Given that it’s my last week of field work here in Madagascar, it’s time for another reflective post! Looking back at my first few blogs, I feel like I’m going to puke. Not only because I think I was incredibly naive in my writing of those early posts, but also because I got another bout of food poisoning. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into this summer, from the off-trail bushwacking to the frequently poor state of my stomach. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, am I right?

And I do feel stronger: not only physically from my daily lemur-chasing workouts (I really should have trained before coming back to hilly Ranomafana!), but also in terms of mental strength. I forgot how exhausting it is being in a different culture when you don’t really speak the language. Just ordering a pack of cookies or getting from one place to the other without a Malagasy friend helping to translate can be a whole ordeal. It still amazes me how much gets lost in translation, even when I am speaking to people who know English.

It has been frustrating operating on “Malagasy time” as well, and I am surprised how much time is wasted just waiting around for things to start moving. They aren’t as uptight about timeliness here in rural Madagascar, as I remembered from my last time here. However, as a more independent researcher this time it affected logistical planning a lot more. I have, consequentially, become more patient, but I could have practiced patience a bit earlier on to make the transition here a lot smoother.

Being here a much longer period of time, I have picked up on some new cultural norms. Even mere acquaintances are very enthusiastic about showing guests their house and families, and they always want to offer food or drink as a custom. Everyone is so genuinely friendly and eager to help, and I think that is one of my favorite things about Malagasy people.

Another critical communication norm that I wish I knew from day one is that oftentimes, when answering a question, many Malagasy say “yes” to be polite and not as a confirmation that they understand. This has led to several miscommunications in the beginning that could have been prevented by explaining myself more clearly. Being polite is very important here, and fairness even more so. When served meals, everyone waits until every plate has food on it before eating so that everyone begins at the same time. This often leads to the first person having to eat cold food unfortunately, which drives me crazy after studying abroad in Ecuador (where I burned my mouth more times than I can count from eating hot food right away). Also, just like in Kindergarten, if one person gets a snack everyone has to get a snack.

I am still learning about this one though, because sometimes it is appropriate to only give gifts to one person. For example, we were invited to the circumcision ceremony for the son of a field guide, Zaka, and we brought gifts just for the little boy. It didn’t stop him from crying during the circumcision, but I think he will enjoy the gifts once he heals. After witnessing that, I am very grateful for the US custom of circumcising babies in the hospital! I feel bad for the little boy though, since he didn’t get to dance and enjoy the party afterwards, which doesn’t seem very fair to him. Zaka provided about 40L of alcohol for the party, and many people were very drunk (don’t worry, the doctor performing the circumcision was very sober and did a great job!). Greetings are very important here too, so I shook more hands and said “Salaam-a” to more drunk strangers than I can count. Even though drinking seems to be encouraged, being overly drunk is frowned upon. People tried to politely get rid of the very drunk people when they were getting to be too much.

Looking back, I wish I could have been more flexible. I knew the schedule was for sure subject to change, but sometimes we did not know what was going to happen until the day of an excursion sometimes. This lead to lots of disappointment and frustration that could have been avoided if I always anticipated changes in the first place, and eventually I did learn to embrace them. Still, it was annoying to have so many factors that can’t be controlled affecting the schedule, and we did not collect data from the groups I thought we would. In the end, I still collected data for 8 weeks, even though almost all of the observations are from the disturbed forests. However, I am still confident that I will be able to come up with interesting results for my senior thesis.

A lot of the changes were actually better than what was originally planned, such as the expedition to Mangevo where I had the amazing opportunity to help with capturing (and got to hold!) a sifaka. If everything stayed as planned, I never would have slept in a tent with a sifaka or gone to the beautiful pristine forest. I definitely have learned to embrace and even enjoy unexpected surprises, since (most of the time), it works out just fine.

A great part about our research protocol is that we are comparing lemurs from many different sites. This takes us to a variety of forests, and some are better than others. This last week was particularly challenging in Vohiparara (meaning “Mountain flute” in Malagasy), one of the secondary forests in the park. There are lots of invasive guava trees, which grow in dense clumps and are miserable to climb through. Lots of marshes are there too, so I got stuck knee-deep in the mud more times than I would like to admit this week.
When I wasn’t tripping over vines and thorns, I was able to follow the lemurs pretty closely because Vohiparara has such short trees. oftentimes, I’d be running off-trail trying to find the lemur I was following and-all of a sudden-find him eating some leaves no more than a meter off the ground. It was fun being able to observe them eating so closely. They sort of slurp up the leaves in a couple of bites and rarely use their hands, which are excellent at gripping branches (kinda like a chameleon).

