Fish Rodeo

It’s all fun and games…

until someone wrecks their right ear by  diving too deep hunting clams and can’t equalize because of a sinus infection.   

I’ll back up.

Last summer, we collected 4 species of fish along with some clams and snails at each of our 12 survey sites, cut out a little piece of their muscle, and prepped the dry, ground powder for stable isotope analysis. It basically tells us who’s eating what (or whom, as the case may be) in the lake, and based on those data, it would appear that the food chain is getting shorter (gasp!).

A Perissodus, one of our target species! Their foraging strategy is to EAT SCALES OFF OTHER FISH (what the what!), so they (usually) manage to catch themselves in the net when they prey on other net-victims.

To convince ourselves that it’s real, we’re re-doing the entire survey this summer. Pete has years of experience wrangling fish, but I’m new to this game and have marginal (at best) skills to bring to the team. To date, I’ve only caught one Lepidiolamprologus (!), and Pete has captured the other 83 fish solo (I’m such a failure!). But since we still have 5 sites to go, I’m counting on the chance to improve my stats in the 11^th hour.

Pete, doing what he does

My supposed contribution was to collect the clams and snails, and usually this isn’t too hard since even in my ineptitude, I’m brilliant at hunting things that don’t move too fast or too much.  But clams were hard to come by at certain sites, and I ended up freediving a bit deeper than I’m (apparently) capable of going. The clotty blood in my spit was a sign that all was not well up in my sinuses. That, and the fact that it felt like someone was stabbing me in the ear with a sharp object every time I went under.

It's no big deal when they're nice and shallow, but that's not always the case.

Luckily my far-sighted teammates were ready for such an event, so I’ve been bumming ear meds from buddies and trying to keep my face out of the water in the meantime. 

Fish rodeo days get kind of long, especially when most of the cutting and tagging occurs after dinner. We’re pickling these guys and bringing them back to the States with us, so if you want to see them up close and personal, come to the Zoology Museum in Madison this fall! 

Since death by hammer awaits my unlucky victims, these clams have good reason to remain evasive.

As for the food chain question, we won’t have stable isotope data in hand for quite awhile...but it would appear that big changes have occurred in this lake in the past 10 years. Stay tuned.

Looks like we made it

Why not start my 2013 field blog with a Barry Manilow reference (it just feels right given the title, ignoring the content; I have no idea what that song’s about…)?

We. Are. HERE!!

It’s been 10-ish days since leaving Madison, and after months of preparation-related stress and daydreaming about being someplace else, I’m finally back on the shores of the lake I’ve thought about daily since I left last August. 

It's a wee bit hazy since we're deep into the dry season, but she's still a sight for sleep-deprived, sore eyes.

It’s oh, so good to be here.  

We’ve jumped right into the business of collecting data for what looks to be the last year of the Lake Tanganyika Ecosystem Project. Work-specific blogs are forthcoming, but I’ll start at the beginning, with the journey and the story of how we got here. 

Getting to Kigoma is Not Easy. This year’s travel adventure involved:

  *   a 3-hour minivan ride to Chicago with Pete and 3 generations of his family (during which time my bladder nearly burst). Pete may or may not have sat on the floor of said minivan due to a seat shortage; 

  *   24-ish hours in the air/moving zombie-like through airports (and watching more in-flight movies in 2 sittings than I’d previously watched in the entire year leading up to this trip). FYI: Django Unchained is worth a watch; 

  *   2 lazy days in Dar es Salaam (eating good food, hitting the fish market, befriending an eccentric photographer, and getting the 2^nd best massage of my life); 

In case you're in the market for half a shark's head, I might know a guy...

The underside of a guitarfish is very awesome!

  *   one more flight to Kigoma on a plane that was probably brand new circa 1970 (complete with an ash tray in the arm rest). The inflight meal consisted of 2 stale buns, and my heart almost broke when I realized there was no jelly. 

There was no stopover in Mwanza this year, home of Lake Victoria and these nasty-ass Nile perch. This is the biggest one I've ever seen, and it smelled terrible. You never know what you'll see in the Dar es Salaam fish market...

