Boring Name but Cute Nonetheless

Allow me to introduce the common brown lemur. And since we have talked about lemurs before let me skip the old stuff and just mention what makes these "common" primates uncommon.

Well, for one thing they all look alike. The males and females look and weigh pretty much the same. That is rare for lemurs or any primate for that matter.

These are no night lemurs. They spend their days scouring the trees for food. But sometimes they do stay up late and hunt around in the night too especially when the moon is full. (Vampire lemurs perhaps?)

And what do they eat? Mostly fruit, but they won't turn down a tasty cicada or millipede if their 5-fingered hands find some (Oh come on, like you've never wanted to eat a millipede). They even nibble on dirt occasionally to get some extra minerals.

A lot of the plants the eat are full of nasty toxic chemicals that would kill many other animals. But common brown lemurs, and some other lemurs, have evolved to be able to handle all the poisons. That means they can eat the juicy leaves that others animals have to leave behind. Smart, eh?

There are not a lot of these medium-sized lemurs flying about the treetops, so they are considered near threatened. Their families have about 9-12 members, but no one seems to be in charge (try that with a human family of 9-12 and see what happens). And their families don't grow very fast. A mature female will only have one baby a year. There have been a few cases of twins too.

All these photos are from a wonderful little weekend away my wife and I just spent near Andasibe. We were lucky enough to lots of wonderful creatures besides these lemurs. I will put up a new post each day this week to show you everything from spiders to geckos.

Come back tomorrow and see whose next.

I Can't See the Forest for the…Hey, What Happened to the Trees?

The once tree-covered highlands around Ankafobe.

Madagascar is a weird and wonderful world of amazing plants and animals. Huge forests with towering trees and jumping lemurs. Giraffe-sized giant birds and tortoises as big as school desks roam around the hills. It is a paradise of life found nowhere else on earth.

Or at least that was true 2,500 years ago. But ever since pesky humans showed up, paradise has slowly been disappearing. Now there are very few forests or even trees for that matter. About 90% of the lush life-giving rain forests are gone. Those big birds and lumbering tortoises are extinct and so are many of the lemurs, fish, reptiles and other unique beasties that used to call the Red Island home.

There are still little bits of this once wild wonderland, but many of those bits are in trouble too. People cut down trees for houses and cooking fires they need to survive. And some people come and cut down the oldest and most beautiful trees like Rosewood to sell for lots of money. And if a tree survives the axes and chainsaws, it may not be safe yet. Fires rage around the country in many places.

Farmers burn trees and brush to make new fields for rice, beans and manioc. But fire can quite quickly get out of control and burn much more that just one or two soon-to-be fields. And without trees, the hard rains that pour down on the island for half the year can quickly wash away the good soil that used to be protected by the trees' sheltering canopy and thick roots.

This all means that it is very important to protect what forests still survive. Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) is one of the groups trying to protect those survivors. And my wife, Dr. Cindy, is one of the scientists helping them.

These photos are from one tiny but special patch of forest that MBG is saving. It is only a fragment of what the forest used to be. But they are working hard to save what trees are left and plant new trees to make the forest bigger.

Does saving one little patch of trees make a difference? Well, just ask a Schizolaena bush.

"Hey, where in the world am I supposed to find a talking Schizolaena bush to ask?"

Well, to be honest, nowhere. Bushes don't talk. But if you want to find a non-talking Schizolaena bush, you will have to come to Madagascar. But not just anywhere in Madagascar. You have to come to a forest. And not just any forest. You will have to come to Ankafobe, this forest fragment that MBG is fighting to save. Every Schizolaena bush in the world lives in this one tiny forest. Only 100 bushes in a forest no bigger than 50 soccer fields.

That is what is called endangered. But then again, that's better than being called extinct.

One of the only 100 Schizolaena bushes in the world.

Awesome butterfly or awesome moth? Check the wings. Wings flat: moth. Wings up: butterfly. That means it's an awesome moth. Not all moths love the nighttime.

Ah, an old favorite...the eyeball leech. I did find it latched onto my hand, but it didn't even get near my peepers.

