The Engines of Ecosystems

One year later

2010-05-17T19:48:00.001+08:00

It has been exactly one year since I packed my bags and headed to Malaysia. The trip feels so distant now--did I really do that? Did two Nebraskans and two South Dakotans really tackle the wild rainforests of Borneo? And yet the memories stay fresh in my mind: the eerie night hike, eating on the floor, the smiles of the Iban kids. Burning my mouth on a hot pepper while the rest of us sang karaoke. Watching a Nephila spider spin a six-foot web. Slipping and sliding up and down the hills, while trying to avoid spiky flora and venomous fauna. Talking about '90s pop music while hanging up clothes to dry under our humble porch.

I apologize for not keeping you posted of the happenings after Gulung Mulu; things got very hectic at that time. Here's a summary: we flew from Mulu back to Miri on June 6. We finished up some analyses, wrote a rough draft of our results for the park staff, and said our last goodbyes. It was a very touching moment, leaving our professor, leaving Lambir. On June 8 we went to Bako National Park, near Kuching. It's a bizarre park, with at least eight completely different ecotopes. We walked from a monkey-infested mangrove forest to the greenest rainforest I've ever seen to a coniferous dry forest to an open grassland with pitcher plants to a kerangas white-sand forest, all within half a mile. The beaches were magnificent, quintessential tropical lagoons, and I did get sunburnt pretty badly. From Kuching we spent two days in SIngapore, wandering around the precious little shops of Little India by day and hanging out at a sidewalk karaoke bar by night. June 12 was the longest day of my life, literally. We flew from Singapore to Tokyo to Dallas to Omaha, crossing the International Date Line, so we left Tokyo around 10 a.m. and arrived in Dallas around 8 a.m. the same day. Our parents were waiting at the airport, as their little kiddies came home from the adventure of a lifetime.

Once we were back, we had a week off before starting chemical analyses on the leaves we had collected. So I slept 16 hours straight, caught up with friends, organized my many pictures, chilled with my family. I wish that would have lasted longer. We reluctantly congregated in Lincoln and started grinding up leaves, in order to run them through a machine that essentially set them on fire. This was to see how much carbon and nitrogen was in the leaves. In the meantime we used computer software to analyze surface area from the scans we had made, and we used another program to find best-fit curves for our photosynthesis data. Over the next semester, we found that the mathematical model and the empirical data didn't really fit together, so the project really became two projects, one with a bunch of equations and the other with a bunch of statistics. We presented our findings at our university's math modeling seminar, and then at the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference in Ames, Iowa.

It's been difficult to work on the project after Borneo, because so many other things get in the way. I've taken some challenging classes, classes with names like Invertebrate Zoology and Principles of Operations Research. And then activities like marching band, Bible study, even intramural soccer have eaten up my time, and I like it that way. This summer, starting today actually, I will be a Technical Support intern at Li-Cor, the company who made the super-expensive photosynthesis machine we used. It's a bit of a stretch for me, since I'm not an engineer, but I'm willing to give it a try.

And that's what got me to Borneo in the first place. I was always more of an animal guy, but somehow I ended up studying plants, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I made wonderful friends. I learned more about God. I learned how to get around in a foreign country. I experienced firsthand how empirical biology research works. I went to Malaysia, and I loved it.

June 5--Dayaks and kayaks

2010-05-14T14:30:00.000+08:00

(note--this lost post was only recently recovered. enjoy the details of one more day in Malaysia)

Everything we did today was something you can do at home. Yet none of it was anything like home. We became so enraptured by the vacation mindset that we didn't even enter Gulung Mulu National Park, instead opting to chill at the resort. We went kayaking, swimming, mountain biking, stargazing, and ended up watching TV and eating apples with peanut butter. Nothing out of the ordinary, right?

Yet it was completely different than any other day I've spent kayaking and mountain biking. We started off day two of our vacation by sleeping in until 9, then wandering down to the resort's dock. From there we embarked on a four-hour kayak expedition through various tributaries of the river that winds through the park as well. The other guy and I navigated one kayak up the river, while the girls in the other kayak basically traveled up the banks, bouncing from one to the other while only occasionally going straight against the current. This ensued for about two hours, scaring the local wildlife away with our laughter and camaraderie.

Of course, the river had my attention from the start. Massive green palms hung over the banks and dipped into the water. Fallen trees, their enormous trunks submerged mere inches below the water's surface, provided plenty of obstacles. Nothing moved, nothing changed save a few lizards on the banks and a gentle breeze against our faces. The verdant canopy muted not only the light levels, but also the sound levels, so the entire experience was a dim, deep journey, entirely isolated from humanity. I can see how boating excursions can turn from something like Gilligan's Island to The Heart of Darkness in no time.

The girls came ashore early, leaving the other guy and I to take independent kayaks and explore a wider, more open section of river. The current was stronger, but so was the motivation. We wanted to go as far as we could, dodging the motorboats coming our way while managing not to entangle ourselves in the branches of drowned trees. Eventually the wind began to change and the sky darkened; the mountains of Mulu appeared ready to cast a storm our way. We said, "Let's go just around that bend" about five times before letting the current carry us back to the resort.

It never did rain much; the sky cleared up enough to give us all sunburns as we sat around the (chlorinated!) pool, yet not enough to convince us that the bats would come out of the cave today. As I rented a mountain bike from the front desk, the lady warned me of rain, and I thanked her and rolled out anyway. It was refreshing, really, trying to race the threatening clouds as they spilled over Gulung Mulu, being passed by hurried motorcyclists, watching the greenery fly past. At one point I passed a school courtyard full of Penang kids playing soccer, and I desperately wanted to just drop the bike and join, but I had only rented the bike for one hour, and responsibility got the best of me. So I headed back, towards the orange sunshine, passing pygmy squirrels and giant grasses and the one-runway airport. Such a wonderful day, yet soon the sun will set on our vacation, our project, our time in Borneo. And then all we will have are data and memories, the cold hard mountains of science and the ephemeral clouds of experiences floating above them. That's why I write.

July 4--Spelunk

2009-07-10T02:05:00.001+08:00

I could start this post several different ways. For example:

In my savory description of the olfactory wonders of Borneo, I forgot to mention one unique smell. Bat guano has the earthy odor one would expect, but it’s an altogether alien experience.

Or, I expected the Garden of Eden to be much less rainy.

Or, I can honestly now say that I’ve been attacked by a golden earwig.

Or, shooting at balloons with a blowgun may not be cultural, but it sure is fun.

These hooks all introduce the topic of today’s adventure: a mini-vacation. We’ve traded our Dr. Frankenstein personas for something more like Ferris Bueller, though hopefully an Indiana Jones complex comes along for the ride.

Today the four of us caught a half-hour flight to an isolated mountain range in the interior of Sarawak Borneo, a UNESCO World Heritage site named Gulung Mulu National Park. It’s been hailed as the Jurassic Park of Sarawak, without the dinosaurs. Included are the world’s largest cave passage and the world’s largest cave chamber (I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference though), as well as beautiful pristine rainforest, canopy walkways and birdwatching towers, a 4-day mountain, and giant limestone formations that have been described as the world’s worst parachute landing. The only ways to get here were propeller-plane, longboat, or four-wheel drive, the latter two taking half a day. You might say it’s fairly isolated.

The only housing still available was the posh Royal Mulu Resort. It’s a happenin’ place, with tons of bustle and commotion. Minus the sarcasm, it’s still a very luxurious resort, although the Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterflies flitting lazily along the boardwalks indicate just how relaxing the place is. There’s plenty the resort offers, including ATV tours and kayaking and cultural demonstrations. But most people are here to explore the park.

We went on a guided tour to see the caves. Our tour guide, a very helpful fellow, showed us through the rainforest, which wasn’t hard considering that the entire route to the first show caves is a wooden boardwalk about a meter off the ground. But he did point out several trails and plants and bugs that we never would have seen, and explained the formation of the limestone caves and the diversity of the region.

He also took us through the first two show caves of the park. Lang’s Cave is a smallish cave, as far as these caves go, but in the grand scheme of things I would have no difficulty fitting my family’s entire possessions in about a quarter of it. There are several artificial lights in the cave, designed to emphasize the peculiar stalactites and helictites and limestone formations that make this place famous. From there we went to Deer Cave, which houses only a couple million bats, with plenty of room left over for swiftlets. Oh yeah, it’s the largest cave passage in the world, and it would have been even larger if a section of forest (the “Garden of Eden”) hadn’t fallen in. Since it’s also a show cave, the trail is a boardwalk, the lights are electric, although the guides are legit.

We were going to watch the bats make their grand exit from the cave, but like Niah, they didn’t show, probably because it was sprinkling pretty heavily when we came out. But the redeeming aspect of our cave experience was the fact that we got to party with Abraham Lincoln on the Fourth of July--there’s a perfect natural likeness of his facial profile jutting from the cave entrance.

July 3--Air means water

2009-07-10T02:04:00.000+08:00

Sorry to unnecessarily scare you. With all the last-minute excitement, the possibility of an extended stay in Borneo, I failed to emphasize that all plans hinged on the cooperation of several airlines and travel agencies, which we all know is a difficult feat to accomplish. So it looks like we will be staying for the original itinerary and coming back as planned. We’ll stay in (near) Lambir until June 7, when we will fly to Kuching for a few days. Then a day in Singapore, a few hours in Tokyo, and the rest of the summer in Lincoln. By the twelfth of July, 2009 A.D., I will have left Borneo. Surprisingly, I can’t even find the words to say right now. It all seems so fast.

We had to mail our leaf samples today. This means we’ll have no physical test subjects to work on for the remainder of our stay. We still have plenty to do—learning and writing code to analyze our light curves, and troubleshooting said code when it doesn’t work, as well as transferring numbers from book to computer, making graphs, and trying to understand what in the world our data tells us. Also, when we drove into Miri tonight to mail our leaves, we almost got hit by an SUV passing a motorbike over a hill, while we were being tailgated by another SUV. Somebody said it could have been annihilation for our little Proton.

Since it’s one of our last days here (we’re going on a mini vacation tomorrow) and it’s our Iban assistant’s last day here (before she goes back to university), we had a party tonight. We’re all going to miss her a lot, because she always brings a cheerful attitude to the house even after a rough day in the forest. Plus she cooks wonderfully and does laundry perfectly and serenades our late-night data analysis with a little guitar strumming. So we bought her a new guitar. I’m told it has much better action than the one she has now, and I guess that’s a guitarist’s term to indicate it makes playing more fun, less painful. Plus it looks like the quintessential acoustic guitar, and it’s a worldwide brand, and sounds like a heavenly harp in the right hands.

The party was fun, with a couple of Iban families gathered around several heaping pots of steaming rice and a plate of honest-to-goodness barbecued chicken. We even pitched in with a cake with American chocolate, which is a real step up apparently. We danced to the Indonesian version of Poco Poco, a local hit. I added a ton of sweetened condensed milk to rose-flavored juice to create a concoction called air bandung. We listened to a worship song accompanied by the new guitar. We relearned how to dance Iban-style. I ate a whole pepper, and regretted it immediately.

I’ll miss her. I’ll miss eating on the floor. I’ll miss it here.

July 2--Bukit Lambir

2009-07-03T17:51:00.005+08:00

Since we don’t have much time left here, and since there’s nothing left to do but massing leaves and statisticizing data and verbing nouns, we took a ten hour hike.

The four of us left around nine in the morning, after a hearty second breakfast of leftover curry. We hiked through the forest, bypassing all the trails that would take us to the waterfalls that we’ve already been to (Latak, Nibong, and Pantu), the hills we’ve already conquered (Bukit Pantu), the ponds we’ve already tried to catch fish in. We found new ponds; don’t worry. We crossed several streams, which was a welcome break from the monotonous hilly trail. It seems like the trail between Pantu and Dinding goes up as much as it comes down, leading to a very exhausting trek without any noticeable net change in elevation. But after walking past the trail leading to Dinding Waterfall, we soon started the upward climb towards Bukit Lambir, the highest point in the forest. I don’t know the distinction between Bukit (hill) and Gulung (mountain), but this hill seems significantly higher than your average Midwestern knoll. At one point we were desperately holding on to the ropes leading up the rock face, which were conveniently slippery, as might expect in a rainforest. There was even a clear change in forest types; other plants started cropping up—fewer ferns, more conifer-like trees. We also saw a lot of mushrooms—big red flat ones with bright green undersides, huge shelf fungi hanging off abandoned logs, tiny neon highlighters of mushrooms showing off from the leaf litter. And a lot of rocks. But I’m not a geologist. Yet.

