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.

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.

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.

…to the next Great Adventure! I am soon ready to begin my new project –which will take me back to a certain small & wonderful lump of volcanic rock in the Indian Ocean. I recently got the extremely good news that I will receive three years’ of funding from the Swiss Velux Foundation — so I shall indeed be working on ghosts and time machines in the last remnant rainforests!

The project is based in the group of Rodolfo Dirzo at Stanford University in California, so when I am not in the subtropics, I will hopefully thoroughly enjoy myself in all the natural marvels that the golden state has to offer. Rodolfo also currently hosts Mauro Galetti, another ghost-hunter, and I am sure we will have lots of fun discussing the ecological roles of extinct animals -and how to resurrect at least some of their functions.

Three months of fieldwork. Thousands of memories and similar numbers of photos. These two are obviously tightly linked in my world. When I flip through the digital album, I sometimes feel overwhelmed. How do I begin to share even a fraction of them with you? In short, I feel like the chameleon on this photo – not sure where to look first! Our two weeks in Stellenbosch with the world’s foremost Oxalis expert, Leanne, were absolutely wonderful. But the chameleons everywhere in her garden were pure magic.