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!