Category Archives: Travel

Gerlache Strait

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While many people will continue, for various reasons, to call the above animals “orcas,” I prefer to use the term “killer whale.”

First, it sounds rad. These whales ARE killer, man!

Second, it’s pretty out of the norm for a species* to be referred to by the second part of its two-part name (Orcinus orca, in this case- the first half is genus and the second half is the species designator). You’d never talk about “sapiens” and expect people to understand you meant “humans;” if you referred to “musculus” and expected me to know what animal you were talking about, I’d have to guess if you meant a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), or a house mouse (Mus musculus).

Third, and most importantly, I follow the opinion of scientists that I respect greatly in thinking that there’s no way that all of the different types of killer whales across the globe (oh yeah, they’re everywhere, in every ocean, doing their killer thing) are still one species. Just in the Antarctic, there are at least five types of distinguishable killer whales, each of which has a population separate from the others, probably with their own social structure, language, and feeding habits (further study needed). In the Pacific Northwest, where I did a week or two of research with Holly Fearnbach and John Durban (NOAA scientists and generally awesome human beings), three types of killer whales co-habitate but never interact, studiously avoiding contact while passing each other in a narrow strait, consuming different food sources, speaking different languages… Maybe it hasn’t been long enough in evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands of years) for them to have genetically diverged enough to make reproduction between groups impossible, but unless they’re forced (in captivity, for example…), different types of killer whales will never interbreed. In some cases, they’d have to cross continents to do so.

Anyways, these are the “small Type Bs,” also known as “Gerlache Strait killer whales.” They feed (probably) on deep-dwelling toothfish and other large predatory fish in the Antarctic, and are significantly smaller than the “large Type Bs,” which feed on seals. You can see in the photo their yellowish tinge- type Bs and Cs both have diatom (algae) coatings on their skin, which they travel north to shed- and the “cape” of grey around their backs. They can be distinguished from the large Bs by size, and from the Cs by the orientation and shape of their eye patches, and overall can be identified by their presence in their namesake, the Gerlache Strait. Aren’t they beautiful?

Whales

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Some of you may be aware that I really like whales. Like a lot. So a highlight of this trip to the Antarctic was definitely the opportunity to see lots of whales in an insanely productive feeding habitat, like this pair of humpbacks. We were awoken by the announcement that the ship was surrounded by them as we cruised through the Gerlache Strait, gliding slowly over what was clearly a whale buffet- small groups of humpbacks were everywhere, weaving bubble nets and lunging up through the water in unison to engulf whatever small prey they had encountered that morning. Though they were far away, the scale of this remarkable event matched the frozen splendor of the landscape behind them.

First Penguins

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The first penguins we saw on our trip were from the ship (the Orion). These Chinstraps seemed to be headed back toward shore after some successful foraging at sea, using their wings and feet to propel themselves through the frigid water (Tim, the expedition leader, announced the temperature to be somewhere around 1 degree Celsius…). Like dolphins, penguins often “porpoise” through the water as they travel. By clearing the waves entirely, they fly through the air and maintain forward momentum while still breathing regularly, reducing the drag they experience at the intersection of ocean and sky. To predators this motion may be very confusing; to photographers it can be both endlessly entertaining and endlessly frustrating, as most penguin-porpoising photos involve a larger proportion of feet and tail feathers than heads and bodies. But as always, patience and a large memory card are their own rewards…

Buenos Aires

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Our trip began in Buenos Aires, my first visit to South America. I really can’t claim to have “been there,” since our stop was perhaps twenty-four hours, but we got a little taste of the city. It was very European, actually, many of the buildings French in style, and much of the art in the museum imported from the Old World as well, which made it feel less interestingly new for me as a traveler. But it was summer, and sunny, and the city was beautiful. I got to practice my Spanish, and we got to spend one last night ashore before our transfer to Ushuaia the next day. The mood was chill and the word was “siesta.” Welcome to the adventure! Just wait till it heats up (…figuratively).

