32

Lost on the Puna

It was dark, near midnight. A thick, swirling fog and steady cold drizzle were soaking through my jacket. I had been looking for frogs long enough that the batteries in my headlamp were dying, so I started back to camp through the wet grass, trying to avoid the mossy puddles. As I trudged along, something didn’t seem right. I stopped. I was no longer sure which direction our camp was, and it was too dark to see any landmarks. I was lost.

Getting lost is always unnerving, and in this instance, both an annoyance and an embarrassment as well. The annoyance was knowing that continuing to wander would probably take me further away from camp, so I had to find the driest place I could to spend an uncomfortably cold, wet night. The embarrassment was because I should have been more cautious. I wondered whether my companions, by now asleep, would notice I had not returned and begin to worry. In any case, I knew that they would never let me forget that I got lost.

It was 8 February 1975. I had been traveling through South America with William E. Duellman, Linda Trueb, and their daughter, Dana, for nine months, living in a custom-built, 24-ft camper mounted on a Ford 350 truck chassis. Much of our time had been spent in places similar to where we were now, well above tree line on a wide grassy plain. After working our way down the length of the Andes, around Lake Titicaca, across Bolivia, and through Argentina, we had crossed into Chile and were headed back north. Now in Peru, we had taken a break to see Machu Pichu, then driven up from Cuzco to set up camp on Abra Acjanaco, 25 km east of Paucartambo. Our campsite was near a curve on a steep, narrow, gravel road that, a few kilometers further on, plunged down toward the cloud forest. Other than the road, the only sign of human activity was a monument to a Swedish engineer named Dr. Sven Ericsson, who surveyed the route in 1911 during the rubber and cinchona bark boom. Construction of the road began in 1921 but was not completed until 1950. The Andes are tough mountains to navigate.

At 3520 m in altitude, Abra Acjanaco is a montane grassland covered with bunch grass, sedges, a few ferns, and low shrubs and crossed by several streams. The word páramo is generally used for the wet montane grasslands from northern Peru through Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela; the word puna for the drier montane grasslands from central Peru south to Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Abra Acjanaco is somewhat in between and is called a wet puna. Because it is on the eastern side of the Andes, it has historically gotten about 75 cm of rainfall a year from the condensation of the Amazonian moisture that rises up to meet the cold of the high mountains. In the nearly half a century since our visit, climate change has greatly reduced the annual rainfall. As a result, glaciers are rapidly receding and wet punas are becoming dry, which does not bode well for the future of the flora, fauna, or people who live in there.

We had spent a lot of time above tree line on our travels, which was my favorite place to be. The open expanses of puna and páramo amid the towering mountains were stunning, the cool air exhilarating, the sudden changes of weather exciting in a bone-chilling sort of way. The adaptations of plants and animals to the extreme environment were intricate and endlessly fascinating. It was easy to understand why people of many Andean cultures revere the austere heights as sacred places. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa said that the Andes remind us of our fragility and insignificance because they are uncontrollable and violent, shaking with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

The high montane flora includes a variety of clump-growing grasses (commonly known as ichu grass), dense shrubs, and mat-forming plants that have thick, waxy leaves resistant to water loss. An occasional Andean condor may be seen soaring overhead, but one has to look closely to find most of the animal inhabitants. The lyrics of a traditional huayno tune from the Cuzco region mention the Andean Pigmy Owl and the environment to which it has adapted: My little owl of the high puna, you count the hours like I do, little cold bundle, little kick of the wind… . The weather at high altitude changes quickly. A warm, sunny day with insects buzzing, lizards crawling about, and hummingbirds fliting around the flowering plants can turn cold and wet with shocking abruptness. When the sun is obscured by clouds the temperature suddenly plunges; the air becomes ominously still and then gives way to thunder and lightning, followed by rain, hail, or snow. For the animals of these regions, the failure to seek shelter marks the difference between life and death.

We had spent this particular day analyzing the herpetofauna in five 10 × 10 m quadrats, collecting information on species occurrence, temperature, humidity, topography, soil type, and vegetation. We were tired and chilled. After dinner that evening, Bill and Linda settled down to record the day’s data and prepare specimens, but I decided to see if I could find a few more frogs. I was particularly interested in the genus Telmatobius, which I knew would be easier to find at night. As I set out, Bill flipped the switch for the camper’s outside light, but it didn’t come on. Don’t get lost, he joked.

I turned on my headlight and peered into a shallow stream, looking for frogs. At that time, Telmatobius was poorly known and relatively rare in collections, a challenge no field worker could resist. The genus was named in 1834 by Arned Friedrich August Wiegmann, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, who based his description on a preserved specimen collected by someone else. Although Wiegmann never saw the frogs in the field, he recognized the distinctive flat body shape and large webbed feet as adaptations to aquatic life, so he coined the name from the Greek words telma (meaning a pool of water) and biosis (manner of life). By 1882 five more species had been described in the genus, and at the time of our trip about 30 species were known.

Unfortunately for the frogs, most Telmatobius are exploited for their presumed medicinal properties. Using the frogs to treat illness often means cooking them in a soup to feed the patient. Telmatobius is considered to be an aphrodisiac but is also used to treat children born with deformities. For the latter, a live frog is rubbed over the patient’s body, then hurled out of the door to take the disease causing the deformity away from the house. The combination of harvesting for medical use, infestation by the frog-killing chytrid fungus, pollution of the waterways, and climate change has resulted in most species of Telmatobius now being threatened or endangered.

