The Dobber

It’s been a while since I posted, so… here’s another post, starting where I left off last.  After we climbed Mt. Kenya, we spent two weeks in a course taught by Professor Andy Dobson.  All I knew about Dobson before the course began was that he was a disease ecologist, he was British (Scottish actually), and he never replied to emails – he’s the thesis advisor of two students here so they theoretically needed to be in contact during March so they could plan their thesis, but, whatever.  While they talked about how he didn’t respond to their emails, they would call him Dobbers because that’s his netID.  

Anyway, he’s actually an awesome, chill guy, and we found out really quickly.  Upon his arrival – a day later than when we expected him to arrive – he gave us our assignment for the course:  we were going to map the distribution of plants, animals, and insects on Mpala Ranch.  Maybe this sounds fun to you!  If so, you are probably not a field ecologist.  If this sounds ridiculous to you, you are probably a field ecologist, or a practical human being, who realizes that two weeks is not enough time to do a thorough sampling.  Mpala Ranch has four types of soil – red clay, black cotton, riparian, transition (between the red clay and black cotton) – so the hope was to see the different biological communities atop these soils.  Like I wrote, it was ambitious and totally impractical, but it was a valuable exercise.  I had never really done anything like ecological surveying before and I learned a lot:  mostly that this type of surveying is ridiculously tedious and annoying.  We split into four specialized groups to sample the ranch:  mammals, birds, insects, and plants.  I was in the mammal group with Nitasha and my roommate Devika.  We called ourselves Mammies and formed what our other classmates might’ve called “a clique.”  I mean, mammals are definitely the coolest things around, and to survey the mammals we woke up every morning at 5:30 AM, went on a drive until 9 AM when we would eat breakfast.  We’d do another drive after dinner (8 PM – 10 PM) to see if animal distribution was effected by time and also to see the animals that only come out at night.  Over the course of one week of sampling, we drove over 200 kilometers.  It was exhausting, but really fun.  On our drives, the bird group would join us so I learned a lot about the different birds of East Africa.  The drives were fun; the vegetation sampling was not.  After our breakfast, we had to go out into the field with the plant and insect groups and do their bidding when all we wanted to do was sleep.  By the time we got back from the field (lunch time) we just had enough energy to eat and then lay down.  Because we were worried we’d never actual analyze the mountain of data we were collecting, we were crabby and resentful all the time.  Eventually, we were able to convince Dobson to let us spend one afternoon at the centre analyzing our data, and it was much needed.  Here’s a list of all the animals I saw on our drives:

1) Dikdik (yes, it’s actually called that…)

2) Scrub Hare

3) Impala

4) Reticulated Giraffe

5) Plains Zebra

6) Grevy's Zebra

7) Thomson's Gazelle

8) Rock Hyrax

9) Vervet Monkey

10) Galago (aka Bushbaby)

11) Spotted Hyena

12) White-tailed Mongoose

13) Black-backed Jackal

14) Grant's Gazelle

15) Elephant

16) Olive Baboon

17) Striped Ground Squirrel

18) Cattle (Mpala is a research centre and commercial ranch, so cattle abound)

19) Slender Mongoose

20) Hippopotamus

21) Defassa Waterbuck

22) Eland

23) Buffalo

24) Steinbok

25) Bushbuck

26) Domestic Dog (we’ve seen wild dogs [actually severely endangered] earlier in the semester just not during our sampling; only domestic dogs which are kinda boring [no offense!])

27) Fringe-tailed Gerbil

28) Leaf-nosed Bat

29) Dwarf Mongoose

30) Honey Badger

31) Lion (heard, not seen; although I saw lions earlier at Ol Pejeta and again at NNP [BLOG POST TO COME SHORTLY!])