Speaking of eating, the food is pretty great at camp! It was usually meat over rice, but the cook gave us lots of vegetables too, and we even had pasta one night. All of the meat cooking over the fire attracted a fosa fosana, a mongoose, to our campsite, so it was exciting having this cute visitor around! Sitting around the fire at night, keeping warm and having good conversations with my field companions made the evenings go by quickly even though the days were long following the lemurs.

Though they moved fast and far when it was sunny, they are pretty sluggish when it’s rainy, so even though it was rainy this week it made our jobs a bit easier following them around. Even though it was rainy, there were no leeches because Vohiparara is higher elevation. There were lots of biting flies and mosquitos though, so there was no relief there.

This group was particularly exciting because the adult female has a baby! It was cool seeing the baby sifaka peeking his head out behind his mother’s fur when doing observations.

Back in Ranomafana! My first week in Madagascar is off to a good start. Though there was not much sleep involved in the first couple days, I am finally able to rest now at Centre ValBio. The two days spent in Tana are now a tired blur, between reuniting with Zo again briefly at the hostel, meeting Alicia and Katherine, and shopping for supplies and visiting the university with the Malagasy students Anselmo and Noro. It was cool visiting the University of Tana campus, which had a beautiful view of the city and even a chameleon! Shopping was still stressful, with lots of people around the marketplace and we didn’t even make it to some of the stores on time. But that night we met Katherine’s old professor, Rebecca Lewis, who does research out in West Madagascar with Vereaux’s sifaka, for drinks. I tried some lychee rum, which was quite sweet.

The next day we headed out for Tana on a 10 hour car drive on the winding but beautiful road. Passing lots of terraced farms and eroded hillsides, we stopped only for rainboots in the market of Antsirabe and lunch in a small town famous for its woodwork. Much of the journey was spent sleeping to make up for the aforementioned lack of sleep. After the sun set, shrouding the best of the views of the journey in mystery, we arrived at Centre ValBio and settled in. The week at the station has been spent organizing logistics, paperwork, and getting the project plan more defined in lots of meetings.

There is a study abroad group here as well, so in my free time I was able to help them organize a collection of 8-9,000 year old fossils! Lots of the bones were little, but there was a large pygmy hippo jaw and a lot of Elephant Bird bones. It was so cool to handle the bones up close, imagining their days running around the marshes of Madagascar.

On Tuesday, Pat Wright, who has been researching lemurs for 30 years and set up Ranomafana National Park, took us on a tour to practice observing lemurs. Though we didn’t see our study species, the Milne-Edward’s sifaka, we saw 2 species of lemurs (Brown and red-bellied). These were the first lemurs I saw 2 years ago, and here I was back at the same site (Vohiparara) seeing them again! They were huddled together in balls because of the cold rain, but occasionally one would separate and run across the tree limb to investigate what we were doing there, then running back to the huddle again. I got a really good look at the red-bellied lemurs a bit later, who were foraging right in front of us! They were eating the invasive guava fruits, which taste sweet but compete with native plant species. One of the lemurs came closer to investigate, and was on a tree less than a few feet away and then went right above us, where it pooped almost on top of us. Though some of us got a bit behind trying to learn Malagasy on the trail, we eventually met up with the rest of the group before lunch.

The food at CVB (Centre ValBio) has been pretty good so far, always served with spicy sakai sauce and a heaping of rice to mix with whatever meat and vegetables are part of the entrée. Also, there is always dessert! The living conditions are very cushy, with hot showers and wifi almost always available. It feels like I’m being spoiled living here, and it will be a nice place to come back to on the weekends from living in the forest.

We tried to practice data collection for the remainder of the week, but it was cold and rainy and we were unable to find our study species. So it wasn’t too fun hiking around in the dreary weather without seeing our lemurs. But we did see golden bamboo lemurs, a chameleon, and a bunch of birds while hiking around! Finally on the last day of the week, the sun came out and we were able to find the sifaka (Propithecus edwardsii), the study species! They are the third largest lemur in Madagascar, so it is easy to see them leaping gracefully through the trees. They are mostly black with a white saddle on their back with a pair of inquisitive amber eyes. It was fun following them around all day and practicing our observation methods, and it was clear that we are going to have to make some adjustments. We celebrated with a relaxing weekend before starting the real data collection on Monday!

As part of the wagoner fellowship, I was asked to summarize and reflect on several recent articles concerning Madagascar and my research.

