Antipode – Chapter 10
Weather is Everything
Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.
A hurricane was spinning towards us across the Indian Ocean when we went into town with the errant lemur. Without connection to the outside world, even in Maroantsetra, we didn’t know what to call the week of almost solid rain and punishing winds until later.
We were stuck in Maroantsetra for three days while the rain poured down and spindly palm trees twisted in the fierce winds. The short trip across the shallow bay to Nosy Mangabe was impossible. We stood on the second story balcony of Projet Masoala and looked out on the swampy marketplace, where even the rice vendors had abandoned their posts. Early on the fourth morning there was a break in the wind, and the captain took us back to the island, grudgingly, for he was scared that the weather would turn ugly again before he could get back to town.
Would we have gone back to the island had we known we were about to get smacked with a hurricane[1]? Maroantsetra had services, and the theoretical possibility for escape, but it was dense with other people who needed services and food. On the island, isolated though it was, we had enough food for three weeks, and our water supply wasn’t at risk of contamination with only a couple of residents.
Three Weeks
Day 1
Finally back on Nosy Mangabe, I’m eager to resume my work. In the pounding, ceaseless rains, Jessica and I went out to search for frogs, demarcating areas of particularly high density, mostly bamboo stands where they congregate. We numbered bamboo stands as we found them, and each took one as our personal “stand” that we would go to every morning and sit in, watching, waiting for revelations from the frogs. My stand, number four, is a small affair with a lot of activity. It is on the coast, a frontier between the rainforest and a thick-grained sand beach. A mango tree hangs over the water. The canopy is open, the rain immediate. Inland, when the rains grow fast and sharp, there is a delay—you can hear them begin, pounding the leaves above, but the water doesn’t reach the forest floor for a minute or two, and then it is subdued, softened. After the sky has emptied, water percolates through the understory for half an hour, as the drip tips on leaves empty the foliage of water.
In between squalls, the waves coming up almost into our stands, Jessica and I alternated between watching unmarked frogs and chasing them with green mesh aquarium dipnets. We captured them and took down their length and mass data before adorning them with snazzy little beaded waistbands. We also clipped their toes, so even if they lost their belts we could identify them.
When it rains hard, even the frogs dive for cover. A Costa Rican frog biologist once told me that a single raindrop can kill a small frog. This is an exaggeration—small frogs survive being nailed by a rapid succession of rain drops all the time. Still, it doesn’t look comfortable. When the rains lash the ground, I search for frogs, but after a while give up, retreating to the fisherman’s camp just 300 feet away to wait out the downpour.
Day 3
It has been raining for days. My frogs are ample, but are doing nothing I understand. Half of each day is spent marking individuals, a thankless task. When I am not marking them for identification, I’m out again in the pouring wet, watching them. We’re trying to get a feel for what they do, not coding any behaviors yet. Neither Jessica nor I are making much sense of them, but patterns take time to reveal themselves. Who knows how much of what we see now is due to the ceaseless rains, the howling winds, the high, ominous seas. The usually inconsequential streams that come down from the summit are powerful and hungry now, breaking everything in their path.
These frogs mostly call from or near natural wells—tree holes and broken bamboo filled with a cup or two of rainwater. Maybe only males call, as is true in the vast majority of frogs, but nobody has investigated this species before, so I have to figure that out myself. I found one bamboo well with eight frogs inside, all amplexing each other—the near universal position for frog mating, male on female. This amplexus was extraordinary, though, eight frogs lined up, one on top of another, in one long string of frog sex.
Other organisms in this forest move in more easily interpretable ways. I have seen frogs from a different evolutionary lineage engage in paternal care of their froglets. I watched a chameleon laboriously dig a hole into which she then deposited a clutch of eggs. Zonosaurs—speedy ground lizards—engage in breakneck courtship and sex. But what can I do with these observations? They are anecdotes, not science. I enjoy theory, and the forest, but haven’t yet put the two together, so that they sing.
Day 4
Hailing rain again, the sound of giant liquid pellets penetrating the ground. The drops are reviled, the soft earth full. The streams are gorged, running pregnant, foaming. A boat moored in the bay slipped its anchor and slammed into the dock in the night, crushing a piling. The sea fights back with intolerably high tides, waves slamming the newly broken dock, making cliffs of the coarse sand beach.
A brief radio transmission from Maroantsetra tells us that this is a hurricane, and is one of the worst they’ve seen in years. In the river in town, corpses are flowing down from the hills. Pirogues are necessary to get through the streets of town, and only the few buildings with two stories are still accessible. Rumor has it that the French have lent the Malagasy government helicopters so that newly elected President Ratziraka can come and investigate the disaster that is northeastern Madagascar.
Day 5
The beaded waistbands we have been putting on the frogs for identification are failing. Most have fallen off, and those that haven’t must be removed, for they are constricting the animals. My new marking plan is to stitch unique combinations of beads into their backs, but for this I need smaller needles than I have here. There are tailors in town, so we radioed Projet Masoala and asked Lebon to bring needles with him when he returns on the boat tomorrow. But the rains continue, and we do not have faith that the boat schedule will be adhered to.
The sea is agitated, high and gray. The tides have disappeared into the storm, and the dock is pounded day and night by white caps. My tent platform is fifteen feet from the dock, which is itself almost submerged. The water is but one vertical foot below my tent. Soon we may have to move to higher ground, perhaps to the cemetery cave, among the body and bone boxes of the ancestors.