We finally decided to stop—at the top. We had a clear view of everything for several miles (sorry, kilometers). We could see the ocean—it turns out it’s not very far from us at all, but all this time we had no idea. We could see the interior of Borneo, a vast tangle of trees. We could see a giant rainstorm headed our way, including an impenetrable wall of rain slowly advancing. Fortunately, the chain of hills is large enough to significantly alter the weather patterns, and even though it rained a lot at the house and a little in the plot, we only felt a few drops.

On the way back down we stopped at Dinding to cool off. It’s a very nice waterfall, with a very tall drop and a moderate pool. Most importantly, no tourists. We spent a considerable amount of time there, not looking forward to the demanding hike back. We ended up arriving at the house around 7, just in time for a supper of fried okra, rice, omelets, and laksa Sarawak. And that was pretty much our entire day. We figured we’d see as much of Lambir as we could, and today we accomplished just that.

July 1--Realization

2009-07-03T17:51:00.003+08:00

It’s July already.

June 30--Groovy

2009-07-03T17:51:00.001+08:00

Fortunately, it did not rain today until we were well out of the field. After removing the leaves we needed, there was only one leaf left on Macala 4, and it seemed quite lonely as we released the tree. An austere flag, waving us a sad farewell.

It was spectacular, the way everything got accomplished. Now we can weigh the dry leaves, which doesn’t take very long at all. We’ll also start analyses with statistical tests and computer programs; I spent most of the night making 55 graphs on Excel, each with multiple sets of data and error bars. Once you get into a groove, it’s not that bad. That holds true for most everything we do—weighing leaves, measuring chlorophyll, wringing wet clothes. We got into so much of a groove that we didn’t realize how little time we have left.

But soon the groove will change, and who knows where it will go. Maybe it’ll end up as a jazzy halftime groove full of lazy days on the beach. Perhaps it’ll switch to a double time jam session supercharged with mountain climbing and city exploration. Most likely, the way our phone calls to ticket agencies and airlines have been going, it’ll simply fade into a familiar tune as we pack our bags and grab the next flight over the pond. We haven’t been able to make very many arrangements with such short notice, but however we go out, rest assured that we aren’t looking for any last-minute excursions to redeem our time here; every day has made it worthwhile.

June 29--Down to the wire

2009-07-03T17:50:00.004+08:00

Remember that little blurb about having to get everything done by the 30th? Maybe, since you just read it if you’re reading these posts in order, or maybe not, since you haven’t got there if you’re reading from the top down, which is a terrible way to go. You’ve got some big news ahead of you.

We are on a time crunch more than ever before. It’s been raining on and off today, which means that the absolute last chance for any photosynthesis recordings rests on tomorrow. We have two trees left, sitting out in the drizzle right now with a full complement of leaves. Tomorrow this must change, because we need a full three days for the leaves to dry. Even if we can’t haul the machine out tomorrow, we still have to trudge through the mud to gather our precious greenery. And that full three days? That would put us right at the night of the 2nd/morning of the 3rd, which is when the packages get shipped. So some of us may end up staying up late, others waking up early, all to put pieces of dried leaves on an expensive balance and record the five digits that appear. But it’s all with a goal in mind, a purpose that supersedes all drudgery. This is research at its finest.

On the other hand, we have not wasted a single day here at Lambir. Every single day it was sunny, and every day it was kinda cloudy but without any rain, and even every day we thought it might clear up but it didn’t, we were out there, getting all the info on four to six leaves. We wasted not, wanted not, whatever that means. Plus our professor said our photosynthesis graphs look great so far. With satisfactory results from a full set of data, we’ve proven we’re worth our salt. Again, whatever that means.

June 28--Back to adventure!

2009-07-03T17:50:00.003+08:00

We can stay in Borneo longer. I can barely believe it myself.

Our professor has decided to stay here at Lambir to identify and collect seeds, fruits, and flowers. The entire basis of her research (did I say she coauthored papers earlier? I meant authored…) is the functional traits across the plot here. A unique aspect of these forests is a thing called masting, where almost all the trees in the forest produce flowers all at the same time. The cool thing is scientists don’t know why. It’s not very well studies, mainly because it happens over a timespan longer than most grant funding.

This is one of those years. So our professor is planning on staying until August for this once-in-six years opportunity. The real bomb she dropped was that we can stay too, since her flights will be all rearranged anyway. But we don’t even have to stay here at Lambir; we practically have free reign as far as planning our own excursions and adventures. The only downside is that we’ll be paying out of pocket for any expenses now; I think we’re all willing to take that risk, considering that everything is extremely cheap here.

As much as I would love to come back home (and apologies to the Cornhusker State Games dodgeball team), I really feel like this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore the culture and environment of a land half a world away. I may never get to do this again in such a nation rich in history and diversity. My heart is still set on home, but my mind is on Borneo right now.

Since we found this out a few days ago, we still don't have any details down, mainly because of our flight plan changes. But let's just say that we're all looking forward to climbing a mountain, going snorkeling, exploring the largest caves in the world, hopefully seeing bearcats in their native habitat, taking a bus ride across the countryside, maybe checking out a world music festival, and hopefully spending a few days in Japan. We're not trying to get our hopes up or anything, but we are keeping our options open.

June 27--Gibbons, boogeymen, and Jedi

2009-07-03T17:50:00.001+08:00

You would think that the common cold couldn’t find you in such an uncommon place. Tropical diseases like yellow fever, malaria, dengue perhaps, or maybe an Oregon Trail-style way to go like dysentery, typhoid, or cholera, but not a cold. Even bird flu seems more likely. This hothouse of a climate hardly seems the place to catch an illness more reminiscent of a day of sledding. It’s still too early to tell, but I think I did it anyway.

Here are some random facts that defy topical essays; I don't even know why I'm telling you these things.

Sadly, there is little wildlife left in Lambir. The park is surrounded by cleared land or degraded forest, and the park itself is secondary forest, which means that it has regrown after being deforested. This means that although the vegetation has invaded again (and it does everywhere―even in Kuching you can see the vines trying to reclaim their rightful property), the animals haven’t come back. And apparently it gets worse every year. Of course, birds still visit; a lively flock of purple-headed finch-like avians came down from the canopy to see what we were doing only a few days ago. You can still hear birds that sound like squeaky shoes or sprinklers or ringtones or even toy laser guns, and of course the garbled growls of the hornbills and the intermittent jackhammers of the woodpeckers. And the insects and other creepy-crawlies are doing quite well too. But you can no longer wake up to the whoop-whoop-whoop of the gibbons, see the zany antics of macaques or langurs, bask in the glory of tarsiers and flying snakes, get mauled by tigers. Occasionally you can see squirrels or civets or pangolins, if you’re quiet enough. But many of the larger mammals have disappeared, some in only the last forty years.

The Straits of Malacca, the seaway between Borneo and what is now Singapore, has a shady history as a haven of pirate activity. This is mainly because it has always been a lucrative shipping route. I seem to recall from high school that Zheng He, admiral of the Chinese royal navy and a personal hero of mine, emerged victorious against such swashbucklers in the Straits. Look him up on Wikipedia when you have the chance. But later China became allied with a pirate lord named Parameswara, who wanted protection from the Thai empire. Piracy continued into the 19th century, though the Rajahs cracked down quite a bit. In fact, there's still speedboat hijackings and kidnappings to this day. Fun fact: the term “boogeyman” is actually derived from the Bugis pirates, hardy buccaneers who preyed on Dutch trade ships during the colonial period. There’s still a district in Singapore named after them.

Yes, I’m a bit of a nerd, but I’ve noticed that George Lucase had to have visited Malaysia before he created his vision of an epic trilogy. There are many words here that bear striking resemblance to Star Wars fictional terms. Padawan (Jedi student) is actually a region near Kuching. Kuat (starship manufacturer) means “strong” in Malay—it’s also a brand of dish soap. Jawa (Tatooine scrap dealers) is another place name. I’m sure there are a few more here somewhere. Where else would you want to get exotic-sounding names?

June 26--Apocalypse how?

2009-07-03T17:49:00.000+08:00

We just realized that we are nearing the end. Soon we’ll have to say a fond selamat jalan to this tree-strewn paradise and send our travel-wearied souls back to the land of seasonal changes and air conditioners.

Technically, we don’t leave until 7-Jun-09. However, that means we should have everything shipped via DHL by the morning of the third, so we can fix any delays on this end of the journey. Included in this mass mailing is our set of dried leaves, prepped for chemical analysis when we return. This implies that our leaves need to be dry by this time, so we can measure the dry mass before we send them out to sea. With the CTFS drying oven, the standard procedure is three days at 60 degrees Celsius. So we need all our leaves collected, measured, cut up, weighed, scanned, and packaged by no later than June 30, and that's cutting it close. Of course, after we collect the leaves, we can’t record photosynthesis with them, because we have killed them (exfoliated, if you will). So we need to get all of our A_max values in three days.

The problem is, we’ve made a list of A_max values we still want, and it requires four days. It’s not as bad as it sounds; we’ve done all these trees before, but there are just a few finishing touches that we prefer. Some trees only had four out of twelve leaves done, some had interfering A-Ci curves, some had unstable CO2, others gave some pretty odd values. So these trees are done, but for a better picture, better parameters for the model, we would like to obtain some more consistent data. Our wish list is simply too long for our pocket watch.

Today all four of us worked purely on the collection process, laboring over three trees for practically the entire day. We hiked out near the Pancur waterfall and collected the leaves from our sandy loam site. I took off all the stipules first, small buds near the spot the leaf attaches to the branch, that contain sugary food bodies for protective ants. This is for my thesis project, which isn’t very well-defined right now but involves plant allocation to defense, how much carbon leaves devote to toxins and ants. I’ll analyze the chemistry of the stipules back home.

Then we broke all the leaves off of two branches of each tree (most trees just have two anyway, so we’re effectively assassinating them, with permits though, so it’s okay). We trekked back to the road and caught a ride back to the house, where the real fun began. The leaf is cut up into anywhere from 5 to 22 pieces, so that we can scan them to calculate surface area. Yeah, they’re that big. It’s a good thing we have two scanners, because high-res images take forever to load. So we’ve got big trees, big leaves, big files. It’s a big deal.

June 25--Aromatica

2009-07-03T17:48:00.000+08:00

So I’ve written about the sounds, the barking deer and the thunder and the cicadas. I’ve talked about the sights, the fallen trees and the ants and the waterfalls. I’ve mentioned the textures, the spines and the clay soils and the beautiful rain. I’ve even given you a taste of Borneo, the kuay tiaw and the seafood and the ladyfingers, more commonly known in America as okra. Now I might as well round everything out and give you an idea of the smells of the forest.

I sweat a lot. Even shaded under the sweeping umbrellas of the canopy, the forest still bakes. More like steams, actually, considering the humidity. I’m acclimated to my perspiration, having done similar work as a detasseler for the past decade. But my sweat is the first thing I notice when I get back—I feel odd for mentioning this, but my sweat smells different here, more vegetable-driven, probably because of the change in diet. Combined with the BioZip co-enzymatic detergent we use, whose hearty odor never quite leaves the clothes because of our meager rinse-and-wring cycles, this makes for a peculiar affront to the olfactory senses. I once described it as smelling like Death itself.

Most of the other smells aren’t that bad. As I mentioned before, a small piece of bark of the bawang hutan, the onion of the forest, can stink up a hallway within a few minutes (been there, done that). Dryobalanops aromatica, one of the tallest trees in the forest, indeed has aromatic leaves, a good kind of aroma. Some Macaranga and other ant-plants give off lemony scents, not just flavors. Sometimes patches of forest have unique smells, mint or citrus or ginger or cucumber. We found a fruit once that looked like a lime but smelled like a pea. Most of the time the forest just smells earthy, with a hint of summer rains and seasalt breezes. The musty decaying wood contributes a bit, as do the stagnant pools.

