Interactions

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.

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.

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.

It is now almost two months since my PhD-supervisor, mentor and above all friend, Christine Müller, died much too early at the age of 46 on the 7th of March, after fighting several cancers for five years. She got the diagnosis in January 2003, literally the day before she was going to go to Mauritius with my PhD-colleague Chris Kaiser and me on our first fieldseason. She persuaded us to go anyway; would not hear about us staying for her. This was emblematic of her. She fought off the first bout of disease, and joined us in the field a few months later – the pull of the rainforest much stronger than that of any hospital bed. The next five years she continued the fight, while building up a strong and dedicated research group at Zurich University. I count myself incredibly lucky to have grown my own scientific wings with Christine during those years.

Since her death, all of us who knew her and worked with her have tried to cope as best we can without her. A large hole has been torn in the fabric of our science and our lives. In her last week the new lab website, designed by Atlant Bieri, a former MSc-student of hers, went online. It now stands as a fitting epitaph for Christine. Together with all of her scientific and human achievements.

I just got an email from a friend, asking me for a pdf of our paper on indirect interactions between plants & geckos. He ended the email with the following:

And how the hell do you get this in your abstract??

‘Among plants, the nuptials cannot be celebrated without the intervention of a third party to act as a marriage priest, and that the office of this third person is to unite the representatives of different households.. Now the marriage priests who officiate in the vegetable kingdom are insects in search of honey; the winds, or anything which by accident, or design, may carry the pollen from one flower to another.’

Clearly the whole I-bet-you-can’t-get-this-word-in challenge is far too simple for you.

Hmm. That quote is actually from the first pollination paper to appear in The American Naturalist – I put it in as a quote before the introduction, to honour the fact that our paper was one of the first in the recently resurrected section ‘Natural History Miscellany’ that used to figure prominently in that journal in its early years. I wondered how my friend mistook that as part of the abstract though? On a hunch, I checked Web of Science – and lo and behold, this is what it currently shows for that paper:

Oh dear. Now, I believe, is the time to use that link to “Suggest Corrections” in Web of Science. Oh, and by the way, why is that they also seem to think that “CRAB CRUSTACEA” would make a good ‘KeyWord Plus’ that will assist readers to find our paper???

A week ago, I got an sms (that’ll be a ‘text’ for linguistically challenged Brits) from Ida, a very good old friend of mine from my uni-days in Aarhus in Denmark. “Hello, we are on a trip through South Africa, and will be in Pietermaritzburg soon; want to meet & do nerdy things?”. So, on Thursday she arrived with her husband, Jakob, and their two-year old son, Noah. I had grand plans to use them as field assistants in a project on a potentially bird-pollinated Satyrium orchid on a nearby farm. But alas, the weather said no, and cold & rain forced us to retreat to a butterfly-park nearby. “Butterflies for Africa”, it is called. We were wondering why it wasn’t “Butterflies of Africa” -but once inside, we understood. Imported Asian and South American butterflies made up the vast majority of the impressive numbers in the small hall, with a few African species thrown in for good measure. Still, it wasn’t too bad a place, and Jakob and I had great fun with our cameras for some hours (even though his camera is a Nikon, and thus by definition less fun).

The two days with Ida, Jakob and Noah once again confirmed to me that the world is a very small place. I may miss all of my old friends in Denmark (and elsewhere), but I keep bumping into them around the world these years. Even more weird, just before coming to Pietermaritzburg, they were in the Kruger National Park – where they bumped into one of our old professors from Aarhus. Small indeed. The lucky trio is now on their way to the Drakensberg, where I hope they will find lots of grand views and better weather than here!