Agent Red Heads South

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Agent Red Squirrel has been remiss- I’m sorry for the disappearance! But I have good reason: things have been busy in my world recently. I relocated hemispheres once again, this time even further south than Exmouth, and I made it to a fifth and sixth continent. That’s right, after a very brief stopover in Buenos Aires, Argentina (South America), I headed for the Antarctic Peninsula on board the National Geographic Orion. It was my greatest adventure yet, scientifically fascinating, photographically exhilarating, and so much fun that it can’t be contained in a regular series of posts. For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a single photo and an explanation thereof four times per week, about every other day, to tell the story of the Time I Went South.

Long Nights

This post may not be appropriate for young cousins, just FYI. Not graphic. But might result in a lot of unwanted explaining about grown-up stuff. And with THAT intro:

Quan, our guide, has by now gotten used to my many questions about life in urban and rural Vietnam, and has in fact begun to offer quite a bit of information that he thinks I’ll find interesting. On the long and windy road to Mai Chau, he talked about the ethnic minorities of Vietnam (54 different groups, all with different religious, social, architectural, and stylistic traditions) and their relationships with the government and one another, the extinct and extant fauna of Vietnam’s mountains, local cuisine (“bird soup” recommended; monkey not recommended), national politics, and, most intriguingly, birth control.

As we drove up into the higher passes, the clouds and sun descended. Lights switched on in the many storefronts and houses along the road, and through nearly every open front door we could see families attending to their dinners and their televisions. According to Quan, it’s only been in the past several years that the villages in this area have had reliable electricity at all. “At six it gets dark,” he said, “and night is very long. So, many childrens.”

Self-evident. Long night equals lots of kids, because, you know, what else do people have to do in the dark? And in terms of birth control, well… “The people from the city are shy about teaching condoms,” he told us. “So they show, and then the people in the villages do like they show. But still, so many childrens.” What happened? Condoms elsewhere in the world are known as effective birth control as well as disease prevention. They’re cost-effective and convenient, with no medical side effects. But, as Quan told us, the city-folk were shy about teaching condoms. “They show using fingers,” he said with a smirk, “and the people do like they show, just like that.”

Certainly not the most effective sex ed. Possibly worse than abstinence-only, which is really not a thing I ever thought I’d have to say. But wait! With the advent of village electricity and the subsequent invasion of television into the homes of rural Vietnamese, we expected a similar rise in sexual sophistication leading to better birth control and the current lower birth rate. Not so, according to Quan. It’s not that they have access to more information or more medical technology, it’s that they’re just too busy watching TV nowadays (apparently HBO is particularly popular) for the nights to be as long and the sex to be as good.

Game of Thrones as contraceptive; who knew?

En Route

One of the loveliest parts of our visit to Cambodia was the side-trip we made out of the city. About a 40-minute drive away, the river is full of boats to take vegetables, fish, and tourists out to the floating villages on the Tonle Sap, a huge shallow lake that rises and falls with the changing seasons. But on the way, we made a few significant stops:

First, we pulled off of the road to take some photos of a lotus farm- fields and fields of soggy ground and plate-like leaves hovering below giant pink flowers and drooping green seed pods.

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The woman who owned this field was shelling the lotus seeds at an alarming speed with an alarmingly sharp knife.

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We got back in the car and drove on a little farther, to one of the many narrow lanes filled with tiny shops, hammocks, and houses high on stilts. I always feel weird about taking photos of people, but Sinat (our guide) walked us down toward the water where the kids were playing, and all of the time I’ve spent with my cousins and the kids at Camp Galileo kicked in. One little girl was clearly a fan of high-fives, and we practiced some new fist-bump techniques. She brought her friends over to say hello, and Sinat helped us buy some snacks from a nearby vendor.

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She’s now a pro at the fist-bump-to-wiggly-fingers maneuver.