Then there are the smells within the house. Dried leaves possess a heady fragrance, but our drying clothes have a less-than-pleasing scent, although it's not as strong if we leave them out to dry for several days. The best smells come from the kitchen. Once dinner starts rolling, you walk into the kitchen and get hit with a wave of wonderful garlic smoke, followed closely by hoisin sauce or black pepper with a hint of onion. The rice in the cooker gives off a warm fuzzy smell. Bamboo shoots have a very woody smell, while the lime-pepper juice we make invigorates the nostrils with a spicy citrus.

There are two unique smells of Borneo that we surprisingly have not yet encountered. One is the Rafflesia, a parasitic plant with the world’s largest flower (1m in diameter). It reeks like rotting flesh, which attracts flies for pollination. The other is durian, the classic love-it-or-hate-it symbol of Borneo markets. When it’s in season (usually sometime between August and December), the so-called king of fruit is easily the most abundant crop around. They are very large fruits, intended to be dispersed by elephants. I’ve noticed in the Imperial Hotel in Miri that they do not allow visitors to bring in durian because the smell might (will) disturb other visitors. It’s that bad.

So there’s our nasal tour of Borneo. I hope it’s not too pungent.

June 24--Keep on truckin'

2009-06-24T19:17:00.002+08:00

I just realized that this is the longest I’ve been away from southeast Nebraska, let alone the Midwest. I had never even been outside the States until this trip. I’ve gone on ski trips and Californian adventures and church camps and Atlanta vacations, but never for this long. There is something weighty about being away from home for an extended period of time, something that I feel I’ve accomplished without even trying to accomplish anything.

Here are some random roadside things I’ve noticed about Malaysia, surprisingly enough to make it a theme.

1) Instead of Jesus fish or Darwin fish on cars, you predominantly see metal Transformers emblems. It seems that the biggest-selling commercial empires here are Transformers and Winnie the Pooh.

2) There are no railways in Sarawak. Therefore, everything gets shipped by truck, and the trucks here are quite big and quite menacing. They pass often.

3) Sometimes there’s a single white line on the road, other times a double, other times dotted. I’m not sure what the single white line means, but it doesn’t matter because everybody passes everybody else whenever they feel like it. Sometimes they pass two or three cars at once, or two or three cars pass one car at once. Even trucks pass other trucks on hills, or buses pass scooters around corners, scary stuff like that.

4) Lots of people drive scooters.

5) Pitcher plants and sensitive plants, both expensive exotics in America, are treated as weeds here. They grow along the roadsides everywhere. It’s probably because they are able to colonize poor soils.

6) The cars here are pretty small. There are a lot of smart cars, or at least smart-looking cars, cars that convince you they’re smart with lots of big words and impressive-sounding resume builders. Then there are a lot of Proton midsize cars, along with your standard Asian companies: Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda. Small trucks are also quite popular too.

7) And as you might have guessed, they drive on the left here. And the speed limit is in kilometers per hour. They have a lot of roundabouts and strange turning lanes too, so when we go to town it feels a bit harrowing, as if nothing we learned in driver’s education applies here. But I haven’t seen any accidents so far, so they must be doing something right.

June 23--A day in the life

2009-06-24T19:16:00.001+08:00

Today was a typical day, and yet it was a far cry from any other day we’ve had because nothing went wrong. The sun was shining, we got 6 leaves done (a new record!), the CO2 didn’t even leak, and the mosquitoes took a day off. This is not usually how our day goes.

I am dragged out of a deep slumber around 5:45 because our neighbors own an exceptionally perky rooster. My alarm goes off at 6:07, but I hit the snooze on my plastic watch until 6:12 because five minutes makes so much difference. Then I finally roll out of bed, read some devotionals to get focused, and get dressed (if the clothes on my indoor clotheslines are dry). Then I stumble down the stairs to eat some fried rice, left over from the night before. I eat it with peanut butter, every single day. Then we load up the gas exchange machine; I usually take the tripod chamber in my backpack, along with maybe a battery or two. I’m usually readyish by 6:45, but we don’t leave until around 7, or until we’re convinced that it’s not going to rain. Even then, we’re usually wrong.

Then our professor drives us to the forest, about ten minutes away. We haul all our gear across the trails to one of our field sites. The other guy and I alternate carrying the computer machine; we carry it in a sports bag. We have two sites we work with: one is east of the plot, with clay soil and lots of cliffs and mosquitoes, and the other is north of the plot, with sandy loam and plenty of sunshine. The hike is generally about twenty minutes either way.

Then we put together the machine. Set up the tripod, attach the chamber, remove the cap from the light meter, tighten the clamp, attach the cables from the chamber to the computer. Plug in the stock battery and the motorcycle battery, set the carbon dioxide scrubber, check and recheck the seals on the CO2 canister. Flip the switch, set the Fan to 700 and the CO2 to 450 and the Block Temp to 30. Check for leaks, open the log file, match the reference and the sample air, wait for everything to stabilize. Adjust the chamber, set the leaf in the chamber, set ParI to 100, then 500, 1000, 1200, 1500 after conductance stabilizes. Take notes at each light level, and let the AutoProg record all vital stats every 30 seconds. Start the light curve for the way down. Put the machine to sleep once it’s done, readjust the chamber for a new leaf. Usually the whole process takes 45 minutes per leaf, so we can get six leaves done from 8:00 to 1:00, which is around the time that the leaves stop photosynthesizing for the day due to water loss.

Sometimes we’ll have other things to do during this time, like take chlorophyll readings or leaf thickness measurements or finding new trees. But most of the time, one person runs the machine while the other two or three read, listen to music, nap, or explore. Sometimes we read about plants or work through the math problems, but most of the time it’s novels or poetry or podcasts. We also eat our meager lunches of a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich and usually two cookies, around 11. Sometimes we can’t wait until 9:30 to eat lunch, though.

Then we pack up and try to catch a ride back with Mr. Sylvester and his ragtag band of forest guards. Back at the house, we take off our boots before entering the house (nobody is allowed to wear shoes in the house--a cultural phenomenon, although it may be traced to Muslim beliefs). Before we can take showers and grab snacks, we have to take the entire machine out of its cases for inspection, and start recharging the batteries.

We usually then analyze the data, format it into a master database (so far it’s 4,400 lines of data), calculate averages and standard deviations and make graphs. We also read up about plant physiology and optimal control theory and genetics. There is a washing machine in the house, but you have to manually fill it from a hose and there’s no dryer. So after putting a load through the wash, we wring the clothes out the best we can and put them up to dry outside (or in my room).

Food preparations involve a lot of chopping vegetables and firing up both burners of our propane-propelled stove. We have a rice cooker, two woks, two burners, a kettle, a refrigerator, and a sink. This may seem like our meal prospects are limited then, but we have come up with an amazing array of food possibilities. We usually have a main dish (omelets or breaded chicken or fried tofu or noodles or even potato curry), plus a lot of cooked vegetables (okra or bok choi or eggplant or even ferns, with garlic and soy sauce). Throw in some juice and maybe a fruit for dessert (mango!), plus a whole lot of cooked rice, and we’ve got a feast fit for eight people who may or may not be kings.

Then we faithfully do the dishes, toss in another load of laundry (though we have to use our headlamps when wringing, since the light in the washroom burned out), do some more data analysis accompanied by soft music and warm conversation, and go to bed around 9, though somebody’s always up until midnight making phone calls back home (13 hours behind) or weighing leaves with the balance or diving into a particularly captivating chapter of a novel.

Of course this schedule ends up getting interrupted some days by caves and clouds and canopies, but this is the general trend of our research experience. And I like it that way.

June 22--Photo synthetic

2009-06-22T21:24:00.002+08:00

Welcome back. It's been a while since I've visited this wonderful little Internet gamer room by the hypermarket, and the slow connection has made it even longer since I’ve been able to load this blog. My new posts run back to June 3. Read on, readers!

Here’s what we did today: we drew trees. A few weeks ago, we drew leaves, but that was just tracing actual leaves we found, to measure surface area and to satisfy our kindergarten cravings. But today we drew simplified stick figures of all of the trees we’re working with. They are diagrams, showing the distances from the ground to the branches and the leaves to the trunk and all other necessary distances. We’ll use this information to get an estimate of the ages of the leaves, since our professor has data about growth rates and leaf production rates. This will help us estimate leaf longevity and a few parameters in our model. Exciting stuff!

We also found that one of our trees has another tree growing out of it. The tree we’re using, Macala 2, is actually growing sideways across a dry riverbed, and it’s a lot taller/longer than we thought. We went to the base of the tree, and it turns out that there’s another Macaranga lamellata growing on it (since it’s sideways), with its roots dangling in midair. This leads us to think it’s another tree, not just a branch, but it is definitely a Macala, with no roots in the soil. I took some pictures of it just to show our professor and check up.

Speaking of pictures, my camera is working quite well. I’m using my girlfriend’s old digital camera, and initially there were some concerns. For example, sometimes the screen goes all purple and distorted, and the pictures turn out that way too. I think it’s a result of pressure on the lens, since it was happening a lot on the planes. But eventually it adjusts itself, although it can be quite frustrating. The macro setting is also a bit frustrating; a lot of the time the camera automatically focuses on bits of grass or leaves further away than the object of attention, which ends up blurry. But I’ve learned a lot about it after reading through the manual (I got bored on the way to Tokyo), and it’s very handy to carry around in the field. I like it. And don’t worry, I’m taking a lot of pictures.

June 21--God save the machine

2009-06-22T21:24:00.001+08:00

Today was a rollercoaster of a day.

First we waited out the cloudy morning, since leaves don’t initiate photosynthesis when there’s no photo to synthesize. But once the equatorial sun came out, we went out to start data collection on a new tree. We barely got the ParI to 1200 before thunder rumbled across the valleys. So we packed up the machine—it was in a garbage bag inside a sports bag wrapped in another garbage bag. We set sail for home, not a moment too soon.

I ended up carrying the machine, the chamber, and two of the batteries, along with my backpack, for about a kilometer up and down hills and trails that turned into miniature rivers and waterfalls in the pouring rain. So I started singing.

But then when we got back our professor chewed us out for carrying batteries in the same bag as the chamber and for not taking the machines out of the bags when we got back and for not telling her about the slipping foam seals on the chamber and she was very disappointed in us and we all felt very disappointed in ourselves.

But then we all climbed a really tall wooden tower and walked on rickety walkways high above the forest canopy for the rest of the afternoon, and nobody talked about the day’s shortcomings and everybody felt better because we were exploring the forest in a new way.

And then we came back and we were hoping to go to the park canteen to rustle up some chow, because we were really exhausted and we were also all out of bread and peanut butter and other important types of food because we haven’t gone to the store in a while. But the canteen was closed, so we had to come back and stir-fry most of our remaining vegetables and fry our tofu that may or may not have been too old.

But the food turned out wonderfully, probably because we were all intent on eating as soon as possible. And then we cleaned up our soil lab a bit, and most of us went to bed because we didn’t have any other tasks to do.

I feel like today was the type of day that deserves all these long sentences that are almost run-ons because it was very intense and there were a lot of good things and a lot of not-so-good things, although I think the good things won out in the end. We got to scramble across a canopy walkway over the tops of hundreds of trees, after all.

June 20--The wildlife

2009-06-22T21:23:00.005+08:00

I must confess: I’ve always liked bugs, ever since I was a kid. In the smallest chance that one of my readers has ever even come close to sharing this interest, I will enumerate my various sightings of insects and other arthropods. There are a lot of bugs here. In fact, that’s all the wildlife we ever see usually.

There are hundreds of mosquitoes, and sweat-tasting red flies. Big colorful butterflies that flit aimlessly and weightlessly through the jungle. Stingless bees that are important for dipterocarp pollination. Train-like black tropical millipedes with beautiful pink or yellow legs. Giant indoor cockroaches—I named mine Alfred. Stick insects, both kinds—the beastly spined cigars, and the near-perfect twig lookalikes. Ants. A demonic-looking red and black katydid. Giant cicadas, four inches long and smashing against the fluorescent lights. Armor-plated centipedes. A scary-looking whipscorpion with one claw missing. One of us saw a lantern bug (fulgorid), an odd bug with a peanut-shaped head. Sleek water striders making their yacht clubs over all the rivers. A mole cricket, scurrying as fast as it can and going nowhere on a tile floor. Surprisingly few beetles here, but the few we see are extremely colorful. Iridescent dragonflies hovering like helicopters. A red land crab, in the forest of all places. Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterfly, a rare specimen indeed. Stalk-eyed flies, smaller than Nature programs make them out to be. Huge colorful caterpillars, covered in hairs that cause skin irritation. Lots of snails and slugs in all shapes, sizes and colors.