32) Warthog

33) Jackson's Hartebeest

34) Oryx

35) Single-striped Grass Mouse

36) Honey badger (speculative…)

Now here are some random stories from our time in Andy’s class:

1) Rock Band.  As Mammies, we would always complain while doing the vegetation plots.  On our first day doing vegetation, we found the work so boring, in between counting trees, shrubs, and blades of grass, we picked up rocks and hammered out beats.  One particularly popular song (only amongst the three of us, everyone else hated our singing) was called “Countin’ Plants.”  The lyrics (written by me) are as follows:

Countin’

Plants

Countin’

Plants

Countin’

Plants

At Mpalaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Ranch

At one point I started banging out a beat that was like this super awesome LCD Soundsystem song, so enjoy it and be thankful you weren’t counting plants and listening to my shrill voice.

2) Q Fever.  Before coming to Kenya, we had to have a pre-departure meeting with a University physician about Q Fever.  Basically, Q Fever is kinda like Chagas disease in that you get it, you think you just have the flu, and, like, two decades later your heart craps out and you die.  If you catch it early, you treat with antibiotics and it’s no big deal.  But they wanted to check our heart function before even going because it probably is bad to get it if you already have valve problems.  So… we were told not to touch livestock because Q Fever is carried on ticks that are on livestock.  But… during one particularly lackadaisical day of counting plants, we just needed a pick me up and it was convenient that at this exact moment a herd of goats/sheep (I really can’t tell the difference) came through.  We wouldn’t jump at just any goatsheeps, but the Maasai herders were curious and came over to look at us, so we looked at them and saw one of them had a baby animal hanging from a sheet tied to his breast.  IT WAS SO CUTE!  So we asked him if we could pet lamby (that’s what we called it even though it was a baby goat [i.e. kid]) and we did when he said yes.  We played with the lamby (that was born JUST THE DAY BEFORE!) even though it couldn’t walk, by petting it and trying to give it pieces of straw to eat.  Eventually we went back to our plot and their herdsmen went back to their sheepgoats.  Dobson came over to us after a while and we told him about our exploits with lamby, to which he said only, “Girls… Q Fever.”  OH SHOOT!  TOTALLY FORGOT!  THE LAMB WAS JUST SO CUTE!  Okay, so we probably had caught Q Fever.  But actually no because we would’ve seen a tick on us and also the lamb was freshly born so I don’t know how it could get Q Fever that quickly.  Anyway, later that night I checked out the Q Fever Wikipedia page and was pleasantly surprised when I read the following (straight from the page):  “Treatment of acute Q fever with antibiotics is very effective. ^{[CITATION NEEDED]}”  I’M SORRY, WHAT?  You can’t just drop this vote of confidence on me Wikipedia, then rip it away with a “CITATION NEEDED.”  Whatever.  But actually, we don’t have Q Fever.  But the incident did breed hilarious phrasings such as:  “If this isn’t Q Fever, I don’t know what is.”

Nitasha and Devika with lamby.

3) Toad in the Road.  On one of our night drives, we saw a toad in the road.  I don’t know what came over me, but I decided to pick up the toad (we named it froggy to stick with the incorrect naming convention established with lamby).  Previously, I wasn’t the type of person to pick up frogtoads.  For example, my cousins would always pick up toadfrogs and I would just pet the amphibians’ backs with one finger if I weren’t running away from the frogtoad.  I don’t know why I was afraid (firstly, I wasn’t afraid, I just don’t like things crawling on me…) of these creatures in the past, but maybe it was the attempt to look like a tough girl in front of Dobson, but I hopped out and picked up froggy and brought it into our car.  Froggy proceeded to FREAK THE HECK OUT and jump around the seat before I flung it outside again (after we had identified it).  Anyway, later in the week, I picked up another toadfrog, so, you know… this is a thing I can do now.

4) Leopard in Da Streets.  Of the big cats here (Cheetah, Lion, Leopard), I’ve seen the first two.  I (along with my classmates) have yet to see a leopard.  The one morning after we were done sampling the mammals (and thus done waking up early for early morning game drives), Dobson and our TA Jake went out just for fun and SAW A LEOPARD.  I curse the gods.

