Daily Mud: Quiet but active on the Western Front

So what's been happening in the dirt of Bang Lang Da? There's been a lull in the MSc report writing process as a first draft has been submitted to the supervisor. While the comments are eagerly anticipated, the free time and good tides have been used carefully.

A sample of 15 plants from both the two test planting plots (green signs) have been labeled and measured. These are plots where propagules are dibbled into the existing pond floor, rather than on a hill, to allow growth comparisons.

Hill E's Ceriops tagal has burst into life and the Ceriops is leafing nicely. As has Hill L's Bruguiera cylindrica.But the main work has been a lot of digging to widen and deepen Channel 2, including 2C (blue signs). This is tricky work as working low down on the site near the sluice gate means that water is flowing over where the digging is being done the whole time. Digging underwater is difficult. It's heavier work and hard to gauge which bits of the channel bottom need further excavation. So it needs a low tide, when the pond has had time to drain, and no rain. Yesterday there was hard rain for a significant part of the afternoon, so the attention was focused on widening the whole of 2c.

Was Noah's Ark really a Pond?

And just when we thought

we had a reasonable understanding

of what is living in the pond,

more animals appear.

Please forgive the quality of the photography. Some of it was taken while chasing these chaps across the mud.

Biodiversity and Barry Bendell

The second visitor of last week was the multi-talented Barry Bendell. Originally from Canada, he now lives in Trang, southwest Thailand, is the thickness of a blade of sea grass away from finishing a PhD on the aforementioned at James Cook University in Australia, knows more than most about marine invertebrates and speaks (and reads!) Thai. So what better person to go hunting for bugs and grubs with in the filth at Bang Land Da. Well accustomed to working with communities in Thailand, Barry spent a good while with the fine folks of the village at the coffee shop, explaining to the assembled bemused what the kitchen sieve and the ziplock bags were for.

We then headed into the mud to do an initial quick-and-sticky audit of what’s in the pond. This baseline data will help us to see if there are changes biodiversity over time and compare inside with just outside the pond. The process is tricky as there are no indicator beasties that allow us to see biodiversity changes on a sliding scale, as there are fresh water fish species in the UK, which indicate well the level of pollution in the water. And we wanted to keep it simple so other communities attempting the same thing could follow this example. So with my breaking shovel (“Welded, na!! Really strong, jing jing!!” Phaa!) creaking like 1970’s garden furniture, we dug up various holes, crab casts, channel bottoms and sieved, photographed and noted. Sadly the pond snakes failed to make a gala appearance. But there was plenty to keep us occupied.

Mid way through our study the pond’s major source of disturbance appeared and starting collecting snapper shrimp for us. Thus we headed home with some bizarre polychaetes in a bag, for further study. After a feed at the night market and a modest beer we photographed what turned out to be a pair of spoon worms, performing stomach yoga. Finally, the ever-benevolent Bareee (as pronounced in Thai) released our exercise troupe into a nearby stream.
Thank you, Barry for your expertise and good humour. See you again soon.

Tom Hughes comes to visit

Trouble might come in threes but visitors to Bang Lang Da seem to come in twos. This week I’ve been thrilled to host Tom Hughes from KL, and Barry Bendell (see next posting). We met climbing trees in the UK for The Tree Company and have kept in touch ever since. He is country manager in Malaysia for an American NGO called The Wildlife Trust and has spent an unhealthy amount of time wriggling around jungles and swimming through mangrove swamps trying to catch fruit bats and flying foxes to test them for Nipah Virus. For those of us who are not seriously-nasty-disease experts, Nipah causes too much fluid to collect within the brain, and is deadly most of the time. Ie, make sure the little critter in the net doesn’t bite you.

Tom is a busy man. He’s getting married at the end of the year to a fabulous, feisty girl called Mae. They are in the process of trying to buy a house in KL. He likes jumping out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes (his fiancee has more sense). And Tom is currently setting up the Zoonotic Emergence Network in Malaysia, a collaborative research project between the Wildlife Trust’s Consortium for Conservation Medicine, the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and the Malaysian Ministry of Health. The project aims to determine if contact with wild animals during the commercial, recreational, and subsistence hunting and butchering of animals results in the zoonotic transfer of animal infections to humans.

Kindly he helped monitor the growth on Hill C as their vitals were measured again. And then went for a swim in sea at Ao Nang - in complete darkness.
At BLD we watched in amazement as a couple pulled a bucket of fish out of a channel that had been dug next to the sluice gate, having netted off the pond at high tide.
Thank you for visiting, Tom. Please come back soon, and bring your wife.

Daily Mud - A New Channel

Please forgive my temporary silence - not to be confused with bone-idleness. In actual fact the last two weeks have been very productive. Not only have I scampered into Malaysia for 12 minutes for the sake of a passport stamp, but also re-registered myself at Krabi Immigration and written up some of the masters research report. And as you will see from the map of the site, a whole new channel has been dug, with four new hills being produced, O, P, Q, R.

These hills have been made deliberately higher than before and added to on subsequent visits. All easy to type, but that has meant a lot of digging for yours truly. The reason for this channel was to help drain an area of standing water left at low tide. Saturated mud is hard for mangroves to grow in as root conditions are anaerobic all the time. This saturated, sloppy mud was also prone to wash off into the channels as the tide withdrew. So this wet mud has been scrapped off surrounding the channel and put up on the hills, creating a gentle slope into the new drainage channel.

The channel has been carefully shaped so it is wider at the bottom (south) near 'chaos corner' (named in honour of the European air traffic control hand-over point from western Europe to eastern) where it meets two other channels, and narrower at the top. And it curves like the resident snake, so as to be as natural a possible. Below is an earlier photo of the first third of this new channel being dug.

Chaos corner will be will be significantly widened and opened up.

Hill C continues to grow well. Now there is something to measure, 15 of the R. apiculata seedlings have been numbered, and their heights, leaf number and general condition measured. This will be tracked every month or so.

The tags are being monitored carefully to make sure they do not damage the plant. In case they do, labels have also been stuck into the mud next to the plant, if the tags need to be removed. 5 plants have been chosen at random from lower down on the hill, 5 at mid height and 5 on top to see if there is a difference.[A small prize for correctly guessing what the tags and labels have been made from.] Next project is to widen the pre-existing channel that runs from chaos corner in the middle, west to the sluice gate. Below is what it looks like at the moment. More news has this happens.