And that’s about all the wildlife we see in the forest. We’ve also seen lizards like geckos and iguanas (and a flying lizard!), and some snakes. Squirrels are quick, but they’re here. Birds are hard to find, but some of us have seen fantails and hornbills. And we’ve heard the prankster calls of the barking deer and the distinctive squeals of the wild boar, but no sightings yet.

Now you know.

June 19--!

2009-06-22T21:23:00.003+08:00

A lot of stuff happened today. I’ll give a brief synopsis, because my eyes are tired.

I woke up at 6 as usual, but instead of breakfast, I called my girlfriend (!) and was able to reach her this time (the first vocal conversation we’ve had in a month!). The phone service cut us off after half an hour.

The Harvard presentations were at 9. This was the last day of the Biodiversity of Borneo 2009’s stay at Lambir, so the students gave short presentations of their 3-day experiments or studies, focusing on everything from liana bark preferences to water strider territoriality to Iban/park interactions. The head of CTFS was there also (I got to talk with him personally about my thesis project!), so the pressure was on, but the students did very well. They’re keeping a blog too, and I have every reason to believe you should check it out.

Then we went out into the field to collect soil samples. One of the important points is to collect from all the trees on the same day, so rain doesn’t wash the nitrates away. So naturally, it began to thunder about halfway through (and lightning hit a huge tree not far away!). Fortunately, this rain came very slowly, so we were able to get all of our precious dirt, though climbing up the hills was an experience again.

Then there was a birthday party at our house. It was a party for the wife of the owner of the house, whom everybody calls Mama Franklin. Fortunately the party was outside, so our soil contraptions could sit undisturbed inside. We had a wonderful cake (specially ordered with American chocolate!), hung out with the extended family (and the kids I met at the wedding!), did some karaoke (and beatboxing!), and learned traditional Iban dances (and did the Electric Slide again!).

A wonderful day for exclamation marks.

June 18--The center ring broke

2009-06-22T21:23:00.001+08:00

Today’s photosynthesis study was a circus. A gasket on our CO2 canister snapped, and we forgot the Parafilm, so we had to rig a seal out of flagging tape (again!). But it still leaked, drawing mosquitos by the hundreds to our site. One of the trees we were planning on using was incorrectly identified, and we can’t find any to replace it. A yellowed leaf fell off one of our trees, probably because of the fact we were planning on using it, specifically because it was old. A fuse for our motorcycle battery clip shorted, which explains why we’ve been draining power so fast. I dropped the flash drive down into the computer, which took fifteen minutes to retrieve. A nearby liana kept dropping its fruit like biological weapons. But we still got three leaves done, plus chlorophyll and thickness. It was a madhouse.

June 17--Y'all

2009-06-22T21:22:00.004+08:00

Exactly one month ago, four Midwestern kids jumped on a plane and got eaten by a green monster, but it was all on purpose. One month is a long time to live inside a green monster without thinking about life outside the green monster.

I’m at the point where I’m beginning to miss people, miss my home. Not in any homesick, desperate way; it just makes me appreciate everybody back home that much more. People who are doing amazing things for humanity or science or God, people who would bend over backwards for me despite their busy lives, people who genuinely take an interest in what I’m all about. Here’s my tribute, again without using names. You know who you are.

First of all, I miss my family. You are really amazing, all of you. You’ve been so supportive of me in my collegiate endeavors, in all my endeavors really, and even though I’ve moved away I still feel right at home when I’m at home, which makes more sense than it seems. A close second is my amazing girlfriend, who is off on her own adventure in Memphis this summer. It’s been tough staying in contact, even tougher expressing all the words we want to say. But you’re taking it beautifully, and I miss you more every day.

I miss my AO homeboys. You guys keep me alive, keep me focused on the things that really matter in the end, and keep me distracted from all the stuff that I can afford to be distracted from. It’s been a blast getting to know you—really deeply knowing all of you—ever since I moved in. All I ask is that the kitchen’s clean when I get back. Also, to the AO people in general: you guys rock. I’m so happy with the growth we’ve seen in the past year, with the width and depth of the group now. I’ll be sure to express my joy by playing extra loud when I get back.

I love all the mentors I’ve had growing up. Pastors, teachers, professors, employers, youth group sponsors, band leaders, choir directors, advisors, even church interns and dance directors. If you qualify as any of these, you have probably had a huge impact in my life, whether you realize it or not. Even though I might not be going in the direction you hoped I’d go (drummer! chemist! translator!) I really hope that I’m living up to the potential you saw in me.

If I tried to include everybody else who has changed my life for the better, this blog wouldn’t be able to load. So just a few more shoutouts, and if you don’t happen to fall under any of these broad categories, don’t feel bad. I’ll catch up with you when I get back.

To my cymbals, and the UNL drumline in general, who have made my college experience more wonderful and more challenging than I ever could have imagined, and giving me plenty of quotable material. To that special group of Norris grads just one year after me (you know who you are), for inspiring me and being genuinely concerned about me well after we left high school. To the praise bands, for giving me opportunity upon opportunity to serve by doing what I love. To my cousins, who make me never want to leave family reunions. To the ballroom dance team, who graciously took me in at six every morning and walked me through step by step, usually literally. To Love 2 and 3, and all the quirky and exceptional people I met there. To all the Christians from my grade, especially the Berean drummers, who infused high school with a joy inexpressible, and continue to do the things of greatness. To the Force, and all crazed detasselers everywhere, for being too darn optimistic to stop, ever. To my Norris fan club, who never lets me go. Thanks all!

June 16--Women and children and IRGAs first

2009-06-22T21:22:00.003+08:00

We didn’t see it coming. The attack came without warning, a bombardment from the skies with deadly accuracy. We sought shelter but there was nothing we could do. So we stood our ground, giving no quarter and taking no casualties.

Of course, I’m not describing some Kalimantan air raid, but the archetypical rainforest rainstorm. We were out in the forest, passively collecting our photosynthesis numbers as usual, when the sky hiccupped a bit, then coughed, then full-out sneezed twice, in the sky’s usual thunderous way. Unlike the other time, there was no audible warning of the rain’s advancement—the rain came down suddenly, and soon after the thunder. By the time we were able to pack everything up and mobilize, the ground had already become slippery. This would have been all good and lovely, except for the fact that standing between us and the trail was a stream-filled valley. We half-slid down the degraded slope with our expensive convoy and pondered what to do next.

We decided to save the photosynthesis machine first. We covered our backpacks with ponchos at the base of a large tree, put the cell phone inside our lunch Tupperware, and hoped for the best. I distinctly remember laughing through the storm, laughing at the impressive experience if nothing else. We made it across the stream just fine, but the upslope was tricky. It’s tricky when it’s dry—it’s another degraded slope, with few solid trees to grab onto, and even fewer trees without spines. Then throw in a bit of moisture, and the sweet dissonance of a million raindrops hitting a million leaves and dripping off onto a million more leaves, and you’ve nearly got a dilemma. Our best strategy was to keep leapfrogging our way up the hill, passing the machine to the next person with sure footing.

Our professor had just arrived when we made it to the top, without any mishaps, by the way. The rain let up a bit when we went back to get our gear, although the hills were no less difficult. So there’s my first experience actually trekking through a rainforest during a rainstorm. You should try it sometime.

June 15--Niah

2009-06-22T21:22:00.001+08:00

Today we went to one of the most extensive cave systems in the world. Niah National Park, about an hour’s drive from Lambir, encompasses a very diverse rainforest (though very different from Lambir), as well as limestone cliffs and caves. And it is fantastic.

We tagged along with the Harvard group after a few hours of field work. Along the way, the group director pointed out several interesting stories about the oil palm industry, limestone formations, extinct pangolins, and snakefruit. Once we arrived, we boarded a boat to cross the river—the park service doesn’t want to build a bridge and have all sorts of animals coming and going. Unlike Lambir, Niah has a neat little walkway that runs all the way from the boat landing to the caves, about 3 kilometers. (Yeah, everything is measured in metric here. My dad would be proud. Yet Brunei, our next-door neighbor, still uses the standard system, which is oddly nonstandard worldwide.) Along the way we saw several examples of the varied diversity that makes Borneo so darn special: butterflies the size of your face, ginger plants with their perfect spirals, macaques hanging out in the rocky outcroppings.

Then we got to the cave. According to our native guide, the cave has been inhabited for several thousand years by various tribes. At first it was used for shelter, then later for rice storage and burial sites and a really big canvas. Now it’s used for the collection of bat guano (for fertilizer) and swiftlet nests (for soup). The Chinese do so love their bird nest soup, even though the nests are only about 2.54 centimeters in diameter, and they’re made of swiftlet spit.

We followed the tour guide through the cave on a walkway. There were a lot of stairs, but it was definitely easier than trying to climb over slippery rocks covered in guano and cave crickets. The guide said one of the vaults could be loosely translated Terrible Cave. We didn’t get to go all the way in, to the Painted Cave with all the ancient graffiti, but we got the idea. They had us turn all our headlamps off, and you guessed it—it was darker than if Tim Burton made a musical about supermassive black holes. We also saw the Niah cave gecko, endemic to nowhere but this unique cave system.

We went back to the entrance to try and see the bats swarming out of the cave. It was pretty anticlimactic actually—I could barely tell the bats from the swiftlets, and there weren’t many in the first place. But it was still really amazing to look out on the sunset, seeing the silhouettes of macaques frolicking in the trees, seeing the jungle encroaching right up to the mouth of the cave, and the little splotches of green ferns amidst the Martian brown of the cave floor.

For dinner we went to a really neat market and I had kuay tiaw (fat noodles with egg and lime and hot sauce) and pau kacang (a very doughy bun filled with red bean curd). A delicious ending to a delightful day.

June 14--Hey Macaranga!

2009-06-22T21:21:00.002+08:00

We’ve added some more ways to examine our trees. Right now we’re only working with two species of Macaranga, one on sandy loam (M. lamellata) and one on clay (M. umbrosa). We were planning on working with other species, most likely Knema or Shorea, but we may run out of time, considering that collecting photosynthesis on one leaf takes an hour, so we can only get through 4, maybe 5 a day. So finding Knema is probably out of the question, though it makes a lovely pun, though finding a forester is even more difficult. Our trees are off the plot, so that we can collect the leaves when we’re done (and analyze leaf surface area and dry mass, plus phenol concentrations). Macaranga is a very broad-leaved, light-demanding tree that grows up to 10 meters tall, but usually only in disturbed areas where there is a gap in the canopy. One unusual thing about this genus is that many species provide sugary food (extrafloral nectaries) and shelter (domatia) for specific ant species, which defend the leaves to varying degrees. We’ve seen everything from tasty lemony ants to ones that bite and never let go. So it’s been fun.

One new gizmo is the hemispherical photograph. This is to measure light intensity, averaged over an entire year, with just one picture. We bend the tree over and place a camera on a tripod at its base. Using a fisheye lens, we can see the whole surrounding canopy that this tree lives under. After lining up the lens with magnetic north, we take a picture. We will analyze the picture with ImageJ software, which will basically divide the picture up into light and dark. Using that, plus given the latitude and longitude and the sun’s track throughout the year, we can figure out approximately how much sun the tree receives.

We’ll also be taking soil samples. Right now we haven’t figured out the field protocol, but we think we’ll take four cores near the base of the tree. Then we’ll dissolve the soil in potassium chloride and send it back to the lab, where we’ll isolate nitrates and ammonia to get a rough estimate of nitrogen availability, which may be an important component of our model. I thought I got away from Buchner funnels, molar concentrations, and endothermic reactions when I finished organic chemistry, but now we’re back at it, mixing 1 M KCl and cleaning glassware. This has taken up our second kitchen table, which was installed because we had already taken up the entirety of our first kitchen table with other laboratory equipment. We’ve been eating on the floor lately.

