Advertisement
Published: January 11th 2016
Edit Blog Post
The end of the semester means two things for me: time to regroup, and time for field work--not necessarily in that order. I jetted off to Sabah as soon as my grades were submitted, in order to wrap up some field work that didn't get completed during the summer field season. Just a few streams with a handful of primary productivity measures required... but maybe I should back up a bit.
In 2011 I started working on the SAFE Project, a large-scale fragmentation experiment that is a collaboration between scientists, an oil palm company (Sime Darby, the world's largest), and the government of Sabah, Malaysia. The government and the oil palm company agreed to leave different sizes of forest fragments intact in what will become a large oil palm plantation in Eastern Sabah, between Danum Valley and the Maliau Basin. Additionally, there will be various sizes of riparian buffers left intact around streams. You can read more about the project here (http://www.safeproject.net/), but to cut to the chase, the streams are where I come in: most of the frogs in Borneo breed on streams, so I look at how amphibian communities (both tadpoles and adults) respond to fragmentation
and the different riparian buffer sizes. Additionally, I measure aquatic primary productivity (essentially a measure of total energy, a good indicator of how much diversity a system can support) to see how that is affected by fragmentation, and how well it predicts tadpole diversity.
I have been surveying these streams since 2011, before the fragmentation began, and have surveyed during the fragmentation process for the past couple of years. While tadpole and adult surveys always seem to go fairly well, I have struggled with the primary productivity since it's a fairly new technique for me, and one that I've received little training in. I blogged about my first season of primary productivity in 2012 if you want to read more about the process of equipment construction and all that. Suffice it to say that in that first year everything that could go wrong, did, and I figured that's just how primary productivity goes. However, after starting my new job in 2014 and purchasing some new equipment with my start-up grant, I was shocked last year when nearly the entire process ran smoothly and I easily got all the data I needed. I was hoping for more of
the same this year, but no dice.
My guess is that basic wear & tear on this equipment, plus the general effects of a tropical jungle, means that i'll have to regularly replace my equipment--so, lesson learned for future reference. I won't go into details here, but after weeks of trying over the summer and one final attempt at the start of December, I'm ending this year minus a full set of data for about 1/3 of my streams. Not the end of the world, but not ideal either.
As luck would have it, a friend of mine from the US came out to see Borneo for the first time right as I was discovering that I'd have to scrap the primary productivity, so we did what any good biologists do when they are thwarted by their equipment or their study system: we went to cool places to see wildlife. After showing him around Danum Valley where we saw some great birds, gibbons, and a pygmy elephant, we went to the Kinabatangan River, which I had actually never been to in my nearly 20 years of going to Sabah.
The Kinabatangan
Orangutan at Sepilok
Photo credit: Paul Brinkman River is famous in Sabah for having great wildlife viewing. Somewhat sadly, this is largely because the forest surrounding the river has been mostly converted to oil palm, so the thin strip of forest remaining by the river is the only place for wildlife to go. Since I was trying to be on mini-vacation and show Paul a good time, I tried to ignore that part of the equation, and focus on the great wildlife. We only had time for a single boat cruise, but most people spend a couple of days on the river, taking morning and evening cruises, which I would recommend if you're thinking of doing it--the more time you spend looking, the more you're likely to see. Still, I was pleased with our efforts--I checked off several birds in my bird book that I had never seen before, the highlights for me being the dark morph of the changeable hawk-eagle, and Wallace's hawk eagle (google that last one--I don't have a camera good enough for pics of birds).
After our morning boat ride and a nice breakfast on the terrace overlooking the bend in the river, we headed off to Sepilok for some orangutans. One of the things I love about traveling with people is all the little things you learn that you would never otherwise know about them. In Paul's case, I learned that he has a soft spot for orangutans. For some reason, I find it surprising and adorable when men--especially large/strong/manly men--have a soft spot for something cute. Paul isn't quite a gym rat, but he can hold his own, and he's been known to use words like "ignoramus" when describing people--to their face. So discovering that this brash guy's guy has a deep love of baby orangutans was definitely a trip highlight for me. And since Sepilok is an orangutan sanctuary in the middle of great lowland forest, we got all the baby orangutan cuteness Paul could handle--as well as some adults just coming out of their nests in the morning, and more new birds for me (Raffle's Malkoha! White-bellied woodpecker!).
The last bit of our trip was spent in the Sarawak city of Kuching, and good ol' Singapore. I love Kuching, partly because it's sleepy and charming, and partly because it was such an important place for Alfred Russel Wallace, the famous scientist (and totally bad-@ass field biologist) who came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Darwin. Paul is an historian of science, so he's one of the few people who doesn't work in SE Asia that is as excited about Alfred Russel Wallace as I am. So we cruised up & down the Sarawak River and explored the Sarawak Museum's "excellent" taxidermy (no photos allowed inside, but trust me, it's worth a trip), and sampled the culinary delights of Kuching. Back in Singapore we enjoyed the always gorgeous orchid garden, the Asian Civilizations Museum, and helped to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Singapore Sling with a drink at the Long Bar of Raffles Hotel.
All in all, it was the perfect end of semester consolation for broken field equipment.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.146s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0556s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb