2.5.16

The Mothpocalypse!

It has been part of a running joke in my time at Gobabeb, that I believe there is no such thing as seasons in Namibia. It’s one of the only questions that I routinely ask of our local tourists, from Namibia and South Africa; how many seasons do you distinguish as existing here? There’s been a wonderful variety of answers – most bring up the rainy and non-rainy seasons as the most distinctive separation; some mention climatic differences, giving a summer-winter dualism; others insist that there’s four fully different seasons, with different hallmarks.

My ten-month in conclusion? There’s at least two. My evidence?

THE MOTHPOCALYPSE!

Moth mortality, photography by Oliver Halsey, GBB's resident
photographer and videographer. 
Beginning sometime in January, we began encountering moths for the first time in the evening hours. This was most obviously evidenced by the growing collection of their corpses scattered around any light source at Gobabeb, but soon manifesting in all nooks and crannies to be found – inside light fixtures, covering window sills, curled up behind binders on desks, sucked into printer rollers, clogging sink drains, and plastering computer body-fans, for just a few examples.

Making moths into art; they covered everything! (Photo:
Oliver Halsey)
It seemed the moth invasion was in some way related to what is termed the “wet season” in this part of the world – but doesn’t feel so wet when experienced in the desert – or the hotter summer months. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not there was standing water or fresh rain, the moths returned faithfully in flocks to the Old House lights every night, flitting about, squirming through the cracked windows and gaps under doorframes to get a taste of that irresistible fluorescent light. It wasn’t until I unknowingly conducted a little experiment that I learned of the very definite connection between the moths and moisture..


I was indulging in one of my favourite evening pass-times, gecko feeding. I had noticed that on the rare occasions when I would turn on my outdoor veranda light, the several geckos that live in the rafters and roof would come out to dine on the insects passing by. And so I found myself setting up in my hammock in the evening, enjoying the cooler evening breezes with a book in hand, and watching my gecko tenants stalk their nighttime snacks around the arena of the veranda light. Most of the time, they were surprisingly unsuccessful in their hunts; they seemed way too loath to move to catch even the lazily-droning flies, let alone the zippy little moths tapping the light.

After watering my garden one evening though, I was astonished by the ensuing mini-mothpocalypse; the moths made up a moving carpet over the garden, zooming around from puddle to puddle, running into each other, and purring past my ears. As if that spectacle wasn’t enough, the geckos soon took up their position to add more frenzy to the moth buzz. There were the same two that always seem to come out, one patrolling the outer wall of the garden shade, and another prowling around the garden surface, snapping at obliviously thirsty moths and mobbing them from its hideout behind chunks of the freshly-turned and seeded garden rows.

Gecko stalks prey in between garden rows of newly-planted veg;
unfamiliar grounds for this one, who normally lives up in the roof rafters!



The moth frenzy had barely subsided in the garden when I noticed the geckos had already transitioned to their standard positions, on the walls and banisters across the veranda. It seemed the abundance of easy flighty food had brought these two into their element – I even caught one snapping up an unsuspecting moth from the banister, mid-leap!
The leap! 
It was quite a sight to see, and I was glad to see that something around Gobabeb was benefitting from the months-long Mothpocalypse. At least something was (purposefully) eating them –the rest of us were merely ending up with moths unintentionally ‘seasoning’ our food.

Who knows what the other, non-mothfilled season will hold for Gobabeb and its geckos? Hopefully we’ll be finding out soon – our latest unseasonable heat-wave of three weeks just broke a few days ago, with a spectacular thunder storm. Stay tuned for more on what’s keeping Old House lively these days!

17.4.16

A Toast to the Tenebrionids!

Despite our relatively remote location, Gobabeb gets many visitors every year – school groups, researchers, friends, and tourists alike. In the dozens of tours I have been lucky enough to give, many people are curious to hear what normal life is like for folks that live out here, in an environment that many perceive (perhaps rightfully) as nearly alien to “normal”. “You live here? What do you … do on the weekends?” is the general reaction.


And there are so many ways to answer that!, she says not-facetiously. There are definitely slow times around Gobabeb – the ebb and flow of people and activities can range throughout the year, for sure – so having hobbies is not a bad idea. But most weekends, there is plenty to do. Sometimes, it’s work-related, sometimes play. At Gobabeb, we’re lucky enough to combine the two most of the time: for illustration, let me take you back to December, during a girls’ weekend out on the dunes.

The cast: Meg, Eliza (Dartmouth Intern at Gobabeb, November 2015 – February 2016), 
and Jess (Research Technician)


Wine glasses? Dunes? Smiling? Doesn’t look very much like work, I know, but this weekend out was spent for science! We were out at Kahani Dune, about 3km drive away from Gobabeb, performing the bi-monthly Kahani Beetle Sampling. Kahani is the westernmost end of the famed East-West Transect (see earlier blogs for reference), and is done every other month to survey beetle population over a 24 hour period. This involves checking permanent pitfalls, placed in the interdune, twice in 24 hours; and setting up and monitoring a line of temporary pitfall traps on the slipface of the dune, which are checked hourly for 12 hours. The whole exercise doesn’t usually take more than 2 full days, between opening up the interdune pitfalls and doing the 12hour stint with the slipface helmet-shaped pitfall traps, and is typically a task given to one of the research team as their role in that week’s research task rotation.

