Family Field Trip

We’ve started on our quick tour of Madagascar which includes marine studies in Tuléar on the west coast, and then a road trip on Route Nationale 7 (the only really good road in the country), stopping at several national parks on the way.  I’m currently writing from Tuléar, where we’ve just finished the marine studies week, which was AWESOME!  We spent 3 days 2 km south of Ankily-be (the place with lots of Kily, or Tamarind, trees), where our academic/program director, Jim, shares a vacation house with his friend and fellow conservation ecologist, Mark Fenn.  We camped behind the house which is right on the beach which is completely lined with mangroves, so we could swim around through the mangroves at high tide, which happened to be at early morning and just before dinner under the stars.

One of the solar stoves promoted by IHSM

Using Jim’s house as a base, we took a couple trips, one into Tulear to the Institute Halieutique et Sciences Marines (IHSM, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the acronym stands for), where we met the director who was kind of a random inventor (think Belle’s dad in Beauty and the Beast) of alternative cooking implements that didn’t use charcoal.  There were some cool solar ovens which concentrated the sun’s rays, and one which reflected them into a black box, and both worked really well.  The IHSM and local NGOs are trying to get the people in the area to use these solar ovens because charcoal production is destroying forests at a terrifyingly fast rate, and only about 1% of the energy of the original tree is actually transferred into cooking the food, after the insanely inefficient process of making charcoal and the also ridiculously inefficient stoves that the people use are taken into account.  Mr. Daniel is also a business man who has a Spiruline cultivating farm, which grows and dries algae which apparently is a miracle food (according to the man himself) which has practically every vitamin ever, can sustain you over long periods of time, tastes great, makes you lose weight if you need to, gain weight if you need to, helps women after childbirth replenish lost vitamins, etc.  Mom, if you want to buy some, it’s a lot cheaper here so let me know, maybe you won’t ever have to take vitamins again if you just eat this magic stuff. And it looks exactly like the green stuff you drink in the morning that Will makes the funny face at.

The traditional pirogue, or Malagasy fishing boat.
They almost all have an outrigger component
on their starboard sides to stabilize them (click on the
picture to make it bigger)

Sunset on a mountain
overlooking the Tulear region

The next day was possibly one of the best days of my life.  We met Michael Mitchell, the guy from Islesboro who is living in Ankily-be and Tulear and working on building the fishermen’s pirogues more efficiently and also working on a business with a Japanese guy on interesting-animal-preservation-through exportation (I think, I didn’t quite get what they were doing, but it wasn’t harming species but it hopefully will be a good business in the future and spark interest in the cool species of fish in the area).  It was so amazing that we were actually working with Michael, and that he’s Jim’s friend, AND that he knows everyone on the island!  We had a chance to catch up about Islesboro, which was so funny and great and ridiculous to be doing in Madagascar-what a small world!  That was great, but it wasn’t the #1 reason why that was the best day of my life, because we WENT SAILING IN MADAGASCAR ON FISHERMEN’S BOATS!!  We paddled out to a sand-bar where the tide was going down, and basically just sat on the sand bar while the fishermen collected their fish (we found out later that they were supposed to let us help, but it was beautiful and sunny and the water was warm so it really didn’t matter).  They had to wait for the tide to go down enough for their nets to trap the fish, at which point they dove into the area which their nets encompassed and swam around catching the fish by hand.  Apparently the previous day they had gotten a lot of fish from that area, so they were trying it again.  The area in which the Vezo (one of 3 ethnic groups in the region, characterized by their fishing skills) fish is massively over-fished, and at the end of 3 hours, our fishermen had about 50 fish, none of which were larger than my forearm (and only about 3 came close to that size).  The fish were mostly dead by the time they untangled the last ones from the nets, and any that weren’t good for eating were thrown back, but there was no catch and release of juveniles or mothers with eggs, because every fish they catch is considered a gift from God, so why would they throw it back?  After they had sorted out their nets on the sand bar, we SAILED BACK! They have two sort of masts, which they stick into a little mast-step like indent in the bottom of the boat, and a square sail made of burlap bags is flown before the masts.  There wasn’t a whole lot of sail trimming and adjustment going on, but we were on a run and there wasn’t any need to jibe or head up, so that didn’t really matter.  I saw a few boats on closer reaches, but they seem to prefer to paddle when they need to go upwind.  We were missing a burlap sack section, but we still flew through the water, and Michael said that the boats are really easy to steer: they just use one of the paddling oars as a rudder, but without attaching it to the boat at any point, just holding it straight into the water.  I actually couldn’t stop smiling, sailing again felt so great!

