Last weekend I finally took a break from field work and headed to the beach islands of Koh Chang in the southeastern region of Thailand. I spend four days there with a couple of friends from Khorat, Linda and Sly. We stayed at Ghai Bay, one of the many beaches of Koh Chang. The island was surprisingly quiet, but I suppose that's because it's the low season now, better relaxation for me :)


This is Koh Chang, the second largest island of Thailand. This is the view coming in from the mainland on the ferry.


Ghai Bay region of Koh Chang. This is the place to stay if you visit Koh Chang, it's less crowded than the popular White Sands region, which is where all the tourists go. The water is much nicer plus there are several small islands that you can kayak to. White sands occasionally gets a strong current which makes it dangerous to swim in, but Ghai Bay is always nice and calm :)


View of the beach at dusk.

I pretty much spent every minute in the water, I absolutely love the ocean and I just can't get enough of it. It felt so good to been surrounded by the warm and clear ocean. Before people started pouring into the Koh Chang, the waters held vast coral reefs, now most of it is dead, but if you swim far enough you can still see what's left alive and it's unbelievably beautiful! I went snorkling with Linda one evening and saw all sorts of life; parrot fish, stag head coral, brain coral, bright green sea anemone, clams, and sea cucumbers everywhere. It was amazing, I've never seen so much ocean life before, and to be swiming amongst it was just unbelievable. This is something I definitly plan on doing more of in my life :D


View of smaller islands from Ghai Bay beach. During low tide, you could actually walk to these islands. The backside of these islands hold beautiful batcaves which you can kayak through :)

We didn't spend much money on food, Linda and Sly had brought groceries and cooking equipment with them. We just bought fresh fish from a local 'fisherwoman' that Linda has been buying from everytime she had been to Koh Chang. We bought two tiny fish (from tuna family) and they fed us for three days! We barbequed them for dinner one night, then Linda turned the leftovers into tuna salad for which we had for the next night, and then again for breakfast. We still had some left at the end of the trip that we ended up having to toss out. Magic fish.


Fresh fish covered in herbs and coconut milk, wrapped in banana leaves then barbequed. Very yummy.


Another scenic view of Ghai Bay beach.


After spending a long day under the hot sun, in warm ocean water, we would hike over to a waterfall which collected into a pool of fresh, ice cold mountain water and we would swim in there for a while. It was the best and most refreshing way to relieve my sunburns... ^-^

Current Mood: peaceful

Jacques, Yo, and I visited two local schools to teach the children about snakes. The schools were rather remote; we had to drive on a dirt road way out into the mountains to reach one of them. The kids were so damn adoreable.


Two cute school boys posing for the camera ^_^

We brought a few live snakes with us, a sunbeam snake (Xenopeltis unicolor), one of my keelback snakes (Rhabdophis subminiatus), and a big-eyed pit viper (Trimeresurus macrops). We also brought several preserved snakes in jars and some of the equipment we use for our daily work. The kids absolutely loved it., especially the live snakes.


Yo captured the perfect expression as we brought out the live snakes :)

We had a slideshow with pictures of the snakes of Thailand and we talked about each one, giving them a basic intro to snake biology :)

To show them how radiotracking works, we had one of the kids hide in the audience with a radio chip (the ones we implant into the snakes) in his pocket while I was turned around with my eyes closed.  Once hidden, I used the atena to track the kid down, it was really fun and the kids were laughing so much :D


We passed around a shedded pitviper skin for the kids to touch and feel.

None of the children understood English so when it was my turn to speak about snakes I was rather limited as to what I could say. Luckily we had the livesnakes and that seemed to keep them quite happy. I walked around with the pitviper in a plastic box and then with my Rhabdophis in a tube with his tail sticking out so that he couldn't bite. ALL the kids were trying to grab and pull that poor snake's tail, he had it rough.





That was much fun :)

Current Mood: amused

Yo, Tracy, Darren and I (snake research group) got a two day break from radiotracking/trap checking and went out to do some sightseeing around the area. Taksin, the station manager took us to see several ancient ruins yesterday, and Khao Yai national park today.


Panoramic view of the ruins of Mung Tam, built in the 10th/11th century.


Panoramic view of Khao Yai national park.