While plodding along, moving my headlamp slowly back and forth, I searched for brownish frogs sitting under water in the brownish mud. The frogs blended in extraordinarily well and were not easy to spot. We had found Telmatobius earlier on our trip, but not often. In November we were joined by Stephan Halloy, a biology student from Tucumán, Argentina, who taught me two techniques for locating them. During the day, I would lie on the ground and grope around under the stream bank where it was undercut by the moving water. In lakes, I would wade in shallow water to find frogs ensconced under large flat rocks. I had discovered, quite by chance, that they could often be found at night sitting in the water, feeding on amphipods, snails, aquatic insects, and small fish. At Laguna Blanca in Argentina, Stephan and I put two Telmatobius in a large jar of water. As we watched, the frogs sank slowly to the bottom and then made rhythmic up-and-down movements to circulate the water around the vascularized flaps of skin on their sides. The tadpoles have the same flat heads and bulging eyes as the adults, giving them a slightly bewildered appearance.

After several hours of diligent searching, I had to accept that there was little frog activity that night. It was growing colder, and despite my best efforts, I had found only three Telmatobius. In the Andes, air temperature decreases by 1 °C for every 200 m; at the altitude of Abra Acjanaco, the nighttime temperatures routinely dropped to 5–7 °C. Between March and October, frosts are common.

There is another inconvenience when collecting Telmatobius—their protective slime coating. Like most frogs, they exude chemical substances from mucous and serous glands that protect their fragile skin. Unlike most frogs, they have two different types of serous glands, one of which exudes a sticky, milky secretion. I had first experienced a reaction to this stuff a few months earlier, in Bolivia, not far from the fabled city of Potosí. I had gone out alone after dark and returned triumphant with 29 specimens of Telmatobius, but after handling all those frogs, my right hand began to swell and my finger joints became stiff and painful. By the time I reached the truck, I could barely move my fingers, which were swollen and red. Next morning, I was back to normal. The same reaction was now setting in after catching just three frogs, which gave me further reason to give up and start back to camp.

One of the things that attracts me to the páramo and puna is that they are sparsely populated. It is not unusual to spend hours without seeing any signs of humans, even though people have lived in these regions for at least 15,000 years (probably much longer) and cultivate a variety of potatoes, ocas, mallocas, ulluos, beans, quinoa, and other food plants and herd llamas, alpacas, and sheep. In fact, the Andean highlands are the most densely inhabited high-altitude region in the world despite the difficulties of coping with cold, inclement weather, and the sparsity of fuel for cooking and heating. The páramo and puna are often described as desolate and lonely places, but to me they have an austere beauty and hold many mysteries. One foggy day on the puna in Bolivia, as I followed a railroad track (so I would not get lost), I heard the mournful quaver of an Andean wooden flute called a quena. It was several minutes before the quena player appeared out of the mist, carrying a load of potatoes on his back. We greeted each other, and he disappeared again in the fog. The solitude of the mountains can be profound, the silence broken only by the wind and the whistling ichu grass as Peruvian novelist Ciro Alegría described in his 1941 masterpiece, El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno.

I had become intrigued by life zones above 3000 m a few years earlier on my first trip to South America. I was working in the Amazon and had only a few opportunities to travel into the mountains, but I liked the high altitude despite the cold and difficulty breathing with lungs used to the hot, muggy lowlands. Here on Abra Acjanaco, however, things were different. We had the right field clothes and a dry camper to retreat to when the weather turned, and we had spent enough time at altitude to adjust to the shortage of oxygen. Not everyone who travels in these heights is as fortunate. Altitude sickness, or soroche, begins with a severe headache, followed by respiratory and gastrointestinal distress; it affects about 25% of travelers who venture higher than 1900 m. In Peru, it is said that you can prevent soroche by eating raw onions or hot peppers, but I have not tested either remedy.

That February night I tried to convince myself that perhaps it might be interesting to spend a night in the open on the puna. I found the driest place I could to wait for dawn and turned off my headlamp. The only sounds I could hear were my own breathing and the rain. Despite the discomfort, I felt a certain exhilaration at being alone in the vastness of the mountain night. Then, out of the dark came the faint grinding noise of a lone truck toiling up the road from the lowlands. As its headlights swept a distant curve, I got a glimpse of the cliffside that was my landmark for our camp and carefully began to make my way toward it. When I reached the camper, I eased the door open and crept in, relieved that I was no longer sitting on a wet hillock in the rain and fog. My traveling companions did not awaken as I changed my wet clothes for dry pajamas and crawled into my sleeping bag. The next morning I neglected to mention that I had been lost.

For years it was not known if Telmatobius made any vocalizations, but the night after I got lost, we left several live specimens in plastic bags of water in the sink in the camper. I was awakened around midnight by an eerie sound, consisting of four or five short notes, followed by what sounded like a squeaky door hinge, and then a rapid hee-hee-hee-hee. Once I realized that it was one of the frogs calling, not a dream, I slipped out of bed and turned on a tape recorder. Seven species in the genus are now known to vocalize, but we know very little about the 55 or so other species that are recognized today, and it is possible that we may never learn more. Telmatobius populations throughout the Andes are in steep decline. The species that I found that night was named Telmatobius timens in 2009. The specific epithet is a Latin word meaning frightened, scared, or alarmed and was chosen because of the threat of infection by the chytrid fungus. The name has proven to be sadly appropriate—the frogs have not been seen on Abra Acjanaco since 2008 and are now Critically Endangered.

Fieldwork sounds exciting and glamorous when biologists start trading stories, but we usually leave out the parts about sweating and shivering, sleepless nights, bad food, intestinal maladies, exhausting fevers, endless waiting for permits, and getting lost. Fieldwork is perhaps best described as periods of prolonged and uncomfortable tedium punctured by periodic thrills and surprises, such as hearing a bizarre underwater frog call or finding what looks like a new species. Sometimes the surprises are immediate, other times the result of long hours of studying data and specimens back in the lab. But the true joy of fieldwork is simply being in nature, interacting with animals we find astounding, and sharing those experiences with other people who also love what they do.