QLEES

I am now in Gaberone Botswana. A lot has happened since the last post. I left Port Elizabeth on July 2 and flew to Durban, South Africa. There I participated in the Quantitative Landscape Ecology and Environmental Sustainability workshop put on by Rutgers University and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. It was a great experience! There were about 40 participants, probably around 2/3 students. Each morning there was a little training session in animal movement analysis or agent-based modeling, or using GIS for ecology work. I learned a lot of helpful things that should aid my Addo work. Then in the afternoon there were research presentations by students and faculty. It was mostly Africa focused so many of the talks were right up my alley. There is a lot of really interesting work going on!

One of the coolest talks was by a girl named Nancy. She is the first deaf zoologist in the world. She gave a really good talk about brown hyena and spotted hyena interactions in which she signed the entire thing and an aide translated for us. I was very impressed! South Africa is making a documentary about her so they filmed her presentation. She was also really friendly and very good at reading lips. I talked to her a little bit and she could understand what I was saying and then answer back. She impressed me even more the final night at the banquet when she and another student danced together. They hadn’t planned it, it was spur of the moment but they did a really great job. Considering that she can’t hear the music and had to rely on watching the guy for cues, that was really impressive as they did spins and twirls and dips and other things. Very cool.

The funny thing about the conference was that even though my work is based in Africa I actually presented on work from Florida. The IGERT fellowship that supports my degree is the one that actually paid for me and a fellow graduate student to attend the QLEES meeting so we presented on the IGERT work we’ve been doing this past year modeling distributions of invasive species in the Everglades. I wasn’t sure how it would be received because it wasn’t in Africa but we actually got some very positive feedback and people seemed to enjoy the talk.

On Wednesday we visited Ushaka Sea World, a well-known aquarium in Durban. We got a tour for an hour and then had an hour to wander around on our own. I was very impressed, the exhibits were well maintained and the entire place was very well themed. The outside looked like a wrecked ship and inside it was themed to be four different ships, each of which was from a different time period and was wrecked at a different depth and thus had different types of marine species. Unfortunately we got there too late in the day for the seal or dolphin shows, but it was still really cool.

All in all, a great conference and a good week seeing a new place in South Africa!