adventures in china

AWESOME.

No, I didn’t find this guy walking around in some forest. Not even on a path in the gardens. It was on a Chinese student’s shirt in the library! I pointed it out, but he was aware of this. The beetle is his pet. He brings it home every night and feeds it fruit in a cage, but during the day he puts it on his shirt and it just hangs out, crawling on him, never flying away, never biting, just enjoying itself.

Maybe I’m not that weird after all. I keep my pet bugs in plastic boxes.

My experiment is coming to an end. I’ve grown different amounts of tadpoles with other kinds of tadpoles, now it’s time to euthanize them so they can be weighed, measured, and staged (find out how close to becoming a frog they are). Some have grown more than others, and it will be interesting to see in what treatments this happened.

But this shit is tedious! The scientist in me has calculated the amount of time it will take to finish collecting all the data for every tadpole and the results are not encouraging. Over 100 hours of pulling tiny dead animals out of jars of ethanol, placing them on a piece of paper, measuring them, looking at them under a magnifying glass to count their toes, lifting them carefully onto a scale, waiting for the scale to agree on a weight, and then putting them back. This must be done for each tadpole in my experiment, so somewhere between 3000 and 3600 times! I think Jocelyn’s assistant (me) needs an assistant. This kind of science is not as glamorous as hiking through remote forests, jotting down notes and taking photos of rare frogs. I’m going back to just natural history observation type stuff after this.

But, once I ignore my future here for the next month and concentrate on what I’m doing in the lab during one moment it doesn’t seem so bad. I have an MP3 player again, and the lab is air conditioned (my room at the dorms is no longer, I broke the air conditioner somehow), so basically I get to hang out in an air conditioned room for 3-5 hours every day listening to music. If I bring in some coffee, it will go fast. Maybe.

So when I was maybe 9 years old or so I bought a “chubby frog” from Aquarius pet store in Monona. This thing was cool. He sat in a little mud hole all day long, popping out to snag any small insect I threw into his 10 gallon aquarium. One night I woke up to a scream. My chubby frog had escaped, climbed out of his covered cage, under my room door, down the stairs, over carpeted floors, and ended up in my parents bedroom (mom, do you remember this?) He died some years later, but I was always impressed that this seemingly inactive brown blob made it through our entire house in one night.

Now I see them everyday. They’re everywhere, and they don’t just sit in little mud holes. I’ve found them in trees, swimming in water, on plant leaves a meter off the ground, and also in the mud. Here is one I found on a path in the rainforest the other week -

and a few other Microhylids, pretty much miniature versions of the above.

These photos were taken by the Georgia herp guy who came here this week, Zach Felix.

From left to right – Bill, Gwen, Jocelyn, Brenna, me

I think this is a photo of breakfast, where you dress up your noodle soup with that stuff in those bowls.

These are apartments down a side street in town, sort of like the one I had for the first few days I was here.

There are a lot of dogs walking around the streets

This is where you buy dresses

This is where fishermen buy gillnets and other fishing supplies

These things are like trucks with tractor engines. I don’t know what they really are, they use them a lot in Madagascar too.

A very typical street scene. People like to hang out around stores and play cards, smoke, chat.

Street

At this fried rice place near the entrance to the gardens you can get all sorts of good food and fresh juices!

You can also order these “potato cakes”, basically slices of potatoes, fried, and then covered in condensed milk. Sort of like pancakes in a way.

Last night, some friends of a friend of Jocelyn’s showed up. They’re herp guys from a university in Georgia. Real herp guys, like the kind who spend years radio tracking thousands of copperheads and swimming with Japanese giant salamanders.

We took them to Dai barbeque. It’s mouth-numbingly spicy food that you won’t find in any other part of China, the kind of restaurant I like to eat at a couple times a week. Skewered meats, tofu, and fish are mostly what ends up on the table, but my favorite is a fiery cucumber and tomato vinegar-based salad that tastes like it belongs in Central America. Everything is loaded with MSG, and the spices and sauces painted onto the foods you pick out taste like nothing I’ve encountered before.

After dinner we went frogging, normal Monday-night work frogging, just around the gardens. The jetlagged professor and friends did well. We will go out again Wednesday night, this time to the rainforest. I’ve promised them flying frogs! I hope I don’t disappoint.

Snakes! We saw this banded krait last week during a survey, well Brenna and I did. This is the most dangerous snake in the region, one which has potent venom and is common in the area. Fortunately, they are not particularly aggressive.

This one is a baby keelback. They’re common snakes around the gardens because they enjoy eating frogs. While they have “medically-significant” venom, they are rear-fanged so it’s difficult to get into trouble with these ones. This baby I photographed yesterday was barely 6 inches long!

Okay, I promise – the next post will be about something other than frogs or work… maybe…

My experiment has begun! This past week was spent collecting eggs, setting up buckets to raise tadpoles in, and finally, today, introducing tadpoles to the buckets. On a smaller scale it’s a breeze. I’ve raised dozens, even hundreds of tadpoles on my own in the basement. But now thousands?! This is a whole different game. Hours (days) of water changes, bleaching buckets, never ending prune fingers, and mud everywhere, on everything, regardless of how often I sweep or mop my bedroom floor and porch. This is how it should be.

Also, I got a new (borrowed) computer and Skype – username devin.edmonds. I’ll keep it open when I’m not in the field or at the lab, so feel free to say hi. I can only handle interacting with academics for so much of each day!