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!

Getting to know the neighborhood

My first month at Gobabeb was spent largely exploring Gobabeb and its immediate surroundings – and, despite the many “middle of a desert” jokes I could insert here, there is plenty to explore around here! In just my first few weeks, I was treated to a few different local excursions. My first was to the Mirabib archaeological site, just a stone’s throw away from Gobabeb.

Up the “mountain” Mirabib is the site of a massive inselberg [“mountain island” – a large granite boulder that, surrounded by the flat expanses of the gravel plains, does take on the appearance of an island oasis in a flat sandy-gravely sea], where MET [Ministry of Environment and Tourism: they’re the government agency that manages National Park areas like Namib-Naukluft] manages a number of campsites around the base of the inselberg. The views, as you can see from the photos below, are stunning, and the climb is tricky – the harsh heating and cooling regimen the granite is exposed to causes a lot of weathering, most often in the form of chunky layers flaking off of the rocks, which can lead to a lot of slipping and tumbling if you’re not careful (or graceful, whatever the case may be..).

I was headed to Mirabib with a visiting researcher from none other than the good ol’ University of Iowa! We were headed on an investigative/general reconnaissance mission to some of the areas around Gobabeb to look into an archaeological theory that needed confirming, and were going to be making stops at several of the old mines as well as Mirabib. I was invited along to lend a pair of eyes and feet to the mission, and because I hadn’t yet seen anything beyond the peak of Station Dune since arriving.

We were whisked away bright and early on a clear if chilly Saturday morning in a VW Polo on a classic African-massage-style drive down the gravel roads towards our destinations northeast of Gobabeb. I attempted to keep track of some landmarks as we were driving, but you know what driving on a gravel road in the gravel plains is like… Soon enough, we had reached our first destination: Hope Mine.

Hope Mine is one of a few abandoned mines in our stretch of the Namib-Naukluft Park. Mining in one form or another has taken place for a very long time in this area – first by the indigenous Topnaar people, more recently during the heyday of mineral prospecting in Namibia during the twentieth century. Despite their long history of use, Hope Mine bears little evidence of heavy mining activity beyond the capped boreholes, used to extract mineral cores to identify the location of mineral-rich veins, scattered among some tailings piles here and there.

Gorob Mine, our second stop, has more obvious remnants of its relatively recent mining past – there are still several rock shelters standing at the site, and the coring was much more extensive there. The landscape at Gorob is much more obviously altered than that at Hope – piles of multi-coloured rocks, ranging in size from pebble gravel to massive person-sized boulders, stand between winding trenches across the site, all of it made glittery by flakes of mica and schist mixed in with the granites and feldspar (shoutout to AndyGraham – I learned/remembered something in ESS!). Although entirely man-made, it has its own kind of beauty – even just the colours around the tailings piles; brilliant blues of copper sulphate, bright rusty reds from all of the iron slowly oxidizing. So many fascinating textures and colours … I’ll stop waxing poetic, you can check out the photos below.

Once we eventually made it to Mirabib, with our car surprisingly intact despite the road’s best efforts to dislodge and detach important components, we took a little time to explore the smaller rock outcroppings next to the main event. It was only on the return trip from East-West transects (forthcoming, promise!) that I got to climb the island mountain and take in some of the views. Inselbergs are common features across parts of Southern Africa, and are actually more than just fascinating sites for geological (and in this case, archaeological) investigation. They have also been found to provide surprisingly different microhabitats, favored by everything from the smaller colonizers of the desert (lichens,algae, fungi) to the big names (reptiles, birds, even some mammals). Granite inselbergs have been found to provide highly specialized microhabitat for a wide range of life forms around the world (much of the research has been done in Western Australia) and as “conservation oases” for sensitive species like reptiles. Mirabib and other granite inselbergs in the Namib are no exception, limited in their diversity only by the somewhat harsher climate and lower moisture availability, making these more than just a sweet photo op on an otherwise seemingly desolate landscape.

Down to the Wash After climbing atop these ‘mountains’, my next excrusion took me downhill, into some of the river washes that feed into the mighty Kuiseb. One in particular, named Welwitschia Wash, is famous for now-obvious reasons. I got to venture there on occasion of our continuing growth monitoring of the Welwitschias there.

Welwitschia mirabilis is, for those who have not encountered it, quite the amazing plant – deserving of its “miraculous” name. It is a gymnosperm in the middle of the Namib with evidence that members of its unique species grew as far back as the Lower Cretaceous epoch (or, between 140 and 100 million years ago, for those that need to brush up on their epochs) in parts of South America. This is back when Gondwanaland was still in existence, that merry time of the monolithic continent, and crazily enough, Welwitschia has been able to happily continue to live and survive, largely unchanged, ever since.