I’ll leave you for now with some alliteration: blowing bubbles from a bobbing bowl

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Next up: a floating village on the Tonle Sap!

Lost but Not Abandoned

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The temples are old, twelve centuries old in some cases. They are mossy, disordered, eroded, unsettled by roots and shifting sands, and sometimes riddled with bullet holes. They were lost to pilgrims and scholars alike until painfully recently, swallowed up by trees and climbing vines until they were unrecognizable. But they were not abandoned.

The faces smiling down from the Angkor Tom towers don’t seem lonely. Nor do the happy little amblypygids smiling down from the inside rooftop corners:

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Ain’t he cute? He’s not a spider, but a completely different type of arachnid also known as a whip spider. You may recognize him from one of the Harry Potter movies, or from a late-night freakout in which you likely jumped onto something as far from the floor as you could manage while maybe squealing or whimpering just… just a little bit. Fear not, gentle readers! Amblypygi are not venomous, aggressive, or even particularly defensive. For the most part they just hang out and eat crickets. Those long pedipalps (crabby-looking claws in the front) tell you whether the animal is a male or a female (males have longer ones, females shorter) and have the capability of grabbing on to little buggy snacks, but at their worst could give you a good pinch if you really tried to make their owner mad.

The temples have been re-occupied by humans and restoration work (funded by Cambodians, the French, Indians, Russians, and Americans among others) is everywhere through the temple complexes. But the company that the temples have kept through the hundreds of years between creation, overgrowth, rediscovery, looting, and tourism refuses to give up its home.

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They live here now. It’s their temple too.

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Some of them even engage in restoration work of their own, contributing silvery adornments to the crumbling walls.

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The temples have been reclaimed many times over their long history, by Hindus, Buddhists, Khmer Rouge, the French, modern-day Cambodians, and the forest itself. But I’d never call them abandoned.

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Howler Monkeys

“Baby monkey, but the PUMA! Oh my god!” yelled the sweaty man. He looked at us, three college girls hiking along the trail with a satchel of insects in plastic baggies and socks tucked into our field pants, and ran back the way he had come, over the fallen logs and around the trees and thick vines. 

What would you do if a crazy man ran out of the jungle and screamed something like that at you? 

We followed him off the path, of course, leaving our packs at the forest’s edge and picking our way inwards. Our crazy man wasn’t alone, as we soon found- a guide was waiting with him under a big tree, and with one mystery solved we started wondering what exactly they were both so excited about: the guide told us breathlessly of the mother howler monkey they had spotted giving birth in the canopy above. We’d heard the troop start making noise, actually, and wondered what had set them off- it seems they might have been at first welcoming their newest member before tragedy struck. The mother, after cuddling her baby for the first time, tried to remove the umbilical cord… and dropped the not-five-minute-old infant twenty meters to the jungle floor. 

Of course the mother, like any animal (humans included) deeply invested in her offspring, nearly flew down the tree to retrieve her baby, but this was Corcovado, the most biologically intense place on earth. It wasn’t going to be that easy. On her way down the tree the mother monkey was met by a leaping mountain lion (Puma concolor). I can only imagine the wave of muscles and damp fur that rose to meet the already-terrified monkey, but still I can’t blame her for taking the edge of the blow on her shoulder and then retreating to the top of the tree, where she sat screaming by the time we arrived at this bizarre scene. 

After the guide and tourist had explained most of this to us, I looked around. We had been at rapt attention hearing about this explosion of energy in what had been a fairly peaceful afternoon (for this jungle, anyways). Now, every shrub could be hiding a cougar; every tree, every vine might be breaking up the outlines of a predator and it hit me that we, too, were potential food in an unfriendly wilderness. The shrieking of the howler troop above did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. But the next words out of the guide’s mouth changed the scene considerably.

“The baby is still here.”

