Discovery Day

Saturday was a big day here at Mpala: Discovery Day.  Everyone is welcome to come, and this usually includes researchers, school children, community members, and of course, the interns who are here for the summer.  Everyone who's doing research here is invited to give a 5 minute presentation about their work.  I was around for about half of the presentations, and it was really cool to hear from the people I'm used to eating with and hanging out with what it is that they're actually working on while here.

Matt talked about his work with hippos. 

Corina talked about the modeling she's been working on of the ecosystem patterns you see around here.  With the models, she can try to predict what will happen in an ecosystem with less and less rainfall.  The models predict a certain point of low rainfall at which the amount of vegetation drops dramatically.  They also predict that the presence of termite mounds can soften this effect and lower the amount of rainfall at which this catastrophic shift occurs. 

Hilary talked about her work in ecohydrology (the study of how the ecosystem--so pretty much all living things--and the water cycle interact).  One of the things she's looking at this summer is how drought affects Acacia mellifera.

Pat talked about his work studying big headed ants, an invasive species here.  His work deals a lot with dung at the moment, looking at how the presence or absence of this invasive species affects decomposers. 

Rob talked about what eats what.  You can kind of make it out in the picture: what's on the screen is a giant web connecting a whole bunch of herbivores to all of the different plants that they eat. 

After the talks, Tyler, Ben and I went out with Rob and Corina to the KLEE plots and farther north to look at the termite mounds there.  

Soil cracks in the black cotton soil.

Acacia drepanolobium.  It looked like a monoculture in some areas where we were. 

Some of the areas we visited had been burned, which made it look like all the trees were dead.  But when you took a closer look, you saw regrowth coming up from the base (like it is here) or sometimes from the branches. 

I'm not sure what this caterpillar will grow up to be, but it has very Princeton coloring. 

Saturday evening Rob and Corina invited Tyler, Ben, Renata and me to dinner at their house, which was lovely.  I'm writing this post on Sunday morning, and it looks like today's going to be pretty calm.  There's the possibility of a game drive later, which would be awesome, but other than that it should just be a lazy Sunday.  A bunch of people (including Kate and Colleen, whom I traveled here with, and Helen and Dayton, who have also been here working on the education/conservation stuff) are heading home today, and it's going to feel very empty without them. 

Hope everyone's having a great weekend!