Or there’s the other way. I’m going to tell you…

Two days ago, that was my birthday. Like every year, I realise it when that day comes (and I tell you, it comes every year). This year, I have my birthday in Amazonia, and given the time lag I was also awake at the very hour I was born.

Since this is a special place and a special day, and since I prefer making gifts than receiving them, I decided I would offer a mango* orgy to my hosts and friends. Indeed, I know of a bunch of trees after a short trail and lost fields in the jungle about 25 kms from home. These trees are producing mangos right now and the ground is covered with fruits. Nobody seems to take them. Indeed, the place is close to Belterra, a charming small city already full of mango trees, enough mangos for everybody. I like those in the jungle because they’re clean, compared to those in the street, and you can really choose the maturity level of the fruit. Plus they are “pink” mangos, which are always good… :)

So this is setting the day. I would take the bike up to Belterra, and as a friend told me, I should try the “other” road, aiming first to São Raimundo and keeping up to Belterra (alternately, you can go to Porto Novo and Pindobal, and turn left to Belterra). Aiming for novelty and a new face of the forest, this was my road of the day. Of course, you might think 25 kms is no big deal, and of course, it is mostly not. Except on sandy roads, especially since the latest rain was a few days earlier. This makes bicycle somewhat less efficient but I had the whole day off, sort of. I did go.

The road was neat, wheather was uncertain as it is supposedly the rain season, and if you don’t take risks, you may end up doing nothing.

To Belterra via Sao Raimundo (do Para)

Until this road crossing. Rarily enough there’s a sign telling me where to go. Straight is a field station, possibly an ecological reserve under study, left is for Belterra. I turned left.

At the cross road

But hey, that was supposedly a second level road (expect 4 meters broad), but it turned out more as a trail than as the road I was expecting. Not bad, because lots of butterflies are to be seen along such trails.

Hum, methink it's more of a trail...

Except that I’ve seen this on the sand. Fresh tracks of something that seems big.

Hum, interesting tracks... :)

Note that would I be a zoologist, I would have kept cool. Because I would have remembered only Cheetahs don’t have non-retractable claws, and there’s no Cheetah here in Amazonia. I vaguely remembered one felid species could not retract claws, and this might well be the Jaguar (it is not, but I couldn’t check on internet in the jungle :). And of course, beasty factlets I learned as a kid have been replaced by plant science. Not that useful in this situation. Oh my, couldn’t remember! Imagine the atmosphere. Nobody around except me. Possibly a big cat around too. And what’s more, the jungle was silent. This is always a bad thing when the forest isn’t speaking out loud. Most of the time, it means that you, the intruder, is under prospect. Birds are waiting to see if you’re a threat or just kidding. You don’t need a strange mind to think that in this case, they might be silent because the threat is the other one. Everything is so quiet… I followed the trail. And guess what? When I eventually comes to something like this, I called it civilization! :)

Civilization is a decently sized road! :)

Which it is. Not far away (say, 10 kms, I should be close to Belterra now), I had to deal with domestic animals. Zebus are fine, but still, I’m not a cow boy, and I wondered what plain males could be thinking when females and calves are involved, and are just grazing on the road. Apparently, it didn’t think much. Even if the bike was squeaking like hell. (Hey! the bike was squeaking, not my knees!). So much for the pig. Muddy road, peaceful pig.

Mooooooh!

Mud is all! Mud is aaall!

Eventually, a hunter told me I was 3 kms away from the town, so I was about 7 kms away from my beloved mangos.

It was time for a break, and there was a trail between jungle and old field recovering slowly into forest. The kind of place I like because you can see many species of insects, birds, and plants flowering around. I hide the bike in the corner (that’s just because I kept the weird kind of thoughts that somebody will come and say “oh, here’s a bike, I’m gonna take it home”, ya know, just like in western cities where I grew up). Civilised craziness.

I enjoyed the walk much. Just to share a bit, there were lots of insects. Just have a look at the following locust. Cool, isn’t it?

Focus on the locust

But the main issue with going jungled with a camera is the kind of slo-mo you eventually end up with. If you want a good picture, you walk slowly. Light feet. Birds don’t know you’re in here. Other animals neither, to the exception of sweat greedy flies or blood sucking mosquitos. You’re part of the party. Nature at its plainest and wildest. Time to enjoy. First wild stick insect! (And it’s been a while I’m trying to find one, despite plenty of species are described from the region…). A wonderful adult male flying around.