Day 7
Still no boat, no Lebon, no needles, and no explanation. The rain is still constant, though not as rageful as a few days ago. The radio isn’t working, so we are here, Jessica, Fortune, and me, on this small island, expecting a boat with provisions and necessary equipment, incapable of knowing when it might show up.
In the meantime, we have identified six coastal bamboo stands that are home to hundreds of Mantella laevigata. Males defend the bamboo wells, extended courtships lead to them, mating and egg deposition occurs in them. I tagged 99 wells, largely in the six bamboo stands, and am taking data every three days on each of them. I have two, consistent goals: to understand everything about this system, and to keep downtime at bay. When there’s no work to do, the hours stretch endlessly, with nothing to do but watch the sea rise.
Day 8
Finally, a break in the rains. The boat came, and with it, the needles we radioed for. The needles work wonderfully in marking the frogs, piercing their skin with relative ease, but they are the only aspect of this frog marking campaign that is going well. Less than 10% of the frogs we are finding now are recaptures—what happened to all we marked with waistbands? Are there many more animals than we had imagined? Are the animals previously caught more wary of us, so harder to catch? Worst, did many of the animals die from our first marking campaign, only to be quickly replaced by eager competitors from the sidelines, the forest?
Lebon came back from town with more stories of utter destruction. Houses washed away, corpses floating by in the streets, and in the middle of everything, two helicopters landing in town. He regaled us with stories of the helicopters, how they landed, what they looked like. When I asked him about the president, who was in one of those helicopters, he didn’t have anything to say. He hadn’t noticed the president.
Day 10
Now that the hurricane is past, the reliably unpredictable weather has returned. We had a lazy, gorgeous afternoon, wind and blue clouds washing in and out of the hills across the bay. The Masoala, they say, is the rainiest spot in Madagascar. It is a place of many clouds, of interminable rain, of unending damp. Even when the rain has isolated us for days, we can expect a respite, a golden day of sun and scattered clouds, a day with enough heat to finally dry the socks that were beginning to befoul everything they came in contact with, a day to walk around barefoot, to have a swim in the sea and a shower under the waterfall. A day to let everything dry. All things must be attended to, or else they will rot, and mold, and fog over and be ruined. After a night of piercing rain, the sun shone so fiercely that by midday all was dry—perfect frog watching weather.
The world never goes blankly gray here. The sea has intrigue even when gray, whitecaps receding to a blue mountain horizon, a gray sky with flecks of white, blue, green. This morning, a rainbow over the distant gray sky plunged on to layers of hills. Electric sounds from cicadas, tiny birds and frogs pierced my ears like flashes of hot color. And the depth of the sky held in it such dimension that even when entirely gray, it was a palette of hundreds, sometimes yielding to a perfect white, or black.
Day 11
The only way to enjoy the forest is to accept dirt and sweat, to immerse oneself in getting filthy. I came in from two hours of focal observations—in which the observer watches a single animal for a set period of time—just as it began to rain. I was on the fence. Should I stay in camp, changing into dry clothes and staying still so as not to dirty them with sweat, moving one step closer to having nothing dry and clean at all? Or should I hike to stand three, forty minutes away along a hilly trail, knowing that I would be dripping wet within minutes of embarking, as the rains began pouring down?
Stand three beckoned, and the rain freed me from trying to feel clean. I was quickly soaked, and by the time I arrived, had no inhibitions about crawling around on all fours looking for frogs, reaching under logs, or sitting on the wet litter striving to become part of the background. As the rains eased, I was in the perfect position to watch the frogs emerge after the downpour. Sure enough, they began to appear, calling, fighting, courting, patterns unfolding in front of a soggy but satisfied biologist.
Day 12
Today was hot, bright, dry. I sat out in my stand trying to watch frogs, but when there is no nighttime rain, they tend to spend the day hiding under the litter. So I sat idle, waiting for my animals to reappear, watching anything that showed up. Unlike the wet-skinned frogs, most animals like the hot dry days. A brown lemur troop came overhead, the males yelling at me. Later they came back through, stopping to feed at the mango tree that overhangs the beach. A resident chameleon was also out sunning herself today, and she accommodated me by turning a bright green when I touched her, then a deep, scary brown. She opened her big jaws and assumed an aggressive pose. As she reached out with a strange mitten-hand, she lost her balance and fell, catching herself with her tail. Hanging from her tail while scrambling to reattach herself to the plant she was on, she became an artist’s palette. The frogs remained hidden.
There is a fisher-family who use this island, respecting it and treading gently. It is a second home for them, and they treat it as such. The matriarch is often out in the family pirogue, casting nets, along with the little boy. Today, the adult son had a guest, a pleasant young woman.
With new people come new ducks. I do not know if these ducks are valued for the eggs they lay, if they will someday be eaten, or if they are just hangers-on, but the fisher-family seem always to have one or two ducks with them.
Sitting in bamboo stand 4, trying to observe frogs that were nowhere in evidence, I found myself gazing out to sea. Suddenly, the young woman, bare-breasted, ran past, laughing, looking back over her shoulder. Five seconds later, the young man ran past, in pursuit, also naked to the waist, also laughing, also looking back over his shoulder. Five seconds later, a duck ran past, chasing the hominids. Was he laughing? I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask.