Upcoming trips

I have been back on Mo'orea for about 3 weeks now. The first week I spent recovering from Rapa, although one one day my labmate Curtis and I hiked a third of the way up Mt. Tohiea (1207 m, the highest mountain on Mo'orea and the highest mountain in French Polynesia outside Tahiti), mainly so that I could see the trail. The trail is indistinct at the beginning, and then goes to steep and muddy, and eventually ends up on a ridge, although we stopped before the ridge. There is some excellent and pretty diverse low-elevation native wet forest in the first 400 m, with mara (Neonauclea forsteri, Rubiaceae), Tarenna sambucina, Meryta (Araliaceae), Pisonia tahitensis, and yes, some large Glochidion (only the fruits were out of reach!), and in the understory, Ixora (Rubiaceae), Cyclophyllum barbatum, and a lot of flowering Cyrtandra (Gesneriaceae) and Boehmeria virgata (Urticaceae), weird lycopods with hanging cones, and orchids with green, photosynthetic aerial roots. Cyrtandra is pretty exciting, since it is one of the most diverse plant genera in French Polynesia, and has beautiful white flowers, but is usually pretty rare.

Then I somehow cut my foot while jumping off the floating dock to snorkel at night, and spent most of the rest of the week hobbling around and doing office-related stuff, like writing a report back to NSF, filling out a mountain of reimbursement forms to send back to Berkeley, writing a grant application to go to American Samoa, and putting together a talk and slideshow for the class from UCLA that is here now. I went to Papeete to run errands and meet up with a Rapa friend who lives on Tahiti.

When I got back from Rapa there was a boat in Cook's Bay called the Braveheart, a New Zealand vessel that the UK government has hired to service Pitcairn Island, east of French Polynesia. It's normally impossible to get to Pitcairn, but before I even got back my friends had started asking the captain (who is friends with a lot of the American researchers at Gump, since the Braveheart passes through often) if it would be possible for a scientist (i.e., me) to travel to Pitcairn. There are two species of Glochidion trees on Pitcairn, and both are endemic to the Pitcairn Islands (although one appears closely related to a species on Tahiti). When I got back from Rapa, I met the captain, who had me e-mail the boat owner, who had me e-mail the Pitcairn Island Office in the British High Commission to New Zealand. To make a long story short, I applied for a visa to go to Pitcairn Island, and I heard back a few days ago that my application to visit has been approved by the Island Council. I'll be departing for Pitcairn (along with a bunch of British government officials) at the end of May, from the island of Mangareva in the eastern part of French Polynesia. It's pretty exciting, but I just can't quite believe it yet.

Before then, I will be visiting the Cook Islands, from next Tuesday for two weeks. The Cook Islands are a New Zealand-associated territory just west of French Polynesia. This will be my first trip out of French Polynesia in over nine months, so I am pretty excited. Geologically, the southern Cooks are part of the Austral Islands of French Polynesia. They have two species of Glochidion tree, one of which is apparently the same as on Tahiti, and the other of which is apparently shared with Fiji and Tonga to the west. It will be good to get both of these species, and their moths, into my phylogenies and see what relationship they have with the twenty-odd French Polynesian species.