The ruins we saw yesterday were much bigger than the ones at Pimai and they were beautiful. I wandered into some pitch black corridors, and had to take flash pictures to see what was in front of me, I felt like Lara Croft…hahaha… :)


Me sacrificing Yo, hahahaha.


Looking out at the ruins of Mung Tam.


Monk at the ruins of Phanom Rung.


The ruins of Mung Tam were so beautiful and exotic, but also empty compared to the others. It's not as popular and accessible as the rest, so few people go there. It was very relaxing and it also gave us the opportunity to play around a little bit ^_^

For dinner last night, Taksin took us to a restaurant where each table was set on individual docks sticking out over the water. They brought our food out on a little boat. It was very delicious and scenic :)


Panoramic view of the restaurant.

Khai Yao National Park is is famous for wild tigers and elephants, but unfortunately we did not see any. We did see lots of elephant poop though, that kind of counts….. We hiked around most of the day, checking out the waterfalls and getting attacked by leeches. Yes leeches, they were EVERYwhere. We had to stop every ten steps to flick them off of our boots and pants.


I took my boot off to check for leeches, and I found this! Leeches and blood >.<


I took the leech off my foot and poked it, it squirted back what it took ^-^

Leech

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We had so much fun with the leeches. Here's a video we took while we were harassing one xD


Beautiful waterfall, many people were swiming in that water.

On our way back, we saw dozens of Macaques all over the road. They were probably used to getting food from cars, which is bad, but they were so cute! Especially the babies!



It was a very fun little holiday. Now it's back to work.

Current Mood: cheerful

Well, nothing truly exciting has happened that merits its own journal entry, so I figured I’d give some detail about the kind of work I’ve been doing here at the station.

We currently have seven green pitvipers (Trimeresurus macrops) radioed that we track everyday. Tracking is probably the most physically challenging thing we do, a few of the snakes move very large distances and we end up having to hack our way through the endless tangle of thorns and spider webs to find them.   I swear, there must have been some major herbivores here millions of years ago for these plants to have evolved such a ridiculous amount of thorns!   You could write a PhD dissertation on plant defensive mechanisms here and focus only on thorns, the variation is tremendous. There’s a tree here that’s covered in gigantic thorns, and each of those thorns is itself covered in more gigantic thorns!


Wading through the jungle in search of a snake.



Another thing that we’re studying here is tropical snake thermal biology.   We’ve been collecting 24-hour body temperature readings on each of our radioed snakes. This is the most exhausting work because we have to take every 30 minutes.  At night we take turns camping near the snakes in order to collect the data, meaning deep in the jungle….all alone… in a little tent… I’ve had to do a couple of overnight shifts and it’s killer, especially if you have a deep fear of carnivorous mammals, like me.  One night, I heard footsteps outside my tent (at 3 am) … I’m sure it was probably just a little rodent, but the only thing that kept popping into my head was the image of a giant hungry tiger… Whatever it was, I sat up in my tent ready to defend with insect repellent :D


Scared in my tent while taking body temperature data on the snakes during the night.

Speaking of being attacked by mammals, I’ve had two run-ins with Asian black bears. The first time, I was walking through the jungle to a location where a couple of radioed snakes have been hanging out and all of a sudden I heard a loud growl.  I looked in the direction of the sound and saw the bear dash in and out of sight.   I was both really scared and really curious at the same time so I ran away a little bit, then climbed a tree to see if I could get another look.  The exact same scenario took place a second time, only at a different location and that time I didn’t run away or climb a tree :P 

Some things I’ve learned during my stay here include, Thai (I’m VERY slowly picking it up), driving stick shift both on and off road (very fun and very badass, automatic cars don’t really exist in Thailand), and surgery (though I have yet to perfect my incision sewing technique…).


Probing the snake's body cavity to remove an expired radio.


The incision, it looks crusty because the cut from the first surgery had not fully healed yet.

