17 March 2011

It is always a sad day when one has to leave Paradise - as did Deidre and Addy. Brad, Justin and I captured 12 mongoose (5 with PIT tags) and placed different colored tyvek collars on each one to help us identify the individuals on the trail camera videos. Deidre and Addy road bicycles into Frederiksted with Jonathan on the tandem to but souvenirs to go along with the memories. I don't know which will fade sooner, but I still remember my first trip to St. Croix with my undergraduate adviser, Dr. Roy Horst from SUNY Potsdam nearly 30 years ago. He has long since retired from mongoose trapping, but I will continue the legacy for at least another 15 years and maybe longer!

Just after lunch I pulled out my digital microscope and made some slides from samples I collected from one of the fresh water ponds (old sand quarry) and the salt pond. There was not much happening in the fresh water sample, but the salt water sample was teeming with life. I captured 8 minutes of video of two copepods mating, several minutes of nematodes, and several minutes of some other type of worm ingesting its food. There were other beasts swimming in and out of the maze of algae and diatoms that were spinning like rotifers and paramecia. Life at 100X is every bit as exciting as the world we experience with the unaided eye.

Brad and I went fluorescent powder tracking this evening and observed, yet again, that mongoose climb trees to enter holes in the trunks. They don't seem to climb into the bole of a tree that has no hole in it. We also observed one mongoose following the exact path of a second one for nearly the entire distance we tracked the trails. The second one even climbed the tree where the first entered the hole but appeared not to enter the same hole but went off in another direction until the trail went cold. It appears that these little beasts know a lot about their environment and their fellow mongoose. As we fought our way through the tangled brush we stumbled upon a hole at the base of a tree where the second mongoose had gone underground. It did not appear to be a dug hole because there was no mound adjacent to the hole that should occur during an excavation. We also found another scorpion under the leaves - a sign that these little beasts are not uncommon.

Fluorescent powder trails left by mongoose.

The same trails illuminated at night with a UV light.

On our way back to Cottages we stopped at the trail camera to check the clock mechanism. As we approached the camera two red lights came on demonstrating that it started recording under infrared (IR) light illumination. We could not see the light, but the previous night we captured video of mongoose eye shine as a result of IR illumination. That is curious indeed as I never knew the tapetum lucidulum reflected IR as well as visible light. I guess I have more to learn about this crazy world!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!