The mountain lion, for all its patience and predatory skill in pursuing the mother monkey, seemed to have been unaware of the newborn, and now that five humans were on the scene it seemed unlikely that it would return to play an active role in finding the baby. The mother, traumatized by her recent near-death experience, was also unlikely to return to the ground anytime soon… which left us, straining our eyes and ears to determine if anything was left of the life that had so recently and so dramatically been introduced to the cycles of jungle existence. 

We found the baby under leaves, clinging with closed eyes to a twig and making tiny, unhappy noises. 

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You can see the afterbirth in this photo- it’s the blueish-white lump under a leaf directly below the little monkey’s face. And it was still attached. Much to the distress of the baby monkey. 

“Do you have a pocket knife?” the guide asked me. Of course I did, but I didn’t expect his next statement. “You have to cut the umbilical cord.”

I’m an ecologist, a student of natural systems and interspecific interactions, an observer of the world and a fairly educated human being. But in this situation, I had no idea what to do. The arguments against intervening at all were very strong- I’d be interfering with a natural system, I could hurt the baby, or I could myself get some sort of disease from contact. But on the other hand, it was impossible to tell how much our presence had already affected the events of that patch of forest that day, like the actions of the mountain lion or the hesitance of the mother to return to the ground for her infant. And tangled in what had once been its life support system, the baby could hardly move or breathe. So in a haze of bewilderment, I tied my hair back, got out my pocket knife, and picked up the baby in the leaves that had fallen on it.

Her. She was a baby girl, sticky and warm and strong-fingered, wrapping her tail tight around my forearm. I pinched and snipped her cord, dropping the afterbirth to the ground and trying to keep my skin away from her tiny body, but her arms scrabbled for me and she wanted, so clearly, with her tiny now-opened eyes and elf ears and wrinkled face all straining forward, to be close to another being. 

I could feel her ribcage, her heartbeat, her breath in my hand, and her little cries broke my heart as I’m sure they were breaking the heart of her mother high in the trees. 

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We left her near where we found her, tucked between a tree’s buttresses. Her family watched from above and I prayed to anyone listening- pumas, monkeys, tourists, or gods- to let her rejoin her clan in the canopy. I had no business interfering any further in the life of the rainforest, but as we walked away from the tiny baby I had just peeled off of my arm, all I wanted was to make sure she got every chance to make it to her next birthday. 

Life goes on. I’ll never know what happened to her after we left, and I can’t make myself believe that she made it or that she didn’t. Life goes on. 

The Monkeys

 

 

 

There are four species of monkey found in Costa Rica, and over the winter we saw them all! In fact, we saw them so often that we became accustomed to them to the point of absurdity- more on this later. 

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This spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) was foraging with its family in the mango trees above the road in Palo Verde. Among Costa Rican monkeys, spider monkeys are unique because of their ability to swing through the trees (brachiate, like humans do on monkey bars)- their thumbs are reduced to pretty much nonexistent nubs, but their prehensile tails and long limbs make up for that. This one looks awfully sweet, doesn’t it? Its friend/relative threw a hard mango at Seth’s head not long after I took this shot. They were cute, but not so friendly.

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This White-Faced Capuchin (Cebus capucinus) was another cute-from-a-distance kind of monkey. We saw them very frequently in Palo Verde, and they let us get quite close a lot of the time… but we had to watch our backs. Sometimes the big males would try to sneak up on us from behind, purpose unknown but undoubtedly unwanted. ImageThe last monkey for this post is the squirrel monkey (Saimus oerstedii oerstedii), that I spotted finally in Corcovado after quite a few weeks in Costa Rica. Tyler pointed out one group, scampering through the trees, on our very first orientation walk in the jungle. I had to wait a few days to get a good photo, though- one of the awesome guides of Corcovado let me take this shot through his scope once his clients had looked at the adorable baby and mother resting in a tree near camp. 

The final Costa Rican monkey is actually quite dear to my heart, as much as its noise-making tendencies bother other people that I know. More on the howler monkey in the next few days.