I’m also learning how to cook Thai food :D I love the cooks here at the station, they are so incredibly kind and they’ve been teaching me how to make the foods that I like :) My taste buds have changed a bit since I arrived here and I’ve picked up some new habits. For example, I now eat fresh garlic cloves, yes, FRESH garlic cloves with my food whenever I can. It’s super spicy and it burns for a few minutes after consumption but it is so good for you; it cleans your blood and kills bad bacteria in your system. Garlic is considered the ultimate medicinal food in Thailand. I’m also really starting to enjoy super spicy foods, which is good considering that everything here is super spicy. The Thais have this saying “Mai peh, mai arroy” which translates to “Not spicy, not delicious.” And I’m in agreement on that now :)


The cooks at the station.


Spicy rice poridge for breakfast.


Super spicy peppers, included in every meal :)

Current Mood: energetic

So I’ve been keeping up with my yoga practice at the station on my own since I’ve gotten here. Lately though it’s sort of progressed into a class. A lot of people here have seen me practice and have joined in, even the front desk lady stops her work and tries to immitate me from behind her desk ^_^

The other day I was teaching Yo and another Japanese student, Akihiko from Kyoto University who comes here every few months to study biological decomposition, it turned out that Akihiko has been studying Akido, a form of Japanese martial arts, under one of the most prominent Akido masters of the world. So in exchange for some yoga lessons, he gave Yo and I a few Akido lessons :)


Practicing how to break free of a grip :)


Yo getting owned, hahaha.

It was pretty fun and very entertaining, especially when we got to use wooden ‘swords’.


Practicing sword combat forms.


Playing with swords.

Current Mood: energetic

During the rainy season, the monks in Thailand retreat to remote locations and go into a sort of isolation. Every year, the same monk comes to stay at an abandoned U.S military surveillance station (leftover of the Vietnam war) deep in the jungles near our research station. Every morning he walks down to the station to ‘beg his food’. The monks in Thailand only eat what others give to them, in the morning they walk through the cities with bowls in their hands, and people put food in for them. This Buddhist tradition is practiced to give people the opportunity to enact in the virtue of selflessness. So every morning our monk comes down and we place food in his bowl. He then sits down with us and shares a bit of his wisdom. I’ve seen him walking on the trails in the jungle many times while I’ve been working. He seems very happy and cheerful, yet he is extremely quiet. He is very old but unless you actually see him up close, you would think he was 20 years old, he moves with a very young energy.




Here he was talking about sickness, injury and death as being natural things that happen to everyone, something to accept and let go.

After finishing our routine work in the morning, Taksin (the station manager) took Yosuke and I to the ancient ruins of Pimai. The people of Pimai still live in the same area, the more modern town has basically grown around the ancient ruins. The site we visited contain the remains of a very prominent religious sanctuary.











I had a wonderful time, I love walking through ancient ruins and imagining what it might have been like back when it was alive...

After Pimai, we went to visit a park that was located under a gigantic tree. I've forgotten the name of the tree, but it's really amazing. It grows and spreads horizontally; roots grow down from the branches, and when they touch the ground they thicken so fast they end up looking like a trunk.


The most beautiful tree I've ever seen.

You would not believe that this was all just one tree because each of the roots look like individual tree trunks, and no one knows where the original root/trunk is located. Unbelievable eh?!


There are fortune tellers that work under this giant tree. Many people come to see them and when their fortunes come true they place offerings on this tree root as a token of gratitude to the power of the fortune tellers.

We ended our day at a Japanese restaurant where for 7 dollars a person, we could order as much of ANYTHING we wanted on the menu, and every Japanese dish you could think of was on it (natto, sushi, noodles, soups, and all the other weird stuff). Yosuke is from Tokyo, so he ordered for us, we got weird Japanese food that I had not seen before, I didn't like all of it... but the sushi was fantastic :)

Current Mood: tired

I’ve been at the research station for the past two weeks and have been very busy getting the research projects set up.

I’ve stayed at four different research stations in Costa Rica, a country well known for its eco-research openness, and one research stations in the U.S., none of those place come close to matching up to the one I'm at right now. It's by far the best place I’ve ever seen, it’s downright luxurious! The facilities are clean, well kept and fully stocked with all sorts of research equipment free for your use. The dorm rooms are very big and each has its own bathroom with a shower included, AND once a week the maids come and clean the rooms and replace the sheets!


