15

In Search of Wonder

How Curiosity Led Me to Madagascar

I have had the good fortune to participate in herpetological collecting trips in the American Southwest, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Australia. While all these experiences have been memorable, the excursion burned into my mind was my 2018 expedition to Madagascar. At the time I was a postdoc at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) working on ecomorphological diversification in Malagasy pseudoxyrhophiid snakes with Dr. Frank Burbrink, head curator of herpetology. I had spent the better part of a year trapped in New York City, producing CT scans of representatives of this diverse assemblage of snakes and combining those data with phylogenomic estimates to quantify how ecology influenced evolution of the skull. Of course, I seized the opportunity to join Dr. Chris Raxworthy on a trip to central-western Madagascar that fall. This was primarily a general collecting trip with an emphasis on pseudoxyrhophiids. After a month of preparation that primarily entailed hemorrhaging money on new field gear, antimalarial medication, and antibiotics I had high hopes would remain unused, I embarked on a 27-hour flight to Madagascar. I’m not sure what I had been expecting, but upon landing in Antananarivo, I was stunned by the press of people in the terminal and in the streets, each peddling rides or advice for dealing with immigration in French. Virtually every street corner was teeming with stalls selling second-hand clothes, rusted car parts, produce, salted meat, and disassembled electronics.

Antananarivo is located in the island’s Central Highlands, the breadbasket of the nation. The weather was humid but otherwise mild, and this comfort held while we headed west from the capital in Chris’s well-used Land Rover. In addition to Chris and myself, the vehicle hosted our gracious Malagasy driver, two master’s students from the Université d’Antananarivo, and Arianna Kuhn, then a doctoral student from my lab at the AMNH. I found myself crammed in the backseat alongside Arianna and one of the Malagasy grad students, wishing there were headrests.

Our first stop would be the small city of Tsiroanomandidy, 130 mi or so to the west. It was a journey that would have taken five hours or less as the crow flies, but it took us two days. Within 50 mi of the capital, the paved roads turned into dirt, and these soon morphed into ravine pocked paths that the Land Rover churned through with mechanical determination. I found myself clinging to Chris’s seat with each dip to avoid smashing my face into his headrest and wishing that there were also seatbelts in the back. Every few miles we would pass a group of Malagasy, haplessly staring at a vehicle stalled in a 3-ft-deep trench or struggling in vain to haul it out with raw manpower. All the while my gaze was drawn to cliffs and rolling hills beyond the road, such as it was. This was the first indication I saw of why the capital seemed so depauperate in wildlife. These foothills had been savaged by a combination of agriculture and poorly regulated forestry practices. Scrubs and denuded hillsides stretched as far as the eye could see. We would occasionally pass a small village in a valley, and I found my thoughts drifting toward the morbid. How long would it be before a flashflood would tear through these heavily eroded slopes and bury its inhabitants?

This trip coincided with a presidential election that seemed to have thrown the country in disarray. We found ourselves under the constant reminder that much of our travels would land us in regions where we’d be prime targets for gangs looking for easy victims. After checking into our hotel rooms, we stopped at a bustling bus port, looking for a westbound convoy to join in the morning. Convoys had become commonplace, relying on strength in numbers to dissuade potential attackers in remote areas. Arianna and I waited off to the side while Chris and our Malagasy friends spoke in French to some police officers. Scanning the crowd, I spotted a little boy, perhaps 18 months old, waddling down the dusty road unattended. I was taken aback on a second glance. His legs were bowed outward, the tibia slightly arched. Rickets. He wasn’t the only one: a slightly older child with the same condition stood behind him. Evidence of malnourishment and the general lack of resources in this region was presented to us at every turn. Tsiroanomandidy was not a large city, but some streets were easily as densely populated as the markets in Antananarivo. However, there was barely a tree in sight, being limited to a few hostel lawns. Virtually every tree in the city and the surrounding hills had been slain and carried off for timber and firewood. The result was a baking dustbowl with little shade.

