Earthwatch Australia Teach Live

Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10 (morn) – DIARY

(Morning of 7th) Checked the harp traps and caught 2 more bats, one a female with a huge pup, which was bigger then her and it was still clinging on! Lazy blighter! While we were processing her, the pup actually took off, so the mum will have to go find the scallywag later.

We saw a massive snake while checking the traps, at least as long 1.5-2m and Jovic nearly stepped on it! After he saw us, he slithered off into his nest/hole at the base of an uprooted tree. Yes, it was poisonous.

Did get leeched this morning. Just a little annoying one. What purpose do they serve ecologically? I doubt they assist in anything, stupid things. My leech defenses have now gone up to death-con-3.

We’re picking up a few little nicknames amongst the group now. Saveng is “Macgyver’ due to his unparalleled ability to whip up something we need out of the rainforest. Ryan is ‘alarm boy’ because his phone alarm kept going off while we were walking in the rainforest. Chris is ‘leech guy’ because he always has a leech when returning from the forest. I’ve been given ‘rambo’ due to the green sweat-band I’ve been wearing. You can see what’s happening in our ‘down time’ anyway…

**LATER ON THAT DAY**

Zam took us all out for lunch at Mentacarp, which is about 30mins from Kuala Lompat, and a look around the shops there. Picked up a few items that we needed and then hit the road again towards the elephant sanctuary and Kuala Gandah.

The elephants were absolutely amazing! Everyone just walked into the large, main area and there were elephants just walking around! They always had a handler with them, but there were around 4 elephants less then 15 years old just walking around, you could pat them on the head as they walked past or feed them some grass (which they were scooping up with their noses anyway) before heading down to the river for a swim. Then the ‘big ones’ came out, with the largest being a 72 year old female. They started walking around too, had a swim and a splash, completely dunking their handlers into the water!

We then had the chance to ride around on the elephants, which was really fun, and then we rode the elephants in the river and they dunked us in too! That was hilarious! While the big one was dunking people into the river, there were the two youngest elephants (6 years and 11 years old) playing in the shallows. We swam over there and started splashing them and they would submerge underwater and stick their noses out for air! That was really funny too.

Getting dumped by an elephant, into a river	I shall call him Stampy and he shall be mine...

The night-market of Kuala Krau were great. I got to eat a few tasty things being cooked up on the spot, like fried chicken. Ryan had some chicken feet but I wimped out on those. There was plenty of fresh produce available too: fruit, veggies and different sized fish. I tried some Jackfruit (tastes like pineapple), Duku (tastes like a grapefruit), Rambutan (tastes like a big lychee), soursop (like slimy sour mango), dragonfruit (like a beetroot), massive peas from massive broadbeans (like peppery raw broccoli) and Jimbu (tastes like a nashi pear).

I also got the chance to polish-up my bartering skills and bought a few gifts for when I get home. I’m sure one guy was glad to get rid of me, he should be ashamed of the prices he was charging!

Plenty to eat and buy!	And now for everyone's favourite game: "Guess That Fruit!"

Went out and had Malaysian for dinner in Kuala Krau. A very nice chicken noodle soup (maybe for Soup Club when I get back).

Morning of the 8th

Had the morning off too, so no ‘morning bats’ in the forest. Had a lovely sleep-in. There has been a death in the local village here, he was around 80 years old, and everybody stops working to help with the burial/funeral process. This means the men who change the harp-trap positions in the forest during the day won’t be working today, so unfortunately no ‘evening bats’ or ‘morning bats’ for the next 24hrs. We will instead setup some more mist-nets over the river.

Nothing particularly ‘note worthy’ happened during the day. We setup more mist-nets on a different part of the river, which Dr. Tigga described as a ‘high-low system’. Two separate mist-nets, one higher and one lower (but overlapping in the middle), are setup and spaced 50cm apart. The local echolocating bats which eat bugs off the water surface with see the ‘lower’ net and go “weeeeeee!” dodging it but flying straight into the ‘higher’ net. Or vice versa.

Morning of the 9th

We caught a few ‘new faces’ last night and this morning, including the Rhinolophus stheno, which was pretty cool. Most of the ‘Rhinos’ are cool anyway (I think so anyway). Plus some more pregnant fruit bats, they look so much like a dog you half expect them to ‘woof’ at you, except for the wings…

We also discovered that the Lompat Female Cat looked a little skinnier today…suspicious…and she definitely was thinner. Then the great kitten hunt was on! Caroline was the winner, finding 4 ginger kittens in an old cupboard behind the kitchen.

