Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I’m Annika Moe and I’m a fourth year graduate student
in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior
and I work in the Weiblen Lab. So Dr. George Weiblen
is a plant systematist and he mainly studies the group ficus,
which is fig plants. George does a lot of fieldwork in
Papua New Guinea, which is how I have a connection
to doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea as well. I study
the relationship between a group of fig plants and their
wasp pollinators and I’m looking at how specific
the wasps are in their choice of figs in which to pollinate
and to lay their eggs. Papua New Guinea is one of these
places, sort of the last frontiers for tropical research.
There aren’t very many places where you have large
contiguous portions of rain forest and so there are a lot of
studies that can't be done anywhere else. Like if you
wanted to look at a gradient, an ecological gradient,
going up in altitude, Papua New Guinea is one of the
last places you can actually do that because the rain forest
is so fragmented in a lot of the other places where
research is being done. But the downside is the
infrastructure is very underdeveloped and it’s very difficult
to do research there. The terrain where I work is incredibly
steep and it's incredibly hot and incredibly humid. And so
every day I was trying to liken it to what kind of exercise here
would be equivalent and it would be like doing a stairmaster
in a sauna all day. I work in Madang Province in a village called
Ohu Village that is outside the provincial seat of Madang Town.
This area is very heavily populated and so there is a lot of
pressure on the land and there is also a lot of pressure from
logging companies, mining companies. In order to do my
research, I have to navigate a lot of social and political currents
that are going on, like there was when I arrived this last year,
some tension between clans concerning who was getting more
benefit from my being there so I had to end up hiring one
field assistant from each clan and had to have some sit downs
and talking with leaders about how we can spread the benefit out
across the whole entire community. I work very closely with
the landowners there and I hire some field assistants that are
local and I teach them some basic science techniques and some
basic research tools so that they can help me to get my work done.
I very much became kind of an honorary member of Ohu Village
because they really appreciated my taking interest in helping them
to develop some community projects and I did become invested
in them because they are taking care of me, they are looking out
for me, and not only is it sort of necessary for my research that
there be some forest preserved, but actually end up caring a lot
about what happens to these people and wanting to help them.