My bedroom. It's nice and bug free, I have a cute little gecko that lives with me who takes care of any bugs that somehow manage to get in :)

The station also has wireless internet access, a library, a classroom, AND a museum with a collection of local plant and animal specimens. We get three Thai meals a day and free coffee, tea and filtered water 24/7. There is also a big screen TV with a DVD player and surround sound speakers in the cafeteria for entertainment. We have access to the station trucks and motorcycles to drive to our research sites, and there is a staff of workers here whose jobs are to assist researchers with their work. In other words, if we need to build or set up anything, like traps, they will do it for you. On occasion, a group of women come to the station to offer Thai massages; I got a one hour massage the other day fro $3. And you know what the best thing is? ALL of this costs about $6 a day; the food, the lodging, and the access to EVERYthing. The herpetologist who I'm assisting with research, stayed here during his last visit in exchange for English lessons to the staff. And what makes all of this even better is that I’m not paying a penny, the research grant is, I love science :D


This is part of the cafeteria. The walls are covered with drawings from kids around the world who've visited the station.




The national park that the research station is on is actually an United Nations Biosphere Reserve. A U.N. program called "Peace Frogs" promotes world peace by bringing children of different countries together to learn with one another. They came to stay at the station last year and left behind some very beautiful drawings :)


The station museum; it's growing very nicely. We are contributing to the herpetology collection :)


The station library.


The station classroom.


The station garden.


Station sports; these are courts for two Thai sports who's names I don't remember, but they are very fun to play :)

Research-wise things are going great. We’re still in the setup stage, we're going out on road cruises and walks every night and catching lots of snakes. We want to study the natural history, ecology and thermal biology of the Malayan pitviper (Calloselasma rhodostoma) and the green tree viper (Trimeresurus macrops). I want to study the natural history, ecology and behavior of the Rhabdophis (the snakes that my advisor is working on). We already have three green tree vipers implanted with radio chips, but we're still looking for more so we can get a good sample size.   Lot’s of things have been happening very quickly, infact we are about to write up a short article about cobra nesting ecology.   Some locals gave word that they had seen a king cobra nest at a location near the station grounds. We went to check it out a few days ago and found the nest. The mother was gone and some of the eggs were hatched (we found out later that some other people had found and killed the mother and sold her meat at the market :(  We kept the eggs for analysis.

Yesterday I got to see my first king cobra, it was crossing the road as we were driving.  You'll never understand just how big these animals are until you see one alive, reared up to your height...


Sewing green tree viper (Trimeresurus macrops) back up after implanting radio chips.


This green tree viper (Trimeresurus macrops) is out (post-surgery). He is well and healthy now, we radiotracked him earlier today.

Last week we visited a Thai school in the city Khorat to teach the biology class some facts about snakes.   After class, one of the kids came up to me and asked what he should do if he gets surrounded by vipers, hehe ^_^

Well, that’s all for now, I have much more to say but it will have to wait for another time…

Current Mood: awake

So I am in Bangkok right now. I flew in yesterday from DC on a Japanese airline (Al Nipon), I enjoyed it at first, but got sick of it pretty quick. I have never been so smothered with Japanese culture in my life before, everyone was speaking Japanese, the airplane food was Japanese (that was nice), all of the movies were in Japanese (that was not so nice), and when the stewardesses translated their announcements in English, their accents were so thick I could not even understand what they were saying. The airport in Tokyo, on the other hand was fun, there were little Japanese food and gift shops that were unbelievably adorable AND they had the most luxurious toilets I’ve ever seen. There were buttons all over them, one of them played a song while you flush, very cool, in a weird way.


High tech Japanese toilet handle :)

I arrived in Bangkok late at night after twenty hours in the air, was picked up by Jacques, my research collaborator, and then taken to my hotel, where I basically passed out. The next day (today), Jacques’ wife went to the market and bought a variety of tropical fruits, which we ate for breakfast. I’ve never had or seen any of these fruits before, and now I'm obsessed with them and will be complaining about not having them in the US when I come back. My favorite thus far is a fruit called mangosteen, it is divine. After breakfast we headed to Chulalongkorn University where we met up with the head of this whole project, Harold Voris (herpetologist from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago) and his Thai collaborators, to discuss some project details. We then met up with one of Jacques’ old undergraduate students from Japan who is assisting on the project, as I am. After taking care of permit details at NRCT (Thai government branch), we headed to lunch in the shopping district. On the way back to the hotel I bought myself a HUGE bag of lychee from the markets for 50 cents, the equivalent amount would have cost about 8 dollars in the US. I ate half of the bag in one go….


