04-APR-C-12
THE DELAYED ANCHORAGE AT ALBANO
IN SEARCH OF THE VICTORIA AMAZONICA,
GIANT WATER LILIES IN BLOOM, LECTURES,
AND THE BBC VIEW OF LIFE IN THE FLOODED
FOREST, AND AFTERNOON FISHING ZODIAC EXCURSION,
IN WHICH I CATCH THE DREADED “CANDIRU”
AT BOCA DOS BOTOS
April 26, 2004
The morning anchorage was delayed, since we had not got there by the time we were supposed to, but then we arrived at a place with a little bayou off the main whitewater river at a place called Albano. ALBA= 2* 23.17 S, and 57* 29.59 W. We went out in the Zodiacs to see the special areas where the giant water lilies called Victoria Amazonica live. There giant pads with the turned up edge are big rafts, and can support a grown child. But, their large blooming flowers are even more interesting.
CONSIDER THE LILIES
The giant lily flower has a thick starchy food inside for ove3r a dozen scarab beetles, one of which was a new species when intensively investigated. They are attracted to the flower which is white, since it blooms and opens up only at night, and only for a single night. When it opens the beetles fly into it. They rummage around inside, feasting, unaware that at dawn the outer petals of the flower snap shut, trapping them in their gourmet’s delight. They wallow around in the bonanza, picking up lots of pollen as they do so. The flower opens up again the next night, but only as the beetles are ready to go, and the rapidly opening flower has changed color to a purple, as these beetles have brought in pollen from another flower and the flower is fertilized from another source. Now, the beetles recognize that there is no food source here, and fly on to another white flower, thereby getting trapped in it and incidentally fertilizing it from the pollen of the first flower when it was white.
We were able to get both white and purple flowers and to dissect them later with the botanist John Howard. We also had a crested caracara flying al over us as well as the wattled jacana. This is s bird with a reversed sex role. It is the male who enters the female’s lek, and then after mating with her, she lays an egg, which the male bird must care for and watch to incubate through. The female, painted hussy that she is, goes off and attracts another male or two, and mates with him. He then has to take on the responsibility of raising the chick from the egg she will lay there, and before long, she has a dozen males scurrying around taking care of a number of chicks she never sees again. The two of them can fly around dragging along dangling toes behind them. This is because their enormous feet support them on suspended vegetation, not just lily pads, but the marshy grass in which they can stand as if on snowshoes without sinking in as they scavenge for the water surface bugs they eat.
LECTURES AND VIDEOS ON THE WILD WORLD,
POSTPONING A TV TAPE I HAVE SEEN FROM
NGS:
“AMAZON: LAND OF THE FLOODED FOREST”
I went to the bridge and watched as we nosed into an area of anchorage in the afternoon, called Boca des Botas. Botas= 2’ 33.61 S, 56* 54.12 W. We were late, so we re-arranged the lectures and had a tape or two to see. I have been watching the whole David Attenborough series made by BBC on life on earth, with his overstated but spectacularly filmed detailed natural history scenes from around the world. Miguel told us about some kind of indigenous “conservation project” in which the precious ‘pirarcu’ is not fished out, and we will see one of those oxbow lakes in which the propagation of this important food source tomorrow. The surface feeding and breathing pirarcu is important to the Indians so they have guarded it by largely not letting outsiders come in—their own indigenous fishing regulations.
David Ascanio from Venezuela, who knows Luis Arturo Ayala and the Terramar project, which has been disbanded because its heavy identification with a government that is no longer in power, He has borrowed my book on ‘Out of Assa: Heart of the Congo.” He spoke about the Orchestra of the Forest, since he carries sound recording equipment and plays back the recorded song of various birds which can be called in to be seen by the serious birders.
CANDIRU!
I AM JOINED UP IN A THIRD “FISHING BOAT”
AND CATCH THE DREADED CANDIRU
I was not planning to go fishing, but one of the men here is very eager to catch the first fish of his life and having failed on the first two outings, he is eager to go again. When it did not look like there would be enough for a raft load, he signed me in since he was worried he would not be able to go.
We went up the small Botas River (named for the pink dolphin, which is blamed for every unexpected or illegitimate pregnancy among the Coboclo) in the Zodiac and saw a couple of indigenous houses along the sides. These folk survive by fishing and then selling their catches to the “buy boats” that come along the main river. We saw their little school, and delivered some school supplies, like note books and pens. We did what we could to watch the overhead sloths and birds, and to see the accumulation of giant cumulus clouds that were behind the anchored Orion on the main river. When we stopped to fish, we saw a small house with a couple of scrawny dogs. The dogs attract caimans to the3 house, and once a caiman spots a dog, there will be no stopping it until it has caught it. We caught a few of the white catfish that are of no interest, since the people here do not eat them, and simply discard them.
My next catch is a very interesting fish—and a big one, at that! I caught a catfish. But this one is long and skinny and almost no barbells or whiskers, unlike the others which had long whiskers, longer than their own length. This one has such tiny eyes that it might even be blind. It has a slender ell like body but an erectile fin on its dorsum and pectorals. It is the famed candiru. This near-blind fish uses its senses of smell and taste, and is capable of detecting things like urine in the water. When it finds this taste, it swims upstream and wiggles into any orifice it encounters and attaches with its sucker like mouth and wedges itself in by raising its spine fins. If this is a tiny fish, and the smell it has detected is urine, and you are the unlucky one who had peed in the water, the fish swims up the urethra, and there it gets stuck, impossible to turn around or back out. Problem.
I have long heard about this fish and it struck terror in to the likes of Redmond O’Hanlon (“In Trouble Again.”) It is often the case that a body recovered from the river will have a lot of candiru wedged into the orifices of the bronchus, urethra, anus, vagina or any opening into which these fish can insinuate. This makes for a great “story time” show and tell feature for the nightly recap where I have already spoken of jiggers and chiggers, and now about the candiru.
The
people on this trip are older, many retired, and very well-heeled. Some have been on multiple cruises, even this
year. They have a lot of stories about
the good bottles of wine placed in their rooms by the elegant hoteliers in
India, or the extra services of special concierges for the upmarket set. Somehow, this is billed as “adventure travel”
in which I have never been so under exercised nor over-fed. Three of our group have sleep apnea, Malcolm,
an obese school chum of a lot of the Churchilian good ole boys from Eaton, who
likes regaling stories to anyone but the girls. The other is a woman named
Shelia, who is morbidly obese, and carries a camera and “duck”—the duck must be
present in each picture she takes, as some sort of emblem. She is a reporter and manager for the Robb
Report, a magazine of sheer opulence in conspicuous consumption in which fast
cars, custom made anything for rich men’s toys, and fine wines and baubles like
jewelry and perfumes—almost everything that I am not in “adventure travel”—the
specialty she is covering now. Each of
the three travels with a special sleep apnea alarm to help them accommodate the
wilds of this remote wilderness in specially equipped state rooms. So, at the elegant dinners we have in
sequence about every time we sit down, I have learned a bit more about the
eccentrics on board as well as about the intricate interrelationship s of the
wildlife about us. It seems that the
outside world—even if red in tooth and claw—is at least more rational than many
of the aberrations we have here on board!