June 13--The plot thickens

2009-06-22T21:21:00.001+08:00

The 52-hectare plot is amazing. It was started in the 1970’s, I believe, as one of the foremost conservation/species studies in the world. There are over 440,000 individual trees (over 1 cm in diameter) in the plot, and this is known because there is a census every five years. There are 1200 species contained in this 1000 m by 500 m plot. Each identified tree has a tag that lists its location north-south, east-west, and its individual number. It seems that there is a vast library of information about the plot, and yet there is a yawning chasm of information that hasn’t been studied. For example, a new field protocol is identifying, measuring, and tagging every piece of coarse woody debris in the plot—all fallen trees and lianas that haven’t decomposed totally yet. Other, more individual projects include identification of functional traits such as fruits and flowers, seed dispersal, lycaenid butterflies, soil respiration, and so on.

The plot is essentially managed by the Center for Tropical Forest Studies (CTFS). They have 34 plots in 20 countries, with 3.5 million individual trees accounted for in plots just like this one. They mainly focus on tropical rainforest ecosystems around the equator, but they do have some tropical dry forests and are looking into expanding their temperate forest plots. The plots are unique in that they were begun as long-term projects specifically to look at how forests work. Among their many broad objectives are maintaining biodiversity, building strong scientific partnerships with the local forest owners, identifying the role of genetics in ecology, and investigating carbon sequestration (will forests absorb more carbon due to increased levels? are forests storing carbon? do they alleviate climate change?). The Center appears to be one of the foremost forward-thinking conservation networks in the world.

June 12--Leaves of trees

2009-06-22T21:20:00.004+08:00

Lately I’ve been reading through Walt Whitman’s breakthrough classic, Leaves of Grass. Poetry in a rainforest is a great idea. One of the girls wanted me to keep my eyes out for this poem, and I found it, and I agree: it is a wonderful poem. It reminds me of all the friends back home, how I need them and depend on them to keep me going. Plus it has to do with trees.

I Saw In Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing by Walt Whitman
“I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.”

June 11--Diverse city

2009-06-22T21:20:00.003+08:00

Since we’ve been talking about bugs so much, I think there’s one group that deserves an honorable mention. Butterflies are pretty prevalent, and flies are everywhere, but the real powerhouses are ants. The total mass of ants worldwide equals the total mass of humanity. They are the movers and shakers of the rainforest insect kingdom, turning more soil than earthworms and termites combined. They are a vital industry in the forest economy.

There are long trails of ants that wind down from the sky-scraping canopies down to the forest floor for hours at a time. There are tiny ants, nearly microscopic, that run around like crazy people. There are big-headed ants, the soldiers of some species, with menacing jaws and bad attitudes. There are long-headed ants, species unto themselves, red and sleek. There are ants that never come above ground. Some trees specifically produce sugar packets to keep ants around for defense, and those ants taste lemony but they can be real nasty biters. There are ants that farm aphids or scale insects to eat their waste products. There are white-bellied ants, as fickle as Sneetches. My favorites are the solitary ants, big as your thumb, with black bodies and red abdomens. They roam about on the forest floor, looking into everybody’s business but not with any hidden agendas. We see them all the time, prowling around us but never biting us. They act as guardians over the ant population, a daunting task indeed.

June 10--Pitfalls and malaise

2009-06-22T21:20:00.001+08:00

Today was a really fantastic day. Let me tell you why: there's a new group of people here at Lambir. In addition to the CTFS crew (Center for Tropical Forest Studies), the Japan lab, the Sarawak Forestry Service, and other researchers and administrators and cooks, there are now a bunch of students our age.

From what I gather, they are studying here for two weeks through a Harvard program designed as an introduction to forest conservation, essentially. They're listening to lectures from all sorts of professors and going out into the 52-ha plot to get some real hands-on experience on everything from botanical cladistics to insect collection to ecology. They are a diverse group, really, coming from Texas and New York and Singapore and Sri Lanka, undergraduates and grad students, in a variety of fields. So the course is very basic, designed to give a brief survey of each field, but with room to give the specialists ideas for special projects and things.

We've been invited to stop by and visit anytime. We missed yesterday's lectures about introductory botany, which would have been great for us. But today we took a day off so that we could listen to lectures about entomology and seed dispersal and even go out into the field to set up some bug traps.

The morning lecture, Insect Biology and Sampling, was fascinating. Of course, I would find it fascinating, given my childhood experiences. Some kids pretended to be Ninja Turtles or watched the same Disney movies hundreds of times over; when I was little I learned about bugs. We still have the collection that I started in fifth grade, although the tagging is all incorrect, and will probably stay that way forever unless I really get it into my head again to become an insect scientist.

So the professor did a broad overview of insects (three body parts, three pairs of legs, two pairs of wings) and the cladistics and characteristics. Along the way he dropped several interesting anecdotes, such as the fact that male stalk-eyed flies (which I have seen here at Lambir) fight each other for territory much like elk, except with their eyestalks. Carnivorous caterpillars, built like tanks, invade ant nests--and when they emerge as moths, they have a secondary layer of scales on their wings that act as a smokescreen to allow escape. Some queens of slavemaking ants invade other nests, signal an alarm pheromone to buy some time, attack the resident queen, and acquire her scent to take over the colony. A hyperparasitoid preys on a parasitoid which preys on a midge which preys on the Cordyceps fungus that bursts from the inside of ants like a mushroomy Alien. And much more.

We also learned about insect collection and preservation, which I haven't really delved into yet. In addition to the standard butterfly net, entomologists use aspirators (sucking insects into a jar), malaise traps (tents that attract flying insects), fruit bait traps (nets placed over rotting fruit), and many more. Then we actually went out to the plot and tried out these methods. I went with them, just for fun. We set up pitfall traps in the soil--ground insects stumble and fall into little cups with water and detergent. We also did leaf litter samples, collecting a square meter of topsoil and dead leaves. Both of these will have to be checked or analyzed later, so I didn't really see any cool bugs on the excursion, but it was still fun to learn entomology techniques and make friends.

June 9--What is the integral of e^(e^x)dx?

2009-06-22T21:19:00.006+08:00

This project is designed as an integration of math and science, an exploration of the blurred border between numbers and data, a chance for math people to learn biology and for biology people to get acquainted with more than their fair share of math.

I'm planning on majoring in biology and math.

That probably means I'm supposed to understand, in detail, both aspects of the project, the field experiments and the mathematical model. Ultimately, right now we're collecting data on leaf parameters so that later we can develop a mathematical model to predict such parameters given environmental and life-history constraints. It might sound messy, and right now it is, in a good way.

The project was designed for two biology majors and two math majors. Since we already have two biology majors and one math major, guess what I count as? So even though I think my career will steer more towards science, I really need to understand the things that are going into the math, stuff like optimal control theory and Hamiltonians. Let's just say I'm trying.

We got an email from our math professor back home today. He gave us a few exercises to work through; mainly for us math guys, but the biology girls are working through it too. But it's hard stuff.

I've never really used computer programs for math before. So I tried working through one of these exercises by hand. It was frustrating, to say the least. Here's where I got stuck: the integral from 0 to 1 of [(10-10x+q)/(100+a) * e^((-h*e^(-a)/q)(1-e^(-qx))) * e^(-rx)] dx = 1. Given h, a, and q, solve for r. I don't even know if I took the right steps to get there. I won't even try to explain what this is trying to solve and what the variables actually signify.

But then the other math guy showed me Mathematica and it was as if the kitschy chandelier in our living room magically started working. Well, not even Mathematica could give me a valid answer for the initial problem. But at least the code is easy to use and helpful and full of all sorts of quirks one would expect from a math program. And suddenly I wasn't so frustrated anymore.

June 8--Lifeboat theory

2009-06-22T21:19:00.005+08:00

Donald Miller is getting the best of me. His book Searching for God Knows What has me all sorts of inspired. It seems he has his crosshairs on the fake corporate American evangelicalism, the one with a middle-class Jesus who promotes consumerism and an us-versus-them mentality while subscribing to a certain set of doctrines because they are right. And to contrast this, he has found the real Jesus, the One who seeks not a human-powered morality but a relationship with Him, the One who offers a core reason that infuses the doctrine, the only One whose opinion matters in our search for acceptance.

"Do you know the easiest part of the gospel of Jesus for me to believe? The part that says 'the wages of sin is death' (see Romans 6:23). I take that to mean when Adam and Eve sinned, when Chernobyl happened in the Garden, from that point on Adam and Eve began to die, not only physically, but in their souls, too, because they had been separated from God. It makes sense that if a plant is separated from the sun, it dies, and that if people are separated from God, they die. And so now it feels as if we live on a planet where there is just a little bit of water left, poisoned as it is, and we all are trying to get it and drink it so we can stay alive. But what we really need is God. What we really need is somebody who loves us so much we don't worry about death, about our hair thinning, about other drivers pulling in front of us on the road, about whether people are poor or rich, good-looking or ugly, about whether we feel lonely or about whether or not we are wearing clothes. We need this; we need this so we can love other people purely and not for selfish gain, we need this so we can see everybody as equals, we need this so our relationships can be sincere, we need this so we can stop kicking ourselves around, we need this so we can lose all self-awareness and find ourselves for the first time, not by realizing some dream, but by being told who we are by the only Being who has the authority to know, by that I mean the Creator." (Searching for God Knows What, pg. 109-110)

June 7--The night hike

2009-06-22T21:19:00.003+08:00

Tonight we took a hike at night up a mountain through a tropical rainforest. How many American students my age can say that?

The four of us strapped on our headlamps and ventured out into the great beyond. We were already acquainted with much of the trail, from our waterfall-hopping excursion, and we were waiting for the spot where our beams would fall on Bukit Pantu, where we would stand in awe at the upwards spectacle and then turn around and go back home.

But instead of just scouting it out, we accidentally climbed to the top. The trail just kept winding through the forest, gradually growing steeper and steeper, with a few rickety stairs kindly placed by the forest service. We didn't come across many animals, except for an innocent frog and a cluster of those solitary ants around a dead lizard. Oh, and the spiders. Their eyes reflect light. We would spot these jewels of the forest sitting motionless or scurrying swiftly or even dangling in midair; even if the rest of the spider blended in perfectly with the twilit forest, their multiple eyes betrayed their presence.

We realized we had climbed the whole thing when, about an hour later, we stumbled upon a vast panorama of treetops far below us. The moon was full, and an eager mist blanketed the landscape in a soft silence. There is a little gazebo at the lookout point, which is fantastic for introspection, especially under those conditions. After taking a few long-exposure photographs of our silhouettes, the four of us sat just listening to the chirp of frogs and the soft whoop of nocturnal birds, each lost in our own thoughts.

It was a very rewarding experience, exerting our energies between darkened trees to be greeted by a pale night sky and a gentle breeze above a sleeping world.

June 6--Ravi and Roosevelt

2009-06-22T21:19:00.001+08:00

Lately I've been listening to sermons and podcasts by Ravi Zacharias, a phenomenal preacher and Christian apologist. He's been talking about the cost and glory of following Christ, filling my head with inspiration. I just want to share a speech he quoted, a famous one given by Theodore Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. Why, the credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. He who actually tries to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and spends himself in that worthy cause, who, at the worst if he fails, at least fails while he is daring greatly. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to wish glorious triumphs, though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

June 5--Chloro fill

2009-06-22T21:18:00.003+08:00

By now we've got quite a few tools in our arsenal.

A new part came for the photosynthesis machine. We used to have to string a tube out of the computer part, leading far away from our tainted breath, so that the machine could draw in air with ambient levels of carbon dioxide. We were hoping to hook up CO2 canisters, so that we could control exactly how much carbon dioxide the leaf takes in, and even run through an internal carbon curve the same way we're running light curves now. But BB guns are illegal here in Malaysia, and other CO2 canisters come in different sizes than in the States. So a very kind rep from the company specially machined us a cable/interface that enables us to attach these canisters to the machine, thus enabling us to stop trying to correct for fluctuations in the air.

We also use a chlorophyll meter to measure how much photosynthetic machinery, how many solar-powered factories a leaf has created. It's a handheld device that clamps onto a living leaf and shines a laser on it. Chlorophyll gives off a signature fluorescence, which the instrument calculates as a neat little chlorophyll index.

Right now we're also measuring leaf thickness, with precision calipers. Leaves are paper thin, usually around .1 millimeters, and these calipers give three decimal points. That's precision. Nothing but the best.