The rest of the day was another ‘stinker’ hot day, with not much breeze at all. I was on bug-sorting with Ain in the afternoon.

We were on the bridge with Julie that night. Caught some more massive Cheiromeles torquatus (3 of them and missed another over the net), 6 other Mops mops and a new face: Chaerephon johorensis. He looked very similar to a Mops mops. So 10 bats off the bridge in total. The forest team caught another 10, so it was a very productive night.

Morning of the 10th

The forest and only caught 1 bat out of 12 traps! A Balionnycteris maculata, the smallest fruit bat around here, and not insectivous so Ain couldn’t use the data for it.

Not many days left here now, so if you want to send me a question, now is the time!

See you round like a dinner plate,

Mr. Logan

Stinking hot Gotham City (Kuala Lompat)

Peninsular Malaysia

Day 10 (Afternoon/Night), Day 11 (morn) – DIARY

Well I am now officially a walking “connect the dot’” puzzle. The Malaysian mosquitoes just loooove me! “There he is! Get him quick!”

Last night Tigga gave us a very good lecture about bat echolocation, which was very interesting and she was using all the technical words to explain. But she has excellent analogies and can relate the material into understandable, everyday concepts.

We had to release all the Mollosidae we caught last night on the bridge (9th), which is brilliant fun, as they cannot ‘take off’ while you are holding them. They are built for speed and very aerodynamic. Normally when they take off, they will fall/glide out of a tree to gain momentum and get flapping. We just chuck them into the air! We did this the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it, so again I enjoyed myself at the bats expence.

While we were doing this, Tigga brought out some echolocation recording equipment. When we had the bat in our hands (and mollosidae stink), Tigga would shout “ready” and we would launch our bat into the sky and she would begin recording it’s echolocation frequency. Cool stuff.

We were in the forest group last night, and followed a very twisty-turny trail collecting about 8 bats. No new faces however. Some Hipposideros bicolour 142, Kerivoula intermedia, Rhinolofus trifoliatus, and a Hipposiderous cervinus. The bridge team caught more mollosidae, so more fun releasing them tomorrow afternoon.

This morning we found another couple of bats, more trifoliatus, bicolour 142, and a new face of Rhinolofus lepidus.

Heading to a big cave today, somewhere around here. Looking forward to it too!

Good luck for kids doing their NAPLAN,

Mr. Logan

Kuala Lompat (near Kuala Krau)

Malaysia

Day 11 (Afternoon/Night), Day 12 (morn) – DIARY

Holy Massive Cave-System Batman!

We went to visit some massive bat caves today after lunch, which are fairly close by (about 30mins away). Gunung Senyum is a popular bat destination for local people or visiting tourists. We went to visit 2 caves in particular: Gua Kelawar (which I will call ‘Small Cave’) and Gua Terang (which I will call “Massive Cave”).

We had a scientific purpose for visiting the Small Cave: collecting carrion-eating bugs for Julie, known as the Domestid Beetle. Bat skeletons are very light and fragile, to help them stay in the air and fly. Julie and other scientists who find partially decomposed bat skeletons want to study them, but can’t risk damaging/breaking the skeleton by taking off the rest of the skin and body tissues. This is where the beetles come in. Don’t be grossed out, these beetles eat carrion, which means ‘dead organic matter’. The beetles will only eat it if it’s dead. These people are obsessed with conserving bat populations so why would they but live bats into a box of flesh eating beetles?

The above picture is just outside the Small Batcave, and you won't see them, but there were heaps of bats flying around the trees.

We have found a few dead bat specimens on the rainforest floor, which is very lucky for the scientists here, so they needed to find the beetles to clean them up a bit more for study.

The beetles were in the Small Cave, the entrance was small, but we could fit through. Tigga had told us there would be hundreds of bats in this cave, so we had to keep our lights low to the ground and not talk too loud, or it would disturb the bats. We crawled/duck-walked through the entrance, climbed up a small bit of rock ledge (we could already hear the bats, but couldn’t shine our torches up too see them or it would make them start flying around) and up to the main cavern. So picture this: 9 people, walking low, lights low, talking low, ankle-deep in guano, with tweezers poking through the guano looking for carrion-eating beetles, with hundreds of chattering bats less then 2m above your heads (when crouched!). I thought it was great fun!