The most noteworthy news item related to Madagascar is about the recent changeover of Malagasy government in April. The Prime Minister, Jean Ravelonarivo, and his government resigned last month, giving no apparent explanation. Because of the slow pace of change on Madagascar and the stagnant economy, opposition has been growing and the opposing party even tried to have him step down last July. The government is still recovering from the 2009 coup that scared away foreign investment and aid, without which the economy has failed to grow.

This change in power reflects on the difficulty of repairing a broken government, when even committed officials cannot bring about the changes necessary. While the President, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, has been in office since 2014, the Prime Minister and his cabinet have only taken office in 2015. It seems apparent that the government has trouble keeping its officials in office for long periods of time. A government that has trouble maintaining long-term stability would certainly have trouble implementing long-term conservation strategies. How is the government supposed to save the forests and wildlife when it can’t even save itself?

Another article I saw spoke to the consequences of government inaction. A recent study predicts that the invasive Asian toad (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) will spread throughout Madagascar, threatening biodiversity, health and the economy as well. This toad arrived on the island from South-east Asia via freight containers sometime between 2007 and 2010. There are currently 4 million toads, but this number is expanding, and their territory is growing 2km/year. If no action is taken to contain them to their 110km² territory, they will spread throughout the island. Similar to the invasive cane toads in Australia, they are poisonous to native birds and mammals, with the potential of causing predators, prey, and competitors of the toads to become extinct.

An eradication program has been identified, but it will cost between $2-10 million to implement. Especially with respect to the recent changes in government, it will be difficult for Madagascar to take necessary actions to eradicate the toads. However, it is essential for this program to be implanted before it’s too late and biodiversity loss and its subsequent economic impacts are further exacerbated. If invasive toads continue to spread, the ecological impacts will likely be similar to those in Australia, where there has been a decline of small marsupials possibly due to poisoning from cane toads. If these toads continue to spread, the ecosystems that Madagascar is known for will be endangered. Regardless of the state of the government, it is important for eradication efforts to begin before it is too late, either from helping hands overseas or from within the island.

As for the scientific world, the “breaking news” findings on Sifakas, the lemurs I will be studying this summer, relate to their behavior and distribution. The first article I read, published in 2016, focused on behavior of Sifaka of two captive groups. (Wallace et al. 2016). They found that there was no grooming observed in golden-crowned sifaka and they spent significantly more time resting than the Coquerel’s sifaka. Females were found to have a dominant social position in both groups. The golden-crowned sifaka (Propithecus tattersalli) spent significantly less time feeding than the Coquerel’s sifaka. Temperature, time of day, species, and intrapair comparisons for the golden-crowned sifaka were found to affect activity and social interactions, while gender did not. Like the Coquerel’s sifaka, the golden-crowned sifaka was found to be diurnal; however, they differed in that the golden-crowned sifaka did not descend to the ground.

This article sheds some light on how behavior of different sifakas varies between species. When looking at the behavior of the study population in my study, I will take this into account when examining behavior in the light of past studies. Variation in feeding, resting, and grooming time may not necessarily be indicators of stress in the troops of sifaka I am observing. Because of this, I will need to compare to other behavioral studies of the same species of sifaka.I will also be sure to take note of time of day and temperate when observing sifaka behavior, since these factors have the potential to affect activity rates and social behavior.

Wallace, G. L., Paquette, L. B., & Glander, K. E. (2016). A comparison of activity patterns                          for captive Propithecus tattersalli and Propithecus coquereli.Zoo biology.

The most recent article I read on sifakas, published in May, looks at intergroup encounters. When evaluating the trade-offs of fights between groups of sifakas, it was found that status was a key factor influencing participation, where high status males participated in fights more often (Wallace et al. 2016). Defending female mates is likely to increase reproductive success, encouraging male participation in fights. Additionally, females with infants were less likely to participate to protect their offspring. The larger the group size, the less likely it was for all members to participate in fights.

This study shows the importance of status in groups of sifakas. High status in the group allows access to mates, so it increases reproductive success and offers initiative to participate in fights. Taking the status of each group member into account when making behavioral observations will be important. Female dominance is likely to be observed, since feeding priority due to high status aids in acquiring the nutrients necessary for reproduction. It is possible that stress, as predicted by my hypothesis, may change the sifaka’s behavior, changing the social hierarchy dynamic. I will keep this behavioral dynamic in mind when observing sifaka behavior this summer.

Koch, F., Signer, J., Kappeler, P. M., & Fichtel, C. (2016). Intergroup encounters in                                      Verreaux’s sifakas (Propithecus verreauxi): who fights and why?. Behavioral                                  Ecology and Sociobiology, 70(5), 797-808.