Close Encounters of the Python Kind: Attack of the Anacards (Gunung Palung, 2009)

Excerpts from email sent on May 19, 2009 titled “Attack of the Anacards, Back in Ketapang”:

"Danger" tree on the Sg Lading pheno plot

I’m back in the city for the next few days, hoping to work on some papers and catch up on data entry while recovering from some nasty infections. I have been following a lot of orangutans recently who have either been eating various Anacardiaceae tree species (same species as mangos, but Gluta species give me a much more serious reaction) or are ranging in areas where they are flowering. And we have been collecting a lot of botanical samples for morphotyping, both during follows and at other times with slingshots. When setting up Sungai Lading, one of my field assistants spray painted "Danger" on several Anacardiaceae trees on the phenology plot to help me learn which trees to stay away from. And somehow, no matter how far I try to stay away from the Anacards, they manage to get their oils on me.

The tree infections were always much worse when cutting through the forest with my machete during or just after big rains. It is also particularly difficult to identify the various tree species that I am allergic to when the trees are still small, which of course in a swamp forest (like my site at Sungai Lading, the Tuanan field site, and parts of Gunung Palung) accounts for most of the trees in the forest.

with friends at Sungai Lading soon after the short course

…and an especially memorable experience with an Anacard infection from 2005:

One day my advisor was visiting Sungai Lading, my field site…He arrived together with a group of Indonesian students and professors who came to do a “short course” like the one we did at Tuanan in 2003, doing gibbon triangulation and orangutan nest surveys to estimate population densities. I had assumed that by the time they arrived, the tree infection that had spread all over my body and had spread to my face would have disappeared. But their early arrival by boat (ten days early with a one hour warning) caught me by surprise. I participated in the last few days of the short course once the infection started to get significantly better, but then my advisor leaned up against an Anacard tree on my phenology plot, touched my arm, and I ended up getting an infection in my arm that lasted for the next month. Luckily this particular species only gave me a localized infection, but it left a scar on my arm. So I can officially say that graduate school scarred me J.