lørdag den 3. november 2012

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.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Mzuzu

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Past and present.

With the PhD done I am now in the midst of a transition in my life. There are the manuscripts from the PhD thesis that need to be updated and prepared for publishing, there is also a new Post-doc at the Natural History Museum of London, several fieldtrips and the ICE conference that need to be planned. I feel almost content with the results achieved in the PhD. Currently one paper is published and within the next months I should have two more coming out. All the papers are on the morphology of some of the basalmost lepidopteran larvae and deal specifically with the evolution and ground plan characteristics. In the process of writing the thesis I have become quite intrigued with the locomotion of caterpillars and especially with the musculature that drive the locomotion. One of the more fascinating things is the information that lies in the muscular arrangements and the several different secondary locomotory structures that caterpillars have.

Keep an eye on the Reference section where I will update my publications and also have a link to my Mendeley profile so you can see my literature collection.