See you in September
July 30th, 2009TheWhere To Buy Viagra Online, No Prescription Pharmacy! blog is standing down for a month or two. With the Americas trip over, I’m taking care of immediate business (writing magazine features, editing, doing a fortnightly radio segment called “Off the Beaten Track” on New Zealand’s national radio program “Nine Till Noon”) until late September, when I plan to spend some time in the mangroves of Thailand and Indonesia. After that, I’ll be sequestering myself in front of a computer screen to write theWhere To Buy Viagra Online, No Prescription Pharmacy! book manuscript.
To keep alive travel memories of Latin America, I’ve taken to making pan de yuca (or pao de queijo, as it’s known in Brazil). These chewy, cheesy rolls are standard breakfast fare, but they’re also great with soups in winter — which is just as well, since it’s the middle of winter in NZ). They’re also incredibly easy to make. Here’s the recipe:
Pan de Yuca
2/3 cup (160ml) milk
1/3 cup (80ml) Canola or similar vegetable oil
2 cups (450g) tapioca flour
6 ounces (170 grams) of hard cheese (Cheddar, Parmesan)
2 eggs
salt and pepper to taste
1. Mix the milk and oil together into a pan, and boil until a white foam appears.
2. Gradually add flour to this hot mixture; mix well to form a firm ball with no lumps.
3. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.
4. Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C).
5. Mix in the eggs and the cheese (plus the salt and pepper) to the dough. The dough will become sticky and wet. If the dough is too wet, add more flour and cheese in order to make firmer balls.
6. Grease your hands, and form small balls 1 - 2 inch in diameter.
7. Place the balls on a greased baking tray or in mini-muffin tins
8. Cook for 15 - 20 minutes, until the top begins to brown.
Beleza!
Pan de yuca, a taste of Latin America.
Another snake mimic
July 5th, 2009Ron Rutowski, Professor of Biology at Arizona State University and a lepidopterist whose major area of study is how insects produce and use visual signals in their lives, has sent this link about the snake-mimicking spicebush swallowtail caterpillar. He notes: “Although the resemblance and its potential advantage appears obvious it has never been confirmed experimentally.”
Spicebush swallowtail larva looks more like something from Disney than nature.
Pelliciera comparison and Belize alert
July 5th, 2009Having just learned how to put PowerPoint presentations on the blog, I am providing two such slide shows created by Candy Feller. The first concerns Pelliciera rhizophorae mangroves, and the second sounds the alarm re the impact of development on mangroves in Belize.
Wetland or wasteland?
June 28th, 2009As arranged, Karl, Rosabel and I show up at the camp by the river at Juan Diaz at seven. High tide is heaving the flotsam of trash in slow rhythmic waves. The Bay of Panama should be called the Bay of Garbage. It floats down the rivers and the tide distributes it along the beaches and up into the mangroves. We walk through it up to our knees to get to the canoe, a stumpy dugout that looks in danger of capsizing even before we get in, let alone once we start across the channel.
KENNEDY WARNE
Wetland or wasteland?
Viĵil paddles us to the opposite shore, where we set out to find the old crab collector. We follow a trail under the roosting trees of pelicans, cormorants, frigate birds and vultures. The undergrowth is so spattered with guano it looks like someone with a paint gun has run amok. The stench of ammonia is intense. Pelicans hoist themselves off the swaying branches and wing across the bay, rising and falling against the distant skyscrapers of downtown Panama.
We slosh through the mud, the mangrove breathing roots and the trash. We are at least a hundred metres from the shore now, but light bulbs, soft drink bottles and flip-flops lie in drifts amongst the trees. On a patch of higher ground I am surprised to find cactuses growing among the mangrove roots.
KENNEDY WARNE
Pelicans, mangroves and the highrises of Panama City.
Antonio finds a path that winds through tall canal grass—an introduced species that looks like ordinary grass on steroids, growing head-high on thick stalks—and we reach the crabber’s hut. Embers are smouldering under a cooking pot, but the crabber is nowhere to be seen. Viĵil and Antonio whistle and call, but there is no response. They conclude that he has gone off hunting.
