Gone Fishin' and lapsing back into food dorkiness.

Being a fisherman is hard. Wednesday morning had me standing on the bow of one of SFS' 2 pangas trying my luck with a cast net.  (Pangas are the small fiberglass motor boats that it sometimes feels like I live in.) We took turns trying to make the round, weighted nylon nets go into the graceful arc and round opening that Poncho and Chilaco, our pangueros, had demonstrated. They patiently taught us gringas this skill they've had since childhood, and we laughed at ourselves as we all struggled with the nets.  At some points, it felt a little bit useless to be bobbing out in the bay looking ridiculous and failing at fishing. We scared off all the fish within the couple of throws, and all we were dragging up was bits of sea grass and an occasional shell. Then at some point, someone joked that it would be easier to just trawl for the shrimp the cast nets usually reel in, and the value of this lesson sank in.  

(I didn't have my camera on me. I know, shocking. Thanks to Larissa for this shot. Madeline is confused, as we all were, by the net. Chilaco looks on, helping a bit.)

Trawling is the practice of dragging a net behind a boat that catches a lot of fish/shrimp, but also catches anything else in its path--turtles, dolphins, other fish... (Remember at the end of Finding Nemo? The SWIM DOWN scene? That's trawling. Nemo and Dory were almost bycatch.) Anyways, bottom trawling, which is usually used for shrimp, involves dragging the net along the ocean floor, destroying habitats, corals, and anything else that happens to be in its way. And it's a LOT easier than the art of using a cast net. It's important for people trying to manage fisheries to really have a complete understanding of that fishery in order to make policies and regulations that are actually realistic. Otherwise people will just ignore them....

Though we caught nothing at all on Wednesday, we were a bit more successful scallop fishing on Friday. Scallops are a fishery with absolutely no bycatch, despite other problems with overfishing and habitat loss. We put on our wetsuits and snorkel gear and jumped into the water with mesh bags, quadrats (squares of PVC pipe), and slates. The bags were for collection. The quadrats and slates were for determining the abundance of scallops in the area. We dove down, picking up scallops and writing down how many were inside the quadrat we threw randomly through the waves. Each pair of us came back to the campus wet lab with 10 scallops, which we weighed, measured, and dissected. Those of you who eat scallops probably know this, but the edible part of a scallop is the abductor muscle that holds the two shells together. In order to open them, we wedge a knife between the blades and cut the ligament (or something) that connects them. The scallop is still alive at this point, and is trying to squeeze you out, but we won every time, and those of us who aren't kosher/vegetarians had fresh scallop snacks. (Only after weighing the muscle to see what percentage of the total scallop weight is actually marketable.)

Our third and final adventure as fisherwomen (and man) was Saturday, when we went out to pull up blue crab traps used by one of the directed research groups. The traps at the first site were suspiciously empty, and we only managed to pull in 6 crabs from 5 traps. Someone had snagged our traps first. That's the way it goes here, especially because the school operates with research permits and doesn't exactly have the same respect from fishermen as they give each other. We were more successful at the second site, and by the end of the morning we had a cooler full of wiggling crabs in mesh bags. 

A brief stint in the freezer did little to subdue them, and after lunch we were faced with weighing, measuring, and then opening up 20-something live crabs. We had a discussion about the prospect of ripping the shells off of the crabs to kill them, rather then letting them go into to a coma in the freezer--the really cold freezer in the lab is full of chemicals, so if we killed them that way, which may or may not have worked in the time we had, they wouldn't be able to be eaten, and would go to waste. If we put them in our kitchen freezer for the period of lunchtime, they wouldn't really go numb before we killed them, but they wouldn't go to waste.  Anyways, it was a bit odd to rip the shells off of the living, moving crabs in our hands, but crab insides are kind of interesting. We were looking at them to determine their stages of gonadal development (to help determine management sizes--you don't want to harvest all of the crabs that haven't reproduced yet!) As we poked around inside the crab, taking out the gooey pink gonads and also removing all of the other guts that aren't edible, we'd occasionally hit nerves that would send the crab legs wiggling again. The first time I did this, I had a momentary panic that I was poking my tweezers around in a live crab. Then I realized what was going on and could see how cool it actually was. I'd stick the tweezers in one part of muscle and the crabs legs on that side would thrash in the same was as they did when it was alive. It felt kind of like playing with a very sick marionette doll.... The crabs die instantly when you rip their shells of, just so you know.  (Antonio, one of our research interns, also pointed out that the gonads look pretty much exactly like grapefruit. You're welcome.) 

