/she is telling me it is time for bed.