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Island Castaways and the Limits of Optimism

The sun woke us up. We were wet. Fine white pearls rolled along our eyebrows, hairs, and skin. They formed small puddles around the eyes and the navel. The morning dew carried in the salty tears of the ocean, and as the sun rays broke through the fog, new hopes of returning to the mainland that day.

At dusk the night before, we had left the island’s shore where sea lions howl all night, stalked by insatiable vampires, and hiked up the narrow canyons dotted by nests of Inca Terns and swifts, to reach the peaks where grasses and tillandsias plucked the tiniest of water droplets from the passing fog. Thirsty, after yet another day spent waiting for good-natured fishermen, or anyone, to deliver us from this arid land, we ascended to this temporary home for a second night. There was no need to drink, as the air at the top of the island was so saturated, inebriating at the end of a fruitless day of waiting. We laid down our wool blankets on the red sand and satisfied our hunger with tenderness. In this best of all possible worlds, our island was the finest of islands, and we the best of all possible baronets.

The research at the Paracas National Reserve, Peru, had taken a sharply descriptive turn after it became evident that an experiment manipulating the amount of beach wrack (algae and other marine organisms cast up on shore) would have required far greater resources than those available. I originally planned to conduct the experiments on the mainland, but after witnessing the experiment’s excruciating failure, the appeal of nearby islands, where biological phenomena of interest were amplified, became too great to resist. The idea of my dissertation was to compare lizards’ use of marine resources across segments of mainland beach where I controlled the amount of marine wrack accumulation. Seaweed cast on shore attracts flies, beetles, beach hoppers and other crustaceans, all potential prey of lizards. Initially the plan had been to remove the wrack manually, mostly green algae and kelp, more arriving every day courtesy of high tides. It quickly became evident that approach was futile. Mounds of algal accumulation outpaced my ability to remove it. I thus decided to build algal nets, which like barricades against the Pacific would trap floating algae and prevent their accumulation on land.

As much as I put tremendous hope into my sea walls, their capacity to trap algae was limited during calm ocean days and disastrous when high tides and choppy waves delivered their loads. There were enormous amounts of algae on certain days, attracting hordes of Peruvian Lava Lizards (Microlophus peruvianus), including on experimental plots that were supposed to receive no wrack. The lizards were ecstatically running down to the tide line, dancing in ballets choreographed by the incoming and receding waves, grand jetés to catch kelp flies that mocked and ridiculed my vain efforts. To add literal oil to the fire, a rock pierced the oil pan of my car as I frantically drove bags full of pestilent and decomposing algae away from my wrack-free (if only!) plots through the desert. A tow truck had to come to the reserve’s parking lot to rescue my car and tow it to the city. During the ride to the mechanic workshop, as I was sitting in the truck’s front seat and making small talk with the driver, I had the time to explore all my misgivings about time lost and decided to abandon the experiment and, instead, pursue a comparative observational approach.

I had, by then, spent several months in the desert and noticed that Leaf-Toed Geckos (Phyllodactylus angustidigitus) were far more abundant and easier to catch than lava lizards. Geckos lived both along the coast and in plantless hills far away from the ocean, in contrast to lava lizards, which aggregated patchily along beaches. The gecko’s ubiquity opened opportunities to examine how their diet, demography, and distribution varied according to the type of coastal landscape and availability of marine resources. Like geckos, other nocturnal animals such as solifuges and scorpions occurred throughout the desert. Scorpions have added benefits as study animals because one can easily spot them by flashing the ground with a black light lamp and because they slowly digest their prey externally, facilitating dietary studies. I tested the regurgitation technique on geckos, and I quickly succeeded in developing a protocol to recover stomach contents without harming the geckos. Small clips of the tails, which the geckos regrew, guaranteed that I could complement dietary analyses with stable isotopic studies, which can trace marine contributions to terrestrial ecosystems.

The next step was to select and mark study plots in the coastal desert. The criteria were based on availability of marine resources, either because of the type of beach—pebbly and shelly beaches retain the most wrack—or the type of food, varying from beach-cast wrack to carcasses of seabirds and sea lions and their scavenging arthropods. A rugged coastline with tall cliffs is an obstacle to Leaf-Toed Geckos, which unlike other geckos cannot stick to vertical surfaces. They must walk down to the beach and feed on intertidal organisms. Once I selected plots, with three replicates for each type of coastline, I started marking the corner of each plot with steel rods. Because of the strong winds, called paracas (literally sand rain in Quechua), I thought I needed something sturdy to delimit the boundaries of my plots. As desolate as the desert may look on some days, peering eyes were scouting out my bizarre rebar planting behavior for free construction material, and it didn’t take long before most rebars disappeared from plots. Another setback.

