Interactions

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.

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???

To most pollination biologists, these words call forth some of the multitudes of nerdy scientific papers that fill our libraries. I just stumbled upon another kind of ‘pollination paper’ on the web. Here you go:

Is is one of many extraordinary creations by the American origami-artist Robert Lang. It turns out my idea of origami as only being small dragons, cranes and swans (oh, and the unicorn in Blade Runner, of course!) is, like, so last century. Also turns out the nerdisms of Mr. Lang to a large extent mirror those of biology nerds. Now go & have fun on his website. Need another reason? What about this one:

You know you want to.

…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.

Why am I a scientist? One of the shortest, yet most hauntingly beautiful reasons:

“Science is the poetry of reality” –Richard Dawkins

Some years ago, my dear PhD-colleague Chris and I were involved as photographers & general nerds in some conservation awareness-raising programmes on Mauritius. One of the outcomes of this was a user-friendly guide to the native and endemic plants of the island — the guides that had been available up until then focused mainly on garden plants and invasive species! (a.k.a. medicinal plants). The first edition of the book came out some two years ago, and rapidly sold out, despite the fact that as a field guide it would fail miserably: the paper quality was so bad that the slightest shower would dissolve the pages (and obviously you do get showers in a rainforest). I am happy to say that the new edition has improved quite a bit –at least with respect to the paper quality. Now we only need to convince MWF that we should have better binding (right now its glue only), and some kind of lamination of front & back cover. Then we can truly call it a field guide!

As far as I know, this book is not available outside of Mauritius. If any of you should be going to Mauritius and want to prepare for some flora-ramble through the last remnants of native vegetation, you can buy it on site in most book shops, and in fact also at the airport bookshop/kiosk, as far as I know. Otherwise, get in touch with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and get a copy directly from them. Proceeds of the sale go directly to conservation projects on the island – so what are you waiting for?

One thing that fieldwork in South Africa has taught me: The skyscape can beat even the most fantastic landscape. Timo and I were hiking up a river valley in the gorgeous Cederbergs, looking for a wee smelly orchid. Rocks and cliffs of all sizes and shapes littered the landscape, sometimes leaning towards each other like old friends. The sun was setting, throwing spectacular shadows everywhere and putting the spotlight on a faraway massif. But it was the sky that literally stole the picture.

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!

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.