Mangosteen fruit


What I had for lunch, it's like a Korean barbeque. You choose a dish of assorted meats, vegetables, seafood, or mix and then they bring it to you raw and you cook it yourself. They put water on the sides so that it slowly turns into a broth wich you can pour into a bowl and create a mixed noodle soup. It was tasty :)


This is the market with delicious and cheap fruits :)


This is in Kumphthor's office (research collaborator). Picture of Kumpthor and Harold Voris talking.


Another shot of Kumphthor's office. It's a cool office, lot's of turtle shells everywhere and this one has a snake vertebrae hanging on the wall.


Here's just a nice shot of part of the university campus. The campus was very beautiful, lot's

So thus far, I am loving Thailand, I’ve only seen Bangkok, but I’m sure I’ll love it even more once I retreat into the wilderness. The people here are so incredibly humble and kind, and I think it's due to their Buddhist religion. Everybody here is Buddhist, and there are shrines everywhere, even in taxi cabs there are shrines, it’s very cool. I’ll get so see some of the temples once I get closer to the research station. The food has been absolutely wonderful, but I’m having a hard time adjusting to everything being spicy, luckily the fruit makes up for it :) Although it is a third world country and there are a lot of really crappy and poor neighborhoods, Bangkok is very modern and advanced. The subway and sky train systems are amazing and much cleaner and classier than anything I’ve seen in the US, same goes for their shopping malls, movie theaters and business buildings are.


Here is one of the many Buddhist shrines in the city.


This a sky train station. All of their trains had flatscreen tv's all over the place that played music videos and commercials.

I leave for the research station tomorrow morning and I will be there for the rest of my expedition, with the occasional trip into town. I hope everyone is doing well, I will keep posting!

Much love.

Current Mood: content

The departure day for my Thailand expedition is fast approaching and I still have a load of work to get done! I've been trying to finish up bird taxonomy edits to an online database, type up a paper, complete two reviews for people because I'm too nice to say 'no' even though I have too much to do as it is. I worked all day and all night yesterday to finish the bird taxonomy stuff, and I still haven't gotten any sleep (hence the leaf cutter ant analogy in the subject title). But I got it done and I feel partially accomplished. Now I'm focusing my energies on writing that paper. I doubt many of you are interested in knowing what it is about but I'll go ahead and explain it anyways. My mentor at the Smithsonian and I have been working on resolving some publication date issues of some zoological literature that was published in the early 1800's in Ceylon (=Sri Lanka). So this guy named Edward Frederick Kelaart (1818-1867) traveled to Ceylon and described a bunch of species and published them multiple times (a species description can only be published ONCE) all over the place at different times (years). This created a mess of a confusion for people like us who are trying to figure out what year to assign to each species he described. So this paper I'm writing is our attempt to resolve this issue, and now you know. I'm planning to work through this night as well, I've never gone two days with no sleep before, let's see if I can do it....

Next week I'm getting my immunizations, apparently Typhoid fever is a big danger in Thailand. A doctor I went to see, who spent several months in Thailand herself said two of her colleagues contracted it; each was sick with the fever for almost a year, and each almost died. Ugh, don't want to get that. Then of course there's the bird flu, which until a recent case in Thailand (just my luck -___-) did not have the ability to move from human to human.

On top of all that, I need to get my student loans and credit card bills straightened out, and somehow end my cell phone service contract early without getting fined. But worst of all, I need to have my graduate school agenda worked out! I am suppose to be starting my masters at Old Dominion University working on Rhabdophis (Asian water snake genus) ecology. BUT, the funding I was originally counting on has been cut and so now I'm just sitting here, anxiously awaiting to hear some good news. Things are still very uncertain, I hate that.

*Sigh* I'm looking forward to some settlement, ok back to work....

Here's a cute picture of a Rhabdophi tigrinus, they are very special snakes with very interesting abilities. Notice the little ridge on the back of its neck?:

Current Mood: busy