Murphy's Place

Everything is red, the bushes, the houses even the dog has a reddish sheen as it lies in the sun glaring at us with lazy uncaring eyes. Mzuzu is a growing city with more banks than I can count and simple amenities like diesel, butter, flour, water and electricity are hard to come by. So imagine the glee when I arrive and open a box containing HP sauce 2 deflated footballs and bars of Cadbury's chocolate.. Ray Murphy our local guide has lived in Malawi for 29 years. He is an old English veteran who used to collect beetles but has decide to use his pension years collecting everything above 5 mm. He is also a wealth of knowledge and is likely the reason I come home with anyuseful bugs.

Ray has built his house on the same red sandy soil that underlies the whole of Mzuzu. The same red that covers everything in sight. There is a tranquility here as the place is self sustaining, water is collected by all the roofs and guided into huge holding tanks, the lights are run by batteries, generator or solar power, there are turkies, chickens, doves and rabbits roaming around.. Well the chickens run cause the youngest kid (4y) has been caught on occasions with a large kitchen knife following the chickens. When you ask him what he is doing he says " I fancy chicken tonight"...

There are bugs everywhere :) I made friends with a 6-7cm spider, it stays on the wall above my head and 2m from my bed and I don't smash the living crap out of it while I yell like girlie girl. While in the field I have been told to look out for red ants and if anybody starts dancing around and pulling off their pants it's not because they are crazy but because they stood in a red ants nest. Rec ants are nomadic and travel around in large processions carrying their young and often the queen to if she is too laden to walk. They will attack in numbers and can kill and clean a chicken or rabbit in a night. On occasions thay will even kill infants who are left untended. Morbid I know.

Tomorrow at 7am the hippie wolks wagen (actaully a toyota dyna 200 from 1986) leaves for Nyika reserve park where we are going to do our first 14 day collecting before coming back to Mzuzu. Lots of tenting and hiking, which means I finally get to try out all my new gear.




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Location:Mzuzu

T.I.A

Sometimes I forget what's so special about Africa. I landed at Malawi airport wilted for my colleague to arrive and then went with our pickup to exchange money, do some shopping and get dodge in to the hotel we are staying at for one night before we head north.

At the local mall I end up becoming very friendly with the guy who is exchanging my pounds to kwatcha. Basically he ripped me off and I got a better exchange rate than the banks would give me so we high fived and laughed a bit about the silly things in life..

I was, in my deranged mind hoping that the hotel we were staying at for one night would allow me a shower and a small breather before some more challenging camping. I mean I was paying $40 for a night.
I did get a shower... A cold one from the sink (the shower head was only for show) with a ladle I fashioned out of a bottle.. I also managed to get some electricity by taping my plugs at just the right angle, using some paper to keep the plug just a bit out of the socket. But the fact is that I am clean, and sitting with my iPad tucked into the corner of my room (thats where the wifi is, and only there) writing a blog entry..

Tomorrow we head to Mzuzu to meet you guide Ray Murphy, with 4 kg of oats, 10 cans of tuna, 8 cans of meatballs in gravy, 8 cans of sardines in tomato, 1 kg corn flour, and a very suspicious bag of apparently everlasting milk..






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Location:Lilongwe

The Pack

Hmm forgot to say what this update was about.. it is of course about the packing for the 2 month field trip to Malawi and Kenya that starts thursday...

Two days to go and here is the first update. It has been great in London so far. Even managed a weekend visit to the GF on Guernsey. So this afternoon I finally decided to see if I could bring everything and as I was laying it out on the bed and crossing the non-existing list (I am a man) I thought I might as well take the time and image it for the blog.  So here goes

1.     Camera Bag

2.     Rucksack

3.     Clothes (enough for a week roughly)

4.     Plastic containers for live specimens and rearing

5.     Football (a requested item)

6.     Cadbury (requested item for out gluten allergic guide)

7.     HP Sauce (a requested item)

8.     Medicine: savlon  (antibacterial), micropore tape, Malarone (200 pounds worth and still not enough)

9.     Solar charger for iphone, ipad, camera and light trap

10.  Passport and vaccination card

11.  Butterfly net with extra bag

12.  Sunscreen, tooth brush and toothpaste

13.  Rain clothes (not monsoon proof but all I have unless I want to wear my tent)

14.  Collecting tubes, needles, scalpels, pipettes, Velcro stamp envelopes for moths and ziplock specimen bags

15.  Dry shampoo and soap from Lush I’m going to smell soooo good (she made me buy it : )

16.  Egglaying sheets and permanent markers (don’t ask)

17.  Sleeping bag

18.  Miscellaneous pouch (cords, knife, field loop, nail clippers etc.)

19.  knee pads for my field trousers

20.  Camera tripod and 2 carbon fiber poles double as night light trap and beating sheet

21.  Sleeping mat

22.  Camera body

23.  3 extra batteries and 3 extra 16gb SD cards for camera

24.  Camera Lenses

25.  Eating utensils (bowl, spork, cup and strainer)

26.  Head lamp and string

27.  Camera Flash

28.  Iphone

29.  Charges, adapters and a sheet for the light trap and beating sheet

30.  Tent

31.  Cardboard Box (extra luggage)

32.  Extra 1.75 pound baggage wrapping bags

As it turns out things fit quite well with the extra cardboard box off stuff that is actually not mine.