Baobabs in the spiny forest

To continue the marine studies, we moved up to Ifaty, a fishing village north of Tuléar, where we walked through another new protected area, saw a turtle rescue area, went snorkeling, and took a tour of a mangrove park.  The new protected area was really cool spiny forest, different in some ways than the spiny forest we’d seen before, mostly because there were so many more baobabs.  I never thought that seeing a baobab would be old news, but we’ve seen so many I’m actually getting used to them!  The new protected area has over 70 species of reptiles which live there, and about a billion species of plants and insects, but a lot of the hardwood is gone because people have logged it for charcoal and construction wood, and we saw a charcoal burning site inside the new protected area boundaries.  The problem with creating so many community managed new protected areas in Madagascar so quickly has been that people don’t really manage the areas at all, and they are really just protected areas on paper.
The “Village des Tortues” or turtle rescue area, was really like a turtle farm/zoo where they bring turtles that were being illegally trafficked out of the country (authorities sometimes catch people doing this at border ports in HUGE numbers because they are sold as pets and for their meat).  They have the capacity to hold 5000 turtles, which they then release back into the wild after rehabilitating them and letting them grow a little more.  There were only 1500 turtles there when we visited, which was still about 1499 turtles more than I had ever seen in one place!

A chameleon in the turtle village!

We went to Reef Doctor, a British NGO based in the village of Ifaty, to do our snorkeling trip.  They have a small (400 m x 400 m) area set up on the reef with a Malagasy guardian, where hotels and other guides can pay to take people snorkeling.  They call the area “Rose Garden” because of this really beautiful coral which looks like huge roses in the water, but there have been quite a few bleaching events and lots of sedimentation resulting from terrestrial logging and logging of mangroves, which allows the rivers to deposit more sediment into the ocean and onto the reefs, which chokes them.  The fish were still pretty cool and colorful and friendly (I was swimming with a school of them for a while), we saw some lobster and really crazy sea urchins, and we got to sail back in the pirogues again!
The mangrove park which we visited is part of an NGO run by a vazaha couple who are trying to replant and preserve existing mangroves about halfway between Ifaty and Tuléar.  A huge percentage of the mangroves were cut down for charcoal when people arrived in the area a little more than 100 years ago-apparently it used to be “like midnight” in the forest, because the coverage from mangroves was so thick, but we needed to put on extra sunscreen to protect from exposure during our walk (lots of mangroves lost).  There were still plenty of crab species, baby fish and shrimp, and mudskippers present, but not as many as there had been previously.  Their project includes replanting, which has been successful in most areas except a charcoal burn site which still exists within their boundaries, because the charcoal makes the soil toxic to the mangroves trying to grow there.  We also passed by some salt flats, which the guides vaguely explained as a money-maker for the local community but the project and salt production has stopped since the political crisis in 2009 because some politician was involved and he had to flee the area.
We have a day now in Tuléar before we start our week long tour of national parks, which should be really amazing because it will include alpine forest, rainforest, more dry spiny forest, and lots of cool plants and animals (fingers crossed of course).  Just broke the 1000 picture mark, so don’t worry (Mom) about documentation-it’s been pretty thorough.  Hard to believe we’re almost halfway done with the semester!