Antipode – Chapter 4
Peut-être, Ongomba, Maybe
Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here is chapter three (last week’s post).
Our first stop out of Tana was the town of Antsiranana, also known as Diego Suarez, named for a pirate who once frequented the area. The northernmost city in Madagascar, it is a mixture of tropical ease and white wash, with a pace reminiscent of the Caribbean. Sky blue mosques decorate many corners. Rickshaws—called pousse-pousse in Madagascar—ferry brightly dressed women from mosque to market. The striking, bold colors on clothes and buildings alike seem to match the tropical sentiment.
In Diego we found Angeluc Razafimanantsoa, a young man we had hired as a guide three years earlier when we had come as tourists. He and his identical twin brother, Angelin, had been trained as naturalists, herpetologists, and research assistants by Ron Nussbaum and Chris Raxworthy, who was at the time Ron’s post-doc at Michigan. Herpetology is the study of creepy-crawly things—so named by the Greek. More precisely, it is the study of amphibians and reptiles. The twins preferred their work as herpetologists to their usual role as tourist guides.
On our first trip, Angeluc and Angelin had played a trick on us early on, before we knew there were two of them. As we were coming out of the forest with Angeluc behind us, Angelin, dressed identically, appeared in front of us, lounging on a stoop. We turned to see Angeluc just appearing around a turn behind us, but when we turned back to see Angelin, he had disappeared.
“How did you do that?” we asked Angeluc, laughing.
“Do what?” he smiled, bashful but a bit devious, knowing he had us going. As we continued through town, tired from our trek and wondering if we were hallucinating, Angelin again appeared before us, an apparition. Turning back, Angeluc had disappeared. We had already been treated to Angeluc’s fantastic ability to whistle two distinct harmonies at one time, creating the eerie feeling that there were two men in a single body. Now he was separating before our eyes, splitting into his two voices.
Angelin, whom we thought was the singular Angeluc, excused himself, and shortly both of them began appearing in increasingly improbable places. Finally they revealed themselves at the same moment, and admitted that they were two. Such was the light-hearted joy of games that Angeluc brought to our ten days together, as he guided us first through the national park Montagne d’Ambre, and then through the special reserve of Ankarana.
Montagne d’Ambre—Amber Mountain—is a mid-elevation wet forest on a hill just south of Diego. For logistic reasons, I was hoping that this would be my research site. Diego is a large town, with a lot of resources, and it was close enough to Montagne d’Ambre to visit once or twice a month, if not more. In the park itself, a new research building had just been completed, and it was gorgeous. There were rooms for imagined, future researchers to sleep in, a large common space, an immaculate kitchen with running water, all framed beautifully in wood. The level of luxury, for field accommodations in Madagascar, was unbelievable. Angeluc led us to this spot with a mixture of excitement and hesitation, and let me absorb the implications of such a wondrous field station. He himself had never lived in such a place, with wood floors and screened windows. We had found him in his home, where he had lived since birth, a one room shack without running water.
“How close are the Mantella? Can we go there now?” I asked him, hopeful. Mantella were the tiny, brightly colored, poisonous frogs I had come here to study. Since Angeluc had previously worked with herpetologists, he understood somewhat my passion for frogs. Most people do not. Sometimes, people want an explanation, something that justifies why a person would study these little, wet-skinned creatures. Some people study frogs because they are indicator species for failing ecosystems. Frogs are disappearing the world over, and though some localized processes have been identified, we are a long way from identifying a single, global explanation, perhaps because there is none. In the upper Midwest, frogs are suffering mutations on a massive scale, and other animals in the system are not. In Central America and Australia, a fungus is decimating frog populations. It is true that frogs often fail first in an ecosystem full of organisms. In part this is due to their reliance on both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems—pollutants in the water can get at eggs and tadpoles, and if the frogs survive to adulthood, they have to contend with airborne pollutants. All of this is true, but has nothing to do with why I work on frogs.
The original reason I worked on frogs was accident. It was sheer good fortune, through no good planning or predictive powers on my part. I had gone to Costa Rica for my first field season as a young graduate student, with a hypothesis about white-faced monkeys and their predilection for fruit planted by people rather than the fruit native to their forests. Problem was, there weren’t any white-faced monkeys where I was. I didn’t have much time in that first field season to travel around and find a better site. But the forest I was in, at a tiny field station in the Sarapiqui, handed me a beautiful, natural field experiment. Someone at a nearby ecotourist lodge had decided that the native poison-dart frog, a tiny red species, wasn’t sufficiently exciting to lure tourists. So they imported a non-native species, a related animal, but much larger, neon green with black spots. Introduced species are a problem across the planet. Gypsy moth caterpillars are defoliating the trees of much of the eastern half of the U.S., many of Hawaii’s native species are disappearing under myriad introduced ones, and honeybees are displacing native pollinators throughout much of the Americas. Humans are the most widespread of the invasive species, having moved into all land areas except the Antarctic.
In Costa Rica I had a perfect set-up to study the effect of an introduction on a native species. It was then that I began studying frogs. I could say that tropical field biology regularly offers such opportunities for flexibility, but in truth, it’s the other way around. Flexibility about what questions you want to address is a requirement, because it is extremely rare that everything goes as you planned it back home.
I got lucky. Those frogs turned out to be fascinating, and easy to stay excited about. “Charismatic megafauna” refers to all those beasts that show up on nature shows and in pleas for money from conservation organizations— primates and big cats and wolves and elephants and whales and ostriches. The term is used derisively by people who study important but ugly or uninspiring things. They’re right, those things arecharismatic, and I like watching charismatic things more than I like watching fungus. I plead guilty to having sought out the most charismatic, unstudied thing around. I have dubbed these frogs, both in the neotropics and in Madagascar, the charismatic mesofauna, small but not microscopic, and captivating. And while those in Central America are well-studied, the ones in Madagascar were still waiting for someone to unravel their secrets.