We were only in the main cavern for about 10 minutes, as the bats had tolerated our presence for long enough and decided to bug-out of there. Now picture this: 9 people now walking upright, with lights looking forward and up, with hundreds of bats weaving in and out between us to escape the cave! It was not like the movies, with us running and screaming, bats latching onto our heads or backpacks. These guys have the best echolocation adaptations in the bat world. Not one of them hit us. Walking back out, I had a Batman Begins moment: when Batman throws his little high-frequency emitter and all the bats come over, with him just walking though them. That’s what it was like, Hundreds of bats flapping around us and we’re just walking through them. We finally got out of there and into the forest outside the cave and there was at least 200 bats flapping and weaving around the forest, close to the cave entrance.

Myth/Freaky Fact: Bats only fly out of a cave to the left side.

Status: BUSTED – BIG TIME

I saw bats leaving the cave from both sides, and entering from both sides, so you can forget about that one Nicka. Myth Busted.

Now, the Massive Cave was indeed massive. Took a little hike to get up there but it was definitely worth it. It wasn’t very wide, maybe 50 meters at its widest, but it was around 300 meters long and at least 450 meters high. There were two points up at the cavern roof with sunlight coming through, so these were the entrances the bats would use to enter/leave the cave at dawn and dusk.

We had another big night in the forest at the harp-traps, with around 9 bats. The traps are currently set on the ‘main trail’ that we use to quickly move through the grid. This means the traps are in a larger space then normal, along a big open corridor through the forest.

Hence, we caught a Hipposideros diadema, a very large bat from the Hipposideridae family. We hadn’t caught them yet, and we caught a male and female in traps adjacent to each other, so obviously a pair. We also caught some more Kerivoula intermedia, Hipposideros bicolour and Myotis ater.

This morning we caught some more intermedia, Kerivoula pellucida, Rhinolophus lepidus and the most exciting was a Hipposiderus ridleyi. I like those guys, because they have big ears (all the better to hear you with, Mr. Fluttering Moth).

2nd last ‘Highlights’ post. Hope the NAPLANs are going well for everyone.

Mr. Logan

Kuala Lompat Research Station

Malaysia

Day 12 (Afternoon/Night), Day 13 (morn) – DIARY

Yesterday around lunchtime here (1:15pm Aussie time), I got to call the school and talk to my class. It was great to hear that they’ve been going very well and learning lots with Mr. Chapman. I was impressed with your questions Room 1, they were excellent, and Dr. Tigga was extremely impressed with them. Good job guys!

I’ve got plenty of new activities, games and experiments up my sleeve for when I get back. I’m positive you will learn a lot from them.

Last night we had the biggest storm so far. Massive amounts of lightning, thunder and then heaps of rain, made us take down the mist-net we were using near a big tree out the back. The tree was fruiting, and we were hoping to catch some fruit bats. Unfortunately, the bats can dodge the nets really, really easily in the rain as they can get a better ‘picture’ of the trap when they echolocate (like in the movie Daredevil, remember?). So we had to take that down, which was a shame.

The team in the forest had to check the harp-traps super fast for the same reason, the bats can echolocate the traps easy from the raindrops hitting it. They did get some bats which was good. No ‘new faces’ though.

This morning (13th) we found quite a few bats in the harp-traps, as the heavy rain stopped at about 4am, and bats still need to eat. No ‘new faces’, but because it was raining so much, no bugs were caught in Ain’s Insect Traps. So sorting the bugs will take 5mins today, a world record! Makes sense though, for anyone who has seen A Bug’s Life or Bee Movie, insects can’t fly in the rain. This means we won’t catch many in the trap, and a lot of bats will be hungrier then usual today.

My time here in Malaysia has been highly enjoyable and extrememly educational, which is good experience for me, and will be even more beneficial for my class this year (and in future years). But I can safely say that after:

* 20+ Rainforest Harp-trap checks

* 5 Mist-net trappings

* 6 Leeches (and the award for First Person on the Expedition with a Leech)

*100 mosquito bites

*15 litres of sweat

* 8 ‘Highlights’ postings

* 750 digital photos

* 200 jokes

* 13 afternoon naps

* 20kg of rice and 75 excellently cooked Malaysian dishes (we had 3 each lunch/dinner)

* 80 litres of filtered water

* 20 cans of 100 PLUS

* 4 bags of Curry Twisties

* 39 cold showers

* 6 Bat Lectures

* A dozen ‘processed’ bats

* 2 dozen bat releases (especially the Mollosidae!)

* 3 thunder storms

and a tube of Bushman’s insect repellant, that I will be back on Australian soil on Sunday morning. Ready for school on Monday, although I might be a little sleepy still.

Thanks for reading these posts. I hope you’ve had as much fun reading them, as I have writing them.

Dr. Logan (Hon. Phd in Bat Fieldwork)

Kuala Lompat

Malaysia