adventures in china

Where have you been? We have spent one month waiting for you, with only an occasional afternoon drizzle to get our hopes up. Well, I am glad you finally made it. Friday and Saturday it rained nearly all day, today it looks nice and cloudy too. This means good frogs!

Leptolalax (ventripunctatus?) This is an unusual frog of which nothing is known about, although they seem to be all over the stream in the rainforest section of the gardens.

We call these “slippery frog” because they are hard to hold onto. Males are larger than females, which is unusual (it’s usually the other way around), and they have giant heads which Jocelyn says they use to battle each other with?

Okay, this is what I came here to see, a real flying frog. Not the little R. bipunctatus I posted before. These are the real deal. They live high up in the canopy where they literally fly from tree to tree (some species have been recorded gliding 80 meters or more!), but during the rainy season, if you’re lucky, you will find one at night venturing down to a pool of water to breed. The rains have come, and I’ve been lucky.

This is a good one too – Philautus menglaensis, a new species to the project. They’re call sounds like a mantella.

And a foam nest. The tree frogs around here make these frothy egg-filled things. They usually put them over water, and then the tadpoles hatch out, dropping down below after a day or two. This one was placed over a mossy rock however, and I watched an unfortunate tadpole fall a good meter from the nest, hit the rock, and then eventually wriggle off the side into the water.

>> Giant metallic-winged bee <<

Someone is stealing our artificial breeding sites. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. But all of last week’s work hauling buckets out to different parts of the garden has been lost to the bucket thief.

Some small creatures I caught recently:

At first glance, Menglun appears as a lazy riverside town. Men carry their days catch in woven reed baskets, Dai women giggle to each other as they float down the street in colorful dresses. First impressions are sometimes misleading.

Sunday night: I’m walking the streets alone. Kids scream as they run through garbage piles, past slot machine casinos packed full of men and brothels with exhausted women glowing red in the light. I hear yelling approaching from behind, but I don’t turn around. Drunken teenagers on red motorbikes often hoot at one another at this hour. Then they pull up next to me.

I glare through the dark. Who could this be? Familiar faces smile back. “heeellloow” they say. It’s my former landlords. The ones who installed worthless window locks on a brand new apartment complex, who thought it was a good idea to house americans (the only ones living in Menglun) on the first floor, the ones who could barely look at me or say “duibuqi” to me when the police showed up after the break in. It’s those guys.

“Ni hao” I say. I don’t know what is going on. Blurred colors float over their heads as stores advertise goods with fluorescent lights. At night, this town comes alive in ways you would never expect, and I’m part of it.

The wife hops off the motorbike and carriers her 2-year old daughter with her. “Go! Let’s go!” the husband yells at me as he pats the back of the seat, signalling me to get on and ride into the night.

I tried to decline. But what the fuck. Who cares at this hour. So I straddle the red motorbike and we speed off, leaving his wife and child in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Moments later we pull into the parking lot of my old apartment. It’s too famliar. I told myself this was home for every second of every day until the break-in. He leads me to my old room and points proudly at the new security measures – chicken wire over the window bars – so that if someone wants to steal your stuff they better bring wire cutters! Great. I nod, smile, and try not to trip on things as I follow him around.

I have a seat in the living room and look at him. I mean I look at him. Dead in the face. I give him a look that transcends all language barriers. And I see how sorry he is, and how bad he feels, and how bad he has felt. I see this, and it all melts away. My anger towards this man is washed into the Mekong. Down through thick mud and sediment-filled shoreline. Flowing past gillnets and finally into green waters that lead to sea. All of it. Finally.

