Peru diary: 5/5.

Erica: Here is the final instalment of Dave’s account of the fieldtrip to Peru. I have to say that it has been really interesting reading his musings on the trip. All of the things that we take for normal – the weird looks, the entertaining facilities, the near-death experiences, the discovery of new species – seen through new eyes has been a pleasure. So for the last time, over to Dave:

 

Out of the frying pan and back along the mighty Marañon and up, following a tributary that irrigates lush orchards – very much the oasis in the desert. Bursting through the tops of the orange trees, and we were climbing again, up the other side of the valley. Not having to drive I could enjoy the views of where we’d come from, and the ribbon of green where the little river had ploughed a green furrow in the dusty gorge.

Enjoying the views.

Sandy’s keen eye spotted something clinging to a cliff and we stopped smartly. A single specimen ofNicotiniana glutinosa clinging lonesomely to a roadside crag. This variant of nightshade is a species of tobacco, as the name suggests, and is important as a “model organism” as it’s resistant to the the tobacco mosaic virus. Useful therefore to the tobacco industry (so possibly best to leave it alone).

But there’s no stopping the Sweep Sisters, who were already unpacked and sampling the area. The plant itself was out of reach to safely take a sweep at it, but there was no escape from The Mac, who began her assault with the hoover. She was just able to reach the tiny yellow-flowered specimen to get a suction sample. How unlucky was the fly that, of all the plants available, chose to alight on this lonely specimen that morning.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that it was quite convenient for us that Solanaceae tend to colonise disturbed ground readily, as on our numerous stops we were often able to park the car and sample the area without having to hike too far into the brush.

Unfortunate invertebrates stashed once more, on we went. Higher, greener… greyer the skies. The prospect of rain? The road narrower still, and presently there came a tight right-hand corner, a loop where the high cliff was divided by one of the many deep, overgrown ravines where streams sliced the steep mountainsides. We stopped at Sandy’s direction and wandered into the bush. So much lusher at this altitude, and to my untrained eye must be a much better prospect for mini-critters.

Sandy had also been employing me these past days in “DNA” duties, which consisted of picking the fruits from various solanaceae and carefully extracting the seeds for use by boffins back in London, which I did here to the best of my abilities.

Meanwhile, Sandy showed me a sapling – a young Solenum albidum – that to me looked a bit like a rubber plant, with its huge succulent dark-green leaves. The species grows well at mid-elevations (1,000m plus or so) round these parts. Sandy then showed me the adult plant nearby. Frankly, if this had been a human specimen I’d have suspected mummy had been a bit friendly with the milkman: the parent looked nothing like its offspring; this was a small, woody tree with small, veined, oak-shaped leaves. Sandy couldn’t understand my surprise at the difference. But I suppose I have come to expect such metamorphoses in certain pupating insects – why not plants?

Sandy pointing out some interesting species.

Evelyn’s arachnids.

Evelyn turned out her net to reveal two colourful-looking arachnids of respectable size.

Back in London the first was identified by Museum spiderwoman Jan Beccaloni as an orb-weaver, but the other remains tantalisingly unidentified many months later:

“That’s a very interesting spider!” says Beccaloni. “It’s in the family Nephilidae and most closely resembles the genus Clitaetra (one of only 4 genera), but it isn’t one of the 6 species in that genus – given that they are from Africa, Madagascar and Sri Lanka. I don’t suppose you collected it did you?”

We didn’t – as far as we know. Perhaps Evelyn did and it is preserved in Peru rather than in Blighty. What if it was a new species? Perhaps a target for the next trip.

Erica was well pleased in any case with her catch, which revealed plenty of interesting new pipunculids (literally “big-headed flies”). They like hanging around plants, laying eggs in other flies (useful in pest control) and the adults dine on honeydew (like Kubla Khan). Their bulbous “holoptic” eyes take up their whole heads: they look ridiculous and frankly should be ashamed of themselves. Because of the sheer weight of their eyeballs, pipunculids have to fly head-down-tail up, like a flying exclamation mark.

Now it began to rain. It was extraordinary how quick the weather had changed with elevation: an hour ago we were in a dustbowl. We headed upwards as the chasms to our right yawned at us anew. Erica was on the left-hand side of the vehicle so mercifully couldn’t see the juicy drops we were narrowly avoiding. As we emerged into sun-dappled uplands and mist again, we came upon a tiny, adobe and-tin-roofed cafe with a rickety balcony overlooking the valleys, where we sat out the showers and had lunch. But it turned out the day’s sampling was done. By 2pm! Turns out the insects don’t like the rain either.

We still had a ways to go, but we were able wind along the tricky bends at a relaxed pace. Erica became relatively comfortable with the precipitous drops, and we were able to plan possible sampling sites the next day. I was just enjoying the views. We breached a pass in the Cordillera de Calla Calla at 3,600m. Sandy says the pass is so named because, before the road was built, “calla calla” is what locals, carts laden with booty for the market in Celendin, would call out before turning the narrow blind bends.

…..

I now see I was playing a bit fast and loose with the task of record-keeper. I remember fondly my Dad once recounting how he and his school mates would wind up the science teacher by recording the effects of experiments in florid prose: “the aluminium lit up like brimstone, its fiery refulgence white-hot” and so on.