It isn’t possible to wait for his return. So quickly does the tide fall on the Pacific coast that we would be stuck here until evening. Even on the way back to the canoe the sea has retreated by hundreds of metres, leaving a brown silt soup below the wrack line.
KENNEDY WARNE
Viĵil, Rosabel and Karl negotiate the mangrove trash-heap.
And so ends my visit to the mangroves of Panama and my journey among the mangroves of the Americas. Seven weeks, six countries, dozens of communities visited, hundreds of people met. It seems appropriate to be finishing up in a mangrove forest that is both a cornucopia and a rubbish heap. Juan Diaz epitomises the mangrove problem: treasured by the few, trashed by the many.
I don’t see much hope for the rainforests of the sea until their true value gains wider recognition. I don’t mean just a price per hectare, but their intrinsic worth. Karl Kaufmann mentioned something that has stuck with me: the need for a new narrative about land use. It is no longer legitimate, he said, for us to think of land as private, discrete assets. “From the point of view of the earth, my plot of land isn’t separate from everyone else’s. We all have a stake in what’s left.” This is a big topic of discussion, one I have I only started to get my head around. Smarter minds than mine have written about the need for a transition from an environmental metaphor of infinite wilderness, inexhaustible and impervious to human desecration, to one of the “house of nature,” finite and vulnerable, which each resident shares with everyone else.
KENNEDY WARNE
An unusual sight: cacti among the mangrove pneumatophores.
As I see it, my task withWhere To Buy Viagra Online, No Prescription Pharmacy! is to help establish and promote the intrinsic worth of mangroves, and to make connections between one resident in the house (eg the consumer of unsustainably farmed shrimp) and another (eg the cockle collector who relies on healthy mangrove stands). A shared sense of values surely leads to a shared desire to preserve. Or as Jacques Cousteau once put it: people protect what they love.
Beside the canal
June 27th, 2009With the afternoon high tide lapping at our ankles, Rosabel’s husband Karl Kaufmann and I are poking around in a patch of mangroves in a suburb of Panama City called Diablo. It’s in the former Canal Zone, a corridor of land that extended five miles on either side of the Panama Canal and was controlled by the US until 1979. It’s a leafy neighbourhood of spacious weatherboard duplex houses that were characteristic of the zone—an entity that ended in 1999 when the canal passed to Panamanian control.
KENNEDY WARNE
Panama's cash cow: the canal.
Karl, who has lived in Panama for 30 years and works as data manager at the Smithsonian lab, tells an amusing story about the city being unhappy with the name Diablo and changing it to Altos de Jesus, “Jesus Heights.” But the residents objected, and signs with the new name kept disappearing, until eventually the name change was given up as a lost cause. (So it is now accurate to say that the Panama Canal lies between the devil and the deep blue sea.)
We’re in an area of boatyards, boatsheds and rickety wharves. Karl remembers seeing Pelliciera here in the past, and, sure enough, as soon as we start looking we spot the distinctive pointy leaves and star-shaped flowers. Here on the Pacific coast, the flowers of Pelliciera are much pinker than they are on the Atlantic. Candy Feller wonders if they are distinct species.
KENNEDY WARNE
A fly discovers the nectar riches of an unopened Pelliciera flower in Diablo.
There’s something special about finding a treasure like Pelliciera in a neglected backwater in a place called Diablo. It’s partly why I became interested in mangroves in the first place. They’re maligned, they’re marginalised, they’re considered uncharismatic. Documentary makers aren’t beating a path to the mangroves. Their eyes are on terrestrial rainforests and coral reefs. I’ve got nothing against those habitats, but they’ve become ecological celebrities. Mangroves are underdogs. I like the idea of showing what they’re made of.
I turn to see a container ship slipping past, leaving the canal. The canal is being expanded at the moment, with the predictable attendant loss of mangrove forest. Karl asks me a question: Is there anywhere I’ve been on this journey where mangroves are held in high esteem by a majority of people? I can’t think of any.
In the evening Karl and Rosabel take me to the visitor centre at Miraflores Locks, where we watch the electrified “mules”—vehicles on rails on each side of the locks—towing ships through the canal. “The next TV you buy may have spent some time on an old mangrove site,” he says. “Panama grew up on the edge of mangroves, but today’s city is turning its back on them in favour of golf courses and recreational areas.”