At the time, I was living at the reserve’s headquarters, helping with cooking, upkeep, and maintenance. One of the brooms used for the long daily routine of removing sand from the interior spaces had just broken, leaving me with the stick in my hand. I had the images of the nearby Nazca lines in my mind, giant figures and lines drawn in the desert, which require a bird’s view to appreciate fully. The two thoughts combined into the idea of drawing small trenches in the desert as a way of marking my plots. The following days, I started walking along the full perimeter of each plot, dragging the decapitated broomstick into the desert soil. Not quite like The Adventures of Priscilla, costume trailing from a perch atop the roof of a bus blazing across the Australian Outback, but as close as you can get to that image. After marking the external perimeter, I subdivided and marked each 250 × 250 m plot into smaller 50 × 50 m plots to facilitate geolocation of the geckos and scorpions that I would capture and recapture over the course of my research. I waited for the next paracas, and it was with great relief that I witnessed the resilience of this simple and disturbance-proof marking method.

The paracas were not the only challenge to the marking system of my plots. Curious about the sudden apparition of the squared-shaped patterns, some local people conjectured about planned real estate and luxury hotel projects, landing pads for extraterrestrials, or archeological study areas. Getting to one of the plots required ascending a red hill, colored by a type of porphyritic rock, near places where archeologists and huaqueros (graverobbers) had previously excavated and found ancient mummies and their precious textiles. Walking to the top of the hill at night, under clear skies and the moon’s reflections on the deep red igneous rocks, was a nearly mystical experience. Disruption came when unknown and unscrupulous huaqueros suspected that the plot markings indicated the location of burial sites. They visited the plot on a dark new-moon night, when we were busy working in another area of the desert, and started digging at various locations within the plot. We discovered many holes in the ground the next time we visited the plot. It must have been a long night of disappointments to discourage the diggers and finally convince them to abandon the site.

Initially, all study sites were on the mainland. The reserve was employing volunteer rangers, and one of them decided to remain at the end of the program and help me with my research. We built up a routine for our nocturnal meandering through the desert plots. During the drive, we would listen to a radio program focused on helping people with mental health issues—they would call the station, and the host would talk through their concerns with her soothing voice. Sometimes we had chips and drinks at sunset, looking at the sun sinking into the desert and ocean behind, saturating the hues of yellow, brown, gray rock layers and sand. The research data were slowly telling a story of extreme reliance on marine nutrients: some geckos, for example, fed nearly exclusively on beach hoppers. Their main daily movements were nocturnal walks from desert burrows to the beach and back.

Like the geckos, our diet was becoming increasingly maritime. The rangers periodically inspected unauthorized people caught fishing illegally, or collecting scallops, other mollusks, and seafood from protected areas. The seized seafood was then given to clubs of mothers (many of whom were the fishers’ wives) in nearby towns, but when transportation was not available, we had to consume the seafood before it spoiled. Whenever some fishers returned to dock too late in the morning, found no taxis waiting, and feared their catch spoiling, I would rescue their day by driving them to the nearest fish market, in exchange for getting several kilos of fresh fish. I would tell them about my research, and our nocturnal wanderings, but I suppose I did not meet a sufficient number of the fleet, as I discovered one night.

The night we unintentionally terrorized fishers started like any other night. We were working at a desert plot near the dock. We had just completed the surveys of geckos and started our scorpion survey with a portable, meter-long neon black light. We were wearing light beige, almost white, pants and carrying the lamp at waist height. The night was very dark, with the moon just a slight crescent, and the beach was populated by dozens of scorpions. We were fully absorbed by our work, unaware of how the reflection of the blacklight lamp would appear from far away. Two animated pairs of torso-and-head-less legs appeared vividly to any passerby in the depth of the night. When taxis carrying fishers started arriving around 2 a.m., we saw the cars approach at high speed, reluctantly slow down as they neared our plot, then stop entirely, and finally frantically make a U-turn and speed away. It must have looked like the day of reckoning had arrived.

We made good friends with several of the fishers, especially once we started visiting nearby guano islands, and it might have been karma that left us stranded and thirsty on the island of the sea lion rookery, payback for the terror we briefly inflicted on the fisherman guild. The islands had even more astonishing examples of terrestrial animals relying on marine nutrients. The geckos and scorpions were feeding on seabird ticks and scavenging beetles found on sea lion carcasses; lava lizards went after the red feces of sea lions, which had consumed shrimp; and vultures flew over dead pups and placentas. After two days spent without water, we eventually decided to call for help. I had one of those brick-sized cell phones, with a retractable antenna, an early low-cost model marketed by Telefónica during those years. It was esthetically and practically very unpleasant to carry but had the benefit of being able to get the feeblest of receptions. We called the reserve, and their boat promptly came to rescue us. As we were surfing the waves back to the mainland, my mind returned to the two nights spent on top of the hill, and I daydreamed about waking up every morning, laying in the midst of the wildflowers of Tillandsia and Solanum, and being a gardener of that little plateau, so close to the sky.