More Ado About Dobson:  He’s actually really cool.  Some afternoons we had cocktail lectures and he talked about really interesting things!  One lecture was on general ecology of the Serengeti.  Interestingly, after rinderpest was eradicated (one of the only two viruses to be wiped off the planet, the other being smallpox), animal communities altered because wildebeest populations we no longer depressed due to disease.  This altered predator populations, plant communities, and ultimately soils.  I had never before considered a disease to have the ability to alter soil make-up.  Just goes to show you… it’s all connected…

Another one of his lectures was about rabies.  Definitely not the type of lecture you want to have in Kenya without having received the rabies vaccine.  Basically, you can get rabies from many sources:  domestic dogs, wild animals (hyenas), bats (just inhaling their saliva can do it), etc.  SUPER SCARRY CONSIDERING BATS LIVE IN THE FREAKIN’ BATHROOMS!  Also, when the director of Mpala mentioned that once they had a rabid hyena chillin’ in the bathroom.  Basically, I didn’t want to use the bathroom for a week after hearing this lecture.  The sad thing is the week we arrived at Mpala, a research assistant had died of rabies.  This sh*t is happening all over people, and I feel like in the U.S., we never really consider it as an issue anymore because a vaccine exists and treatment is readily available for those bitten.  Ain’t the same here.  Dobson works with a group in Tanzania trying to vaccinate pet dogs (if you could call them pets; they live in the house but have to fend for themselves for food) and it’s pretty successful, but there’s still so much that needs to be done.  I told him someone should do their senior thesis work on rabid dogs and call it “The Real Reservoir Dogs.”  He chuckled.  I chuckled.  But actually, this stuff is pretty sad.  Dobson told the story of one man who was bitten by his daughter who was bitted by a pet dog.  The man didn’t have the money to get treated.  There’s only been one successful treatment (The Milwaukee Protocol) of rabies once symptoms started settling in.  Doctors pumped her full of ketamine to slow her neural function and limit the spread of the virus to her brain.  With the virus slowed, her body’s immune system (with the help of antivirals) was able to fight off the attack on its own.  However, post-first-symptoms survival is extremely rare.  When someone starts showing symptoms, the treatment is, as Dobson said, “say goodbye and chain them to a bed.” 

We had another lecture about Elephants and the Ivory Trade.  Basically, China sucks.  But not really because every country exploits a different natural resource and it just so happens one of China’s is ivory and Americans want elephants to hang around so their children can see them in zoos but know they exist in the wild as well.  But China likes ivory for traditional purposes, and since the Chinese middle class is growing, so goes the ivory demand.  Many countries operate a legal ivory trade with quotas, but it’s total bullsh*t because poachers will always find a way to cheat the system if there’s a system in the first place.  In West Africa, elephants are basically all gone.  In East Africa, they’re declining.  In Southern Africa, where they use the “legal ivory trade” to pay for their conservation efforts.  But the sad part is, poaching totally screws up elephant social structure.  I don’t really remember why, but it totally does.  If you’re curious, send me an email and I’ll look back at my lecture notes.

Don't tell me you don't like elephants...

Our last lecture was on roads.  Sounds boring, but it was specifically on the road the Tanzanian government wants to build that would cut straight through the Serengeti National Park (SNP) and straight the wildebeest migration corridor.  Hundreds of thousands of wildebeest migrate from south Kenya to south Serengeti every year and having a road there probably wouldn’t be good.  I’ve driven down NJ/NY highways and seen so many deer dead on the side of the road.  I guess it’s kind of bad that I’m desensitized to deer, but if it were cheetah or wildebeest that I saw dead on the side of the road, I’d be appalled.  The funny thing is, it’s also totally more economical to go around the SNP, but the government promised one thing and if they go back on its promised road it will make them look weak.  A government going back on it’s word looking weak… guess Congress is pretty damn weak.

THE END.  More to come on Paula Kahumbu’s class and my experience in Nairobi National Park!

P.S.  I’m addicted to Game of Thrones.  That is all.