  *   upon landing, Pete being swiftly whisked away to the immigration office with local authorities because he didn’t have a residence permit (due to a clerical error last year, mine was accidentally renewed an extra year, so I flew under the radar this time…)

But we got here with all (ALL!!!) of our luggage, and big hugs and the smiling faces of the friends we left behind last summer greeted us upon arrival. 

Joining us this year are a couple of Pete’s buddies from grad school and a professional photographer from the States who are here to make a website about the project. It works in my favor since it keeps Pete occupied and I have time for other pursuits, scholarly and otherwise (Swimming! Napping! Submitting revisions to a manuscript One Entire Week before deadline! Woohoo!!). 

I think my body is finally adjusting to this time zone (Madison + 8, by the by), and my guts are getting used to the daily consumption of ridiculous quantities of beans. Slowly but surely we’re finding our rhythm, and it’s time to get to work!

Eureka!

That’s the subject line of an email I just received from Benja.

When the rest of Team Tanganyika left Tanzania back in August for (a much less exciting) life in the States, Benja stayed behind on a quest to collect data on the lake for an entire year.

And while the stories from the field are no longer mine, I still hope to share noteworthy updates from time to time (and live vicariously through my friend). 

This week something Very Noteworthy happened, and what follows is Benja’s epic tale regarding the critical piece of field gear that we love to hate: the thermistor chain.

It's been At Large since sometime in September, but luckily for Benja, the lost has been found.

Keep on keepin' on, Benja!

Hi All,

So here is the thermistor chain story…

The day was off to a very bad start. 

All of the gear was loaded up in the boat and Hagai, George and I launched out from TAFIRI at about 8:45 am to go install a new thermistor chain mooring. After motoring for about 200 meters, the engine started making a terrible noise and died. George started taking apart the engine as we drifted north across Kigoma bay. When we opened up the carburetor, we discovered what was wrong: where the carburetor should have been full of fuel, it was full of WATER. 

 Georgie's boat. It's a little more robust than our Zodiac

Uncertain about where the water came from, we decided to investigate the contents of the fuel tank. George unplugged the fuel line from the engine and pumped the contents of the fuel can into the lake. Sure enough, the liquid streaming from the fuel line was entirely clear. There was no rainbow sheen on the surface of the
lake like you would expect to see if it was fuel. To be sure, George stuck the fuel line in his mouth and gave a couple pumps. It tasted like water too. 

So, we started paddling back to TAFIRI, wondering about how the fuel tank could have come to be full of water. The best explanation that we could come up with was that the gas station where I filled the fuel tanks must have gotten rainwater in its storage compartment. Rainwater that subsequently got pumped into our tanks and sold as fuel. 

When we got back to TAFIRI, we started dumping all of the fuel I had recently purchased into buckets to see what was inside. Of the 80 L of fuel I had bought the week before, about 60 L was water. Determined to deploy the thermistor chain anyway, we decanted the actual fuel into one fuel tank and George worked on fixing the engine—taking it apart, emptying the water, replacing the spark plugs.

After taking the engine apart and putting it back together 3 times, the engine was fixed and we were on our way.

For the new thermistor chain, I planned to center the boat over the target deployment and toss the anchor/rope/buoys overboard and let it fall so that the anchor would have a better chance of embedding into the sediment. So we centered over the point where the 2012 thermistor chain had been deployed 5 months before and tossed the new thermistor chain overboard. After snorkeling from the surface, it appeared that the metal TAFIRI buoy was right at our target, 10 m below the surface. George and I loaded up our SCUBA gear and went down to add more buoys to the string to give it some extra floatation just in case one of the buoys were to fail.

We added a little good luck charm to last year's chain (yes, I mangled some US currency! On the 4th of July! I felt twinges of guilt...) hoping we'd be able to find it again.

But, when we got down to the top of the mooring, I arrived first and saw that the metal buoy had already failed. The pressure had caused the buoy to totally collapse, and a slow stream of bubbles was emanating out from one of the resulting cracks in the metal. Feeling quite dejected, I started thinking about what to do. 

