Colours and Cameleons

Sorry to let you all wait, always not an easy thing with internet here.
One month is over, it actually feels like I am longer here. I got used to my life somehow really quickly. 35 degrees in shadow, sunrise at 5am, sunset at 6.30pm. I spend 10 days in the forest and usually have 4 days off after this, which I spend in the close village.

Rainy season already started, a little bit too early, but weather gets crazy here since a few years. I really enjoy it, I started loving rain in Osa, it belongs to the forest to a place where life is at every place and everything starts to explode because of rain. And here you can see the change. Dry forest turns into a green place, animals start mating or come out of their holes, where they hid.
And also the babies of one of our chameleon species ( Furcifer labordi) started to hatch. So tiny, so hard to find..

Labordi baby, 1cm=blue/white

I work basically at night looking for chameleons. It's nearly impossible to find them during the day, but at night they lose their colouration so they are a little whitish.
For anyone who thinks that chameleons do change their colour trough the change of the background, that’s not true. They have one basic colouration to camouflage themselves. To communicate with each other, they change colour due to their mood. They easily get angry and colours turn into  black or dark within seconds.

Labordi female adult normal

Labordi female angry

Labordi male adult normal

Labordi male angry

When we found them we measure and weight them the next morning and release them afterwards. We have a few chameleons in cages to compare they aging and life cycle in captivity with the ones in the wild. So the study focuses on the aging of one species which lives usually 6-8 month, they are the shortest land living vertebrates in the world.

 We also compare this life history with the one of two other longer living chameleon species in this forest. 

Furcifer nicosiai

Furcifer osteletti

When my day is not busy with catching flies and feeding chameleon,  Falk ( the guy I am working with) me do some crazy things together. This was for example our Halloween celebration.  We painted our faces with UV- colors, which are normally used to mark the animals.

The animals in the forest can keep you busy, also awake at night. The mating season of the Fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) got to an end by now. Nowadays, they are the biggest native mammals in Madagascar, really similar to a wildcat. Every day they showed up at our camp, where lying around, fighting and screaming to mate. The female climbs up a tree and calls for males to come. The one who wins the fight gets up ready to mate. This spectacle can least for 2 hours. Mating season is about 2 weeks long.

Yes, that's my life by now. Still have a lot of free time, which needs to be filled. Hope to take some nice pictures, paint a little, and make a small trip to discover the island.