I forget where we were

A few months ago, I'd apparently convinced myself that after 3 field seasons on the world's Greatest Lake, experiencing something novel would be all but impossible.

Thankfully, as per usual, I was brilliantly wrong.

Thirty days and a thousand stories later, I'm lounging on my deck back in Madison with some gin, soaking my fungus/blister-ridden feet in salt, and nostalgically looking back at photos and videos... trying to convince myself that the last month actually happened. People keep asking me how it was, and the word that immediately comes to mind is "hard". Not to be overly dramatic, but coming back alive AND in one piece didn't feel like a given this time.

Trenchfoot. It's for real. 

The Internet was largely absent for large chunks of the trip and more of a myth than reality during the remainder. And when 14-hour days became mandatory, I abandoned the notion of blogging and devoted all my daily free time to sleeping.

But I am a lover of stories, and even though my tales from the summer will be have to be reconstructed from the late night, so-tired-I-feel-drunk scrawls of journal entries, there are stories I need to tell. And over the next couple months, I hope to share field notes from our wild, hot, African summer on a lake that's more magnificent than we can ever hope to understand.

In the meantime, I'll force my body stay awake when all it wants in the whole wide world is to sleep, abandon my inclination to hoard toilet paper, and try to remember that most people shower more than twice a month. And I will hesitantly resume a life that feels safe and tame and a little bit dull by comparison.

Stay tuned.

The important places

As field season draws nigh, I figured it was high time to fire up the ol' blog after months of neglect. Let's call this Episode I (of many) in the field chronicles of #2015Ellen.

Tonight I watched an incredible short film by American Rivers ("The important places"), and if you have 10 minutes to spare, I promise it's VERY MUCH worth your time. It made me feel all the feels I usually try to stifle, which is to say, watch it with a hanky nearby.

Or maybe it's just me.

Because it struck a chord.

Today, after much fuss and many pointlessly long discussions about timelines (since it was important to most folks to spend as little time as possible away from family), we finally have virtual tickets in hand, and we (the old field team, minus a very key member*) are going back to Lake Tanganyika. 

It's happening. And I should be excited. 

Should be...excited...

There was a quote, in the film, that won't leave me, and it sums up why I've been more...hesitant about returning to a place that I love.

"Sometimes we get stuck, in eddies and in life. Currents that won't let us go. Places we shouldn't be."

Tanganyika is one of my Important Places, and it's also my eddy. 

I have the sinking suspicion I'm not supposed to be there anymore, and so I'm treating this summer as my chance to say goodbye. The Sirens call of new adventures, somewhere else, is barely audible, but very, very real.

"Open your eyes and see what you can see with them before they close forever."**

Stay tuned.

*BENJA IS NOT COMING THIS YEAR!! I still can't believe it. 

**Prevalent theme throughout "All The Light We Cannot See," which I HIGHLY recommend

The end, and a beginning

This is it, the last entry in the field log from the Pacaya-Samiria (a mere 5 months after it all ended; I am nothing if not prompt...).

When I got back to Madison last August, I wrote a post that was meant to bring all the loose bits of memory and science and friendship that happened in the Peruvian Amazon together, and to a close.

All the stars we can't normally see

But in the end, that morose gem (written at 4:30am when I was Very Sad and couldn't sleep) turned out to be a mushy piece of garbage. And since this blog aims (above all) to shed light on the art of field science, I will sum up our summer on happier note.

In the end, there were just too many pictures to choose from to make a consolidated album (since the worst possible thing you can force on people you love is perusing thousands of vacation photos). So instead, I took this challenge as an opportunity to finally figure out the magic of iMovie (file it under 'painful attempts at becoming a Mac person') and spew my favorite memories into one giant...piece of art(?).

Thanks, Iquitos, for letting Nico and I become our own art!

If you find yourself with 4 minutes to spare, have a look-see at this photo tribute that's chockablock full of Things I Love, including:

BEN HOWARD!

Peru

Fishes (lots and lots of fishes...)

Lovely faces that continue to make me smile

BEN HOWARD! (He's so good I'll mention him twice.)

I think Peru changed all of us in ways we couldn't have predicted, and despite my attempts to tell our story, no life-changing experience can be meaningfully reduced to a series of anecdotes. So we go home, remember fondly, and begin again, thankful to those who joined us on the journey.

Todos mi amor, jungle friends; thank you for fishing with me ;).

Until we meet again...

"Todos los pescados..."

It's winter in Wisconsin, and since convalescence has atrophied my leg muscles to the point where I can't do anything fun outside anyway (and I live in fear of my skis...), I find myself in front of this here computer more often than I'd like. And for the first time in a long while, I have time. Lots and lots of time...

