Interactions

It has been a few years since I was lucky enough to work there with Yoko, Alfredo & Jens – but this superb video by Pedro Filipe took me straight back to some of the magic places we worked, particularly the sub-alpine volcanic landscapes around El Teide. There is even a clip of an endemic lizard eating fruits! Alfredo, your islands are magical! Imagine if Pedro Filipe had had a time machine, though. He’d have captured giant rats, giant tortoises and giant lizards, plus several other extinct species as well. Sigh.

Another one from my inbox, below. My best (?) guess is that one of our papers on seed dispersal for obvious reasons includes information on fruit pulp, and that this was picked up by some automated robot. By the way, because I am evil, I ignored the first email they sent me. Naughty.

Dear Professor Hansen,
I am writing to inquire whether you have received my previous email inviting you to submit an article to the Special Issue on “Vital Pulp Therapy/Pulp Regeneration,” which will be published in the “International Journal of Dentistry”.

“Professor”. Giggle. But yes, I should send them a few of the gut-passed quandong seeds I just picked up in Australia. Maybe they can regenerate the pulp on those?

Those were the words in the subject header of a recent email in my inbox. Apparently, someone got something mixed up along the way, as the email continued:

Dear Dr. Hansen,
WHO has declared H1N1 pandemic on June 11, 2009. You are probably working against the clock to create effective vaccines and discover the infection mechanisms. You do not have to fight against the pandemic alone; GenScript is at your side to help accelerate your projects.

I guess this is one of the side effects of having the Department of Biology as part of the Stanford School of Medicine. Surely, EVERYONE here must be working on that thing, right? Now forgive me, I have to go and test my latest vaccine on someone. No time to waste. Schnell, schnell.

I just started writing a book. There, I said it. So now I guess I better get on with it. Actually, it has been on the move for 10 years since its first, drunken inception, but I digress. Who am I trying to kid, right? It’s going to be an awareness-raising book on lost & disappearing mutualistic plant-animal interactions – specifically pollination and seed dispersal – and why we should give a flying hoot about this loss. The book will consist of popular scientific case stories from all over the world. I am fully aware that my writing skills leave much to be desired. Thus, I have teamed up with a rather brilliant Australian wildlife artist – Robin Wingrave – whose amazing illustrations will take up more or less half the space, and hopefully detract from the inadequacy of my ramblings. After close to a year’s worth of chatting, phoning, and skyping with Rob (and apparently quite often sounding like giggling teenagers in love, according to Rob’s wife Sharyn), we recently finally managed to meet face-to-face, in the Atherton Tablelands, Queensland, Australia. It was an absolute blast! – Fellow nerds, friends & such – I give you the Team: Robin Wingrave and Yours Truly. More to follow.

Today is a happy day for Mauro & me – our short Perspective on the relativity of the megafauna concept is out in Science! Plus, even better, we convinced the well-known and fantastic paleo-artist, Carl Buell, to do the illustrations! I think they are fantastic; especially (no bias whatsoever) his rendition of the extinct saddle-backed Mauritian giant tortoise, Cylindraspis triserrata.

And here are the two happy nerds – two weeks ago; now Mauro has left us and is back in his native Brazil, to be the King of the Castle in his brand-new lab.

Last Thursday and Friday I participated in the defaunation symposium, hosted by Rodolfo and Mauro, with Camila as the benign wizard making everything run smoothly. A thousand times thanks to this dynamic trio for the immense work they put into making this happen! (why is Mauro looking so weird…? -watch this space!).

It was a great meeting, where I got to harp on about one of my favourite topics; rewilding, or REfaunation. On the last day, as a surprise, Rodolfo revealed that the symposium had been held in honour of John Terborgh – and called up John to present him with a truly nerdy plant-animal present: a painting of an interaction that only few people have ever seen – the spider monkey Ateles belzebuth and the fruit Batocarpus amazonicus.

My dear – if somewhat Australian and thus slightly weird – friend and artist collaborator, Robin Wingrave, had spent the last two months before the symposium frantically researching about these two species, to present John with as correct a rendition of it as possible. I think the final result is fantastic, and really speaks for itself.

No, I didn’t mis-spell; that’s the name of Gael – the “moderate tropical storm”-currently having a blast a wee bit to the north-east of Mauritius, and passing us close during night. Quite fitting name, though. Fingers crossed for my guava-and-tarpaulin hut whare. Kiwi-built, and upgraded over the last 10 years by Brits, Germans & a Dane.  “Na worries, mate!”. Off to bake cyclone cake & drink cyclone rum. Camp rules.

I am so happy to know that even the take-away container from our local cafe here on Campus does not contain any GMO. You know, it’s like, you know, like, totally, like awesome and stuff. But the food inside is freshly made, and of pretty high quality. Sure hell beats the old sour re-heated stuff one would encounter at the UZH mensa from time to time. GMO or not.

Two of my best friends & colleagues, Chris & Nancy, just got married to each other in the Seychelles. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds – they both live & work there. And yet. The wedding was on Bird Island, a private nature reserve & a tiny speck in the Indian Ocean, where some 800.000 sooty terns and thousands of other seabirds (noddies, frigate birds, fairy terns, etc) were breeding. The wedding itself was absolutely fantastic; we were only 50 lucky (!) wedding guests in total, about one third of which were biologists.

The island?  A full one half of it was constantly covered by a magic carpet of tens of thousands of hovering, gliding, screaming sooty terns. Hitchcock would have loved it. And then there were the fairy terns – elegance personified. And -oh joy!- there were a few giant Aldabran tortoises roaming free, too.  And some ripe Pandanus fruits.  But that is a story for another day! Bird Island is, after all, first & foremost an island of birds.

Today our paper on the seed dispersal and seedling establishment of a critically endangered endemic Mauritian tree went online, you can find a pdf of it here. The tree is, in fact, Syzygium mamillatum the gorgeous species that Christine is looking at in the previous post.

Its main content is focused on empirically testing the predictions of the Janzen-Connell model on an oceanic island, and in relation to practical conservation issues. The second focus of the paper, for which we present less empirical data, is the use of ecological analogues to replace extinct species – in our case resurrecting lost seed dispersal interactions using giant tortoises as stand-ins for extinct Mauritian giant tortoises. This is en exciting recent development in conservation and restoration ecology – and one which has to be used with extreme caution, to avoid unwanted ecosystem effects or new invasions. Tortoises are ideal analogues: they move slowly, they grow slowly, and they are thus easily controlled – and I for one have so far not heard of invasive tortoises anywhere on this planet.

And they are goddamn cute.