As I was one of the few vegetarians ripping open and poking around in crabs, a couple of people asked me if, given that I'd fished, killed, and gutted these crabs, I would eat them. Thinking about it (and putting almost 21 years of keeping kosher aside) I decided that in theory, philosophically, these crabs (and the scallops, and the pen shell that some fishermen gave us while we were out getting out crab traps) were fair game for me to eat--they're local, were going to die anyways, and while they didn't exactly come from a sustainable fishery; they actually died to help figure out what a sustainable fishery would look like. So yeah, in theory I'd eat them. But almost a decade of vegetarianism and 2 of keeping kosher, plus the fact that shellfish is just kind of gooey in general, kept me from satisfying my curiosity. 

The semester has FLOWN by--I can't believe that I've already been here for 2 months and that April is just a few days away. Before I know it I'll be back in Boston... well, probably back at Colby, and fishing for scallops will be just a memory. 

Love and hugs!

~Emma

Spring Break: Loreto!

Hola!

So first off, sorry it's taken so long to actually update this thing. It's been a crazy couple of weeks--homestay weekend, a camping trip, the whale festival, a couple of day trips, and a bunch of projects and presentations to work on. Then midterms and on to spring break. All good things (well... I guess the midterms were good as midterms go...), but definitely not conducive to updating blogs regularly. It feels like there's so much going on that it's hard to choose what to write about in here. I know I won't be able to convey every exciting, interesting, fun, or otherwise notable thing I do here, and prioritizing is tough. It's all new, all momentus, and I want to share all of it with you. I was going to talk about my directed research project, but I just published a column about whales and turtles in the Colby Echo (the weekly student newspaper. The article is also posted here as my last entry). I know you all have many things to do in life other than read my blog, so I try to keep these entries short. Which I guess I just failed at by rambling on about topic selection for a paragraph. Oops.

Wednesday morning, after 2 days of midterms, we all boarded a bus from Puerto San Carlos to Ciudad Constitucion, the closest city. In Consti, those of us going on to the historic town of Loreto left our La Paz and Cabo bound classmates, and spent an hour enjoying muffins and coffee in "Coffee Star" before our next bus ride. The bus in Baja is VERY nice. Nicer than some Greyhounds I've been on in the States. We watched dubbed versions of Little Miss Sunshine and Pirates of the Caribbean II from comfy coach bus seats for the 2 hour ride through the mountains to Loreto. Loreto was founded by Jesuit missionaries in the late 1600's and is now a tourist destination, capitalizing on its proximity to the Bahia Loreto National Marine Park and historic sites. We walked across town, down a pedestrian walkway, lined with trees and tourist shops selling ceramics, textiles, hammocks, and t-shirts. Loreto is approximately the same size as Puerto San Carlos, but feels worlds away. Prices are in dollars and pesos, English is spoken pretty much everywhere. After checking into our hotel (the type of thing Mom would pick out for us and love--a converted house, decorated in classic Mexican style, beautiful, with lots of common spaces to hang out... or write in blogs. And a dog to pat and play with.) After Puerto San Carlos, where we are hyper-aware of our status as outsiders and very careful not to do anything that marks us as "those gringos from the escuela," the chance to relax and be goofy loud Americans was great. We decided early on to embrace being tourists and obvious Americans, and to just have fun. Last night we went for dinner somewhere where they served us bread and olive oil on the table, and we got pasta and pizza for dinner. There's an ice cream place with mint chocolate chip and chocolate oreo. All the streets are paved and have side walks! Development is a nice change....