As darkness fell, it became clear that the convoy was not leaving until the morning. Luckily, the grounds of our hotel hosted some of the only large trees near the city center. I perused the grounds after dusk in the naive hopes of spotting a leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus sp.) with my headlamp. Geckos can often be difficult to spot in the tropics. Their eyeshine is comparatively weaker than a mammal’s, and dense vegetation does not help in the least. Luckily, there were only five trees on the property, and I instead relied on the ghostly pale cast of most gecko skins at night. In the lowest boughs of an aging tree, I caught the stark white form of something massive on an overhang branch. With its turret-like eyes sealed shut, I found myself staring at a sleeping male Oustalet’s Chameleon (Furcifer oustaleti), one of the largest chameleons in the world. This individual was easily 2 ft long, including the tail. With some effort, I pried his mitten-like hands from the branch, ignoring his lazy open-mouthed threat display. The next morning, Arianna and I found two additional males of the same species.

We returned to the bus port hoping to join a convoy, which, again, never formed. Instead, we were informed that we needed to hire soldiers as armed guards during our trip. After negotiating with the local garrison commander, Chris was able to enlist two young Malagasy soldiers. Armed with AK-47s, the pair couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. Our journey resumed with our armed aides crammed on the benches behind the backseat, assault rifles cradled between their legs. The Central Highlands had been dotted with rice fields and well-provisioned villages. As we descended into the western foothills, this pattern vanished. The cooler weather dissipated and morphed into swampy humidity and oppressive heat. Somehow, there were even fewer trees in the lowlands. The few stands that remained close to the dirt road were but distant memories, having long been reduced to charred skeletons by the locals. Where the higher elevation settlements had hosted brick homes, these lower villages were composed almost entirely of clay. This region supported little agriculture, its residents relying heavily on the relative prosperity of the high-elevation rice fields. People huddled in what little shade they could find, and malnourished children were a more common sight in these parts. We passed several villages that had clearly been overtaken by an unmanaged burn that had gotten out of control, leaving a smattering of charred clay mounds.

We were occasionally reminded of the ever-present risk of bandits upon passing burnt out van chassis, riddled with bullet holes. Our next stop would be the Beanka Protected Area in the Melaky Region. About a day out from our destination, we stopped at a dense stand of trees, a relatively rare sight at this point. As I wandered off a short distance for some privacy, a sharp crack rang out through the trees. I hit the ground, heart pounding, immediately recognizing the sound of a gunshot. Moving back to the car at a crouch, I watched as one of our guards fired, seemingly at random, over the forest. A quick word with Chris revealed that he was warning any bandits hoping for an easy ambush that we were well armed. We moved on, reaching Beanka by nightfall. By this time, I had become accustomed to the wild and sometimes vivid dreams brought on by antimalarial medication. What was more worrisome was the growing gastrointestinal distress that was sapping my strength and ruining my appetite. I chalked it up as a side-effect of the meds.

Beanka was beautiful, the first rich forest I had seen on the trip. It hosted a ranger’s station of sorts, a small village of locals who relied on the land, and an extensive karst system. For a week, we struck out at night, led by a local guide, avoiding the blistering heat of day. The first night we found several dwarf chameleons (Brookesia sp.) sleeping in the undergrowth. These tiny creatures, shorter than the length of my thumb, would promptly curl into a ball and fall from their perch if startled—an amusing defense strategy that was effectively useless against a team of seasoned field biologists. Each night we found fish-scaled geckos (Geckolepsis sp.) scrambling over jagged karst and gnarled tree roots. Numerous gecko genera, such as the Australasian Gehyra, have evolved extra fragile skin that can be shed upon capture by a predator and regenerated after successful evasion. Geckolepsis proved challenging to catch, their agility matched only by the severity of de-gloving they could survive. After successfully bagging two or three slimy, naked geckos with sticky, scale-covered hands, I opted to avoid these animals for the remainder of our time at Beanka.