KENNEDY WARNE
A five-billion-dollar expansion will give the canal two new flights of locks and allow larger ships to pass through.
The mangrove outlook isn’t all bad. Along with the recent protection of coastal land along the Bay of Panama, resolutions have been passed that attempt to put a price on mangrove loss. Where mangrove removal is deemed a “public necessity” the land is valued at $20,000/ha. If part of a commercial project the price goes up to $150,000/ha. If mangroves are removed illegally, the fine is $300,000/ha.
Karl sees a problem with this approach. “If you put a dollar value on mangroves it’s an incentive to sell. You’re taking a public asset—the goods and services that mangroves have provided for hundreds of years—and putting it up for grabs in a one-time sale. And it isn’t even the people who get reimbursed for the loss of the asset, it’s the government.”
The correct approach, Karl thinks, is that for every hectare of mangroves taken, a hectare should be replanted. That way the public good is perpetuated for future generations.
KENNEDY WARNE
Canalside mangroves of Diablo.
Rosabel and her colleagues are working to develop a conservation strategy for the Bay of Panama protected area, which they hope will be incorporated into the management plan. They expect battles ahead. Nearly half a million hectares of land near the protected area is under consideration for mining, and a further 40,000 ha just offshore is subject to applications for the extraction of rock and sand. The protected area is going to need sharp legal teeth to fend off developers. It will be interesting to see how the city balances its commitments.
A city and its mangroves
June 27th, 2009How does a city live with its mangroves? How does it accommodate growth without irreparably damaging its natural assets? Or is that an impossibility? These are questions I am trying to address while in Panama.
KENNEDY WARNE
Panama's dilemma: burgeoning city, declining mangroves, and a mountain of trash.
Today Rosabel Miró wants to show me a new area of coastal development, at a place called Juan Diaz, on the eastern fringe of the city. To get there we drive past the crumbling rock walls of Panama Viejo, Old Panama, sacked by the pirate Henry Morgan in 1671. Then through the upscale residential area of Costa del Este, then past a sign announcing “Santa Maria Golf and Country Club” to the development site itself, where bulldozers are at work.
Rosabel has shown me a newspaper article with an aerial photograph of the site. It shows a dramatic juxtaposition of intact mangrove forest, a recent residential development and a great scar of development in progress.
CAVU
The city's advance is the mangroves' retreat.
She is concerned about this new development because it is within an area that was declared a protected area in February of this year, and because the continued nibbling away of mangroves poses a threat to shorebirds. As director of the Panama Audubon Society, she has a vital interest in the welfare of those birds.
“The Bay of Panama is the most important stopover for migratory shorebirds in Central America,” she told me. Two million shorebirds of more than 30 species, including plovers, sandpipers and whimbrels, use the area. One reason they stop here are the huge tides on the Pacific coast—up to seven metres difference between high and low. When the tide goes out it exposes up to 70 km of mudflat—a huge open-air buffet.
KARL KAUFMANN
Two million shorebirds use the mudflats of the Bay of Panama as a migratory stopover.
Mangroves are important to shorebird ecology not just because of biological interactions between mudflat and mangrove forest but also as safe roosting areas at high tide and a security buffer between the birds and urban areas inland.
After looking at the site we drive to the end of the road, where a cluster of ramshackle huts stands on a scrap of land between the mangroves and a sheetmetal works that is turning out sections of tailrace tunnel for a hydroelectric project.
We brush past banana palms and papaya trees and introduce ourselves to Antonio, Magdalena, Lisbeth and Viĵil. They’ve drifted together, along with a few others, by happenstance and word of mouth. They have fashioned a simple, if not entirely idyllic, existence on the shores of the bay, drawing from land and sea for their sustenance. The fact that they wake in the morning to the sound of arc welders and angle grinders is a small price to pay for a life close to nature.
KENNEDY WARNE
Magdalena with pumpkin.
We swing in hammocks in the shade of an almond tree and they talk about their life here. A crocodile tried to eat one of their dogs so they shot it and dined on crocodile for a good while after that. They grow vegetables in what looks like pretty fertile soil. Magdalena shows off a huge pumpkin which will be used as crab bait in the ingenious spring-door traps they set out at low tide.
