Geese and Dassies

These are the 'nuggets of enlightenment' you find while reading scientific articles. Taken from Nature 426.

"When a female is sexually promiscuous, the ejaculates of different males compete for the fertilization of her eggs1; the more sperm a male inseminates into a female, the more likely he is to fertilize her eggs2. Because sperm production is limited and costly, theory predicts that males will strategically allocate sperm (1) according to female promiscuity1,3–5, (2) saving some for copulations with new females3,6,7, and (3) to females producing more and/or better offspring3,8. Whether males allocate sperm in all of these ways is not known, particularly in birds where the collection of natural ejaculates only recently became possible. Here we demonstrate male sperm allocation of unprecedented sophistication in the fowl Gallus gallus. Males show status-dependent sperm investment in females according to the level of female promiscuity; they progressively reduce sperm investment in a particular female but, on encountering a new female, instantaneously increase their sperm investment; and they preferentially allocate sperm to females with large sexual ornaments signalling superior maternal investment. Our results indicate that female promiscuity leads to the evolution of sophisticated male sexual behaviour."

Below are some of the 'logo' dassies i used for a recent presentation i made on my research. There is even a dassie wallpaper!

The answer

Mother or Vicki are the winners. it is in fact something to do with mushrooms. more accurately my roommates learn to cook and attempt to feed me the results. this one was green and ugly ugly ugly. we eventually decided to make it into muffins, which were much much better and not green.

"Kruncher"

Getting real familar with the bowel movements of these guys. not really what i had forseen for my time here, but hey what can you do?

Guess What this is. It is edible, i think

Mushrooms and Dassies

Lesotho 360

Mushroom hunting!

We have found an abundance of mushrooms. I think we could harvest enough to eat mushroom every night. So far the only cooking of mushrooms has been the mushroom pasta, mushroom quiche, and mushroom rice.

Dassies!

They are caught. They are caged. It is a little sad to see animals in cages. They need names. There are already some names floating around but nothing is certain. It is up to you to give them their proper titles for their life in captivity, about 2 months. Previously purposed names are Cletus, Fransisco, Mongo, and Didymus. There are six animals, that means six wonderful opportunities.

Dassie going into cage.

The quarry.




As for the last competition…lets just say it was the personal result of caving without a flashlight. Or rather turning off your flashlight while caving, scaring some friends and bumping into some rocks in the process.

Dassies and Arizona

Skipped some classes on Wednesday and headed to a local granite quarry with a bag of food and a raccoon trap. The plan was just to place the food out on the ground in a line and then watch to see what the little furry animals like to eat. Its called a cafeteria experiment. When we walked into the quarry little animals went scurrying in every direction, the place was infested with dassies. I laid out an apple, carrot, tomato, broccoli, sausage, dates, bread, rusks, and banana. Then stepped back about 20 yards and watched. Sure enough within 15mins the little buggers emerged from their rocky hiding places and began sampling in the delicacies presented to them. Apples and bread were the favorites. Egged on by the ease of which we had lured the animals out of the rocks, we decided to get the trap and try baiting it with bread. 10 minutes later we had two furry animals in the trap. One managed to back out under the door, but his friend was ours. The poor little bugger didn’t even notice or care that the trap had shut. It just continued to eat, even as we approached to within 10ft. We covered the trap, carried it back to the car and returned home. About an hour later we repeated the same process with the same ease to catch Cletus a friend, Francisco. Now we have two dassies and this weekend will hopefully catch 4 more and begin the long awaited Rock Hyrax Geochemistry Study.

This could almost be arizona

Thursday morning I got up at 3 am to go to the airport. Off to Bloemfontein, at least for a few hours, then drive to Maseru, Lesotho. Lesotho is known as the mountain kingdom and is completely surrounded by south Africa, in fact it is the only country to be completely enclosed by another. On the drive in, I saw the king pass going to Bloem, maybe for some shopping. I had a very nice and relaxing 5 day vacation visiting my almost step sister, her husband, and their 15month old daughter. Sara, ben and kadeysha. Spend most of a day driving around with a condom salesman, Mosito, stopping at bars, watching him try and sell condoms and questioning him about Lesotho, HIV, and life. He was a good guy and fun to talk to. Seeing the bars and the people around them was my first introduction to Lesotho and a good one.

We took an overnight trip to a lodge somewhere in the center of Lesotho. Neat little place and home of the worlds biggest commercial rappel next to a large waterfall. It was pretty, quite and it snowed.

Lesotho was very different from south Africa in general and even more different than cape town. Much more relaxed, much more friendly and it felt more alive. Probably because there were more people around or visibly working walking or sitting. Lesotho is a very rural place, interesting in that and I would definitely go back for a time.

bonus points if you can guess what this is or where it came from