But in December, Jess, the technician responsible for that month, got two extra volunteers to sign up – so we headed out over the first weekend of the month, a cooler packed with a sack of wine, water aplenty, snacks and food to last us dinner-breakfast-lunch, and our beetle buckets of course! We opened up and checked the interdune pitfalls in the late afternoon, and set up our picnic in the last light. 


Eliza and Meg toast: Long live the Tenebrionids!


Armed with our massive box of delightfully-seasoned popcorn, we took in the night, setting up camp at the base of Kahani dune. We all had our cameras at the ready, as we were looking to capture some sweet star photography out there. We had a beautifully star-lit, moonless night, the short-lived serenade of the raucous barking geckos welcoming us at dusk. Fueled by a box full of delightfully sticky lychees and a dash of creativity, we experimented with some long exposures. Besides catching the stray shooting star, we also got to playing with lighting up the Gobabeb vehicle, Albida, and writing our names with coloured torches – see the evidence below… 

















The next morning, we were greeted by the cool mist of a deep morning fog swirling around us, coating our sleeping bags, and making some of us reluctant to leave the wonderful cocoons of our sleeping bags. Our early wakeup call, up and at it by 630am, was a wise decision though, because that fog wasn’t going to last. We were still rubbing the sleep out of our eyes an hour later, when the fog blanket was already drawing back towards the coast. What had made the morning so bitterly chilly was gone in what seemed an instant! And without that fog, the 12 hours spent monitoring the slipface pitfall traps is that much more brutal. 
The fog beats its retreat early in the day, completely gone by 9am.

The reason the slipface pitfall traps are monitored hourly, rather than daily (as the interdune pitfall buckets, and the routine research pitfall traps are), is due to the difference in conditions: the slipface is completely exposed to, and at the mercy of, the full brunt of the sun. It is on the slipface that temperatures of 50-60C and higher have been recorded, the space of the ‘dancing lizards’ and burrowing … well, everything. It’s pretty tough to find shelter along dune slipfaces, which might lead logically to most living things avoiding such a hazardous environment; except for all of the lovely detritus (the leftovers and nibbled bits of plants and animals) which accumulates along the slipface, thanks to little wind eddies. Detritus happens to be a primary component of tenebrionid beetles’ diets, so the slipface is a relatively hoppin’ place for our pitfall traps to be placed – and an essential component of beetle monitoring, as many beetle species are specific to the slipface environment, as opposed to strictly frequenting the interdune area. Excluding slipface pitfall monitoring from our East West Transect beetle monitoring projects would thus create an incomplete picture of the beetle populations.

Our day of beetle sampling was spent curled up in the back of Albida, popcorn, peppadews, and good books at hand, as we took turns checking the pitfalls on their hourly mark. Any beetles discovered were released some distance from the line of buckets, to avoid recapture, and recorded in the Kahani sampling data book. So our Saturday flew, as we devoured books and snacks, played card games, and, of course, data. We packed up by evening time, and headed back to Gobabeb, our duty done and some science accomplished!

21.2.16

Drones in Dunes: A Weekend Mapping !Nara



Gobabeb has begun a few newer research projects, instigated by the arrival of some new research equipment graciously donated by Dartmouth College after their annual visit to Gobabeb in November 2015. Among these research tools is the much-hyped drone, which had been used by the Dartmouths this year to begin mapping hummocks of !nara around Gobabeb and the Kuiseb Delta (read their report HERE). Our ongoing research on the !nara is benefiting from the arrival of our new ‘eyes in the sky’, as we endeavor to continue this !nara mapping around Namib-Naukluft Park.

Which is what brought us out to Far East, the weekend of 18th December this past year: mapping the !nara. We drove past Saagberg Mountain and the vast valley of stubby grasses and big sky, bumping along the euphemistically-labeled ‘track’ towards a secret series of !nara-filled hummocks. Eliza Hoffman, our Dartmouth intern, had previously arranged several flights over these hummocks, which Gillian and her !nara team have already done research (ongoing research) on the phylogeny and condition over time on these dense populations of !nara.

Setting up the "batcorder" over beautiful sunset. Saagberg
("Saw tooth") mountain in the background
After we had overcome the tremendously bumpy track, with the help of fearless off-road driver Jess Sack, we arrived in between our targeted hummocks in time for sunset. While we set up camp and enjoyed the view, we began setting up a “batcorder” (or bat echolocation recorder) to record in the area while we were there. This is part of the ongoing bat surveys that one of our newest arrivals, Angela Curtis, will be working on for her Master’s degree. Since we’ve little idea of where and what kind of bats frequent different corners of the Namib, she’s looking for evidence of bats in all kinds of places - !nara hummocks included! (You can read more about her project HERE). The drone flying would happen in the morning, but we would have to find the approximate “take-off” points that Eliza had programmed into the flight paths for the two hummocks. The take-off scouting of course gave us the chance to explore the area – and the stunning scenery that is the Far East. While I was scouting around the hummocks, I got to hunting after the subject of my would-be pet-project: the Namib golden mole. The trails were fantastic (and fresh!) around this hummock, and you could clearly see the diversity of spoor left by this one little critter. Check out some of these meandering trails and surprising spoor...
 