June 4--The real jungle, shady

2009-06-22T21:18:00.001+08:00

By now, we've become at least somewhat familiar with the forest that surrounds our work, our home, our current lives.

The inside of a rainforest is a lot different than the outside. As we drive our little Proton to the field entrance, we take in the sights of green canopies without any visible markers or highlights, simply an impressive expanse of broccoli. But once we walk through fern-filled meadows and actually enter the forest, the sky darkens. The canopy blocks out a huge portion of the sun's irradiation, which is great for avoiding skin cancer but not so conducive to photosynthesis. Sure, it's still bright enough to see, but plants have to struggle an awful lot just to make a living. It's a dipterocarp eat dipterocarp world out there.

The trees here grow straight up, branching little until reaching the canopy, transforming the hilly landscape into a vertical maze. And since hills are part of the name of this here town, that's exactly what we deal with. We scramble up clay cliffs covered with crunchy leaves the size of our hands, we slip and slide down sandy loam hills, avoiding the tripwire vines and spiky rattan that so easily entangle us.

In this Seussian world, creeping vines twist around bigger creeping vines that are busy twisting themselves around trees. Trees grow roots so big, not even the soil can contain them. Mosquitoes make airports out of any puddles. Little leaves sprout straight from tree trunks, sharing space with lichens and fungal spores. Spiders disguise themselves as ants, butterflies look like leaves, insects act like twigs. Roots form natural steps up hillsides. Birds are constantly noisy yet invisible. Vicious-looking thorns spring from harmless little vines. Some small ants roam the plains in herds of millions, while their monstrous cousins ambulate solitarily, acting extremely interested in any goings-on. Dead trees, fallen giants, provide momentary glimpses of the cerulean sky after taking out hundreds of their kin on their way down.

Often I think to myself, "This reminds me of the Lied Jungle at the zoo in Omaha." But then I'm reminded that it was modeled after real rainforests, not the other way around. The Lied Jungle looks, feels, smells like this. This is the real jungle.

June 3--Latak, Nibong, and Pantu

2009-06-22T21:17:00.000+08:00

This is also a national park, after all. There is more to see here than just palm trees and big ants. Take waterfalls, for example.

Since today started out a bit rainy, we were left at home to analyze the data we've collected so far. That took all of two hours. So we decided to go on a hike, through the tourist-trodden trails of Lambir Hills National Park.

Waterfalls almost always take my breath away. Sometimes quite literally; they often produce extremely cold lakes. But something about the ethereal mist evoked from the ceaseless cascades over ancient bedrock just speaks to my soul. The first waterfall we came to was an unmapped short drop, about four meters, but very broad and with very little water, so we went down and walked around underneath it.

The next one was a tall beauty that flowed into a big pond. This one was tamed for swimming, with little patios and grills and changing rooms on the beach. But it's still a bit wild; we noticed a monitor lizard swimming among us, from one side to the other like a reptilian Michael Phelps.

After a moderate hike, we encountered the next marked waterfall, which was still open for swimming, but the pool was at most four meters wide, and of course there were the signs indicating strong tides in Malay and English. I just waded out into the pond (my boots go up to my knees) and watched the fish float skittishly nearer. I was thinking about catching one with my hands, but with refraction and shadows, let alone the Australian tourists behind us, I decided against it.

At the next one, though, one of us did capture a small crayfish. This waterfall was highly isolated, an oasis of solitude from the hassles of photosynthesis machines and chlorophyll meters. The water ran narrowly off a rugged cliff face, plastered with ferns and mosses, straight down into a murky pool near a rocky shore. This was the utopia we had been looking for.

On the hike back home we made friends with some British commandos in the Royal Marines stationed in Brunei, encountered some ferns that diverged into fractals, and took an obnoxious amount of photos of an extremely patient iguana. Overall, we made the most of our day off.

June 2--Finally

2009-06-03T19:18:00.007+08:00

Today it finally rained. This is a rainforest, after all.

We heard the thunder long before we could sense any sort of a change in the weather. It was a deeply ominous thunder; since we can’t see the sky, can’t even remember our cardinal directions in the forest, it shook us a little. After a few minutes there was a discernible change in light intensity.

And then we heard the rain. It seemed to take forever to reach us, building in intensity as it came sweeping across what seemed like the whole island of Borneo. Finally the precipitation caught up with the sound, and….we got a little damp. That was it. The leaves in the rainforest block probably 95% of the rain from reaching the ground. But it still sounded cool.

Then, tonight as I'm writing this, the rain came down. All of it. It started off light like before, but soon crescendoed into a drilling cacophony as the skies ripped open. Our tin roof didn't make it any less noisy. I'm glad that we have finally witnessed both namesakes of this wonderful ecosystem.

June 1--My favorite is Trmmol

2009-06-03T19:18:00.005+08:00

We’ve been measuring photosynthesis for the past few days, using our magical gas exchange analyzer. Today we didn’t use it, because it was cloudy and the leaves are fickle, but every sunny day from here on out, we’ll be out in the forest calculating how productive a plant can be.

I’ll try and break down the process a bit in nontechnical terms. We’ve got a machine with two components: one is a boxy computer/air pump, and the other is a sleek tripod-mounted laser. We bend a tree over, gently, so that we can reach its leaves. We hook up a whole bunch of air hoses and electrical circuits from the computer to the machine and run a whole bunch of diagnostics to make sure there are no leaks. Then we carefully clamp part of the leaf, still on the tree, into a special chamber on the tripod machine. The computer pumps air into the chamber, and the machine provides a selected intensity of light to the leaf. The lasers measure the carbon dioxide going into the chamber and the carbon dioxide going out of the chamber, among other things. Using these factors, the computer calculates the photosynthetic rate of the leaf.

Of course, the truth is a lot more complicated; the computer records everything from transpiration rates to partial pressures to stuff labeled VpdA or CsMch. And the photosynthetic rate of one particular leaf on one particular day depends on sunlight availability (rare) and stomatal conductance (which also depends on water loss) and how the plant is feeling (which usually depends on the weather and the economy). In fact, most tropical trees stop carbon fixation around 1:00 in the afternoon, taking a little siesta for the rest of the day.

What we’ve been doing is making a light curve—feeding the leaf different amounts of light and seeing how it responds. It’s comparable to a treadmill workout; we start the leaf off at an easy pace, and then we keep bumping up the intensity until we get a maximum heartrate, if you will. The machine continues the cooldown back to 0 PAR automatically, recording over 50 variables every two minutes or so. From these light curves we will be able to estimate both a maximum photosynthetic rate (asymptote) and a standard photorespiration rate (x-intercept). We’ll compare leaves of different ages, ultimately for our model analysis.

I find it more fascinating every time I describe it.

May 31--Live long and prosper

2009-06-03T19:18:00.003+08:00

Today, and tomorrow, and the next day, is the annual Iban harvest festival, called Gawai. So the owners of our house invited us back to their house for more tribal celebration. At first we helped make Gawai cakes. They possess a taste similar to our funnel cakes, but they are crunchy and small and delicious. I can only compare it to making Christmas cookies in a wok.

Sadly, since the longhouse burned down, nobody knows what to do for such ancient festivals anymore. We did end up watching a DVD of some traditional Iban dances. Then again, we also ended up doing the Electric Slide to a remix of a popular Malay song.

But the most interesting part of the night, for me at least, was the church service. Around 10:30 p.m., we went over to the neighbors’ temporary shelter (they used to live in the longhouse). I got to sit next to the guy playing the guitar. Even though I didn’t understand what everybody was singing, it was interesting to note that worship through music is pretty universal. Then the guy playing the guitar got up and gave a short sermon about John 14:6. It turns out the guy is also the local missionary. I was very fortunate to sit next to him; we had a wonderful conversation during the meal. He seems very genuine and earnest.

The significance of one of the components of the service still evades my grasp. The missionary, his wife, and two men from the church put their hands over a girl’s head and prayed over her, very rapidly, in Iban, and all at the same time. The girl started crying and everything. At first it seemed like an exorcism. But after talking with the missionary and our Iban assistant, it appears that it was more like a baptism. The girl had gone prodigal and was now seeking to confess. She had been crying over her deeds as she was publicly reaccepted into church fellowship. It still seemed like a strange tradition to us outsiders.

But it was really refreshing to see Christians in another country, proclaiming their faith during a pagan holiday. Hallelujah needs no translation.

May 30--Wild

2009-06-03T19:18:00.001+08:00

I don’t mean to scare you, but: I could have died.

We were on a trail through the 52-ha plot to go find a specific tree, since we now have adequate training with the portable photosynthesis machine. I was leading the way from the trail down the hill to our tree. I came across a huge snake. I actually came very close to not even seeing it, putting my hand on it as if it were just another branch. It was a vibrant dark green with intricate white patterns, all coiled up on a branch about eye-level. I guess I stopped, threw my hands up and just stared at it. The scariest part was that it glared back at me.

It turns out that it was a viper, “very venomous” according to our Iban assistant. They can leap over half their body length, and I was definitely within its striking range for quite a long time. But it just sat there, poised in a threatening stance. I was able to get a picture and get away.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that this isn’t some zoo, some exhibit where everything is controlled. This is a real rainforest; along with the benefits of wild plants, we take on the risks of wild animals. It’s worth it.

May 29--Selamat datang!

2009-06-03T19:17:00.001+08:00

That means welcome, in Malay. Tonight we were warmly welcomed to a traditional Iban wedding. Well, it was as traditional as they could make it without the longhouse and the consequent loss of the rice crop. The groom was the son of the cousin of the owner of the house in which we are staying. Things are as complicated here as they are in America.

At the wedding, I mainly hung out with the Iban kids. I seem to do this a lot. I don’t know if I start out avoiding the adults or just being bored, but I always gravitate towards the kids and then never leave them. Before the wedding there were about twenty kids in this room where we were waiting, so all of us students started playing tag with them or teaching them things or telling them about America. But throughout the whole wedding and the after-party, there were three boys, about the same age as my little brother, who sat by me and made faces at me and hung on to my every word. They taught me to count from 1 to 10 in Iban, which I almost got; how to make a shadow puppet snake, at which I failed miserably; how to play rock, paper, scissors Malaysian-style, which I rocked. And papered and scissored. We also mock fought and put together a toy robot and took ridiculous pictures.

I will remember them more than I remember the wedding. Actually, we couldn’t understand a single word that was being said on stage, and most of the wedding was speeches. But I don’t forget kids easily. The whole time reminded me of the missions trip last year to work with Navajo kids. I may not remember their names, but I remember their smiling faces.

May 28--Searching

2009-05-28T18:12:00.001+08:00

I finally get to post! It's been a while since I've had access to the great Internets, so here's all that's gone down since Kuching. You can read the posts from the bottom up in chronological order, or you can just start here and be completely confused. Thanks for reading!

One thing that's been on my mind lately is the human condition. Why, fundamentally, are we the way we are? Here's Donald Miller with an answer:

"Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity, and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human's social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem." (Searching for God Knows What, pg. 92)

He goes on to say that the something that helped them function and live well is God. He has gone missing not of His volition but of ours. When Adam and Eve did their deed, searched for something outside of God to give them fulfillment, God was required to distance Himself from them, and ultimately us.

"Scripture would indicate that God had to break the relationship when man sinned against Him, that because His nature is purely good, purely right and lovely, He could not directly interact with beings who were, in their hearts, set against Him. This should not be confused with a lack of love, a lack of compassion; it must be understood only as two opposite natures unable to interact without one tainting the other. This is a very beautiful thing because you and I need for God to be perfectly good, we need for Him to be the voice that did one day, and will in the future, speak pure glory into our lives. But for now, because of this act of war, relations have been strained. And we are feeling it in our souls." (Searching for God Knows What, 86-87)

May 27--Only one of us is short

2009-05-28T18:11:00.002+08:00

Forgive me. Up until this point I have been describing all the verbs, tossing all the adjectives, and yet leaving out some very important nouns. I have purposely avoided descriptions of the people with whom I have the privilege of studying leaves. I've decided to try and give you a brief glimpse of my friends, without using names or disturbing their right to privacy or a fair trial.