Rosabel is enjoying herself, singing to a parakeet that is perched on her finger. She grew up with parakeets—“they were all called Juanito or Juanita”—and she and the neighbouring kids used to go adventuring in the mangroves next door to the house. So she has a warm feeling for this little band of outcasts living their Swiss Family Robinson life. (When I offer the bird my finger as a perch, it pecks me with a grip that could crack a macadamia.)
KENNEDY WARNE
Rosabel Miró with friend in Juan Diaz.
Like all subsistence communities, they know the bounty that each season brings. November is when the iguanas come, for instance—“cooking time,” Viĵil says with a grin. Antonio walks a few steps into the mangroves and uses a table knife to show how he digs up shellfish from around the trunks of the trees. It isn’t the mangrove cockle, but a much smaller bivalve that lives in sandy conditions. It looks like you would need a lot of them for a meal.
Mounds of empty soft drink and beer cans are scattered through the camp. When the scrap metal merchant comes they’ll get a few dollars for the aluminium. Lisbeth, an older woman, says she collects parakeet chicks in the mangroves during the breeding season, raises them to fledging size and sells them in the city, three dollars each.
KENNEDY WARNE
Antonio with mangrove molluscs.
They tell us there’s an old crab collector living alone, deep in the mangroves on other side of the river, and offer to take us to meet him at high tide the next morning. It’s a deal, we say. We’ll show up with breakfast and they’ll paddle us across the river to meet him.
Before we leave I ask if anyone from the new development has visited them, perhaps to tell them they’ll have to leave. They say no, and clearly hope that it stays that way. I hope for their sakes it does.
Green charcoal in Chame
June 26th, 2009White smoke swirls around a man who is shoveling soil onto a perfect conical mound. He shovels and then pats down the black peat, working his way round the mound. The wind changes and blots him from view for a few moments, then he reappears, still shoveling and patting.
KENNEDY WARNE
Carbonero attends a smouldering charcoal mound.
He is a carbonero, a charcoal maker, and he is sealing up the ventilation holes in an earth kiln, lit just hours ago. The mound will smoulder for six days, and when it is opened the chunks of mangrove timber inside will have been transformed into charcoal.
The work is happening near a town called Chame, 50 km south-west of Panama City. In this region many rivers spill into the Pacific and the coast is thick with mangroves. The majority of people here depend on mangroves. They earn a living by cutting mangrove poles for construction or converting the timber into charcoal, and they sustain themselves by fishing and collecting shellfish from the mangrove forests.
KENNEDY WARNE
Stack of mangrove wood prior to being covered with grass, then earth and converted to charcoal.
In 2004, Panama’s environmental authority (ANAM) became concerned about pressure on the mangrove resource. Three hundred families in the region were found to depend on mangroves for their livelihood. At least 100 charcoal kilns were in operation, each consuming 15 to 20 mangrove trees per month. Pole cutters were taking 100 trees per month.
“The forest could not support so many people cutting so much,” ANAM’s José Berdiales told me.
With financial backing from the International Tropical Timber Organisation, ANAM began a project to manage and conserve 4000 ha of mangroves in the Chame region. Some areas were placed off limits to cutting, some were slated for replanting, and some were to be used in agroforestry.
KENNEDY WARNE
Once the mound is alight, the ventilation ports at the bottom are sealed off.
Now, five years later, the project is in full swing. Near the charcoal mounds, I saw a small nursery of young mangrove seedlings. Reforestation began in 2005, and the resulting stands are already more than two metres tall.
Many of the initiatives have been implemented by Juliana Chavarria, a young ANAM staff member who explained some of the challenges to me.
“Some of the people weren’t happy to have any restrictions placed upon them,” she said. “They believe the mangroves will never end.” Juliana realized she needed to find ways to create a win-win outcome for the communities and their forests. For communities, the “win” that would have the biggest impact was more money in the pocket.
KENNEDY WARNE
Juliana Chavarria with mangrove nursery.
