The Case of the Missing Juveniles, etc

Number of Ticks Removed: 30
Days Tick Free: 0

Just to back up to where I left off: Homeboy Rodolfo didn’t show up last Friday, which didn’t actually surprise me all that much. Note to self: do not pay in advance (I know, I know, but he claimed to really need bus fare…). At any rate, it wasn’t that big of a deal. To tell you the truth, I was so worn out that I’m not sure I was up to it anyway. I didn’t even want to test the leaves I’d collected as part of my “if-Rodolfo-doesn’t-show-up” contingency plan. But I thought S.L. would be aghast if I just wasted the day sleeping, so I set up the Toughness Tester and got to work. It was as if the machine somehow sensed that I was in such a fragile mood that I might actually throw it into the lake if it didn’t work properly, because the thing gave me perfect, beautiful toughness values. My faith in the machine has been restored.

I’ve spent this week with the South Group, and its been pretty standard: easy all-day follows, no big surprises. While I was watching the monkeys sleep yesterday, I noticed that a beetle had gotten trapped in a spider’s web right beside me. It seems like for every season, there is a different kind of spider (except for the height of the dry season, when there were none). Right now, even though its still really dry, we’ve got this kind of spider that lives in a little hole underground and builds a very thick, funnel shaped web up to the surface. Well, I saw a beetle fly right into one of those funnel webs and it was sure stuck. It struggled and struggled, all the while just getting more tangled. At one point, I saw the spider emerge from its hole for just a second and peer up at the prey. I really did not want to see that thing come up and finish off the beetle, so I decided that I must free the beetle. With my machete, I carefully excavated the poor little guy from the sticky, sticky web. The beetle was still covered with that super-adherent web even after I got it out. I did my best to wipe off the strands, but the beetle did not like me cleaning it off any more than it had liked being stuck in the web. I ended up dropping the beetle while it was still all covered in web, and it disappeared into the leaf-litter on the forest floor. So I am not sure what happened to the little beetle, but I certainly hope it escaped and has gone on to have a lovely life.

One thing I have noticed this week is that the South Group (that of Uno and of a male I recently named Funny Nose, on account of his funny nose) seems to be doing better than the North Group in terms of juveniles and infants. The South Group has got 3 weanlings (foraging on their own, but still nursing several times a day), one slightly older juvenile who may already be weaned, and 3 smaller infants that still travel on their mothers and get most of their nutrients from milk. So that’s a total of 7 “pre-adults” (to borrow a term that I think S.L. himself coined) in the South. The North Group is down to 4 total: the already weaned Horace and Buster (note: Buster is actually a female), and the infants Stacy and Mabel (whose sex I have not yet been able to determine). According to my notes, this means that 4 of the North Group pre-adults have gone missing. Obviously, I know that one of the infants died as a result of the dog attacks. This was likely the December infant I had called Scooby. But that still leaves 3 whose whereabouts are unknown. One of the missing pre-adults is little Spud, who would be near 6 months old and reaching locomotor independence about now. So, I don’t know what’s been going on with the North Group. At the beginning of the study, I thought that the North Group had a better diet and that their infants/juveniles would have a better chance of surviving. But now it seems like, despite its scrappy territory, the South Group must be doing something right.

The ever-earlier rising sun has got me more exhausted than ever, so I was glad when I was able to collect some interesting plant samples yesterday and then spend the day today testing them. I was really excited about sleeping in, but unfortunately I woke up at 4:20am anyway. Why is it that on a day when I have to get up at that time, the sound of the alarm makes me cry, but on a day when I get to sleep in, I am wide awake and ready to go? At least instead of having to jump out of bed and blearily get ready to go out to the forest, I eventually fell back asleep again. When I got up at a more reasonable hour and put the toughness tester together, it was still behaving perfectly, so I got a lot of data. I think even S.L. would be proud.

Just one more thing. Readers of the blog, please lend your thoughts, best wishes, prayers, etc, to Rob’s dad, who is having surgery tomorrow. We are sorry we can’t be there during this difficult time, and we are wishing him the speediest recovery possible. Thanks for reading.