Wednesday afternoon and Thursday were spent exploring Loreto, buying souvenirs and gifts that we just can't get in Puerto San Carlos, enjoying coffee and the possibility of food that didn't involve beans, rice, or tortillas. We hit up the supermarket for non-biodegradable shampoo (our gray water at the center is filtered through the mangroves) , chocolate, and Nature's Valley granola bars. We sat on the rocky beach right next to town and read for hours, people-watching from the shade of little thatched umbrellas set up on the beach. We also made friends with Cesar, a representative from a tourist agency, who found us discounts on a boat ride and car rental. (He was confused when we kept responding to his English greetings and questions in Spanish, and we got to talking.)

Thursday night, we ran into the other SFS group in Loreto. As we wandered around Loreto, looking for somewhere to hang out, we found what looked like a private party in a club next door the the bar the other group of girls had wanted to take us to. The bar was closed, but as we loitered outside the club, a woman came outside. "This isn't a private party, you can come in" she said. "It's my 40th birthday party, but please, come in!" How often are you invited to a 40th birthday party? We headed in, taking in an outdoor bar, palm trees, and all the trappings of clubs we imagine in the states (yay for not being 21...) Settling into a zebra-striped bench with high stainless steel tables, we rocked out to 90's American pop before the band started to play. The band played American classic rock, many of the guests seemed to be American, and the hostess made her speech, thanking the guests for their donation of toys for needy children, in English and Spanish. We never did get the whole story, but our hostess (whose name none of us could remember) was gracious, constantly checking in to make sure we were enjoying ourselves, happy we were dancing. "This is the best night of my life. Thank you girls so much for coming!" She said as we left, thanking her profusely for a wholly unique night.

Friday morning, we got up early to get to the marina to meet the Panguero (boat driver) that Cesar found for us. We left the dock and headed around the nearest island, Isla Coronado. As we sat in the back chatting, the boat slowed down, and our panguero pointed off the side--"ballena!" Sure enough, a humpback whale was going down for a dive, showing his flukes! Though we all see whales on a regular basis with school, it never gets old :-) Further around the island, we saw sea lions (well, heard then saw... they bark) and a HUGE pod of dolphins--over 100! (Photos to come when I get back to school. Also check out the photos of volcanic rocks and caves. They are SO cool.) We continued around the island and got to a white sand beach, protected by spits of basalt rock leftover from volcanic activity. Palapas (pavillions) are set up on the beach for shade, and we can see the fish around the rocks from the boat. We had a few hours to chill on this beach that we only had to share with a few other tourists and their pangueros. We slept in the sun (yay sunburns. Oh well, it had to happen some time) and then went snorkeling. The water was cold, but schools of Sargent Majors, scattered puffer fish, and the biggest King Angelfish I had ever seen made it worth it.

Today, we headed up the the San Javier mission, 32 km off the highway into the mountains via dirt mountain road. We rented a car and left Loreto early to make the trip. Stopping at cave paintings and beautiful oasises (oases? oasii?) along the way, the road was harrowing and would have made mom cringe, but was a LOT of fun and BEAUTIFUL. Again, check out the photo album once I get back. The mission is old and beautiful, a relic of the Jesuits who were the first Europeans in Baja. We tagged along with a tour and followed them down to a hundreds-year-old olive tree at the edge of a farm. It's beautiful trunk branched and twisted intricately. It still bears olives every year. (Pictures. Picasa. Soon.) We headed down, taking the curves carefully, narrowly missing disaster when a pick-up truck came barreling over a steep hill--we couldn't see it from below, it couldn't see us from above. I threw our rented car into reverse, he threw on the brakes, and we were fine. The rest of the trip was uneventful, driving the rough, windy dirt roads was fun, and the scenery was BEAUTIFUL. We stopped at Del Borracho, a grill/bar/restaurant right before the highway, for malted milkshakes, and then came back to our hotel for a nap. Which I am now going to go take.

Love and hugs!
~Emma

Reduce, Reuse.... ahh just recycle it already!

Hola!