Popcorn and wine for dinner, set to the background chorus of barking geckos. We all embraced the productive silence around us – just knowing that there was so much life around these dunes, that it existed inside this bubble of Namib-Naukluft Park, is somehow very comforting. And there really is nothing like star-gazing in the desert!
Panorama of the dunes surveyed; courtesy Jessica Sack

The next morning we set up for the drone launch. Here’s the general gist of the drone-flying set-up: there are four modes for the drone, STD (Standard) = hovering, LTR (Loiter) = hold position, AUTO (Command to take the planned flightpath; essentially ‘autopilot’ for drones), and RTL (Return to Launch). For our drone at least, it’s not recommended that you free-fly it with the joysticks – remote-controlled car-style. This uses up a lot of battery, and since our drone doesn’t have a lot of juice to each of its lithium-ion batteries, it’s more productive to use the pre-planned flightpath feature. Once we’ve set up the ‘launch pad’ for the drone – consisting of a tarp laid on the ground for the drone, and the computer perched and ready with the flightpath and control panel up – you can start setting up our drone for flight.

HOW TO FLY (THE GOBABEB) DRONE (ish)
Step One: Plug in the battery at the base. Usually, we let it sit for a half-minute or so once it’s lit up and started searching for its satellites. The controller and computer panel will tell you when it picks up satellites. Once it’s R2D2-beeped at you relaying this message, you’re good to continue.

Step Two: Attach the camera to the base of the drone. We’ve hijacked a shock-proof Canon point-and-shoot to take continuous photos at regular intervals, which we just Velcro-strap onto the belly of the drone and turn on before lift-off.

Step Three: Connect the drone to the computer. This is an important step, to ensure that the line of communication between what the drone is doing and the computer is registering is clear. The drone’s flight path will be on the control panel, and they’ll be ‘talking’ during the whole thing – relaying everything from its current height, speed, perceived wind direction, etc so that you can read it all from the computer and foresee any possible issues with the drone.
Pilot Eliza and Meg watching drone lift-off at Dune 1

Step Four: “Arm” the drone. This basically tells it to get ready for flight, and it starts up its (surprisingly noisy) engines.

Step Five: Lift off! For our quadcopter, you just flick the left toggle down towards the right, and slowly, carefully throttle up with the joysticks to the needed height before you select the AUTO mode and it launches into its flight plan. For the drone to keep connection with the computer, the controller needs to retain at least 40% connection; the controller will conveniently beep for you if it senses it’s getting too far away from the drone.

Once the drone is up, up and away, you’re mostly just watching it – for us, we had at least one person watching the computer control panel and relaying information as necessary to Eliza, who was piloting with the controller. Although it does mostly ‘fly itself’, it’s important to watch the drone anyway – sometimes flukey things will go wrong, and it’s better to be watching in case you have to make an emergency landing, or if it strays from its path have it RTL. Our first flight, for example, went pretty swimmingly – until the end, when it was returning to launch, hesitated about 200m away from the launch pad, and promptly began plummeting towards the ground. Since we saw the battery was declining too rapidly, we were able to anticipate this, and Eliza caught the drone before it could get itself tangled up in a spiny thorny !nara mess. And we also knew why this happened – we saw on take-off, once satellites had registered the global position of the drone, that our chosen start-point was a little bit further than the programmed one. So the drone ended up traveling further from the launch pad to the start of the planned route, and was thus a tad short on juice on its return flight.

Our second flight went swimmingly too, as we all watched the drone zooming in line-transects above the swaths of !nara. Following the flights, we did some sample surveying of the !nara being photographed, noting the sexes of the plants (one of the things we’re interested in looking for patterns about with widespread !nara mapping; since !nara plants are dioeceous [plants are either male or female], there might be interesting insights regarding where male versus female plants predominate) and noting general condition. Worryingly, many of the plants we observed were getting absolutely hammered by the wildlife in the area – the female plants always get a little beaten up in the frenzy over the fruits, but many of these plants’ conditions was cause for concern according to our resident !nara expert, Gillian.
Eliza, Meg and Gillian survey !nara hummocks

And the future of these plants is a big reason for the ongoing work that Gobabeb is doing into the !nara plant, given the relatively recent developments in !nara tourism products, and the resulting conflicts facing the Topnaar community. Read more about !nara and the work that Gobabeb’s team is doing on our website.







x

Ten Days in RITS’ shoes. Or, The Week Meg Got Promoted Thrice [Sept 2015]



As much of a meeting place as Gobabeb often is, of people and creatures alike, there are times when our staff gets a bit pared down. It is during times like these, and as in this episode relating to a particular week in September of this past year, that we like to emphasize the point in all Gobabeb job descriptions (and emphatically noted in the Grinnells’ job postings) of being flexible. Gobabeb is a small family, with plenty of responsibilities to take care of, and there are times when it really becomes ‘all hands at hand’ around here. To illustrate, let’s hop aboard a time machine back to mid-September of this year…

It is around September 17th, 2015. I am just returning with Gillian from my short excursion to Windhoek, where I successfully sought an intact (but, as it would turn out, structurally deficient) boot for my newly Fickle Foot. I arrive back to much fanfare – less for my arrival and more in celebration of our lovely IT guru (and featured previously in a particularly memorable encounter with a horned adder) Doris’s birthday – and cheesecake. (Glittery cheesecake, no less! A marvelous treat of our generous chef Hendrik’s creation) No sooner have I arrived back at the station then everyone else left – well, not everyone, but the bulk of the research section was leaving for about a week for a series of conferences in Windhoek.
The upshot? Doris, Gillian, Johanna (our chipper receptionist and accommodation assistant), and myself were on our own for the week. Which left us with all of the research tasks to take care of, for about 10 days. Here’s how we made it work out:
Doris
Meg
Pitfall Traps (M-W-F)
Weather (Thrice daily)
BSRN (Daily at 8h)
NOAA Sampling (Thurs or Fri)