Our professor has already been to Lambir several times. This fact alone makes us all more comfortable. She knows how to handle the forestry administration (well, as much as anyone knows), she knows her suppliers and who she can count on for assistance, and she knows where to buy groceries. Plus she's coauthored several papers on the site and others, so she definitely knows the local flora. In fact, right now she's handling three projects at Lambir: ours, another student's, and her own.

The other student's project is pretty interesting too. She came here last year with a similar research group; their project looked at tree height, something that's a little difficult to measure without a canopy crane. Lambir does have one, but that's only for the Japan lab. Anyway, this year she's back with her own independent supplemental project, studying wood density as a correlate of soil gradients, or something like that. She has to take core samples from trees that are not too big, but not too small; trees that are just right. This means that she has to go off the 52-hectare plot, because taking a chunk out of a tree, even a small chunk, is not entirely conducive to robust health. Sad but true.

There is another field assistant who also doubles as a housekeeper of sorts. She is an Iban, one of the tribes that lives by the sea. The Iban traditionally live in wooden longhouses on stilts. Her particular tribe's held 52 families, before it burned to the ground only a few weeks ago. Thankfully her family has their own house, but still, it's a huge loss of ethnodiversity. Anywho, she's our age, studying accounting but possessing a seemingly innate knowledge of the forest. By day she scampers through the forest recording any new leaves that have grown since last year (yes, the 52-hectare plot is THAT intensely analyzed), and by night she makes tea and fixes our stir-fry mistakes. We do make our own food; she just makes it better. I'm really glad she's here.

Then there's us. The undergraduate students, none of us very familiar with internal carbon or plagiotropic trees, but willing to learn. Two are biology students considering medical careers, one is a math student considering grad school in physics, and then there's me, a biology/math student with no idea what I want to do besides write books for children.

The math/physics guy is really interesting, analyzing the reasons behind absolutely everything and yet he's done cool outdoorsy stuff like motorcycle trips to California. One of the biology girls is going to be a junior; she's a bit flighty but works hard and will definitely contribute to the research. The other is enthusiastic and rock solid in everything she does, from camping to missions trips to long-distance relationships. We've actually had a few conversations about our beliefs, and I'm ecstatic to declare that she is just as committed to Christ as I am.

Suffice it to say that I will enjoy the next few months living in a house with these seven crazy people.

May 26--Snafu

2009-05-28T18:11:00.001+08:00

We didn't go out into the forest today. Originally, we were supposed to stay home and learn how to use our gas exchange analyzer, which is magical and expensive and heavy and tells us all the dirty little secrets of a leaf's photosynthetic rate. But our professor is having some unexpected delays with permits and deposits and carbon dioxide canisters.

So we still haven't started any work yet. In fact, we still don't even know what we'll be measuring. Sure, we'll check out things like specific leaf area (surface area per mass) and light intensity (using a hemispherical lens and contrast analysis software). But for the big things, like photosynthesis, we still haven't developed a protocol that's practical, useful, and manageable. Every option so far has some little snag or impossibility or counterproductivity associated with it. We'll get there, don't worry, but right now it's more of a waiting game than anything.

On a positive note, we do have a refrigerator now.

May 25--Mr. Sylvester

2009-05-28T18:10:00.005+08:00

This morning we left the house at 6:45 a.m. so we could scurry through the forest with Mr. Sylvester.

Mr. Sylvester is nothing less than amazing.

His name is Sylvester Tan, which I recall being on several important papers we had to read for this project. He is a short, jovial Asian man, with a full head of black hair and a wispy beard of white. He is 60 years old, but he navigates the strewn logs and spiny vines like a mountain goat. We were running to keep up. I feel like he was really in his element today, doing what he loves most. And he loves to identify trees.

Mr. Sylvester, in addition to being very enthusiastic about tree identification, is very adept at tree identification. He seemed like he knew every tree in the forest, which is a lot. He can quickly identify the genus of a tree by its trunk or leaf arrangement or even a single decayed leaf out of thousands on the ground. In most cases he can call the species too by looking with binoculars at the canopy arrangement.

But this is not a dry knowledge. Along the way Mr. Sylvester showed us that tree identification can be vibrant and practical. He told us which species have become more popular in the economy, both local and global. He told us which species are becoming more endangered because of their life history strategies and human intervention. He told us which species produce edible fruit, which ones are good for hornbill nesting, which ones produce a sap that can induce an allergic reaction, which ones are the subjects of intense nomenclature debates.

He showed us immature durian fruit. He taught us how to catch a pheasant. He explained current field protocols that are ideal in the research proposals but impractical in the forests. He encouraged us to taste leaves thought to lower blood pressure. He explained ancient Iban lore. He showed us a flattened spot where a wild boar had given birth. He told of a field worker who lied to his wife to support his two mistresses. He had us smell the wood of the bawang hutan, which I can only describe as nuclear hickory-smoked garlic.

In short, he is epic.

We talked about him at dinner, about how it would be so cool to be that guy, a specialist at the top of his field, 60 years old, trilingual, well-published, and still enjoys teaching others and cracking funny jokes occasionally because he is doing what he loves. I want to be that guy.

May 24--Good and bad

2009-05-28T18:10:00.003+08:00

Today we swam under a waterfall in the rainforest. Later I found a leech eating at my thigh.

It was a mixed day.

May 23--Blades of glory

2009-05-28T18:10:00.001+08:00

My roommate's name is Wallace. He only wakes up when I go to bed, and he doesn't speak English, so it's kinda hard to tell you much about him. It's kinda creepy, actually, the way he stares at me when I'm going to bed, but his presence keeps the bugs away for some obscure reason, so I'm fine with him sleeping in my room. Oh, and he's a gecko.

Today we went for a walk in the park. Let me give you a picture of Lambir using math, the way my dad taught me. Lambir Hills National Park is 4200 hectares. There is a plot within Lambir (a very well-researched plot in which we will probably do our research) that is 52 hectares, which is approximately 1000 meters by 500 m. So 1 km by 0.5 km, or 0.6 mi by 0.3 mi, or 0.18 square miles. If 52 hectares is 0.18 sq mi, then 4200 ha is about 17 sq mi. Within these 0.18 sq mi, and most certainly within these 17, there are 1200 species of trees represented. Now picture North America, much bigger than 17 square miles, yet it only has 400 species total. This is the staggering diversity we are looking at.

The plot is like a haven, a sanctuary from the cars and the businesses and Facebook. The only noise is the constant hum/buzz of insects, although some cicadas sound like power drills, buzzsaws, or Transformers. Occasionally you'll hear the muted warble of pheasants, the rapturous chirps of fantails, or the haunting squawks of hornbills. Other than these sounds, the ever-fascinating expanse of green is mute and inviting. There are trees everywhere: trees that stand like mountains of bark; trees with Gordian roots; trees with thin, wispy trunks; trees that have just erupted from the leaf-covered soil.

The leaves are most splendid. There are the hard, broad leaves of dipterocarps, that are extremely difficult to break even on the forest floor. There are wide palm fronds. There are innocent-looking pinnate leaves that bear spines underneath. There are small bunches of lovely little green leaves. There are enormous monsters of leaves. There are leaves that grow only flat on the trunks of other trees. There is a leaf for everybody.

May 22--Protons have three windshield wipers

2009-05-28T18:09:00.000+08:00

We flew in to Miri today, the middle-sized city near our field site. Our flight was at 7 a.m., so of course I've been tired all day. We finally arrived at Lambir Hills National Park. We'll be staying at one of the many houses there that the Forestry Service has provided for researchers. It's a quaint old house with big windows and tacky floor patterns and no refrigerator so far. I like it.

We rented a car to accommodate our travel needs. It's a Proton, which is a Malaysian-based car company. Apparently there is a high tax on all non-Proton vehicles, which explains why they are so prevalent. However, this does not mean they work well. A nice Toyota Hilux would have been my choice, and I've never even taken a ride in one, because they don't make that particular breed of midsize truck in America. But this car was cheap, even though it only seats five, and we have seven people in our crew. This means we have to make two trips everywhere we go.

I actually got to go with our professor to the car dealership. She has a good rapport with the husband and wife who own the place. The husband is a jolly little Malaysian-born Chinese man. I would love to spend an entire day with him if I could. He mentioned that he had just gotten back from China sharing the gospel to inner-city kids there. He said that the hardest thing to do was to convince them that there was only one God instead of several small gods.

He jumped right from this quick sermon into a few scientific questions for me: why don't saltwater fish taste salty? and why does an increase in altitude mean a decrease in temperature, even though you get closer to the sun? The answers are osmotic regulation and atmospheric density and also way over my head. But he did confirm that mankind, even with all its technology, is incapable of making an efficient leaf the way a plant can. He felt this was pretty humbling too. I hope I get to meet him again when we take the car back.

May 21--Don't try the belachan

2009-05-28T18:08:00.000+08:00

Today is our last day at Singgahsana. I'll miss it. It's such a wonderful little hostel, trendy and yet off the beaten path. There are many wonderful opportunities for introspection here, from the unused tables in the cafe to the flowered smoking deck on the second floor to the hammock in the bar on the third floor. If you're ever staying in downtown Kuching for a night, check out the Singgahasana Lodge.

One aspect of Malaysia that's definitely worth mentioning: the food. It seems everyone is eating all the time, and yet it's healthy and delicious and inexpensive and amazing. Here's a sample menu, what we had to today:

Breakfast: toast with butter and blackberry jam, along with watermelon and lime juice. This is the free continental breakfast at the Singgahsana, served in the bar. Even though it's Americanized, it's still good. Lime juice is pretty much universal here. The first day we came to Malaysia, we all had a lime ice consisting of hot water, then small limes that are unique and yet ubiquitous here, and then ice is added at the buzzer for a delicious beverage. Cost: 0 ringgit.

Second breakfast: okay, so this isn't Lord of the Rings. Second breakfast isn't traditional here, it's just that some of us skipped the continental breakfast. So we went across the street. Here in Kuching, you will find these "restaurants" everywhere. Several vendors pool their resources together and rent a streetside shop-like space. Then they specialize in certain foods (rice dishes, noodle dishes, drinks, etc.), thus maximizing profit while minimizing overhead costs. It's a cool system, and it's a good way for customers to enjoy cheap traditional foods. So for our particular second breakfast, I had fried taro with egg. Taro is a starch-like tuber, similar to potatoes. So the whole dish felt like buttery hash browns, especially when served with a sweet ketchup-like sauce. Cost: 3 ringgit. Plus I had a tai peng, which is a tea-like drink that calls for sweetened condensed milk and ice, among other things. Cost: 1.20 ringgit.

Note that 1 US dollar is 3.54 ringgit, so everything is cheaper here than it actually seems.

Lunch: same setup of a streetside restaurant. I had a bowl of fried rice (Nasi Goreng) with three sides: octopus and green beans in a brown soy sauce, small shrimp and red peppers in a hot sauce, and mussels with onions and okra in a curry. Cost: 4 ringgit. Lime ice to drink. Cost: 1.20 ringgit.

Dinner: we went to a fancy place. There are several restaurants in an arena, similar to a food court in a mall but much better. But all of these were seafood restaurants. You went and checked out their fish and shellfish selection (on ice, like at a fresh air market), and they cooked it for you right then and there, with all the veggie selection you could handle. I had 3 prawns in a black pepper sauce, with a sweet lettuce mix (something I couldn't pronounce), fried okra, cooked eggplant, topped off with a watermelon pulp juice, and watermelon and starfruit for dessert. Cost: 10 ringgit.

So I spent 0 + 4.20 + 5.20 + 10 ringgit, or about US$5.50. Amazing. You really can eat well here for cheap. I know I am mentioning a lot of seafood, but that's mainly because I love seafood. Malaysians make wonderful dishes out of shrimp, fish, prawns, squids, clams, and even fish paste (Belachan), although that last one's a bit sketchy. They also do chicken and pork very well, plus there's an overwhelming abundance of vegetables and fruits. Rice (Nasi) and noodles (Mee) are the two primary forms of grains here, as expected.

Overall, the food here is phenomenal. Healthy, tasty, cheap. I can't think of a better combination.