So first off, sorry it's taken so long to actually update this thing. It's been a crazy couple of weeks--homestay weekend, a camping trip, the whale festival, a couple of day trips, and a bunch of projects and presentations to work on. Then midterms. All good things (well... I guess the midterms were good as midterms go...), but definitely not conducive to updating blogs regularly. It feels like there's so much going on that it's hard to choose what to write about in here. I know I won't be able to convey every exciting, interesting, fun, or otherwise notable thing I do here, and prioritizing is tough. It's all new, all momentus, and I want to share all of it with you. I was going to talk about my directed research project, but I just published a column about whales and turtles in the Colby Echo (the weekly student newspaper. The article is also posted here as my last entry). I know you all have many things to do in life other than read my blog, so I try to keep these entries short. Which I guess I just failed at by rambling on about topic selection for a paragraph. Oops.

Saturday afternoons find 2-4 SFS students hanging out in a dilapidated, roofless building on the outskirts of Puerto San Carlos, waiting.  While I would love to delve into a sketchy story that explains what we're doing there, no such luck. From 4-6 every Saturday afternoon, the Recycling Center of Puerto San Carlos is open.  This center was started last fall by Brady, the Student Affairs Manager at SFS, as a way to begin dealing with the problem of trash in Puerto San Carlos. (See my photo album/will be a photoessay as soon as I have time to edit it:http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/DownInTheMexicanDumpS#) The center buys plastic of all kinds, aluminum, and cardboard, and will take glass as well, but won't pay for it. Brady pays the same rate that the recycling truck from La Paz will pay her when it comes to pick up everything, once we have enough collected. The financial incentive to recycle is small, only about 10 pesos per kilogram (about 35 cents per pound), but works well. There are some people who come every week to recycle, bringing plastics and cardboards in huge quanities, collected from businesses and other people around town. Others seem to see it as a way to get rid of their trash that happens to be plastic/aluminum/cardboard and get some money for it.

On one memorable occassion, we noticed a car driving towards us with what looked like a bumper on its roof. We thought it was strange, but not entirely out of the ordinary in this town where it's a shock that some of the cars drive at all. As the car got closer, we realized it was coming for us. A family with a few small girls piled out of the car (nobody wears seatbelts and I doubt any of the cars would pass a US inspection), and opened the trunk. It was an old station wagon, with all of the seats folded down to fit in the tangle of black plastic and assorted junk inside. As we mobilized towards the open back of the station wagon (which was propped up with an old pipe stored in the trunk for that purpose,) we were able to make out some of the shapes inside. Cupholders, vent covers, a glove compartment, bits of dashboard, and the rest of what had clearly been a car started coming out. As we pulled things out to weigh them, it became clear that the entire interior of a car had been shoved into the back of this one and dragged to the recycling center. Some things were clearly not plastic (though we couldn't identify what they were) others we gave the benefit of the doubt, but none of it would have been recycleable in The States.  As we darted around, unpacking the greasy mess of trunk, the family milled around watching, clearly amused. Once in a while, they would lend a hand with a particularly bulky piece of siding, but mostly the little girls played in the tall grass of the empty lot next door, and the parents leaned against the station wagon, watching. Old toys, bottles and cans, and a pile of cardboard rounded out the contents of the trunk, and we weighed it all. 

[This is all I wrote, but I figured I'd publish it. Not that anyone's still reading this...]

Colby Echo: South of the Border, Watching Whales

So I'm going to post an actual post later on today (hopefully), but here's my article that was just published in the opinions section of the Colby Echo: 

http://media.www.colbyecho.com/media/storage/paper1174/news/2009/03/11/Opinions/South.Of.Border.Watching.Whales-3668766.shtml

3/7/09
I've been up since before 4 a.m, but Nutella and anticipation are keeping me alert as I scan the horizon for whales. I woke up this morning in a tent, surrounded by mangroves. With the sky still glittering with stars, my roommate and I climbed quietly into a boat to check out the nylon nets. In three shifts, from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m., our research team caught three green sea turtles-less than half the number we caught on our last trip, but you can't control the turtles. We measured, weighed, tagged and took DNA samples from these juvenile turtles who spend their long adolescence in the mangrove-lined esteros of the coast of Baja California. These turtles, like all other sea turtle species in the world, are endangered, and studying their population dynamics and structure in this area will hopefully help create effective conservation plans for them. But we released them hours ago. Now I'm perched on the front seat of a small fiberglass panga, searching for gray whales in Bahía Magdalena. 

