Back from Rapa

Apologies for not writing in the past two months. It looks like a lot of people have been checking my blog regardless. In late February, I went off to the Austral Islands (Rimatara, Rurutu, Raivavae, and Tubuai) with colleagues from the Australian National University and the French Polynesian government. This was actually about the least successful fieldwork I have ever done. The vegetation of the Australs is heavily degraded by feral livestock and invasive plants. In much of French Polynesia, the good native vegetation remains high up in the mountains. The Australs are so low, and their terrain so gentle, that the native vegetation only remains on cliff faces and in difficult-to-access gulches on mountainsides--in short, places that apparently even goats find too hard to reach. Glochidion trees usually persist pretty well even after disturbance, but in the Australs (except Rurutu), they are as rare as most other native plants. Then when I found trees, most of them didn't have any fruits, and only a subset of those were at the right stage of development to get Epicephala moth larvae out of them. So in the end, I have exactly what I need for my thesis--one moth specimen from each species per island--and nothing more. I had originally planned to go to the Australs alone--and I am very glad I didn't, because I never would have found what I needed otherwise.

The oddest of the four islands we went to on this trip was Rimatara, which is small and flat (only a few kilometers across, and 83 m high in the center). Rimatara is notorious for being the source of something like sixty percent of the marijuana smoked in French Polynesia--that is, until last September, when the gendarmes arrested 27 people (out of a population of less than 800) and sent them to jail on Tahiti. Fieldwork on Rimatara involves trying to get into the makatea, or raised coral limestone that is the only place where any native forest remains. It's also filled with abandoned pot fields. Makatea is extremely challenging to walk through--it is filled with sinkholes and crevasses, and the exposed rock often erodes to jagged blades. At one point when I fell I got a magnificent wound on my hand that somewhat unfortunately, didn't leave much of a scar. The gendarmes on Rimatara are clearly trying to stay on top of everything. They asked for my name and personal information when I arrived at the airport. One of them, who looked just enough like Matt Damon to get away with thinking he was the coolest guy on the island, asked if I needed any assistance. I ended up getting driven to the airport one afternoon in the gendarmes' Land Rover so I could go look for Glochidion growing in the forest near the runway. I found some, but no fruits. They turned this trip into an opportunity to go look for Cannabis growing in the same forest. They were equally unsuccessful.

About ten days after returning from the northern Australs, I turned around and went back to the Australs--this time to Rapa, the southernmost island in French Polynesia, which has no airport. The journey to Rapa is by boat, and takes two and a half days. Rapa was amazing. I will write more later. In the meantime, enjoy these pictures.