This photo is from last year, but it illustrates the point. Even under the best conditions (i.e., no biofilm accumulation, no waves, etc.), that tiny white dot is all you can see from the boat at 10m. And THAT is what holds this Very Expensive Equipment!

Just then, I turned to my right, and there IT was, in all of its biofilm-covered glory, the thing I had spent days and days searching for, months lamenting its loss, not 10 meters away from where the new thermistor chain had been deployed. I turned back to George and he was already excitedly pointing at it. We swam toward each other and gave a big underwater hug. I’m sure he could see the grin on my face even with the regulator in my mouth.

It's hard to express emotion with a regulator in your mouth...

So, our plans changed a little bit. We swam to the old thermistor chain, attached a surface tracer buoy, detached the sonde and thermistors, and came to the surface with shouts of joy. We brought it all back to Aqualodge, downloaded the data, redeployed the instruments, and made it back to TAFIRI at sunset. In light of all that had happened that day, so many unanswered questions came up:

What do we do with the new mooring?
What do we do with the new thermistors that are, as we speak, on their way to Kigoma?
What do we do with the 60 L of water that we paid an exorbitant amount for as fuel?
HOW THE HELL DID WE MISS THE THERMISTOR CHAIN BEFORE?!?!

Nothing in the data suggests how we could have missed it. For example, according to the depth sensor, the chain did NOT spend a month down at the bottom of the lake only to be resurrected when we plunged the new mooring down on top of it. We did, however, catch another offshore spike in chl-a at the end of September that coincides with a chl-a spike near shore. More on data updates later, though.

I hope this news finds all of you happy and healthy back in the US! If you have any ideas on the questions above, let me know. I’ll probably come up with a plan early next week for the new mooring. 

Happy December!

Tell me a story

If you and I have ever visited for longer than 10 minutes, I’ve undoubtedly found a way to bring a Radiolab* reference into our conversation. In writing this blog over the past few months, the episode called “Tell me a story” often came to mind. In it, Robert Krulwich gives the commencement address to a fresh crop of CalTech graduates and urges them to talk about their research to anyone who will listen, even if they feel completely inept at doing so…

…because science has to compete against so many other (inaccurate, dangerously misleading, beautiful-but-wrong) stories about how the universe works and how we all came to be upon this planet.

In the case of Lake Tanganyika, it’s no easy task giving voice to a giant body of water that likes to keep her secrets. But we measured this and that, took samples and conducted experiments when we could, and now begin the hard-won task of turning those numbers and observations and samples into a story:

The story of a place that can’t speak for itself.

And in my humble opinion, it’s a good one.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but my hope is that in reading my stories about Lake Tanganyika, you have a slightly better understanding about my little corner of Africa and the absolutely incredible place I got to call home for a while (and have a new-found appreciation for where a tiny fraction of your tax dollars go!). 

The last fish (a kazumbe!) of the fish pee study (oh, happy day!)

If not, the fault is mine, and I promise to try harder next year.

I’ve been home a whole month now, and I think I’m almost back to what could pass as normal. Coming home again is always tough for me, so big thanks (and bigger hugs) to all of you who helped get me through the (painful) transition. Without recounting the incredibly stress-inducing details of my final hours in Tanzania (most assuredly, I lost years of my life ensuring those damn water samples made it to These United States), suffice it to say that if you’re willing to throw down enough cash, you can get even the most overweight of coolers across international borders. And miracle of miracles, everyone and everything arrived home safely once again. 

Some illegal fishing in Mahale (lest we forget the big picture...)

 

And as the brazillions of samples wait patiently for analysis in the CFL freezers, I have the added advantage of time to look back on what I officially call a Very Successful (if not challenging) field season.

Thank you all for joining me on this journey, and hopefully I’ll have more stories to tell soon.   

*Radiolab is just the BEST PODCAST IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD. I can’t say enough good things about it, and I have a secret crush on Jad Abumrad. He and Robert are coming to MADISON at the end of the month. GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!!!