One pilot scheme that has shown great promise has been the production and marketing of “eco-charcoal.” Ordinary charcoal sells for a pittance. Carboneros get $2 for a 35 lb sack from a distributor who on-sells the product to restaurants and other users in Panama City. Juliana negotiated with a supermarket chain and found that the same sack of charcoal would sell for $13 if it were repackaged in 8 lb lots. “Everyone benefits,” Juliana said. The carboneros get more money, the supermarket stocks a quality product and the consumer has the satisfaction of supporting a sustainable harvest.
The new product, developed with just one of the Chame communities, is about to be launched, and if successful will be rolled out to four other communities in the area.
The Chame project is Panama’s first mangrove conservation effort. But mangrove protection is by no means the norm in Panama, as the next few days would show.
KENNEDY WARNE
Mangrove crab sellers on the road to Chame.
More on the snake caterpillar
June 26th, 2009Annette Aiello, an entomologist with the Smithsonian, has provided me with the following excellent information concerning the caterpillar we found in the Pelliciera forest of Peninsula Valiente (see June 22 post).
KENNEDY WARNE
The art of deceiving.
“My guess is that your spectacular caterpillar belongs to the moth family Sphingidae, the sphinx moths, which include the well-known ‘tomato horn worm.’ Several sphingid genera are snake mimics, and in most of the cases I’ve seen so far, it is the ventral surface of the body that is displayed to resemble a snake. You can see that in the attached photograph of a species of Hemeroplanes. The head, mostly hidden, forms the blunt nose of the snake, then behind that you see the ventral surface of the thorax with its three pairs of true legs folded against the body, and the large, dark, false eyes (that can be opened and closed with blood pressure) on the sides of the third thoracic segment.
Pholus labruscae
“Continuing back, you see the first three pairs of false legs (prologs), which are the large black structures on the ventral surface of the abdomen. The larva is holding on to the substrate with its fourth pair of prologs. In contrast, your caterpillar presents its dorsal surface during the display. The only record I can find of a similar caterpillar is Pholus labruscae, shown figure d, plate xiii of Miles Moss (1912) publication “On the Sphingidae of Peru,” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 20(2): 73-134. Moss describes the final stage larva as ‘Remarkably snake-like, either end appearing as the head of a snake.’ He reports that the caterpillar eats members of the grape family (Vitaceae).”
John Christy, a fiddler crab expert I met in Panama (more about his work in a later post), adds the following comment:
“Kennedy – that is an amazing (!!) caterpillar, complete with liverwort-like patterning. It would seem to be highly specialized. You may well have something new. I wonder if the pattern mimics a particular snake? A quick google search produced Liophis cobellus as a “mangrove snake” of South America. It is a colubrid and looks vaguely like the caterpillar.”
Here’s a picture of the snake John referred to. Though not restricted to mangroves, it frequents mangrove forests, feeding on frogs, geckos and fish.
Snake in the grass
June 25th, 2009For a lot of people, spotting a green vine snake on the road, looking for all the world like a length of discarded ribbon, wouldn’t be a big deal. But when you come from a country without snakes, it’s a “Stop the car!” moment.
KENNEDY WARNE
Well camouflaged green vine snake.
I was on my way to a town called Chame, about two hours south-west of Panama City, to see a community project which aims to improve livelihoods and preserve mangroves—the kind of win-win scenario that all mangrove-rich developing countries should be seeking.
With me were Rosabel Miro, director of the Panama Audubon Society, and two people from ANAM, the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente or national environmental authority, who were running the project. We had just driven to the top of a hill with a panoramic overlook of the Chame mangroves. Or at least it would have been panoramic if low cloud hadn’t blocked much of the view.
I had missed seeing the snake on the way up (looking out the wrong window, as usual) but in between us going up and coming back down the obliging reptile returned to the warmth of the asphalt. And then it paused in the roadside grass to which it retreated, allowing me a shot of its elegant head.
Two other photo ops during the Chame journey:
1. A group of environmental volunteers holding banners and giving out posters and pamphlets on the Pan-American highway.
2. Stopping for cheese-filled empanadas and chicheme, a refreshing cold drink which is basically corn kernels floating in sweet, thickened milk.
KENNEDY WARNE
Environmental campaigners on the Pan-American highway.