This arrangement happened organically while I was cleaning, and it feels very apropos. 

And so, at long last, I've begun the monumental task of sorting through all ~1500 pictures I somehow managed to take (and steal from others) during my time in Peru.

For the record, I'm inherently against the concept of taking pictures to facilitate memory..., but in this instance I'm willing to make an exception because it helps tell the story. The fish community of the Pacaya-Samiria is one of the most diverse and understudied in the whole wide world, and my hope is that this record serves as a snapshot in time to document the tiniest fraction of what's lying beneath the surface. In a very literal sense, at any given moment, we could have pulled a species of fish from the river that was completely unknown to science, and that is truly amazing.

Case in point: Pool and I still don't agree on what this fish is...

So for the fish-lovers and the apathetic alike, click the link and behold: "Todos los pescados of the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve (Peruvian Amazon), captured during 2 months of the summer when the water was falling fast." This album features whole fish, parts of fish, fish teeth (I'm admittedly obsessed), people holding fish, and a very special photo of a tree that can KILL FISH (true story). I promise to add captions eventually so it's a better resource...

I tried so hard to sell the kiddos on just how cool these fish were, but hopefully the pictures tell the story better than I ever could.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Last call

I had a mild panic attack this morning when someone in the dining hall offhandedly mentioned today’s date. Since time doesn't really matter out here, August always felt like some irrelevant, distant point in the future, important only because it marked the time when we all go home. Apparently when no one was paying attention, August showed up..., and days that once seemed endless feel suddenly finite.

All too soon, instead of taking out the boat to scout for bats and macaws or bushwhack through the jungle in search of mammals or primates, I’ll be back in the city, sitting at my desk by the lake, and daydreaming about This Place. My remaining time in this corner of paradise can be measured in hours now, and out of necessity, my lackadaisical attitude about the river has been replaced with a sense of urgency to make it all count.

One free afternoon, Alex and I went spearfishing with Samwell. This catfish didn't stand a chance.

But at the same time, it's time to go.

Field-weariness has definitely set in, but I've also been actively resisting the urge to nap away my afternoons in the blessed luxury of the Nutria's air conditioning (or "air con" as the Brits say). It’s been crazy-hot (CRAZY-HOT) the past few days, which (as many now know...) makes me cranky and impatient. Except for those few, precious hours of 65 degree (F) bliss, our home (an unintentional oven) threatens to bake our organs inside our bodies (Can that happen? It feels possible...). Hard Choices, indeed.

Hot = cranky

So, I’ve been living it up. The other night was the first-ever “Staff Frog Night”, which is pretty much the most fun people can have on a boat in floating vegetation, at night, on the river, in the Amazon. We basically drank some beers, rammed the boat into a sea of water lettuce and other macrophytes, and commenced grabbing tiny frogs off the leaves (for science!). Euclides held tightly to my shirt a few times so I wouldn’t fall out of the boat (he was *much* better at seeing them than I was). True story.

Just about the best bunch of people anyone could work with. Center, then clockwise: Nick, Matt, me, Dan (Euclides driving), Greta, Rachel, and Emma (Photo by Mario)

A typical night in the Nutria: Team Herp often brings frogs back to our house for ID's and measurements 

Check out those eyes!

[Brief aside: I momentarily became a hero when a long silvery fish with GIANT SHARP TEETH JUMPED INTO OUR BOAT en route to the floating veg. Euclides just kept yelling 'peligroso', so I was more focused on getting it off the boat than getting a good ID. Still...I think I saved our collective toes.]

Euclides has a modified headlamp (torch) that does the trick!

Since "Staff Frogs" was such a hit, I suggested we all do "Staff Fishing Bats” the following evening (very few of us had ever done that survey either). A species of bat here EATS FISH. WHAT THE WHAT!! We took off just after sunset to do a 5km transect upriver, and the boat went fast enough to keep the mosquitoes from eating us alive.

This isn't a fishing bat, but it is a Dead bat. We found this on one of our excursions into the jungle.

It works like this: Someone does a sweep of the water surface with a spotlight, and we all yell “BAT!” loudly when we see one. One lucky person gets to hold the bat box, a little device that turns the sonar into an audible signal. When we finished the transect, I got to spotlight the shore on the way back and look for the red glow of caiman eyes on the banks of the river, so I was as happy as a person can possibly be at night, in the jungle. 