Don't stick on stick insects too much!

But then, slo-mo has its inconvenience. One of them is that I stepped next to a mygala nest. Okay, I’m still paying attention, looking around and enjoy carefully.

This is no silk scarp. Almost.

But eventually, I stepped on a resting snake. Saw the wide open mouth, almost heared it crying “who’s freaking disturbing me when I sleep?”. Did not think twice, not even once, just begun running fast. A dozen meters away, walked back. Wondered about this strange drum noise out and realised it was just heart beats as it sounded in my ear. Got my mind back. Breathed slowly. I did not go back to get a picture, but quite likely (given the memory of colours and shape fresh in mind), it was one species in this Genus, most probably Bothrops atrox (okay, that’s also because I like its cool name!).

Got back to bike. Got to my sweet mango trees. Got the following 30 kms (this is a loop via Pindobal, that’s why the way was longer on the way back) with about 20 kgs of fruits in the backpack.

And guess what I had for dinner?

Chickens!

This is how you get chickens in the Amazonian rainforest.

* I know you know what is a mango, but the wikipedia page is really interesting, even to learned naturalists like you. May even be worth a few blog posts… :)

Here is what I found a few days ago. Got striked by the brown body growing out of this plant. Asked myself twice, weird, it really looks like the plant was parasitised by a big fungus. I admit I may have been influenced by other cases of parasitism I’ve observed a few weeks ago.

What's that?

Of course, the location should have oriented the diagnostic: this thing is growing at a place where regular pieces of plants grow, a typical bud location. Yep. But then, a parasite would divert existing structure into their own plans for multiplication. Nothing extraordinary. But I had never seen something like such a fruiting fungus body doing that. Okay, but I’m at place many things weird happen, biologically speaking, right?

Sure. But I was rather optimistic. Or just wrong. The plant hundred meters next proved me I should not interpret too many things as weird. This can be just a regular way of life.

And these?

I guess you see where this is going to end… :-)

Flowers. Heavily compacted flowers (note the stamen length, it is rather impressive).

Hum, basically, an inflorescence.

-This is the vertical garden from Quai Branly, and the wall builds up onto the Museum building- It is really fantastic…

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Amazing diversity, isn’t it? Wonder how it will evolve over time. See you there in ten years! :)

I’m still trying to figure out what can be done to leave free lunch reprints for other scientists to pick up if they need to. Maintaining a personnal website may be time-consumming. I did something in a pre- web 2.0 era but eventually got swamped by all the other things in life.

So this is an opportunity, except that you still can’t really leave out reprints for people to take home. (I tried with academia.edu, which is working fine in this regard, except that now you need to have an account to download papers of others). (Did I mention it is there?).

I remember first that academia.edu was at a time only open to those who had an official affiliation, and I was of course an independent scholar when I first discovered the site (I have’nt yet spent as much time as an independent scholar as as an official scientist but who knows?). Now google scholar accounts make exactly the same thing: your page can’t be searchable in the scholar database if you don’t have an official affiliation. Thanks for us independent scholars, guys*! We are looking for a job before fame but we’re not acknowledged as regular scholars ?!? Grrr!

Anyway, my page is here. And if you’re looking for a post-doc for your lab, feel free to email me! :-) (I’m ready to go worldwide, maybe even in Alaska!).

PS: wordpress is funny. It is recommanding some strange tags for this post: “debt consolidation”. No thanks!  :-)

* Assuming they are guys. Any woman would have figured out that not everybody has a place in Academia, wouldn’t she?

May Seeds Aside reappear* on a regular basis… :-)

A butterfly on cashew tree. (That's for an happy new year!).

* I don’t know if that’s the correct orthograph, but I damn like it!

Subadult nymph of an Amazonian cricket living currently (a few days ago) near the Lago do Jacunda, Tapajos, Brasil. Me dunno the species of course. *

Even in the wilds of the deepest Amazonian jungle, photographers still make decisions about when to trigger the shutter and what to include in or exclude from the frame. These decisions are as much a lens into the imagination of the photographer as they are a recording device for the subject, and the difference in artificiality between farmed animal photos and wild photos are more in degree than in kind.

