Happy Mother’s Day – from hippos to humans

Quite a day for celebrating life and biodiversity.  It started out with sampling of ants then photographing caterpillars doing the conga, observing lounging lions, and then watching the nightlife of the Park.  Just another day in Gorongosa.

In the morning Gary Alpert and I finished hanging up the leaf litter samples from yesterday in the Winkler funnels.  This method basically dries out the leaf litter and the ants move to the bottom in a small pouch of alcohol where they are trapped.  As we were finishing Greg Carr and Bob Poole arrived out of breath telling of us something amazing that was going with insects outside the fences.   We quickly gathered our camera gear and rushed out to the dirt road to Vinho. 

The caterpillars halted their procession to feed on the grass.

Upon reaching the forest road to Vinho we saw what the excitement was about.  They had observed a procession of caterpillars moving in a chain. We stayed with them for a while photographing with with different cameras and accessories.  It was beautiful sight.  It was nearly destroyed by a passing truck.  However, Greg helped direct the massive truck over it so the ants could move undistrurbed.  The caterpillars would possibly keep moving and eventually stop in an ideal location and then metamorphosis in mass.

As darkness descended some fireflies buzzed near our truck.  Upon looking further out to the flood plain we could pick up more and more of them.  As our eyes adjusted from the spotlight we had been using to see nightlife, we viewed an incredible spectacle out across the marsh.  The bioluminescence of the flies appeared to be pulsing across the plain in waves. 

Ranger Lucas stands watch as James Byrne, producer of Lost Eden lights up the night.

The mesmerizing dancing lights kept us entertained as Piotr went out to collect more katydids.  His technique is to use a high frequency amplifier to detect specific calls from the katydids. The instrument is similar to what bat biologists use to detect bat echolocation.  Piotr was able to pick up the unique song of each species and also determine the relative distance of each animal.

Late in day we spotted a mother hippo and its baby heading out into the flood plain. The young hippo was nudged along into the deeper grass until we could just see its ears popping up over the tips of the grass.  It was now safe in the refuge of the marsh. We thought of our mothers and gave thanks to their love and the freedom they gave us to do things like letting us go out in the night and collect insects in the bush.