May 20--God is even more majestic than rainforests

2009-05-20T22:38:00.000+08:00

I was going to bring a lot more books on this trip, but I didn’t know if I’d have room for them. So I only ended up bringing a book by Donald Miller—you might know him as the author of Blue Like Jazz. Turns out I had room for a few more books, but this one inspires me so much that I’ll have no problem rereading it and rereading it for the rest of the summer. In this book (Searching For God Knows What), he explains how Christianity is much more than subscribing to a set of doctrines, much more than promoting a certain political or activist or economical Jesus, much more than doing the right things even with good intentions. Here’s a sample, what I mulled over before lunch today:

“…if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on a nice list, then it doesn’t meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn’t interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather, obvious) language we are all speaking. But if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it is more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.” (Searching for God Knows What, pg. 45)

Plus last night I listened to a sermon by John Piper (podcast from SermonAudio.com: The Peculiar Mark of Majesty, Part I) that was encouraging and intimidating at the same time. God is a huge God, and yet we maintain such limited views of His power and love. Here’s how I described it in my journal: “The message was about God’s majesty, how it is declared resolutely and unequivocally from the simplest and humblest means. It was awe-inspiring.” I need more of these thought-inducers in my life, and I also need more thoughts to be induced by them. It is no small matter to be concerned with the soul.

So I bet all you readers out there want to hear about what I actually did today. A bunch of stuff. I went to an orangutan rehabilitation center and watched the feeding time; we stood in an actual rainforest as about a dozen orange primates descended to munch on bananas and wrangle about. I used chopsticks for breakfast. I watched live turtles swim around in a sanctuary of a Taoist temple. I saw tribal spears and orca skeletons and models of oil rigs at the Sarawak ethnic museum. I found a small shop that sells local-made drums for about US$35. I greatly enjoyed fried bananas. I saw a Prevost’s squirrel, my absolute favorite. I laughed at more cat figurines. I pondered the very essence of life itself. Needless to say, it was a busy day.

May 19--Jamie Cullum and Cat City

2009-05-19T21:13:00.000+08:00

So the bus tour around Singapore fell through. Not through some rotten old boards of a rickety bridge over a bottomless chasm, mind you, but it just didn’t work out for us. But it’s okay, because we will definitely have an entire day to spend in the city on the way back. By then, we’ll be tired from all the field work, but we won’t have the jet lag yet. It’s a trade off of sorts.

So we wandered around the Singapore airport, looking for things to do. We found a sunflower garden on the roof. An exhibit of Lego windmills, supplemented by Jamie Cullum tunes. Powerful foot massage chairs that knead your legs into pulp. Travellators. The world’s largest plasma screen TV. And more. But then we got bored and played cards and read books.

Then we took a flight to Kuching, the largest city of Borneo. Surprisingly, they served us a full meal, even though the flight was only an hour long and it was in the middle of the afternoon. Once we flew over Borneo, I was hooked. I finally got to sit at a window seat that wasn’t right over the wing, so I marveled at the pristine green expanse rising out of the glittering blue of the Straits of Malacca. We soared through the stratosphere, gawking at neat rows of palm oil plantations and the chaotic entanglement of untouched forest hiding beneath wispy clouds.

We had to fill out a bunch of forms in order to officially enter Malaysia. These countries are taking swine flu seriously, probably because they’ve already had to deal with bird flu and SARS. Everyone’s wearing masks, and at the airport they had an infrared camera to detect fevers.

We had to specially order a caravan of taxis, because we have so much research equipment. We waited for that at the airport for about an hour. We also had some difficulties with money—the ATM ate one person’s debit card and didn’t spit it back out. The taxi drivers, once they showed up, were very nice and helpful and even tried to make small talk in what little English they knew.

They brought us to the Singgahsanna Lodge, a wonderful, fun little hostel in downtown Kuching. The walls are extraordinarily colorful and covered with professional photos of orangutans and farmers. Several wooden and ceramic sculptures adorn the place, as well as a shelf full of books and several computer terminals (again, where I am now). The whole place gives off an exotic yet comfortable feel; if I were to write a travelogue or a short novel about an old lady who leaves her house full of cats to see the world, I would write it here. Speaking of cats, Kuching means Cat City. And there are cats. Sculptures of cats, figurines of cats, campus cats. We ate dinner across the Sarawak River, away from the touristy restaurants, and there were plenty of cats scrounging around the locals’ fryers and ovens. Tomorrow, we’ll hopefully have time to explore the city more. It’s really fascinating to get to know my fellow researchers more, and to experience the culture here. It’s an adventure!

Clearly I will have been to Singapore

2009-05-19T07:13:00.002+08:00

It says 6:15 p.m. Monday on my watch. It turns out that here in Singapore it's 7:15 a.m. on Wednesday. We just underwent a monumental marathon of plane flights. We woke up at 3 in the morning on Sunday morning to catch our 6 a.m. flight out of Omaha. The hotel was nice enough to start continental breakfast an hour early just for us, so I felt obligated to try everything they had. The flight to Dallas/Fort Worth was bumpy and the cabin pressure felt overwhelming. I ended up buying a book (Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler) because those were the last things I forgot to bring.

But then we transferred to a 777 to Tokyo, and life was good. During the 13 hour flight, we had time to watch several movies and TV shows (with our personal screens on the backs of the seats in front of us), read books, play games, and still get bored. It was a luxurious flight; I can't even imagine what first class felt like. We even got sushi as part of one of our meals.

We had a few hours to chill at the Tokyo airport. I felt a strong urge to walk around and stretch my legs, and an equal and opposite urge to lie down and sleep. I ended up walking, and trying various settings on my camera, and watching over everybody else's stuff, because all of them took a nap. I felt like a silent guardian, a watchman with their lives at stake. It was fun.

Then there was another 777 waiting to take us to Singapore, which it turns out is still a good 6 hours from Tokyo. Sleeping was pretty much mandatory on that one. We ended up at the city-state at midnight local time, and slept in pretty nice hotel rooms in the airport. The airport here is literally a city within a city: it's got a movie theater, gym, millions of malls, free internet-capable terminals (where I am now), and tons of locally-grown orchids.

Today we will take a bus tour around Singapore, which I'm very excited about. Clearly, I will now have been to Singapore. A city with paper lanterns and wooden bridges would be cool to see, very much like Pirates of the Caribbean, but I know it will turn out more like Coruscant from Star Wars, modern and glitzy and with oddly-shaped lights. I can't wait.

May 17--Flight plan

2009-05-17T05:51:00.000+08:00

The mechanism is in motion. I'm leaving soon.
Tonight we're taking the OmaLink bus from Lincoln to Omaha. Tomorrow we will jump on a plane at 6 a.m. headed to Fort Worth, Texas. From there, we'll take a short jaunt over to Tokyo, Japan (something like a 20-hour flight). Then we'll end up in Singapore. After spending the night in the Singapore airport's hotel (yes, the airport itself could be a small city), we'll find ourselves in Kuching, the capital of Malaysia's Sarawak province on Borneo. After getting all our paperwork and car rentals in order, we will drive to Miri, a city of about 300 thousand people, which is close to our study site, Lambir Hills National Park. And then we will study the rainforest. Now you know about as much as I do about our itinerary.

So my last minute checklist is in order. Waterproof yet uninsulated boots, knee-length socks, compass from Norway, downloaded Ravi Zacharias sermons, two ponchos, outlet adapters, and of course, a Frisbee. Then there's the optional stuff like passports and traveler's cheques. I hope I've got everything...

May 15--The Sun and the Son

2009-05-15T03:09:00.000+08:00

The sun gives life.

Before we could ever get into stomatal conductance and carboxylation constants, we must start with this fundamental fact. All life on earth finds its sustenance as a derivation of the sun's energy. And the only way to capture this energy, in fact the only technology so far that can effectively convert electromagnetic waves and carbon dioxide into glucose and water, is the common leaf.

Leaves are everywhere. Lawren Sack, biology professor at UCLA, has called them "the engines of ecosystems." For example, the most common protein on earth (RuBisCO) is directly involved in photosynthesis. Yet very little is understood about the actual inner workings of a leaf. How does a plant determine how long it should pump nitrogen into a leaf before it starts redistributing it elsewhere and letting the leaf fall off? How does it decide what kind of tannins and phenols to manufacture, in order to protect against bugs? What are the most important factors that determine a leaf's aging process? These are the questions that remain unanswered. But not for long.

Basically, leaves are the champions of the natural world. But there is more to this world than merely the natural. With this blog, I want to keep my friends, family and colleagues informed not only about the development of my research, but also my thoughts on life through this time. And a lot of my thoughts will inevitably focus on my personal relationship with the One who made RuBisCO and phenols and every other basis for life. You see, God is a perfect God, set apart from all corruption or deficiencies. But the truth is, you and I fall short of that standard. We must admit, if we are being honest with ourselves, that we have not been perfect every day of our lives; even if it was something as insignificant as lying or stealing, it falls under what the Bible calls sin.

So everybody sins. The thing that makes this a problem is that the penalty for sin, even one sin, is death. Please understand that death is not termination; it is separation. Physical death is the separation of the body from the soul. But an even more terrifying kind of death is spiritual death, separation from God forever in agonizing torment. And this is the sentence that all sinners--you and I--must serve under the judgment of a just and perfect God. We can do nothing about it, either; our best attempts at good deeds are not enough to satisfy His justice. This is the dilemma we face, the chasm we cannot cross.

But there is hope. Jesus Christ, God manifested as man, died on a cross to pay that penalty, to satisfy God's justice, in our place. He singlehandedly took upon himself all the sins of humanity as a perfect sacrifice, the only valid sacrifice, to conquer death once for all time. In this way God displayed His love, that even in our wretched condition, He gave us a gift we could never deserve--the opportunity to have our relationship with God restored forever. Instead of eternal spiritual death, we can have real life, eternal. The Bible says all you must do to activate this redemption is to believe this message. Admit that you are lost in your sinful condition, and believe that the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the only means of rescue and the only way to fully know the One who created you. I don't want to sound harsh here, but I just want you, whoever you may be, to know what I consider most important.

The Son gives life.

May 13--Good to know

2009-05-13T23:57:00.001+08:00

Here are some essential items to get out of the way:

I leave this Sunday, May 17. I get back around July 13.

The rest of my summer will be taken up by chemical analysis and mathematical modeling. So I'll be in Lincoln about a month before band starts up again.

Although we will have computer access, we will not have constant Internet access. We might not go into town for up to two weeks at a time, and therefore my posts will not be in real-time. But I am planning on typing up my thoughts each day, and then posting them all at the same time when we get to an Internet cafe or something. Just so you know...

And so it begins...

2009-05-13T07:10:00.001+08:00

I am going to Malaysia to study the rainforest.

I am super excited. This is pretty much what I've hoped for ever since I was a little kid. The details are a little different; I'd always imagined going to the Amazon and studying animals, not plants, but the exhilaration is the same. It's still not even real to me yet.

Here's the lowdown: along with three other students and our biology professor, who has written several papers about the site already, I am taking an adventure to Lambir Hills National Park, which is in the Malaysian portion of the island of Borneo. And we are studying leaves.

We are measuring things as simple as leaf toughness (a penetrometer, which acts like a three-hole punch, calculates the force required to poke a hole) and factors as complicated as photosynthetic rates (using a $40,000 gas exchange analyzer, manufactured in Lincoln, NE of all places). We will also collect leaf and soil samples, calculate average light intensity, and oh yeah, have a blast experiencing a culture half a world away.

The whole purpose of this project is to make a grand unifying theory of leaf growth and nutrient allocation, or something like that. Basically we're trying to construct a mathematical model that can predict how long a leaf will live given certain parameters. It's actually kinda revolutionary because nobody's done it before. I might get a little technical later on, but I'll keep it really simplified for now. I don't want to scare anybody away from reading this just because they don't care about discretionary structural carbon.

So for now it's enough to say that I am stoked. Borneo is one of the most diverse islands on the planet, both in terms of biodiversity and ethnic diversity. They've got pristine rainforests, caves, and coral reefs, but also a pretty well-developed country. We will be living in a house at the national park, so we will be isolated from the human experience most of the time, but we are relatively close to a city about the size of Lincoln, with a vast assortment of indigenous Malays, Chinese, Britons, Australians, and of course the awkward American tourists.

Here I am, a Christian white boy from landlocked Nebraska going to a Muslim island on the equator to do research on the environment. It will be an adventure like no other. And if my writing can give you even a glimpse into what I experience, I will have done my job.