After months of preparations, finally I had reached the forest in which the charismatic mesofauna lived, but now had to rely on Angeluc to interpret it for me. For it was June in Madagascar: the dead of winter. In the tropics, winter doesn’t get particularly cold—barely even cool in most places—but it is the drier season. Amphibians need water to reproduce, and though I thought the frogs I was looking for—the Mantellas—were likely to reproduce all year round in wetter climes, they were sure to be less active, and harder to find, in the winter. Because of the schedule of the academic year back in the States, though, I had to make my scouting trip to Madagascar in their winter, our summer. Here I had my first moment of truth. I hadn’t seen any Mantellayet, but absence is a hard thing to assess. Were the frogs absent because it was winter, and they were aestivating—hidden under ground to protect themselves against desiccation—or because they simply didn’t exist there, ever? Local ranges of these species seemed to fluctuate greatly, and although there had been Mantella nearby in years past, it wasn’t clear that they were there anymore. My hopes rested on Angeluc’s answer.
“The Mantella…” he paused. He seemed to be searching for words. “There are Mantella in Montagne d’Ambre,” he reassured me, “but not many, and not close.”
“How far?” Not close might mean a fifteen minute walk, or it might mean two days of hiking.
“About eight hours,” he admitted. I was stricken. This wouldn’t do at all. Pitching a tent eight hours from the nearest building, which itself was a long ways from food or other resources that I didn’t bring in myself, wasn’t a possibility.
“Eight hours,” I said to myself, then to Angeluc, “towards the edge of the park, towards town, or towards the middle?” I thought, maybe, that if the Mantella populations were near the village just outside the park, I could still make this work, even if I couldn’t take advantage of the glorious new research facilities.
“Towards the middle,” Angeluc allowed, quietly. Angeluc is an amazing man in many ways, always surprising. One of the qualities I treasure most in him, when he is my guide, is that he tells the truth even when he knows I won’t like it. This seems to be a rare trait in the developing world, where people often want to please in the moment, and often give misleading, or downright false answers, if it will bring a smile to another’s face. Angeluc knew, probably from many years of working with Ron and Chris, that the vazahadidn’t appreciate wrong answers in the long run.
“Well,” I turned up my hands in defeat, “I guess I won’t be working here for the next few years.”
“Too bad,” Bret said, looking around. “Nice digs.”
“Yeah, they sure are.” I turned to Angeluc. “Let’s go to Ankarana.”
Ankarana is a phenomenal, mystical place, largely unspoiled by human intervention until recently. About seventy miles south of Diego, Ankarana is on a plateau, a calcium rich massif one hundred and fifty feet above sea level. The plateau is traversed by underground rivers, which have dug deep into the earth, forming vast caverns 150 feet high in places, and more than 70 miles of underground caves and passageways. On top of the plateau, on top of these vast caves, the limestone surface is a highly eroded karst formation called tsingy. Little grows on the tsingy, these vast rock seas, and the razor sharp stones can easily cut through leather boots.
In several places, the caves have collapsed. In their place, forests have sprung up, isolated by the remaining caves and tsingy formations. The only access to most of these forests is through the caves, formed by the underground rivers, so they are isolated pockets of life in a surreal, otherworldly landscape. The rivers that are underground where the caves are intact are exposed in these forest pockets, and animals flock to the water in an otherwise bone-dry landscape.
Ankarana has recently been targeted by people more interested in industrial-grade emeralds than natural beauty, and is quickly being destroyed. These are not even stones to grace the hands of the vain beautiful, but slivers of stone to attach to grinding wheels, stone that could surely be harvested from a less glorious place than Ankarana. But labor is cheap, and the already existing caves make mining relatively easy, so a few men are making a profit on the destruction of a place unique on the planet. In 1996, it was still desolate, forbidding, and largely pristine.
We only had a week to scout Ankarana for Mantella, so we hired a quatre-quatre, a 4x4 pickup, in Diego to take us to the back side of the reserve. From there we would hike out, catching a taxi-brousse back to Diego when we emerged from the mix of caves, forest and savannah of Ankarana. The expanses of dry land we went through in the quatre-quatre was scattered with villages, savannah and small patches of forest. Lovely bright fields of green sprang suddenly out of the yellow rolling hills, rice paddies in a scorched climate. The Malagasy adore their rice, and will plant it even in the most inhospitable places. The earth was red, as everywhere in Madagascar, and soon we and our things were covered in a fine silt. When the road was impassable, due to past flooding, the driver made his own road. We went through a village comprised entirely of small thatched houses on stilts, suggesting regular, immense flooding. A little girl hid behind the stilts of one house, then ran behind the truck waving at us, shouting “sali vazaha!” as we bounced out of sight.
After a long, dusty trip, we arrived at a spot in the shadow of an impressive massif, where nearby an underground cave opens up enough to allow people on the surface to retrieve fresh water from the depths. For reasons that were never clear, this spot was called the campement des Americains. We set up our tents, and cooked some rice and beans over a wood fire for dinner.
“Do you think we’ll see Mantella tomorrow, Angeluc?” I asked him, as we sat at the fire after dinner. He laughed and looked at his feet.
“Ongomba,” he nodded his head. “Peut-être, ongomba, maybe.” The way he strung the words together, the French, Malagasy and English syllables all meaning the same thing, there was a melody, a lilt that was almost calming. If Angeluc says so, it must be okay. He meant “probably not, but who can predict these things,” but his tone was reassuring. Peut-être, ongomba, maybe.