Scientist at Work Blog: Waiting for the Dark

Mary E. Blair is a postdoctoral researcher in the American Museum of Natural History?s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, where she coordinates the Enhancing Diversity in Conservation Science Initiative.

March 18, 2013

At night, we all see things very differently. Our senses shift: Sounds are louder and things that you easily see during the day close in on you. Have you ever driven at night in a secluded, rural area without streetlights? It can feel as if you were driving in a tunnel. You are only aware of the road right in front of you, illuminated by the headlights, and the rest feels like a deep dark ocean of the unknown. Now, picture walking in the dark in a Vietnamese forest where you can see only the tiny area right in front of your feet, illuminated by a flashlight or a headlamp.?The forest feels as if it were closing in on you from above, behind, to the left and to the right. Imagine trying to do your work in this dark world.

Granted, I survey wildlife for a living, but this is my first time doing that work at night. I have a lot of experience surveying during the day, and I love to look for frogs and snakes at night for fun. But it is very different when you?re trying to collect data at night. I really took it for granted that the species I studied for my dissertation, the Central American squirrel monkey (Saimiri oerstedii), was a day-walker just like me. Now, the idea of being on the same sleep cycle as my study species seems like such a luxury. But I could not be happier so far on this trip.

The slow loris finders include, from left: Dao Van Cau, Nguyen Van Thanh, Minh Le, Eleanor Sterling, Mary Blair, Duong Thuy Ha, Chien, Truong, Huan, Lam and Thach Mai Hoang.

We have arrived at the site of our first five-day survey for pygmy and Bengal slow lorises: Na Hang Nature Reserve in Tuyen Quang Province in northern Vietnam. It took us two days just to get here. First, we had an eight-hour drive from Hanoi to Na Hang Village, broken up by a quick breakfast stop ? pho, the soupy staple of Vietnam ? and then a coffee break in Tuyen Quang City, the provincial capital.

We arrived in Na Hang to spend the night. In the morning we bought food for ourselves and for the forest rangers we would meet inside Na Hang Nature Reserve. Then we trekked to the dock to take a boat about 45 minutes up a river. From there, we hiked about an hour up a very steep slope to the ranger station to set up camp. Luckily, the rangers used their motorcycles to haul our supplies.

Na Hang Nature Reserve is a good first location. Our consultant and survey coordinator, Hoang Thach Mai, has been working here for several years studying snub-nosed monkeys, and he knows the rangers quite well. Using their expertise, we are able to design trails to survey several different habitats so that we can better understand where slow lorises are found in this region. We will survey mixed bamboo and limestone forest, regenerating secondary forest, magnolia plantations and secondary forest, among others.

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We have spent our first couple of days (or, should I say, nights) survey training. We have two graduate students with us, Duong Thuy Ha and Nguyen Van Thanh from Vietnam National University in Hanoi. It?s their first fieldwork experience, but they are learning quickly and are already keeping the right pace (a slow and steady quarter-mile per hour) as we navigate the dark trails at night.

For our night surveys, we are following in the carefully placed footsteps of the few other intrepid loris explorers in the world. We are a small, close-knit community, in part because night work can be so challenging and very few researchers are willing to do the double duty of marking trails all day and then forgoing sleep at night to survey.

In our surveys, teams of three to four people spaced about 30 feet apart slowly traverse our marked trails for a few hours beginning at dusk. We scan all levels of vegetation using headlamps with red filters to detect lorises? bright orange eyeshine. When we spot a loris, one of us shines a halogen spotlight on the animal to get a really good look at it, confirm the species and, with luck, take a photograph. The photographs are extremely important because loris facial markings, such as stripes or patches of dark colors on the face, are a key way to describe species-level variation. I will discuss in a later post why we think there may be more species of slow loris than have been described so far ? and how we hope to use facial markings as well as genetic information from droppings, hair and museum specimens to examine that hypothesis.

So far, our surveys and training sessions have gone pretty well. We saw a slow loris on our first night. Unfortunately, we were not ready for such quick success. By the time I swung my camera to focus on the loris frozen in the headlight, it had already run away. But we?re getting better, and the next set of wide, bright eyes won?t sneak away without capture. We are pretty sure it was a juvenile Bengal slow loris (Nycticebus bengalensis). This is the edge of the range for the Bengal and pygmy slow lorises, and so we were not sure how many we would see. Even seeing just one at this point is very exciting and has given us hope that we will find more.

As I write, I sit next to a solar panel I brought to charge my camera. We hope to get some great shots of the animals we find in the next few days before we head back to Hanoi to prepare for our next two survey sites. But it?s time to sign off. There are some water buffalo nearby, and I don?t want them to trample me, or my panel!

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/waiting-for-the-dark/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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