Weight wise I have no idea but I bet I could bring a lot, probably 10-12 kg more, but then I would have to carry it around in an awkward extra bag … I’m too lazy for that. I will undoubtedly also have to carry something with food and water too, so no more bags.

Now what’s missing is deciding whether my Iphone or Ipad are going to be the main digital entertainment and then load at least 50 sci-fi books and some good collecting music onto it. Although I was thinking that a cheap mp3 with fm radio could be an even better idea.

Last item besides the odd ends and bits are my blacklight trap lights that hopefully arrive by Thursday noon cause without them I am F’ed.

I bet I have forgotten enough things to make this trip a living hell for myself but then again who can’t make a bucket out of a raincoat, start a fire with a plastic bag full of piss and survive on roots and palm tree pulp. Hope none of that is necessary but wish me luck. I will keep you updated.

Welcome to NHM London

Finally made it to London, My new home, at least for the next 2 years. That said I will be spending a total of 11 days here before I go on a 2 month field trip to Malawi and Kenya.
Cant wait to be out of mail and phone contact, spend some time in the field and hopefully take some amazing pictures. I will have no possibility of updating during my trip as I am not bringing any laptop.

Back for a breather

Back from a massive entomology conference in S. Korea. Had great fun, met amazing people and got my eye opened to some really interesting research. In specific check out the work of Robert Dudley, Sanjay Sane and Daniel Rubinoff, loving their work.

Now I am home for a one month breather before going to southern africa for a two month collecting trip. I am quite excited about the trip, mainly because I have just bought the MPE-65mm macro lens and the MT-24EX flash for my Canon, so I am ready to lugg it around and get some great shots..

I am also trying to alter a field light trap for easy transport and field efficiency. This involves a solar powered battery pack the right lamps for the job and a custom sheet and umbrella that wil fit on my fully extended camera tripod.

Lets see if I can keep the blog updatet during the trip.

  

Quick update

The next two years I will be working on the molecular and morphological phylogeny of the Limacodidae. The Post_Doc project is in collaboration with Thomas Simonsen (Natural History Museum of London), Naomi Pierce (Department of Evolutionary and Organismic Biology Harvard) and Marc Epstein (Department of Food and Agriculture Sacramento California). It is going to be a good project if I can get the taxa I need (mainly focusing on the African, Asian and Australian fauna). After the phylogeny is done and compared to the current research, most of which is done by the Leptree group and a future paper by Weller er al. I will be able to start looking at the autapomorphic locomotion found in the caterpillars of this charismatic family.

                      What I find so interesting about the Limacodidae is their additional abdominal prolegs, the abdominal appendage reduction in some taxa and their creeping locomotion that must have some very derived musculature behind it. I am also greatly looking forward to possible work on the semi fluid silk of the family and to the several field trips that are already being planned.

My PhD.

The trunk morphology of the basal Lepidoptera larva.

So basically I am describing and studying the larvae of the most primitive Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Why would anyone do that?

Well as it appears there is a quite interesting dilemma in the morphology of the lepidopteran larvae. First of all we still don't exactly know what the first lepidopteran larvae looked like. This uncertainty is mainly due to the lineages that we perceive as the most basal Lepidoptera have larvae that are quite divergent from anything what we would expect from a lepidopteran larvae. Secondly over 99% of the Lepidoptera have a larvae with a trunk design that is almost unchanged. The aim of my PhD is therefore to study the larval trunk design of the 4 most primitive lineages of Lepidoptera the results I obtain can then be compared to the larvae of more primitive orders that are expected to share a common ancestor, and to the typical larve of the Lepidoptera. The morphological comparisons should give an image of what are primitive characteristics of the Lepidoptera and at the same time allow for a study on the origin and evolution of the 'typical caterpillar'.

The Lineages currently being studied are:

Heterobathmidae and Eriocraniidae

... and I have just started a study of the larvae of the Micropterigidae.

Methods used for analysis of specimens:

SEM (scanning electron microscopy)

Great for the external integument structures and Chaetotaxy.

Micro-ct-scanning

Haven't started this but having my first scanning session on the 16-03-10

Light microscopy and stereolup

Basic observation, musculature reconstruction and dissection

Polarization microscopy

Musculature reconstruction.