The water is smooth as our blue and white panga cuts through the bay, weaving between fishermen pulling up traps and setting nets, heading toward open water. We're on the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico, studying the distribution and behavior of gray whales, which were once hunted almost to extinction along the eastern Pacific coast. They spend their summers feeding in the Arctic, and in the winter trek down the coast to Mexico to breed, give birth and now be patted by eager tourists. Their protection has been a major success story in species conservation, and the eastern Pacific population is once again considered stable. The more we know about these marine mammals, or any other species, the better we will be able to protect them. 

Tourist pangas, distinguishable by their canopies set up for shade, crowd around a mother and calf. We think we've seen these whales before, but we take GPS coordinates again. I climb onto the bow of the boat with my camera just to make sure. My research for the semester involves the photo identification of whales, and though I have a 300mm zoom lens, I rarely need to use it. These whales come right up to the boat, apparently attracted by the noise of the two-stroke engine, and bask in the shallow water below us. The mother stays below the surface, coming up only to breathe, but the calf is more curious. 

Boats surround the pair-my boat of eager students and then three or four tourist boats. All of us want to get closer, to pat a whale, and the excitement is palpable.

This is hardly the first day my group has seen whales this semester; we're out here doing transects and photo IDs twice a week, but each time is thrilling. Not wanting to crowd the whales, we get just close enough for me to take as many pictures as possible, our boat bobbing in the swells with the motor off. The tourists have no such reservations, and the baby is patted, kissed and even bopped on the head. The mother surfaces a few times and is excitedly reached for and stroked. They don't seem to mind too much, but we wonder if the constant crowding by whale watchers has a larger impact on the gray whales in the bay. We try to figure out ways to incorporate that question into our research as the baby and mom surface just beyond our outstretched fingertips. 

As we move on to the next group of whales, I think about the fact that all of this-watching the sunrise while measuring turtles, sitting on a boat taking pictures of whales-is class. I can't control a smile as I realize that of all the reasons my experiences in Mexico have been amazing, this is why I'm here. This is a completely different way of learning science. Some people go abroad on language immersion programs; though I'm learning many things here beyond the realm of ecology, days like this I feel immersed in the world of conservation research. It's a little window into the world I someday want to be a part of, and I'm loving every minute of it.

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Hey Everyone!

I currently have a list of topics I need to "blog about" that includes cars and driving in Mexico, Homestay weekend, my Directed Research project/whales/photography, the recycling program in Puerto San Carlos, my perfect day of "class" yesterday, and the amazing trip to the Oasis today. It's getting longer by the day. 

However, I somehow don't have the hours that will take, so I'm going to tell you that a picture is worth a thousand words and post a bunch of pictures instead. I'm going off turtle monitoring again tomorrow night, but maybe when I get back I'll tackle one of those topics... Sorry, I'm falling behind! 

The following albums are now online: 

Last Few Weeks of Februrary: http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/LastFewWeeksOfFebruary#

This creatively titled album has pictures of puppies, lunch in town, and our sunday trip to the dunes a week and a half ago. It also includes footage of a scavenger hunt we had to do one night on campus, which involved my team doing the macarena with our professor. There's a video. 

This is class. Now go find a whale: http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/ThisIsClassNowGoFindAWhale#

All of the photos in this album were taken during class time. Some of them are part of the nearly "perfect day" referenced above. There are whales here. And dolphins. And sea lions. And fog :-) 

Host family Day: http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/HostFamilyDay#

Photos from my day with my host family

A Desert Oasis: http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/ADesertOasis#

Photos from the Oasis we visited and had class at today. It looks like it belongs in a Disney movie. AMAZING. Look at these pictures. Yeah, whales are cool, but look at this album. 

Love and hugs!
~Emma

P.S. If there's a topic you want me to add to that list/something you've been wondering about Mexico, leave me a comment. I'll try to incorporate it.