Radio Silence

My radio silence has been due to a bunch of travel, time with Tom, and data management.

I went to Tana to pick up Tom three weeks ago – the trip there went off without a hitch. The sailboat got me safely to Morombe, and the plane took off when it was scheduled to – a miracle! The return trip was more eventful, but at least Tom and I were together for that Madagascar Air-provided adventure. We spent a week in Tana working at Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and meeting with Conservation International (CI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Tom was reviewing WCS’ climate change projects, and I was preparing my poster for the conference next week in Reunion. Our free time was spent plowing through the rough octopus data to get something worthwhile to put on my WIOMSA poster. In the end, I decided to leave the poster relatively vague because any results would be so bogus (due to data issues – see below) that I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about them in public.

Tom’s week in Andavadoaka started off with a bang. Air Madagascar cancelled the flight from Morondava to Morombe, so we got to spend 2 nights in Morondava. We spent the first evening’s sunset at the “avenue of the baobabs”, a section of road lined with an enormous variant of these magical trees. The next day we went with Fran, a London-based BV staff member, to collect shark catch data from one of her villages. What was supposed to be a 3-hour mellow lakana trip turned into a day-long epic trek through mangroves, beach, and scrubby plains. The ocean got too rough to safely exit the village, so we first tried to take the lakana through the mangrove. It was a lovely ecotourist adventure, but unfortunately, there was no exit back to the ocean that the surprisingly wide lakana (with its outrigger) could get through. So we abandoned it in a small village and set out on foot. Let me summarize this way: Nathalie (a USAID worker befriended) suggested as we were tromping through the mud that we ought to inspect the bottoms of our feet for white, flaky blisters in about a week’s time. Seems worms like the mud, too. Ew. It was a fun day nonetheless.

Our week in Andavadoaka was very, very busy. Tom’s brain was in high demand from all the biologists. He designed numerous studies and analyses, taught me a database management program, helped clean up a dataset with over 100,000 entries, and sexed octopus on the opening day of the reserve. We spent days plowing through the data that BV has been collecting over the past 6 years. It is a dream dataset for a biologist (and for an economist): individual weight and sex of each octopus caught, where it was caught, and by whom. Unfortunately, as is the case with any long-term dataset that has passed from hand to hand repeatedly without anyone ever actually using it, it is a mess. We had all hands on deck to start its cleaning, which (hopefully) will be done by the time I leave so I can start my analysis.

The reserves opened successfully on August 21. The landings were supposedly very high, indicating a good effect. Preparing for the openings involved coordinating massive movements of people so data could be collected in all the villages. The northern villages decided to stage a surprise attack (and open their reserves a day early). Being on the edge of the MPA, they are the most vulnerable to free riders from the north. I went to Nosy Hao, an island just off the coast of Andavadoaka. This reserve was special because they limited the permission to fish there to those who had paid for the guard. This goes against traditional village norms of open access. I sat in on the community meeting where I literally watched property rights evolving.

We were exhausted when we left Andavadoaka, and headed straight to a conference of the West Indian Ocean Marine Science Association in Reunion. I presented my poster and attended a number of interesting sessions over the three days. Tom networked like crazy, and found all sorts of new partners and potential funding sources. All in all a very useful week! The weirdest thing is getting off an hour-long flight from Tana and landing in France. All the usual stores: boulangeries on every corner, Carrefour supermarket, Mr. Bricolage (an enormous Home Depot-esque store)…The infrastructure is perfect, the tap water drinkable, the public transportation seamless (oh except for the strike the first day – in case you had any doubts if you were in France!), the people warm and friendly (OK so not France). I was underwhelmed with Saint Denis (the administrative capital = boring and incredibly expensive) but St. Leu, about 100 km down the coast, has a wonderful Santa Cruz-like vibe. We spent an entire evening sitting at an outdoor terrace, watching the locals, playing dominoes, eating samosas from a street vendor, and drinking rum and beer. Delightful!

For 2 days before returning to Tana, we explored the island. I fulfilled my birthday wish to go on an ass-kicking hike. We hiked straight up the face of a mountain in the interior for 3 ½ hours, then hiked down for another 3 hours. Consider ass sufficiently kicked! That night, birthday wish #2 was fulfilled: a deep, hot bath (not an easy thing to find in European hotels!). We had a hilarious dinner in a small creole home-turned restaurant, replete with a flamboyant host and an Abba serenade. On day 2, we drove up to the edge of the very live volcano on the island. Unfortunately, our legs didn’t have it in them to climb down and up again to peer into the earth, but we could see a lot from our vantage point on the caldera’s rim. We then fulfilled Tom’s wishes: snorkeling in a marine reserve and paragliding. Yes, indeed, I trusted a complete stranger enough to strap myself to him and jump off the edge of the earth. It was really cool!

