Namibia

I went to Etosha National Park in Namibia to join some old friends from the Getz lab at Berkeley - also known as the Anthrax crew. Yes, they are studying anthrax epidemics in Etosha. They were also organizing a centennial conference in celebration of Etosha, so I demanded to be put to work on sampling and more practical conference organization.

Once again, I seemed to be a fecal sample totem. This time I went out with Pauline and Olivier, collecting zebra feces. On the first day, Olivier turned to me and said "do you know how to sex a zebra?" - I, of course, started envisioning all kinds of things, but it turns out that you really can look at the back end of a zebra and tell pretty easily. The boys have, um, tight white buttcheeks. Females, particularly after they have had a foal or two, are more distinct. It was definitely exciting driving around the Etosha pan and pausing to wait for the huge herds of zebra, just keeping an eye out for a lifting tail and then keeping a close eye on the location while confirming the sex of the individual. I also watched the realization of legacy in wildlife biology - the technique that Pauline was using to collect DNA from the feces had been passed on to her by another friend of mine, Clint Epps. So this was known as the Clint technique. I'm not sure I want poop drying and scraping named after me, but Clint should be proud of a named methodology.
One interesting zebra factoid - in Etosha, they have quite a few melanistic zebras. They are simply zebras that are all black (or rather, dark brown); they just aren't striped. It looks slightly odd, but there's no real reason why they shouldn't exist, and apparently it doesn't really affect survival, because they are there. Anyone who has thoughts on this, feel free to air them.

I also had a chance to see a site that I had only previously seen in talks - Mushara. A professor and her husband have a very remote site in Etosha where they study the accoustics of elephants. They have challenged some of the widely held beliefs about rumble calls and are collecting some amazing data on social structure and demography. Their site only exists during part of the year, and is simply a tower made of rebar. They have a fence erected around it so that lions don't get in at night - but have anyway. It is only accessible by firebreak roads, which means you have to be fairly confident about driving quite quickly through light sand. Sort of like real snow driving. Essentially, there were some fecal samples that needed transporting, so I had a unique chance to see the site and talk to the O'Connell-Rodwells http://www.utopiascientific.org/.

The centennial conference was amazingly well organized (I'm not taking credit, Wendy did a lot of work, and all the rest of the Anthrax team did a great job managing the flow); the talks were varied and interesting, and people did a lot of networking. Etosha is an amazing place, in a country that has the second lowest people density in the world (after Mongolia). They are on the edge of getting into bioinformatics (to manage data resources in ecology) and are facing the conflict of getting tourist dollars and managing a natural resource as a wilderness-like area.

The conference was in a nice lodge just outside the park, and so there was quite a few opportunities for drinking a few and chatting. One such evening, I had decided I was quite exhausted, and stopped after the first beer and wanted to get an early night. I wandered off towards my room, came around a corner, and suddenly had the feeling that a tree had just moved. I turned around and saw several skinny trees in front of me; then a few of them swayed. Hang on, what's going on here? I only drank one beer. I looked up to see a huge bull giraffe noshing on the treetops - all I could see was about 8 feet of legs! He looped down out of the tree and looked at me when I laughed, then walked over to the next tree a few feet away and started going to town on that one. Giraffes out of context are really tall.