Kindly said. But maybe this is somewhat truer when it coes to what people think when they think about wildlife. Slightly biased… This is an animal (not a plant), with a spine (not an exosqueletton, we are the 99% –Oops, needs an upadte!), furry or featherous, etc. Admittedly, many pictures of tropical insects are fake somewhat. I know what it is: cheaper to breed your pet than look for it in the jungle (though that works too, but not as well as rearing these critters yourself). But for plants!

Anyway, the post is actually very interesting and unfortunately true.

*Of course, the setting is natural. And indeed, the same picture could have been taken in a greenhouse with palms that nobody would notice. Huh ho!

Just kidding.

I took time to lurk a bit, and found about books. You may have good reviews first, or even open books themselves:

The debunking handbook. Take a look and cook a tale.

Panama Trees guide. Gosh, is there the same for in here? I don’t know any of them (okay, I actually know a few, two fews, too few).

Climate change, the effects on health.

I myself just finished reading a book from Daniel Chavarria, which doesn’t even seem to have an English translation. I heard about this book about ten years ago, and was strongly recommanded reading it. The French title translate as “A tea in Amazonia” and guess what? I found it a month ago in a second hand book market. The whole plot basically begins here, on the Tapajos. Amazing coincident, wouldn’t it? Not a bad book indeed. A plot theory that would find echoes in the current worldwide political situation. Maybe that if you can’t find an English translation, this would be because there’s some truth in it, would it? Just kidding once again, I don’t believe in Tap tea. Not until I find a tree… :-)

When I eventually realised being a biologist is different from having an academic position, or a position in society at all, and since part of my family in law is here and there for some time now, I decided I better have to go. Some grow up, some go in.

After the fold, a few pix to describe a more precise area, since Amazonia exist only on a map, and we should probably better pluralise the place to better reflect changes in substance occuring between natural areas. But here it is.

First I crossed French Guyana after a staying a few days and give a talk, and have a look at the forest of course (it is completely different from Amazon, and at least near the frontier, much more primary). That’s not quite long, only a height hours drive from Cayenne to Saint George, but the road is much like what we get in French Brittany, turning and turning and returning, up and down, and not very large. This is forest almost all along.

Crossing the Oyapock, the natural frontier between French Guyana and Brasil

A very interesting step is crossing the frontier between France and Brasil. That’s just a river to go, and many people will offer you to. Made me think as to what borders are, in essence. Historically, in many places borders are natural frontiers (rivers, mountains) that would be difficult for a whole army to cross. Amazingly, such natural borders are actually nowadays fairly easy to cross (and in this regard, quite difficult to control, as seems to be the rule in this area where golden forests are unfortunately growing on lands filled with a few actual gold stones and thus represent survival open resources to too many poor people).

Oiapoque city

The river crossed and you’re now in Brasil. You’ve to yourself get your stamp on the passport. Some day in a near future, the frontier will even be crossed by driving or walking through the new bridge. No doubt there will be a lot of economic activity around next.

Bridge Oiapoque/Saint George

Then I reached another port, on the Amazon this time. Macapa. Night Bus. But as the night took over the day, I was really surprised to see how the land was much more occupied in Brasil than in Guyana, way more villages, meadows populated with Cecropias, and secondary forests taking land back. The change is sensible.

Macapa port

Macapa to Santarem. A boat trip on the amazing Amazon. Pictures speak for themselves. There will be more about there soon… :-)

Amazon banks (paying with biodiversity)

Dense green wall

The long boat trip (about two days despite an impressive speed) revealed something interesting. The region is both wild and at places frequently inhabited… Rarely would you wait long before you see some house. Sometimes  you would wait a few dozen kilometers. But the western part of the Amazon is of course the wilder jungle place…

This picture needs a caption

Guess the water level in Spring?

Deforestation by fire

Now I left the Amazon river to step on the Tapajos, near Santarem. I’ll post pictures, but guess what, I have few time to spend before a computer when there’s so much to see up there… :-)

Tapajos shores

Not the least idea about the species name, but maybe some reader does?