My notes, too, were drifting into the arena of the unscientific. Under the “conditions” column it reads: “sun and stratocumulus; v warm; humid, but stiff breeze; like a tart’s hairdryer”. Elsewhere I seem to dabble with amateur meteorology: “Hot and sunny; but some shade. Good-natured cumulus flit across the sky heading west at about 3,800m asl.” “Overcast, dull, but now warm (20C+) stratus dominates. All is grey. It is like Mordor. There is a little offshore breeze.”

Under the column method of collection, “suction” evolves into “suck”, “sucking”, “sucky”, “socktions” and even “suctionez”. I’d thought no harm could come of this, thinking it was for Erica’s eyes only.  But apparently it was given to a record keeper at the Museum who wrote it all down verbatim.

It was my way of amusing myself in the evenings while I copied my handwritten notes into spreadsheets. What I haven’t mentioned yet, scandalously, is that every evening after a day of driving and sampling we unpacked the van and that was when the real work started. Every night I did the spreadsheets, while Sandy erected her plant drier and stared sorting her haul, carefully arranging the samples and layering them in paper sheets ready to dry the sample overnight. Erica and Evelyn sorted through the numerous bags and ‘kill jars’ from the day’s sampling, emptying each one separately on to plastic trays, the thousands upon thousands of insects in each tray then to be sorted that night and either pinned individually with microscopic pins or preserved carefully in alcohol, noting species, date, time, location in lat/longitude, then slotted carefully into little polystyrene boxes, ready for the next day.

This red-eyed ritual happened every night before and after dinner till about 11.30pm, sometimes later. At around 6.30am the next morning, we would repack everything into the van (my job chiefly), Sandy having been up for an hour or so already, dismantling the plant drier and packing her samples with scrupulous care. All to be loaded into other boxes for transport eventually to the UK where the real work of identification, classification, labelling and record-keeping begins. And that’s just the start – when the real science starts and the project begins to bear fruit. Erica and Sandy can tell you about that in various sober academic journals, I should wager.

Work continues into the evening…

Sandy packing samples with great care.

We arrived in Leymebamba in the late afternoon.  It is a quiet and friendly country village with a tiny well-kept plaza de armas, with narrow streets leading off, lined with with adobe-brick houses with renaissance-style balconies and big weathered wooden shutters. And a lovely stone church. It had a contended feel.

We found a little guesthouse up a side street. It knocked all the others we’d stayed at into a cocked fedora. The accommodation we’d been staying at, taxpayers, was more than comfortable, and very cheap – about $10 a night. This was only marginally more expensive, and not what you’d call luxury,  but the rooms were more modern – clean, and with the benefit of warm water. The hostel centred round a carefully tended courtyard stuffed with pot plants and rustic local knick-knacks. In one corner a pair of hummingbirds sucked nectar from a feeder. I kid you not. The upstairs balcony opened on to an idyllic view of the higgledy-piggledy red-clay rooftops, with the Andes tumbling into the distance beyond.

Someone very clever decided we should stay two nights this time and use Leymebamba as a base to strike out, and I didn’t complain. I could have stayed there for a week or more.

This would be useful as a base to discover more sampling areas in a comparatively verdant habitat. We had in any case realised that we were now about as far east as we were going to get in the time available, and any further progress would have to be north and then westward to the coast again, on rather faster roads, to complete the 700-mile loop out of the Andes – the journey overall being about 1500 miles in all.

But I can’t recount that here. I have to cut this short or I’ll be here all year… oh wait: I have been already. Such is the curse of the day job, which I am sure you will now be hoping I’ll stick to.

But in the days that followed if there was less in the way of climbing, offroading and hair-raising cliffhugging, there was no less incident. I got behind the wheel again, so of course the driving got better (…) My notes got worse if anything. There’s a lot more to tell in a separate blog, which I’ll share later elsewhere. If people are nice. It shall tell of exploding hotwater tanks, ancient ruins and getting caught in landslips. There may be mention of waterfalls, crooked cops, giant wasps, pelicans and bandits. And I lost my special stick.

Erica and Sandy are planning their final trip for the project (with an extra botanist as driver this time). Meanwhile, Erica and her team at the Museum are still going through the samples we took on our trip nine months later. Now I know what they’re doing over there I see it’s worth every penny. Their dedication and expertise impressed me endlessly.

If I had to take away one thing from the trip it would be that how astonishingly common it was for the scientists to identify new types of both plant and animal. As Erica says: “It’s so nice you get to experience this. Every time I look down a microscope of my foreign material I know that realistically, I have new species. Right now in my study I have new species. God it rocks!”

That’s under a trained eye: how often must inexperienced eyes come across new species without knowing it? It hammered home the fact that there must be species we haven’t even seen yet becoming extinct through human activity every day. The work of Sandy and Erica and others at the Museum is just a small part of the important work being done to prevent this.

I count myself fortunate indeed that I was invited to take part in this trip with such distinguished scientists for the world’s best natural history museum (and humbled that they entrusted me with their wellbeing on roads like those). Also, thanks to Erica for allowing me to hijack her blog for the best part of a year. But that’s quite enough from me. Sorry it took so long. But don’t blame me – I’m just the driver.