FogNet Monitoring

MPI Sampling (Thurs)






Gillian and Johanna were around for support, while Doris and I basically tag-teamed it as needed. Fortunately, there were no needy school groups or such things around in Training’s hair for the week. A little background on each of these tasks, before I go into storytelling of my week as RITS:

Pitfall Traps: How intriguing-sounding, hey? An easily-deducible answer – it’s literally spelled out in the name. A pitfall is nothing more than a bucket buried so that its lip is flush with the surrounding soil surface, where it waits for anything crawling around to drop in for a visit. They’re an easy, cheap method used to survey insect and crawling-critter populations anywhere, and a particularly useful one around Gobabeb. GBB has been using pitfall traps to sample the area’s famed variety of beetle species for many decades. There are two key, long-running projects that have been making good use of the hundreds of buckets (and bucket-like objects) around Gobabeb: regular beetle sampling around the three ecosystems, and the East-West dune sampling.

I have previously referenced the East-West Dunes excursions, which happen semi-regularly every three-ish months, and take you out into the less-frequented dunes of the Namib Sand Sea, east of Gobabeb. I went on one-such outing in August, when we were testing the methods of the anticipated “Watering the Desert” experiment of this year’s SDP 19 programme in December, in addition to the standard tasks of typical E-W outings. Here’s how it usually works:

[Recipe for East-West Excursion]
2 Research Technicians (more hands are more helpful!)
40 buckets
2 spoons
Weather sampling kit
Food for 3-5 days
Water for 3-5 days
Beetle ID book
Sampling vials
2x 25 m measuring tapes
1 square-meter quadrat
Plant ID book
Spade
Cook stove, table, chairs, eating utensils
Toilet paper
Sleeping bags/personals

The responsible researchers head out early on a Monday morning to trek through Namib-Naukluft Park in what amounts to a massive loop back to the dunes that lie east of Gobabeb – if we could go directly from Gobabeb as the crow flies, it would be a much more direct route. Unfortunately, our vehicles don’t yet fly over the dunes, unless you’re driving them in a vehicle-lifespan-shortening fashion. It is reported in GBB gossip that this direct-if-slightly-treacherous route has been previously attempted, but the dunes were deemed too sharp-angled for our vehicles to survive the route intact. In any case, the route to the start of the E-W transects is a beautiful drive, especially when begun in the wee hours of the morning: you get a great view as both the sun and temperature slowly rise over the horizon of the gravel plains. A couple of hours into the drive, you’ll reach the gate – we actually re-enter Namib-Naukluft from a sort of back entrance, with permission of MET of course, and begin the trek along the far-less-traveled path. The tire-treads in this part of the park are best described loosely as ‘paths’ because they are often little more than a faint shadow on the surface of the wash-ridden, boulder-strewn plains that stretch before you. If you’re able to catch a glance of the landscapes wrapping around the route, you’ll be amazed by the hills and valleys, the storied and still mysterious so-called ‘fairy circles’, the silent herds of zebra and groups of oryx that pop up suddenly. (Had you not just left a major motorway bisecting this portion of Namibia and frequented by many the white bakkie racing through these hills, the transition to these landscapes might not be so dramatic) In any case, you soldier on through the bumps and jolts of the pathways, until you find three different sites parked along the dunes – the first, Mniszechisvlei, occurs on the far side of what looks like a more modest ‘beginner’ dune. Continuing on up through a dried creekbed and past several challenging running-start-worthy dune fields, there’s the second site tucked away past a spring frequented by surprising numbers of wildlife. This one is Noctivaga. To find the third one, you’ll venture out along the rim of the X Canyon and its sweeping views of dark stone crevasses towards the furthest station, aptly named Far East.

Once you’ve arrived at your station, the set-up is as follows: usually one technician will start by setting up camp, including a shade if accompanied by other vehicles, tent, cooking station. The other technician will busy themselves with setting in the pitfall traps – loading oneself with about forty buckets and digging them into the slipface, the dune slope, and the interdune in sets of ten. These traps are what will be monitored by the researchers at different intervals – all of the traps must be surveyed at least thrice a day, once first thing in the morning, once around lunchtime, and then again in the evening. The slipface traps undergo special monitoring, and must be checked hourly for a full day. This labour of love is for the beetles. The 240-some species of beetle that are found in the Namib Desert are key indicator species, and their monitoring makes up an essential foundation of a lot of the environmental monitoring that Gobabeb has been doing for the longest. For example, one of the superstars of Namib ecology is Onymacris unuicularis, popularly known as the Fog-Basking Beetle, and is suspected to be changing its range and concentrating more on coastal dunes with more regular fogs rolling through. With the long-term monitoring that Gobabeb does on these further-inland dunes, we can prove or challenge these suppositions – all those hours of pitfall checks, thrice-daily weather measurements, dozens of data logbooks are the evidence on the ground that tells the story.

The more regularly-performed pitfall trap monitoring involves a series of pitfall traps in the three ecosystems around Gobabeb - the gravel plains, the riverbed, and the dunes - which are checked thrice weekly. It's the same concept as the Far East sampling, except these pitfall traps are permanently installed, so there's none on the slipface of the dunes (they'd be buried within hours, with all of the quickly-shifting sand at the peaks of the dunes!). The responsible researcher heads out to check these pitfalls early in the morning, before things heat up, armed with a spoon, the Beetle ID book, and the record book. Each bucket is thoroughly scooped to evict any of the temporary residents. Each of these is then identified, before being registered in the record book, and released away from the pitfalls (to avoid another visit too soon). 
Pitfalls Map around Gobabeb

The pitfall traps are just one among the wide range of projects that Gobabeb has been doing and hosting for the long run. These Long-Term Ecological Research projects (LTER) are what Gobabeb excels in. Speaking of long-term, one of the other pretty-fundamental-to-GBB research tasks I was tasked with was Weather.