Besides being an ancient plant, Welwitschia also live to be ancient (relative to human/other plants) – the oldest known Welwitschia is in excess of 2000 years old! Welwitschia are endemic to the Namib, their range extending down from Angola just to the Kuiseb River catchment – so we at Gobabeb are at pretty much the southern limit of their range – and an especially important plant in Namibia. In fact, if you take a peek at Namibia’s coat of arms, which I’ve handily provided below, you’ll see I’ve circled a rather inauspicious-looking green wiggle beneath the shield bearing the flag decoration for the country. That is a Welwitschia! They are the national plant of Namibia – and how could you not be impressed by such an ancient but stubborn survivor?

As the pride of Namibia (or at least its botanists), lots of folks care about these plants – and Gobabeb has been researching Welwitschia for a long time, in the hopes of learning how best to ensure it lasts another 100 million years. To that end, some of the research performed by Gobabebeans has sought to discover everything from why it grows in particular places (and not others) to what contributes to successful germination. I highly recommend the comprehensive paper written by Goddess of the Namib Desert, Mary Seely, and former director of Gobabeb Joh Henschel, found here, to give you an idea of what the Welwitschia is like.

We continue to monitor Welwitschia growth today, in the same area and often with the same plants that Mary Seely and others have worked on before us. It was for this task that I was introduced to Gobabeb’s local Welwitschias –some in the area of Hope Mine and others in Welwitschia Wash – so that we could help one of the current research techs, Titus, collect growth data for their sample of the Welwitschia population. Others before us found that the Welwitschias’ rough sandpaper-like leaves grow only 0.2-0.8mm/day on average, but we’re still learning about what causes those spurts of growth, and generally keeping an eye on their health. (Learn more research deets at our fabulous website)

Unfortunately, as you can see from the picture above, the Welwitschias we were monitoring in the Wash didn’t have those long green leaves you see on the crest. The Welwitschias around Gobabeb have fallen prey to an unexpected (to me, anyway) predator in the area: horses. I know, who knew! The Namib is so diverse it even has wild horses! It’s actually a much less exciting discovery – the local Topnaar chief has a sizeable herd of horses he keeps on the land around here, releasing them to graze around the area. The Welwitschia leaves, as unpalatable as you’d imagine their sandpaper texture would make them, have just enough water in them to make them a target. Although those leaves hold less than a day’s water needs for the plants, it’s enough water to warrant a tough tug from a passing grazer-turned-browser. The result is sad, nibbled-to-the-cork Welwitschias – and frustrated researchers, since the horses ate the leaves we made measuring marks on – decorated with spools of half-chewed Welwitschia-leaf-cud, which is draped across the plants and strewn around the Wash like animal scat.

This, like so many other conservation-related issues, is political. Getting the horses to leave the Welwitschia leaves would require a lot more politiquing than Gobabeb has the authority or wherewithal to do, although we have communicated the problem to the country’s Minister of the Environment. For now, the Welwitschias in the Wash will have to dig a little deeper to keep on surviving.

[Belated] Greetings from Gobabeb!

It has officially been one month since I first entered the gates of the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre and, given the theme of delays this journey began with, here’s my much-delayed first blogpost about my time in the Namib. After arriving to Walvis Bay’s tiny tented airport and packed into Gina (one of Gobabeb’s vehicles) alongside a fridge, I began the Hectic Handover. Patty and Tayler, my predecessors at Gobabeb, were leaving on Saturday the 18^th for various parts of the world, giving us only 48 hours of overlap during which they could pass on whatever wisdom they had gained during their time at the Station. Since Chris, my fellow fellow, was still delayed back in the States with more visa struggles, I was to gather as much intel as I could for both the TAOS (Training and Outreach, my own position) and RITS (Research and IT, Chris’) positions.

After meeting a flurry of faces that first evening, at Tayler and Patty’s farewell dinner and my first meal at the famed Old House, our Friday was packed chock-full as Patty attempted to give me enough context on the basics of my forthcoming year for her and Tayler’s advice to make sense. [Let me just put in a tremendous thank you to both Patty and Tayler for the intense amounts of work they put into recording their best, most thoughtful pieces of advice and guidance into their incredibly detailed handover documents. I can’t speak for Chris, but the variety of documents you left with both broader context and smaller detail were, and continue to be, of great help as I adjust to GBB!] Friday was pretty hectic as we jumped from different projects and through a range of responsibilities I was inheriting, but we eventually brought our day’s discussions to a close to head up Station Dune for a last sundowner for Tayler and Patty.