Tomorrow at 7 am I return to Andavadoaka. Allegedly (Air Madagascar is once again involved…). We have less than 3 weeks to finish the clean-up of the dataset, then I will bring it home with me. The on-site biologist will work on establishing the biological marine effect of the reserves so I can make the economic case. We had all hoped to have this all done by the time I left, but things never go as planned, especially when field work in a remote location is involved. Luckily, I won’t be teaching at all this fall, so I will be able to work on the project. Isn’t it weird the turns life takes? I mean, me working on octopus? Establishing the effectiveness of marine reserves?? In Madagascar?!? Even odder is that Tom and my roles have completely reversed: he is in meetings with the bureaucrats all day talking to them about policy coordination, and I am plowing through individual wet weight of cephalopods and GPS coordinates. Who would have thunk?!?

Tom is heading home tomorrow afternoon. Sniff sniff. Wednesday night he’ll be sleeping in our bed with our mmmrumphs who will, undoubtedly, either be purring or peeing on him, depending on whether their joy at seeing him or anger at being left behind wins. It has been great to have him here! Now that I’ll have more time alone, I promise to post more often.

Love to all and thank you to all of you who sent me birthday wishes!

Cleaning data

August 3, 2009

After returning from Tulear, I needed a day of rest. My days were filled with running between offices of key people and shopping for on-site necessities between appointments. The shops are only open between 8 – 12 and 3:30 – 6 which, inconveniently, is also the time people are in their offices. So getting to the stationery store to buy printer cartridges between appointments was a sweaty endeavor; even worse was that the crisis means that the South African exporter of boxed wine has shut operations, so there was no boxed wine to be had in the entire city! GASP! My time was also made extra stressful because of poor BV communication and coordination. Two things happened: a guy in Tulear was apparently told by the on-site project coordinator that he could ride back with us, but we were told by the project coordinator before leaving that under no circumstances were people allowed to ride in the back of the 4x4. The guy in Tulear sent me multiple pissy text messages, but I could only say I had no idea what was going on.

The second thing was a bigger deal. I had scheduled an interview with the Director General of the fisheries export company. This is a key interview for me. Unfortunately, it degenerated into a bitch-fest about the lack of communication from BV. I was caught in a storm that had been brewing for years before my arrival. The company has been an advocate of the marine protected area from the beginning, and a partner in many of the activities (such as developing sea cucumber aquaculture as a source of alternative livelihoods for the villages). From everything I have read and heard in interviews, COPEFRITO is a very progressive company. Of course, they are a for-profit business, but by all accounts, their model seems to be to help their profit by helping ensure sustainable resource management. They really do seem to be practicing a triple bottom line model. It seems that the current management of the growing MPA has some partnership re-building to do.

To make a long story short, the potential enormous harvests on opening day requires all of the export companies' trucks and boats. This implies that the equipment cannot be collecting elsewhere. This is a major risk for the company: it opens up their other areas to competitors and they might not have enough production from this one, remote area to fill all the trucks. Moreover, the villages have decided to open all the reserves at once, and have scheduled that opening for the lowest day of the spring tide. That will be the day that all villages along the 400 km coastline that COPEFRITO normally covers (Velondriake is only 10% of that) will be harvesting that day. This increases the company's foregone collections from other areas. It also means there is a risk that there will be an enormous glut that the factories cannot process (opening day plus lowest tide). In other words, there may be no buyers for the octopus harvested opening day, or the price could drop out. Neither of these seems like a good result for our MPA.

The Director General of the company complained that BV seemed resistant to compromising the desire of the villagers (open all at once at the lowest tide) to accommodate the company's logistical and market constraints. So for 3+ hours the staff of the company and Georgi (BV sea cucumber leader) and I discussed this, trying to forge a potential solution. It was very tense because I found myself stepping out of my role as researcher, and back into project management (yet with no authority to make decisions, and all the while messing up the neutrality of my data collection). At the end of the day, I didn't end up with the data I need to do my immediate analysis. Looking on the bright side, I suppose I have some wonderful data on the larger supply chain linkages and constraints.

Speaking of data, I now have raw data from octopus collection from 2004 through 2009!!!!! I started to clean up the datasets (for example, find where we are missing data), and now my miracle worker RA, Haj, is on the case. His long-term knowledge of the project has sped the process up by orders of magnitude (he can so easily find misspellings of village names, multiple names for fishing sites, etc.). Hopefully by the time I get back from Tana on the 14th, we will have a workable dataset! WOOHOO! Haj and I decided that we would make this the master dataset and erase all others that anyone has around. I told him that we will put his name as the primary citation for the dataset – people can use it, but the list of folks responsible for collecting and cleaning it should be clearly acknowledged.

This afternoon, I will call to see the likelihood of the flight departing Morombe on Sunday (it depends on how many people have paid for tickets). If the chance is less than 50% I might take a 2-day taxi brousse trip south to Tulear to fly out on the a-bit-more-certain daily flights. (The taxi brousse rides are reported to be hellish – 40 people crammed into the back of a truck, riding squished over 2 days, sleeping in an unknown village along the way...have I mentioned the fleas in the villages, yet? Yeah. Fleas. Everywhere.) If the Morombe flight is going, how to get to Morombe? I may hire a pirogue to sail me there, unless there is a taxi brousse going (2 hours – not too hellish). Travel here is a game of weighing probabilities: Will there be a flight? Will there be wind? Will there be a taxi brousse? Will the taxi brousse break down? Again, it's a good thing we have Plans A, B, and C.

I'll keep you all posted. ☺