Gobabeb has been taking weather data for its entire nearly-54 years of existence. For the most part, this has been in the form of our First Order Weather Station, where we continue to take weather measurements thrice daily at various times according to season. Within the weather station, you’ll find your basic weather gear – wind vane, thermometers galore, rain gauges – in addition to some less-easily-identified instruments. My favorite is the mystical-looking Sun Recorder: Gobabeb’s divining orb, this glass sphere concentrates the day’s sun rays onto a strip of paper, which is extrapolated into hours of sunlight received per day. The patterns in the line give us the daily report of sky conditions; for example, a slow start to the sun-burned line likely indicates the presence of fog that day. These strips are then photographed or scanned and sent in to the Namibian Meteorological Service, where they inform the long-term patterns of cloud cover, surface radiation and such.

Also at the weather station is our array of soil thermometers, a set of six reaching depths ranging from 5cm to 1.2 meters below ground; these tell us more about the soil profile over the course of the day (which has important ramifications for the wildlife around here!). There’s also an evaporation pan, an anemometer, and several fog screens, in addition to the Stephenson screen, which houses our full array of thermometers and our hydro-thermograph.

Gobabeb’s long-running and extensive weather record is one of its most valuable data sets. Particularly in an extreme if fragile environment, observing changes in weather phenomena and temperature is extremely valuable – because it is an environment of extremes, any changes manifest themselves much more obviously over the relative short-term. And, in today’s flurry of research on climate change, long-term weather records are really valuable to informing current/future/ongoing research, by providing a baseline on which other studies can be based and change can be observed and tested for.

We now have an automated weather station on site, as part of the FogNet tower at Gobabeb. However, we continue to take manual measurements at the FOWS because we want to ensure the relative continuity of our data in the long-term; if we switch to relying on the automated weather station at FogNet, then we need to see if there are any major differences with how they both measure maximum temperature, for example. If there are, our new data will have to make clear that the older data is not on the same relative scale/sensitivity.

What the NOAA box looks like
NOAA, the research task named after the American National Occeanic and Atmospheric Administration, is probably one of my favorite research tasks – it’s simple and easily performed, and it takes you out to the dunes! What’s involved: you take the box pictured below, the one which I am so enthusiastically toting, onto the quad bike and drive out to the designated spot. Haul box to northern edge of dune, and open ‘er up. Slide the extend-o-pole tube sampler to its highest reaches. Flip a few switches, and allow the gas flasks to flush for a few minutes while you take the wind reading (standing Statue of Liberty style towards the wind). Flip a few different switches and record a few readings in the box (pressure of pump, etc), before walking away again to let the flasks to fill with fresh Air of the Namib. Meanwhile, you get the opportunity to take in the view, marvel at the perfectly glazed quartz stones along the slopes, or even hunt for some Golden Mole trails…

After the sampling is done, you strap the box back onto the back of the quad bike in as secure and convoluted a manner as possible, and jet back to the back lab, where the flasks are placed with the filled-out info sheet into their appropriate box, bound for somewhere in the US of A in ~6 months or so (with a legion of its fellow flasks). The gas samples are part of a global data set of air samples that NOAA documents and tracks over time for a wide variety of trace gases and the like, and Gobabeb has been working with NOAA to provide air samples since 1997.

As long as we’re onto the alphabet-soup portion of the research projects, BSRN is one of our atmospheric-sciences projects that requires daily monitoring. The purpose of this robot-looking machine-upon-a-rock is to look at long-term trends and patterns in solar irradiation, both atmospheric and reflective off of the ground. It takes continuous measurements over the course of the day, and the Micky-Mouse-heads-on-a-stick portion of the machine tracks the sunlight directly. Our job is to ensure that the sensors are cleaned daily, and to record what type of cleaning we did – to correspond with local weather events and accompany the solar irradiation readings the machine is taking,
BSRN array at Gobabeb; picture courtesy Reyk Borner 2015

Most people don’t relate directly to the need for data on solar irradiation, unsurprisingly. So why do we painstakingly record whether sensors are wet when wiped (code 1) and whether the balance is accurate on each one (0 or 1) +-365 days/year? Solar irradiation is an elaborate term for how much energy (via light) we get from the sun. Understanding how much of that energy comes directly from the sun to the surface of the Earth, and how much is reflected back off of the surface into the atmosphere, is pretty important for a number of reasons: (1) weather! Energy in the system is largely what drives weather patterns, on regional and global scales. Getting a grip on how much energy is coming directly from the sun, and how much that varies daily, seasonally, geographically can improve our understanding of weather and climate. (2) sun power. Direct data regarding how much energy we’re receiving from the sun can support future research into and justification for different forms of renewable energy. In this part of the world, and as it happens at our very own station, we have a solar array that generates most of the power we use. This is an extremely fitting example of what is termed an “appropriate technology” – one which not only enhances the quality of life for a group of people, but does so in a relatively low-cost, efficient, and environmentally-conscious manner. The data provided by BSRN, or Baseline Surface Radiation Network, details where and when the greatest amounts of solar energy are received, and where they’re going (whether that is back into the atmosphere, or into the ground).

