• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

Tom Smith (right), director of the Center for Tropical Research, measures a bird in Uganda with A

Whoever said biological research is cut and dry has not set up pitfall traps to catch lizards in Cameroon or tagged them using tattoos in the Bahamas.

The graduate students of the Center for Tropical Research have studied all over the world, with all types of people and with all different species.

Yet all the students share a common interest – to find the link between evolutionary biology and conservation biology through research.

Adam Freedman, a graduate student researching lizards under the guidance of Tom Smith, professor of organismic biology, ecology and evolution, and the Center for Tropical Research, of which Smith is the director, has experienced a multitude of Cameroonian adventures.

From snakes to uncooperative border police to a mob of drunken tribesmen, Freedman has seen it all.

He first heard of the Center for Tropical Research in 2000, when he ran across some of Smith’s work in Cameroon.

Now, five years later, Freedman plans to fly today to Cameroon for the second time to further his study of lizards, under the advisory of Smith.

“My take is that we live in a time when there is global and rainforest change due to human impact,” Freedman said. “So we need to understand and conserve variation while we can.”

These variations in lizards are both genetic and plastic. Plastic variations result from predator and food pressures, on top of deforestation, said Erin Marnocha, a graduate student studying lizards in the Bahamas.

Cameroon is an ecotone region – a region which overlaps the rainforest and savannah. Ecotones are evolutionarily important because species are shown to be dissimilar from species within the rainforest, Smith said.

The country is a great place to study biodiversity because the northern region is grasslands and the southern region is rainforests, Freedman said.

But that does not necessarily make studying in Cameroon easy. “Before we start research, we have to ask the village chief for permission to work in their neighboring forests,” Freedman said. Most of them are cooperative and accommodating with the “man from America driving a shiny truck.”

Considered “his son in America” by the chief of Nkouk, Freedman has wined and dined tribal chiefs and politicians to the extent that in one day, “I had two boxes of wine in the morning before I could go and measure the lizards.”

But there are times when permission from the chief is not enough to warrant a safe journey into the forest and back.

On one particular trip, Freedman said he and Princewill Tamón, his assistant, were driving back from a day’s research when they ran into a drunken mob from a village that had blockaded the road and threatened to torch his truck.

The two in the truck explained to the mob that they had permission from their chief to work in the forest, but the crowd was unimpressed, Freedman added.

Apparently, a village under the chief’s direction was in conflict with the tribal elders and did not care that Freedman and Tamón were cleared to use the roads.

“No amount of negotiation would change their minds,” Freedman said.

Finally, Tamón flashed out his forestry badge as if it were a Cameroonian government badge and started yelling angrily. He threatened to bring the police if they were not let through.

“He put on this huge show of stomping and flashing his badge,” Freedman said. Some of the villagers bought the act and opened up the blockade, and the two sped off as quickly as possible.

To this day, Freedman acknowledges his assistant saved the day. They haven’t been back to the village to study lizards since the incident, despite invitations from the tribal chief.

The villagers’ responses to Freedman’s arrivals are varied, with some happy for work and others suspicious of his motives.

“I even had a tribal chief try to sell me elephant tusks in a request for permission to work in his village,” shared Freedman.