KENNEDY WARNE
'Let's live with the forest' is the banner message.
KENNEDY WARNE
Empanada and chicheme, an excellent mid-morning snack.
Ecologist at large
June 23rd, 2009When I was at university, involved in the cutting-edge discipline of sponge classification, I regarded ecology as “soft” science, suited to those who lacked the intellectual molars to chew more demanding meat. Ecologists, I liked to think, were the ones Mark Twain had in mind when he wrote, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
KENNEDY WARNE
Candy Feller and team exploring a new river.
Now I think differently. Ecology is about getting the big picture. And today, with the extinction rate in overdrive and ecosystems in crisis, how sorely humankind needs that perspective. Candy Feller’s CV calls her an insect ecologist, but this really means she’s interested in everything that has to do with an insect’s world of interactions, which is a wide world indeed. Tracking those interactions may entail analysing the sugar content of flower nectar or making aerial surveys of mangrove deforestation as much as it involves slicing open twigs to see what’s living inside.
Candy is part of an ecological subdiscipline called biocomplexity, the study of the mechanisms—physical, chemical, biological—that determine ecosystem structure and function. She came to mangrove ecology in an unusual way. She was a scientific illustrator, and was assigned to draw the underwater component of a mangrove ecosystem. Actually to draw under water, using waterproof materials and a scuba tank.
KENNEDY WARNE
Pelliciera reflections.
She found she liked mangroves. They reminded her of the rhododendron forests of her youth—the feeling of being enclosed and embraced by nature. These days Candy lives in Maryland, but at heart she’s a Carolina gal. I asked her what her favourite southern comfort food was. “Squirrel,” she said, without missing a beat. When she was little she and her brothers used to go out and shoot squirrels for breakfast. It was pretty much a no-brainer to find out she liked bluegrass music as much as I do. We swapped stories—I’d backed Emmylou Harris on a New Zealand TV show; she’d met Gid Tanner of the legendary Skillet Lickers. Then she opened up the iTunes playlist on her laptop and we spent an hour getting high and lonesome on four-part harmony.
KENNEDY WARNE
Candy and Anne Chamberlain team up to trap tree crabs lurking in liverworts.
When she retires she says she’s going to work on a plant called Jack-in-the-pulpit, which was found recently to be pollinated by thrips. She finds that an interesting interaction—thrips are normally thought of as pests, not beneficial pollinators. “I don’t want to publish, just to know,” she says. “I like the idea of pushing my walking frame into the garden and studying wildflowers.”
Watching Candy in the field, I’m pretty sure the walking frame is a long way in the future. By midday I’m wilting in the heat, with Noel Coward’s lyrics about mad dogs and Englishmen running through my head, but Candy, mud-spattered and sweating, presses ahead with the work. She doesn’t miss much, either. Today she found a fish I had been hoping to see: the mangrove killifish, or Rivulus. It was swimming in a shallow puddle in the Pelliciera forest, darting down fiddler crab burrows when it was disturbed.
KENNEDY WARNE
We bought the sweetest pineapples I've ever tasted from these paddlers passing our research site.
Rivulus is the only known vertebrate capable of breeding without a mate. It can develop male and female sex organs and fertilise its own eggs. What’s more, it can breathe air through its skin, like a frog, and one specimen spent 66 consecutive days out of water, living in a hole in a tree. The fish’s ability to survive out of water comes in handy for Rivulus researchers, Candy said—they swap live specimens through the post.
When the field work was over for the day we explored a new river system. We passed groves of Pelliciera where the buttress roots and their reflections produced rows of diamonds at the waterline. Candy stood in the bow of the boat, surveying the forest, enthusing about the epiphytic orchids, wondering out loud why the Pelliciera on this coast seem to reach a certain height and then stop growing. The birders in the group had eyes only for trogons, toucans and other avian exotica, but I suspected that Candy’s mind was on the mangroves, pondering how they fit into the complex ecological pattern she is helping define.
KENNEDY WARNE
When the collecting finishes, the analysing begins.
I came across a statement from the late great US writer John Updike. His goal as a writer, he said, was “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” It seems to me that this is what Candy Feller is doing for mangroves, and I admire her for it.