Replanting a forest takes a lot of trees. And all trees start as seeds. Local villagers run this MBG nursery that produced over 6000 saplings last year.

Saving a forest is more than just putting up keep out signs and planting a few trees. Local people have to have some way of making a living if they can't cut down the trees for money. Here is one wonderful way that MBG helps. This is a fish farm that produces fish that can be sold at nearby markets. It takes up less space than other forms of farming. It produces more money. It also generates compost that can be used for plants and vegetables. Sadly, a large rain the week before broke the damn and most of the fish were washed down into the surrounding rice paddies.

The See-Through Alien in Our Kitchen

Geckos are more than just cute insurance salesmen. They are amazing little lizardy beasties. They ring the world and live where ever there is a nice toasty climate. That's why you don't find any back in New Jersey, but I do find a lot here in Madagascar. And not only do I find the lizards in our house, at work, in the forest, almost every one I find lives only here on the lovely Red Island. About 92% of the reptiles here live here and only here. (That's nothing. A whopping 99% of the frogs are endemic.)

Check out some pics of a few geckos we've seen so far. If you are reading this with your class, please ask your students to raise their hand each time they hear something they didn't know before.

This little gecko and a few of his friends live around our house. This species seems to like the dark. But that's ok, because geckos' eyes are much better at seeing when the lights are out. And we love having them as house guests, because they eat the mosquitos that buzz around at night. They might see better than us, but we got them beat when it comes to eyelids. We have them; they don't. That means we blink when we need to keep our eyeballs nice and sparkly and moist. When they want to clean their peepers, they have to lick them. Watch the gecko in the Geico commercials. He usually licks his eyeballs once or twice.

This is the most famous of the Malagasy geckos: the day gecko. It is also one of the largest day geckos in the world. And, in case you haven't figured it out, a day gecko is not nocturnal. They spend their days hunting down insects, grubs, worms, etc.

Those fabulous feet. A gecko could make Spiderman jealous. Geckos can pretty much walk up, across or upside down on about anything they want. Maybe Geckoman vs Spiderman could be the next big comic? Spiderman could probably sneak in a punch or two when Geckoman was licking his eyeballs though.

Though this one wasn't blending into our bungalow very well, nocturnal geckos are masters of disguise. They can blend in with the best of them. Which is good for them and bad for their prey and predators. They cannot change color like chameleons though. But in case a predator does find them, they do have a few tricks up their sleeves. They can drop their tail and have it dance around and distract the would-be diner as they scurry away. They can also shoot out a stinky smell and even poo if the tail trick doesn't work. Yikes.

A see-through gecko friend in our kitchen. Though we didn't here a peep out of this little girl, we could have. Gecko's are the only lizards in the world that can make a sound other than "hissssss." They can bark and chirp for goodness sake.

[Photo by Bjorn Christian Torrissen]

My what hairy feet you have grandmother! A gecko may not look hairy, but its feet surely are. Each square millimeter (about the size of a big grain of sand) has over 14,000 hairlike things called setae. It takes about 20 or so of these setae to be as thick as a hair from your head. And the hair doesn't end there. At the tip of each of the setae are as many 1,000 even tinier hairs called seta. That means a grand total of about 14 million sticky hairs on each sand-grain-sized speck of foot. No wonder they can walk upside down on glass. NASA loves to study gecko feet to see if they can come up with a way for astronauts to walk on the outside of spaceships and space stations the same way.

This Little Piggy...

...went to market,
This little piggy went home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
This little piggy had a tungiasis infestation from a burrowed sand flea
and went "Wee, wee, wee" all the way home.

On the recent trip back stateside, my old students had lots of great questions about the people, places and customs of wild Madagascar...but mostly they just wanted to know about the creatures that had hatched out of my toe. Sadly, I didn't know exactly what they were. I know, what kind of science teacher am I anyway? Well, I can now proudly say that my little piggies had none other than sand fleas.

The flea in question: the sand flea.