MPI is another of our more complex regular research tasks. It is another atmospheric science monitoring project, from the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, which goes a little bit further than the NOAA weekly samples do.  MPI installed a shipping container filled with beeping, buzzing, clicking machinery and manned by four different computers connected by miles of thin metal wires and neatly-taped-together bundles, a suite of massive gas cylinders, a cryotrap, and a briefcase-sized gas sampler in 2012. This container with its ~12m tall tower are continually measuring trace gases in the local atmosphere. Like many of our atmospheric projects, this is one of a network of stations around the world, which all report back to the mothership in Germany, creating a more complete idea of global atmospheric gas concentrations. With all of that intimidating machinery and glam tech inside the temp-controlled container, you may wonder why we humans must enter this elaborate techy trap at all. Our weekly work with MPI requires us to manually capture several (four, to be precise) air samples to send back to MPI for further analysis. We also perform checks on the rest of the system, and answer any queries the MPI staff back in Jena may have for us – usually they can see everything that is (and isn’t) happening with the system through the manifold computer presence of the MPI box itself, but sometimes the computers need a little human help after spats with dust storms and such.
Meg carries the NOAA sampling box effortlessly


Usually MPI goes swimmingly. You ride out the 2km east of Gobabeb to the tower via quad bike or bakkie, open the gate (to keep out those wayward goats with an interest in atmospheric sciences), wave hello to the camera outside the container itself, unlock the container, and pop in. Once you’re in, you tell the computer who you are and what you’ve just done/are coming to do: for example, “Meg and Chris, entered container”. Then you start going through the regular procedure – which involves a lot of checking on things, like reading off the gas pressures for all of those tanks I mentioned, gingerly replacing the cryotrap, entering data into the spreadsheet, and of course performing the gas sampling. However – when MPI is not working, it usually takes a whole fleet of Gobabebeans and lots of correspondence to figure things out. Mostly, you just pray that the science gods are on your side when you enter that nicely-cooled container. It’s easy to get intimidated by the container, being a living caricature of science – but once you get used to the sampling process, and as long as you have the trusty guide developed by RITS alum Taylor Chicoine, you’re in good hands!

Finally, FogNet Monitoring. FogNet is a German-sponsored initiative to get a better idea of fog frequency and distribution along a 120 km gradient stretching from the coast (Walvis Bay) inland towards Gobabeb. The project consists of a network (thus Net) of nine towers stationed across the gravel plains, each equipped with a local weather station array, a fog harvester, and several pieces of fog-specific weather monitoring equipment. These stations collect real-time weather data and ‘collect’ the fog that passes, delivering that data directly to a website (accessible here). Our resident FogNet technician, Ruusa Gottlieb, oversees the ongoing operation of these towers and collects the data for later analysis. The researchers behind this project are looking for patterns in fog production and frequency over time across this gradient – specifically with change in mind. Climate change was a key driver behind the instigation of this study, because of observations by
FogNet Station at Gobabeb: two fog harvesters pictured
Photo courtesy Reyk Borner 2015
long-time Gobabebeans that fog production and frequency at the station have been declining over time. There are concerns that climate change is the culprit behind this too, owing to changes in ocean circulation and currents. The Benguela Current, which flanks the Namibian coast with upwellings of cold and nutrient-rich water from the Antarctic south of us, may be warming slightly. And it is this current that provides the cool air that then collides with the hot, dry air coming off of the Namib to reach the critical point of condensation, which is then blown inland by the coastal winds. If fog production is declining over time, it will have pretty serious consequences for the wildlife of the coastal Namib: both furry/scaly and photosynthesizers around Gobabeb obtain most of their moisture from fog, which is an obvious choice when it’s about five times more available as a source of moisture than fog is. Much of the unique biodiversity that calls this desert home is dependent on those fog banks that roll through, and if this region were to receive less fog (whether that’s in fewer events over the course of the year, less of the right kind of (usable and accessible) fog), it would spell trouble for the long-term sustainability of these unique and bizarre animals and plants.
Novald shows Meg a lizard during FogNet Monitoring, November

FogNet monitoring, while at the Station, involves ensuring that all of the towers are reporting their data to our servers here, and checking out the fog harvesters after fog events. When a fog comes through, we have to take a sample of the fog that is collected. This is then labeled and stored in our refrigerators until Ruusa takes a whole load of these samples down to UCT, where she is able to use their laboratory equipment to run analyses on what that fog might contain. Her Master’s degree research is a study of a known fog-collecting plant, Trianthema hereroensis, and whether it (and other plants/organisms) might be getting more than just moisture in the fog. Regular FogNet maintenance just has us measure the amount collected by the fog harvesters, and to ensure that all of the equipment is operating. Once a month, several technicians go to the eight towers across the gravel plains, where they clean all the equipment, collect the fog harvested for the month, and do general maintenance as needed at the stations.

Meg marvels at aforementioned lizard

These are, of course, hardly all of the research tasks that Gobabeb technicians are tasked with, in addition to their own research. Besides this is the Oxford Dust Models, several different towers operated by KIT, the Salt Spring CameraTrap, and Kahani Beetle sampling – just to name a few of the ones I’m familiar with. I don’t always get to do research work, but I enjoy learning everything from the reason we have four thermometers to read for ambient temperature, to getting to know some of the 80-plus species of beetles during pitfall monitoring. Some of my latest research exploits were had on a weekend out for Kahani Beetle Sampling – stay tuned for that story!