The true prizes of our nocturnal excursions were perhaps members of Madagascar’s most notable gecko lineage, Uroplatus. Arianna and I found a couple diminutive Spearpoint Leaf-Tailed Geckos (U. ebenaui) in low shrubs, scarcely larger than a Brookesia. Slow and passive, they were poor preparation for what awaited us when one of the Malagasy students gave an excited holler down the trail. We scrambled over the pitted limestone path toward the commotion, narrowly avoiding twisted ankles. All the while, my guts were writhing in agony, a sensation that had been intensifying with each day. When we reached the group, I followed the gaze of the senior grad student. Sitting head up on a thorny tree was a massive gecko, its mottled skin blending in perfectly with the bark—a female Henkel’s Leaf-Tailed Gecko (U. henkeli), a behemoth by gecko standards that was at least the length of my forearm. She was not alone. Perched on saplings to either side were two larger males, frozen in our lamplight. At night they looked like pale ghosts, but it was evident how impossible they’d be to spot in the cold light of day. These males had been courting the female before being interrupted by our search efforts. I pried one off the tree, reveling in the soft, velvety skin typical of geckos and taken aback by the animal’s remarkable strength as it sought to twist around and sink some of its 200 or more teeth into my wrist. It then stared into my eyes and gave a shrill, horrid scream. Our trail guide from the village, a man who had hacked a hapless mouse lemur (Microcebus sp.) to death as an offering to our team just moments before, backed away with a warding hand. The larger Uroplatus are seen as supernatural creatures of ill omen in some parts of Madagascar, a trend I had seen applied to geckos by the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Caledonia. Indeed, they are uncanny creatures in the wrong light.

Each night at Beanka revealed additional denizens of the karst forest. Several Nosy Komba Ground Boas (Sanzinia volontany) were recovered from craters in the karst or under the buttressed roots of trees, waiting for some unwitting mammal to wander by. These were beautiful boas, the largest individual measuring just under 4 ft in length. We even found one female with striking rusty-red and black patterning, which contrasted sharply with the more common mottled green morphs we had been finding. Both Arianna and I managed to receive defensive bites from the comparatively small but elegant pseudoxyrhophiid Cat-Eyed Snake (Lycodryas pseudogranuliceps). While venomous, their bites proved very mild, eliciting some minor burning and swelling. These rear-fanged snakes (opisthoglyphous) crept silently through the low vegetation, hoping to surprise a gecko or sleeping iguanian. Upon glancing up, we were occasionally graced by the curious, glowing gaze of a mouse lemur or dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus sp.) as they hunted for insects and small vertebrates.

The days were marred by some of the most relentless heat I had ever experienced. The pain racing through my innards had grown to the point that I could no longer dismiss it as a side-effect of my antimalarial meds. I was losing weight, nearly 14 lb in three weeks, and I could barely hold any food down. Each foray into the forest took all my strength, and it became clear that Arianna was suffering from similar symptoms. To make matters worse, we were running low on clean drinking water, forcing me to use iodine tablets and filters to decontaminate well water. By the time I decided to start a full course of oral antibiotic, I had a full-blown fever topped with severe muscle cramps and chills. On our last day at Beanka, I stood and watched the team prepare our latest specimens in the shade, gripping my stomach, unable to speak through the pain.

Our time at Beanka was but the first portion of a month-long trip, and the sickness that I now knew to be a parasite wreaking havoc on my intestines, the dire need for clean water, and the countless scrapes would fade with time. Our soldiers would eventually be swapped for armed police, all as protection against the bandits we never saw. Somehow, we managed to miss violence altogether. The only evidence we witnessed were more burnt-out cars and, on one occasion, a French tourist who had been beaten and robbed on the road behind us.

Our trip was defined by encounters with dozens of Madagascar’s endemic beauties, so in need of protection. I even found myself being chased by the island’s largest mammalian carnivore, the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) while trying to capture its likeness. When I tell tales to laypeople, or anyone else for that matter, I often receive the same responses. Looks of bafflement. Or impatient questions on why I would subject myself to such discomfort or how this path could be lucrative. On rare occasions, someone with little to no interest in nature will shock me by saying, It is so cool that this is your job. Such sentiment gives me hope. While I can honestly say that fieldwork is rarely easy or even comfortable, it always leaves me with a sense of awe. If I can impart just a fraction of that through stories like this or my photography, then I can take solace in knowing others will see the natural world for what it is: a place of wonder. To witness the things that we have seen as biologists and natural historians can only leave one with the reverence the natural world deserves.