Caiman eyes glow back red when you shine them with a spotlight. In other news, there are SO MANY CAIMAIN in the river... (Photo by Greta)

And since I take every opportunity to get off the big boat (AND I’d heard a rumor of giant river otter sightings in the lake by transect 6), I went out one last time with the mist-netting guys. It’s not my favorite survey, but since there’s quite a bit of downtime (30 minutes between net-checks), Jorge took me on a private jungle tour while the guys did their business. We saw jaguar tracks, toucans up close and personal, and even a howler monkey, so all in all, I wasn't even that disappointed when there weren't any otters at the lake.

If I had to choose just one guide to help me survive in the jungle indefinitely, it would be Jorge. He. Knows. Everything. Here he's holding a stick from the capinuri tree, famous for its, ..ahem...tell-tale shape...

Rachel and I did give otter-spotting one last try though, since we're two of the few who (still) haven't seen them. We took the canoes out with Jan to the den where they’d been seen frolicking in the past, but after 30 minutes of paddling, we never saw a'one.

Paddling

And then it started to rain…

Luckily the macaw survey happened to be in the neighborhood, so we got rescued and brought back to camp with a little assistance.

T-minus 1 day now; make it count.

Degrees of peligroso

One of the first new Spanish words I learned when coming to the Peru was “peligroso” (translation: "dangerous!"). Far as I can tell, there isn’t supplemental vernacular to differentiate degrees of peligroso, since over the course of one afternoon, it was used both to warn me about potential a tripping hazard (a tap root across a foot path) and to get me the hell away from a Fer-de-lance resting on some floating vegetation.

A WALKING TREE!!! It can Literally walk. Seriously. Google it.

It's hard not to embrace my inner Tarzan and go crazy on these lianas. But alas, branches across the trail have been known to take people down...

Yesterday we were out fishing in the channel (the lake is officially off limits because of the low water level), and I saw an adorable fluffy caterpillar floating on the water surface. I picked it up with the end of my ansuelo (fishing rod [look at all the Spanish I know!]) and showed it to Pool, who immediately “peligroso-ed” me and set to getting it off the boat. Turns out whatever-it-was was incredibly poisonous, and depending on whom you ask, it could kill you within the span of a few hours or a few days. I took some pics, Pool set it free, and I learned, once again, to Touch Nothing, EVER, without asking first.

"I'm Not That Innocent..."

[UPDATE! 16 October 2014: Thanks to a student ID, I now know that these guys are the larval form of the Saturniid moths, and the bristles inject deadly venom that causes internal bleeding, brain and lung hemorrhaging, and inevitable death. Treatment includes a good washing with soap and water, duct tape adhesion to the injection site (seriously!, to get the bristles out), followed by death. Thanks, Alex!]

Fishing has slowed considerably over the past week (one day we caught zero fish in the net; the next day we caught just one sad wolf fish…), but things have finally picked up a bit. As water levels drop and oxygen levels plummet, fish make the move from the lake back out into the channel and main river segments, and instead of just wolf fish (yawn) and armored catfish, we caught a good variety of piranhas and cichlids (dear, dear cichlids!) yesterday. My posse of boat fisherman even managed to snag a couple fish I still needed to fill out my isotope food web sample set (blog post pending...), so ELLEN FOR THE WIN!!!

This guy doesn't look that interesting until you Open His Mouth! They are seed-eaters and have teeth that are rabbit-esque.

Euclides declared himself the best fisherman ever when the net was FULL of these armored catfish. I was less than thrilled when it took an hour to get them all out...

We caught this too.

An adorable little pygmy flycatcher

The canoe folks saw this little fella flailing around in the water on their way back from setting the net. We just happened to have a bird expert on board that day (Rob, my fellow American!), and he figured the bird had recently fledged and was still getting the hang of flying/diving in the river. They pulled him out of the current, Rob found a safe place for him in the trees, and Little Bird lives another day.

Breaking my own rule, I didn't ask if this little buddy was safe or not. I didn't die, so I'm assuming it's all good.

A random storm hit us just before we could measure fish, and instead of the warm showers we've all grown accustomed to, the chilly rain made the river water feel like a hot tub in comparison. Second lesson of the day: never forget your poncho, since apparently getting caught in the rain will get you a stern peligroso from the boat nurse. I managed to pick up a cold a few days ago, and Marta, the nurse, was worried that my soaked bits would worsen my stuffed sinuses and headache. I suspect I'll be just fine in a few days. 

It's a bad sign when you head out and see this on the horizon, but we are Hard Core and cannot be deterred by a little rain (or so I told the kiddos...)

Pool makes me hold his smokes in my drybag when the rain comes. Peru is not messing around when it comes to smoking-while-pregnant warnings.