We sit and drink and chain smoke until our heads pulsate with nicotine. He teaches me the word for beer, for lighter, for telephone (not that I remember them this morning) and he tells me how Americans are different from Chinese people because we are big and like to shoot guns. He saw this on television. Well, I guess he is right, I am bigger than he is and I do like guns. He gives me his phone number and I give him mine, and we agree to meet again for another Chinese lesson. But next time, I must bring “my book” (Chinese/English dictionary)

Looking into his face again, I can tell what he really wants is for me to move back in. He wants rent, he wants his wife not to be angry with him. He wants this American to have not left his stuff on a table at night, and for his wife not to have placed a table near the window. Well, me too. And I give him a look that says so. Then we sit back in our chairs, finish the last of our drinks, and fade into the night.

They are making me do all the work!

Jocelyn (left) and Brenna (right) pretending to work

A “new frog” (a species we haven’t 100% identified yet). It may appear to be a boring brown frog, but would you believe it does not have free-swimming tadpoles? We found a female full of eggs last night, and if it is indeed Ingerana liui, then she was on the lookout for a male who had dug a little hole in the mud for her to put her eggs in. The eggs then develop in the hole as the male guards them, and out of the eggs hatch tiny miniature frogs instead of tadpoles!

This is my new pet mantis. Help me name it (What was aunt Jane/Conner’s mantis called?)

The day my stuff got stolen, Jocelyn pointed out this mantis crawling next to her door. I ran back to my room to get a bag to collect it with, but by the time I had returned the mantis had flown three stories down to the ground below and couldn’t be found. Yesterday, I spotted this guy crawling up the second story of the dorms, perhaps trying to make it’s way back up to Jocelyn’s room?

Now it lives in a jar by my bed and I feed it bugs.

There isn’t a lot of forest left in this part of China because it has been “converted” to rubber plantations. I’m fortunate to work in an area where there is a little left, and in it there are some good frogs. And also 10 inch long killer centipedes!

These are the dorms, where they moved me after my apartment in town was broken into. Lots of scientists live here, from all over the world.

This is where I sleep

This is Menglun, the town across the river from the gardens where I eat every meal and go to buy things. It’s small, but not too small.

I walk across this bridge to go from the gardens to eat in Menglun. There is a cafeteria at the gardens, but it’s expensive and bad.

A view from the bridge…

The gardens

I climbed that mountain in the distance on Saturday, where I caught a bamboo viper.

These are the labs, one of many giant buildings the Chinese government has built inside the botanical gardens. I spend a lot of time on the roof, where I have a bunch of tadpoles in buckets to take care of.

On the roof, Jocelyn taking care of the tadpoles…

Tadpoles!

These are artificial breeding spots where we want frogs to breed. A lot of the time I’ll be walking around the gardens looking in them to see if there are eggs or tadpoles. So far we haven’t found anything.

Johny Worker Bushtit Whiskey

Contrary to what people call it, the bird and flower market in Kunming does not sell birds or flowers. Perhaps it used have birds and flowers. Now it is a partly-open air market full of tropical fish and spectacular (some of the best I have ever seen) aquariums. There was no algae in sight. No dead fish piled on the gravel below the ones for sale. Everything was clean and healthy. Even the plants were perfect – pruned so that the angle of their leaves balanced the shape of the driftwood they grew on.

On the walk home from the bird and flower market we stopped at the puppy and kitty market. Less incredible, more cute, slightly disturbing.

My girlfriend suggested I start a blog while in China this summer. What a good idea! Please, don’t hesitate to comment on anything, it will help me stay sane here.

Below is the abstract of my project, but there are also others I’m working on as a field assistant.

Abstract
Political and socio-economic policies have accelerated the rate of land use change in the frog diversity hotspot Xishuangbanna, China. Little is known about the habitat requirements of the frog species of Xishuangbanna, making it difficult to predict how they will fare against this habitat alteration. Studies of frog habitat requirements, such as breeding habitat, are badly needed here. Frog species that breed in temporary pools of water should favor breeding sites that present a low risk to offspring. Competition presents a threat to tadpoles by reducing their growth. My research will investigate the strength of competition within and between three common tadpole species. I will couple information gained from these experiments with field survey results to determine how the strength of competition within and between tadpole species affects where adults choose to breed.