4.10.15

The Desert-Dwellers Move In


Gobabeb is a unique crossroads for a wide variety of people, from all over the world, at all points during the year. Besides the hundreds of students that visit the Station every year, the Station staff is also joined by different researchers – just in the past few weeks we’ve had researchers from as far-flung as Oxford University in the UK and as local as the University of Cape Town in South Africa – and a growing tide of tourists, curious about what this ‘oasis’ is doing out here.

We also get the occasional, slightly less office-bound visitors. I recently made the acquaintance of a number of our more nocturnal visitors, curiously just as I was researching them for a re-vamp of our offered Scorpion Hunt & Night Hike.


Unanticipated office visitor 


Dancing Spiders and TAOS Fellows Last Friday morning, I had an unexpected visitor waiting at our office door. Well, more accurately on our office door. Chris (also referred to as Woody; my co-fellow here at GBB) was less-than-thrilled to have a surprise encounter with the Dancing White Lady Spider, as he was performing weather duties that morning. In keeping with my promised role as Spider-and-Moth-Rescuer (Woody is not exactly a fan of these flying, zooming, crawling things), I was called into action first thing. Unfortunately for Woody, any removal processes were immediately delayed when I saw what kind of spider we were dealing with – I had only just been reading and writing about the Dancing White Ladies the other day, so to see one pop in for a visit in such a timely manner was a welcome surprise! You might even say spying the Dancing spider set me off in a jig of my own…

As you can see from the photos below, the Dancing White Ladies are a pretty sizeable spider – especially for we Northern Hemisphere dwellers, used to itsy-bitsy spiders and daddy-long-legs – our office visitor was about 10cm across at her widest point! They belong to the general “huntsmen” spider family – meaning they’re formidable hunters, noted for their large jaws and often tipping towards the larger and heavier end of the spider size scale.

The Dancing White Lady Spider’s claim to fame is two-fold: first, they have a notably unique mating ritual/habits, and secondly, they have remarkable, and still not well-understood, navigational capacities. Here at Gobabeb, one of our former Centre directors Joh Henschel did much of the ground-breaking behavioral studies on DWLS (as well as a number of other insect species around the Namib), in a little enclosure now featured in our Nature Walk called Spoon City.

The Story of Spoon City begins with an inordinate number of available green plastic spoons, apparently. A spider-friendly spot in the low dunes just on the other side of the Kuiseb channel was found, dubbed “Vishnara”, and the first of many essential spider studies began in 1986ish. Over the course of 101 morning observation sessions, Henschel et al found 261 spider burrows – little sandily-weaved trap doors – marking them with a spoon approximately 15 cm from the entrance, creating the visual phenomenon of a (seemingly random, to the untrained, non-research oriented eye) dune field of spoons. At peak spider activity (which varies seasonally, October – February being high sighting season), there were more than 750 spoons over a 600 square-meter area! The spoons weren’t just decoration, of course – Henschel et al were investigating burrow abandonment: who, when, how often, and why DWLS abandoned burrows. They also tested some other behaviors of the spiders, including territoriality and prey responses (involving affixing beetles to sticks and awaiting response. Whoever said research was uninteresting didn’t look too hard into arachnid research, hey?).

The many burrow-hunting mornings and spider-trap fanangling led to some fascinating insights about these beautiful strong-mandibled spiders. Henschel et al found that most DWLS kept relatively local ranges (rarely ranging further than 60-80cm from burrow entrance) and practiced their own form of “door-keeping” – a ‘lazier’ form of hunting wherein the hunter eats whatever prey happens to walk by at the ideal moment. In investigating those navigational skills – DWLS are able to cut the most efficient path back to their burrows, regardless of how far or aimlessly they have wandered from it, a unique trait for arthropods – they even affixed mini-dataloggers with infrared beams (!) onto some of the spiders. Although many a wandering path and track were followed and logged, there were no absolutely-conclusive explanations for these navigating feats, however the DWLS superior range of eyes are suspected to play an important role in enabling their knack for navigating.

Their other claim to animal fame is the source of their name: you knew ‘dancing’ had to come in someplace! The Dancing White Lady Spider is so-named because of their mating rituals. Male DWLS emerge from their burrows in pursuit of a female’s burrow, using those impressive navigational skills as they trek around the dunes, sometimes several hundred meters or even kilometers from the safety of their own burrows. Once they have found an audience, they perch atop the burrow and begin their performance – drumming their bodies and tip-tapping their eight legs in a precise ploy for the lady-Lady’s heart (rather than her appetite). Upon completion of their dance, the males await the females’ response – if the dance proved worthy of accolade, the male is rewarded with the chance to mate; if he has drummed the wrong note, then he has danced his last jig. Which will it be?

Sadly for the males, it is bound to be their last performance either way – if the female is adequately impressed, even the reward of mating is followed by her feeding on the male. The prize is the chance to mate, the price paid is the male’s life either way – it’s just a question of whether he gets his money’s worth. Sometimes the males will escape with their lives, but the females are just a bit heavier than them, often giving them the upper-hand (leg?).