Isotopes. Stable ones.

It’s not so easy to get to the Amazon, and it’s even harder to get the right permits to collect data in a protected reserve in Peru.

VIVA PERU!!! We happened to be on site for Peruvian Independence Day, which is a Big Deal in Peru (as it should be.) Photo by Greta

But in general, in life, I operate under the assumption that I may not pass this way again, and so I try my hardest to make the most of a situation, no matter what.  Since most of the hard logistical stuff had already been worked out by the folks running the show here, I thought I’d seize the opportunity and gather as much data as I could this summer while simultaneously pretending to be on vacation.

As an end-of-the-summer-treat, we had the great pleasure of participating in the first-ever PV2 Olympics. Despite our best efforts and intentions, and due to a very unfortunate translation debacle, what should have been a Canoe Dream Team (Nico, Ellen, Samwell) resulted in a disappointing loss. In order, those are the faces of "WE COULD HAVE WON," "Meh...yay for trying," and "We were racing?" 

As I type, things are still a bit in flux (the lack of interwebs makes it difficult to get in touch with folks in the Know…), but the wheels are in motion and I got the initial clearance to use inevitable gill net mortality for the advancement of science.

Other fish mortalities were NOT used for the advancement of science; instead we smoked them on a palm-frond barbeque that was delicious. In unrelated news, at 5' 8", I am a giant in Peru.

Thanks to all our previous work on Lake Tanganyika, my brain automatically thinks in terms of food web relationships whenever I enter a new ecosystem. And so in the 11^th hour (literally hours before I left for Peru), Pete and I set to fleshing out the details of how I could use the gillnet catches to amass a muscle tissue sample set for stable isotope analysis.

There are some armored-catfish surprises here and there, so we have THAT to look forward to (there are quite a few different species of carachama, though they all look pretty much the same, dead, in a bowl of broth, looking back at you...)

When I first arrived, all was easy. The water levels were near-peak (but falling), fish were living it up (eating, having babies) in the flooded forest, and diversity was high. Interested onlookers offered to help with fish dissections and take photos of each sample or write in my log book when my hands were too bloody or slimy to hold the pencil. And since it’s my secret mission to educate the world on the incredible properties (and existence) of otoliths, others watched in awe and horror as I picked around brain tissue to find those precious stones (completely unrelated to current scientific pursuits, but since we were already in there…). I measured gut lengths and rummaged through stomach contents to get a sense of trophic position and recent diet, and (most importantly), I got that tiny piece of muscle tissue so we can (hopefully) reconstruct the food web. 

One of my favorite things to do is go set/retrieve the gillnets with the Peruvian guides. Euclides and I made our way into water lettuce heaven one day, but all we really caught was wolf fish (yawn).

And then everything changed.

The water has come down about 20 feet since I first arrived.

It's kind of hard to appreciate the depth change until you need to get back on the boat from shore. Then Shit Get's Real...

Instead of motoring up to the lake and parking the boat in the forest, we’re suddenly in danger of grounding the boat. The lake I assumed to be a permanent park fixture will dry up completely in the coming months. Instead of 40 or so fish of moderate diversity, we started catching LOTS (hundreds) of ONE species of fish (local name carachama, the once-endearing armored catfish). They’re common aquarium fish in the US since they eat algae.

This has become our go-to fishing spot, and our days here are numbered as well. Here, Pool's on a quest to retrieve a piranha that feel between the floorboards (a common problem in our world).

I usually leave the net-emptying to the experts, but on that particular day I offered to help Euclides (who was giggling like a little kid at catching so many fish) since we were running out of daylight. A thousand tiny cuts ensued, but I think I gained some street cred in the process. Carachama soup is a delicacy here, so we kept some for dinner. I think I expected chunks of meat in some kind of broth, but instead I was presented a bowl full of broth and a giant fish staring back at me.

Death by a thousand cuts. It probably saved us at least 30 minutes when I joined the remove-carachama-from-the-gillnet quest, but there were consequences...

"Mmmm...." (stifles gag reflex...)

I’m not sure how this will play out for my research purposes, but I still have 2 weeks to go. Here’s hoping. 

Even under the worst of circumstances, it's hard to get too worked up when you have sunsets like this on a nightly basis. (I think Mario took this picture)

[UPDATE! and not a good one. My boss says the food web probably isn't "complete enough" to be "useful" (I'm struggling to remember why I work for this person...). Plus they samples in question are still technically stuck in Peru since I don't have the permits in place yet. Ho hum. Yay for trying??]