Learning . . .  Forty-eight hours after my arrival, I was on my own – and with a school group already arriving in a matter of days! My first school group was from Texas A&M University, visiting Namibia for a month this summer on some cultural studies and photography courses. This was my first “Teritiary” school group (university-level students), and since they were pursuing their own courses while here, it gave me the opportunity to shadow Rita, my lovely co-Trainer at Gobabeb, in some of the basic activities we offer all school groups: the Station Tour, the Nature Walk, and the Scorpion Walk. Beyond that, the Texans’ gracious hospitality allowed me to join them on their Topnaar cultural tour-visit to a neighboring Topnaar village. The Topnaars (Dutch-Afrikaans for “people who live at the edge”) have lived along the Kuiseb River for centuries, and continue to be neighbors to GBB today. I joined a fascinating tour illustrating Topnaar livelihoods and indigenous knowledge of the landscape that Topnaar had inhabited for hundreds of years, before we visited a modern Topnaar village to get a taste of the famous !nara cake. The Texans ended their visit to Gobabeb with a sundowner from atop Station Dune, a rather unforgettable spectacle of Aggie pride, and what I can only hope will be the first and last “Dune Dive” I witness while a Trainer here!

. . . and Teaching Soon after the Texans left, I was greeting our next school group – a group of teenaged boys from a British secondary school, visiting on the tail-end of a holiday-tour of Namibia. This was my first opportunity to implement a full schedule of activities for a school group, and I was interested in testing out some new ones – and so I found myself baking muffins in a solar oven, sifting through the library for literature on the Kuiseb River Basin Management authorities, and reading, re-reading guiding notes for the Nature Walk and Station Tour. Rita was going to be in Windhoek for a UNAM conference on remote sensing/GIS technology, so I was on my own for this one – a bit of a plunge, but there’s nothing like hitting the ground running to get you comfortable in your new job! Aside from some unfortunate timing (my first sandstorm! … which continued into the bulk of our scheduled Nature Walk…) and a lot of running around as the single trainer in charge and on hand, all went pretty handily – the boys had a blast during an afternoon racing up and around the dunes, releasing our pet Parabuthus villosus scorpion, and trying their hand at species design for Namib-adapted animals. I found out which activities worked better than others, and got plenty of ideas for possible projects and improvements to Training’s school-group offerings.

Learning the alphabet (of acronyms) at GBB Once the rapid-fire school visits were over and the dust had settled a bit, I got to do some more basic GBB learning myself. Whenever I had the time to spare, Jess, one of our more experienced research technicians at the Station, graciously took me along to show me one of the regular long-term monitoring tasks – including weather, monitoring dune movement/morphology, borehole water-level monitoring, pit-fall trap surveys, and NOAA air sampling. These excursions gave me a chance to see beyond the boundaries of the tour circuits into the research half of GBB, and the time to ask more and more questions about everything from the Station’s history, to the nature of Dancing White Lady Spiders, to who Helga dune was named after. Jess and all the station staff have been wonderfully patient with my many queries, and have done a lot to help me feel welcome in the research wing of Gobabeb – for which I’ve been very grateful, because the research that Gobabeb does is endlessly fascinating! As clichéd and geeky as it may sound, there’s just so much to learn about this unique place where three ecosystems meet and a surprising medley of species make their home.

My day-to-day now often included a lot of reading and asking questions about that unique mix of species around Gobabeb, as I attempted to familiarize myself with both the programs in Training and the landscapes around me in the quieter weeks to come. There are a phenomenal wealth of acronyms that live at Gobabeb – you’ve already noticed my shorthand for Gobabeb (GBB) in frequent use here – including but not limited to: GTRIP, SDP, BSRN, MPI, ODP, FLC, SSP, JDP, DRFN … The list goes on, and much of my first few weeks at the Station has been spent getting accustomed to and educated in what each of these acronyms means. Before we venture into defining any of those acronyms, let me give you my job in a nutshell, as defined through a combination of the actual job description and my own month’s-worth of experience in it:  the TAOS Grinnellcorps fellow (colloquially referred to as “Grinnells” around here) is tasked with “supporting capacity building, science education, and environmental education” at Gobabeb, primarily by implementing the established environmental research internships and educational programming offered by the Station. This support comes in a wide range of forms, and if there is one thing to be taken from the annually-revised job description I received, it is the essential need for flexibility on the part of the Grinnells. This was re-emphasized upon my arrival to the Station by Tayler and Patty, and appears to be the singular feature of the job here that doesn’t change over time. Designing and implementing the environmental education programming for school groups is one of the key day-to-day responsibilities of my position, but is only one of the range of activities I will likely find myself involved in this year. I also assist with the implementation of several other long-running programs that occur throughout the year, including two different types of internship programs, and special projects, like a number of community outreach grants Gobabeb is working on developing on the ground this coming year.

With so many different projects developing, school groups visiting, and researchers researching at Gobabeb, it’s taken me very little time here to realize how suiting Gobabeb’s distinction as an “oasis of learning” is.