[Photo taken from http://www.healthinplainenglish.com/health/infectious_diseases/tungiasis/index.htm]

I say piggies and not piggy, because just one day after I saw my students I awoke to a second lovely hatching. A little natural miracle right there under my right pointer toe. I thought I had a bit of black lint stuck under my toenail, but alas it was no bit of dress sock. It was Tunga penetrans aka chigoe flea, jigger, foot bug, sand flea or pico.

No matter what you call it, it is a parasite. They like to live in warm sandy soil like beaches. The mommy fleas like to attach themselves to a nice warm-blooded host like a cow, pig or me. They chew and digest their way through the outer layer of skin, but they don't crawl all the way in. Instead, they leave their little flea heinie (abdomen) sticking out. They use it like a snorkel to breath. It looks like a swollen bug bite with a black dot in the center. It doesn't hurt though, so most cows, pigs or, in this case, people don't notice when mommy moves in.

The black tubey thing is the flea's abdomen. The white eggy things are...uh, eggs.

[Photo taken from http://www.healthinplainenglish.com/health/infectious_diseases/tungiasis/index.htm]

In one or two weeks the female flea swells up to about the size of a pea with a 100 or so adorable little flea eggs. The eggs drop out of her heinie/abdomen/snorkel and fall to the ground. Then, sadly, the mommy dies and is eventually pushed out of the host's foot as it heals up. Meanwhile, the sweet eggs wiggle and hatch in about three or four days. They zip right through pre-school and the teenage years and in a mere two or three weeks they are crawling into feet of their own to lay eggs.

And since this whole life cycle rigamarole takes about a month and it has now been about a month since I've had any hatchings, I think I can safely say I am flea free. I do think I will be a bit more careful with my piggies next time I'm around warm, dry sandy soil though. I will be sure to wear my Scooby Doos.

(Oh, I may have forgotten to tell you that here they call flip-flops Scooby Doos. No, I have no clue why. And trust me, I've asked.)

My unlucky piggy. You can see the little black abdomen, but she did not get a chance to lay her eggs. There were eggs to be found, but they weren't quite ready for laying.

[The rest of the photos were taken by my slightly creeped out wife.]

A little cleaning and pruning with some toenail clippers to be sure all the wee beasties were gone and I was well under way to a flea free kind of life.

A little peroxide did the final cleaning. Don't worry, the bubbles are a good thing. It's the extra oxygen atom in peroxide (H2O2), being released when it hits the bloody and gooey bits of a wound. Oxygen may seem like a good thing, but too much at one time is poisonous to most germs.

Got No Snow? Just Fake It

It might be cold, white and windy in your neck of the woods, but down in here in the southern hemisphere it's summertime. The sun is bright, the air is hot and there sure is no snow around, not even for Christmas. In fact, the kids here have never caught a snowflake on their tongues, made big-winged snow angels or rolled up three big balls of white to make the perfect snowman.

Even in the winter (your summer), it doesn't get cold enough for snow. That's why we had to fake it. To celebrate the holidays at the children's home, we mixed up some fake snow and had some lessons in good ol' snowman makin'.

And what is fake snow made of?

Diapers.

Ok, not quite. But diapers and fake snow are made out of the same stuff--sodium poylacrylate. The little bits of polymer have the crazy ability to soak up 200 to 300 times their own mass in water. Or in the case of diapers...pee.

If you want to play along with the kids at the home, just crack open a diaper and have a ball. Just make sure it's a new diaper.

Enjoy.

Just add water. Then watch the dazzling little specks slurp up almost all the water you can give them.

Dive in with your hands and give it all a good mixing and voila...faux snow. And since water is so good at stealing heat from your hands and everything else too, it even feels cold. Sadly, it doesn't mush or roll up into a very good snowball though.

But that doesn't mean you have to give up on Frosty. Just lay Frosty down and you're back in the snowman making business. (Also, notice how green the garden is in the background. Remember, it's summer here.)

Most of the kids in Madagascar haven't even seen pictures of what a snowman should look like. Some did a darn fine job of looking like the real thing.

And some had their own Malagasy flare.

Next time the flakes start falling, use the real stuff to make some snowmen of your own. And imagine how strange and wonderful it would be to see and feel snow for the first time.