These spiders have long-featured in Gobabeb’s regular goings-on, most notably while Joh was at the helm. The research section conducted annual spider censes in October and November, before any reproduction skewed the population numbers, for long enough to leave traces of it on our magical GBB Server/the source of all Gobabeb (recent) history. Between my newfound fascination with these remarkably graceful and awe/fear-striking arthropods, and the lucky discovery of a genuine Joh Henschel Spider Trap in the fabled Room 42 (a less-than-orderly reliquary of research projects of yore), I am hopeful that we might be able to see a bit more of these spiders in the future. Hopefully in the field moreso than the office though – for their sakes as well as Woody’s nerves!

Shower interrupter, regular interloper

Going a bit batty… After the Dancing White Lady Spider heeded the call set out by my night hike research, I was soon visited by another subject of the hike: (what is most likely, but not definitively) the Namib long-eared bat, Laephotis namibensis. I say ‘not definitively’ because as it is now, we don’t really know enough about the Namib long-eared bat to say anything definite. There have been very few studies focusing on this species, even given its relatively recent discovery. It was among the fresh faces found during part of the Smithsonian Institution African Mammal Project, when a team of researchers led by Ronald E. Cole set up mist nets at a very young Gobabeb in 1963 to survey the diversity of mammals found in this stretch of southern Africa.

Since being discovered, we have learnt very little about this cute-faced, big-eared winged mammal. It was caught during several bat censes performed at Gobabeb during the 1980s, but remained largely undescribed and its behaviors are entirely unknown. Existing knowledge consists of a basic idea of species range (it has been caught in parts of the Western Cape region in South Africa), and some idea of higher activity time – it is most often caught over bodies of water and is a ‘late flier’, caught closer to 21-22h at night rather than other bats caught at dusk. We don’t even know where these bats live – our best guess is that they may shelter underneath the bark of Camelthorn and Anaboom trees during the day.
That cute little face! How could you not want to study this little one?

That is, when they’re not sheltering in Gobabeb bathrooms. These bats seem to like frequenting the bathrooms at our fair station – in particular, the Old House bathroom in the courtyard, and, more recently, the women’s bathroom at the Station. In fact, when I indicated my interest in seeing one of the bats to my colleagues, I was directed to the OH bathroom as the premier bat-viewing site. And indeed, it was in the OH bathroom that I got my first chance – another morning begun by getting a closer-look at one of our winged/many-legged neighbors. I took my time getting some shots of this shower-interloper, as I had found out during my research the difficulty in finding good photos available of the Namib long-eared bats. I also wanted to get a good collection of bat photos for our quickly-arriving newest researcher, Angela, who will be studying bats around Gobabeb. At long last, our bats are primed to receive the attention they have long been denied – and hopefully I’ll get a positive ID on this little guy/girl/bat!

Snakes on the Plain(s) My next nocturnal visitor also had me dancing and running for my camera – albeit in a bit more panic than excitement than my previous two neighbors had. It was while I was on weather duty, and at the end of a long week, that I encountered my first snake here – and at a bit too close for comfort’s proximity – just outside of Old House. Doris and I had just decided to take an evening trek out onto the Gravel Plains to release a beetle caught that morning in the pitfall traps, which had, at the time, convincingly played dead. Seeing as I had to do evening weather duties anyway, we ventured out together. Just as we were leaving the Old House veranda, the concert began – suddenly Doris is hopping and yelping, I am oohing and aaahing, and the snake (THE SNAKE?!) is huffing and puffing.

In the paralyzed-yet-adrenaline-fueled moments that followed, I snapped a few entirely dark photos as Doris started frantically seeking snake-bite-marks on her flipflop-clad feet and the snake slunk into the shrub still seething. While I know that people’s generally inflated fear of all snakes is somewhat unjustified, I can honestly tell you that the noise made by puffing adders is absolutely, awesomely terrifying. It is a kind of wheezing-through-teeth which is surprisingly loud once the size of the snake is sighted. We, of course, surprised the snake as much as it had surprised us – it and Doris had mirrored each other in leap-like motions, the snake squirming in mid-air as if in response to Doris’ squealing.

This jumping is apparently not out of character for horned adders, noted back in 1988 at, you guessed it, Gobabeb. Other fun facts about horned adders unearthed from Gobabeb’s wonderous library: horned adders are, amazingly enough, not immune to their own venom. This was discovered after several snakes were bungled together for transport back to a terrarium, and two died within a day of their arrival, sporting distinctive puncture-marks. These snakes were also noted to be particularly active in the evenings, despite earlier suspicions of mostly diurnal (day-time) activity, making our sighting all the more likely to be a horned adder.

Our unexpected third resident of Old House that evening was likely a horned adder, which are rarely known to bite. That puffing noise was, however, its way of warning us that it was prepared to do so if we were threatening with the bottom of a shoe. It was likely out and about because, as I had eerily noted just prior to our encounter, it was an unusually warm night. Snakes are also known to frequent Old House, given our (literal, and unofficial) open door policy and our renown as a gathering place for rodents. Luckily for me, our most recent set of (human) residents worked hard to rid OH of its pesky furry snackers making OH a less inviting temptation for wandering snakes.

A probable horned adder slithering over the rocks. Not pictured: Doris and Meg squealing/leaping in foreground.
Horned adders, as well as the also-commonly-found Side-winding adder Bitis peringueyi, although occasionally frightening, play an important role in these ecosystems (as they do in all ecosystems). In the case of both horned and side-winding adders, they regulate the lizard populations around here, specifically that of the shovel-snouted sand lizard Meroles anchietae. From the perspective of we two-legged folk, they also act as a natural pest control, and often underrated and under-appreciated task. They form just one part of the amazing array of wildlife hanging about just under our noses – or doorsteps, in this case!