New Friends, Mud Slides, and a Closer Look at Poo

This week we welcomed a new volunteer to the LFP field station – Jennifer Margono.  Jennifer comes from Duke University in the USA and will be staying with us for 2 months to assist in loris observation and education programs.  Jennifer has a family connection to Indonesia and so speaks a bit of the local language.  We plan on putting her to good use!  J

Jennifer’s first attempted visit to the loris habitat was not very successful.  May is meant to be the beginning of the dry season in Java, but someone forgot to tell Mother Nature this!  For the past few weeks, we have had some of the worst rains of the year.  After an already long rainy season, the ground is very saturated with water.  This means, that all this extra water is causing mudslides and flooding.  So far, the habitat of our lorises has not been directly impacted by the large mudslides, but we will have to be very careful if this rain continues.

View of large mudslide from field station.

This is why when it began to rain on Jennifer’s first visit to our observation area we made the quick decision to head back down the mountain.  The path down the mountain is always difficult and slippery when raining, but with all the extra water our path turned into a rushing stream!  Somehow with a little luck (and being creative with our route) we made it back down the mountain without having to slide down on our bums!  So no official loris sitings for Jennifer yet.

Luckily (or unluckily?) for Jennifer, her first in-depth exposure to lorises came through poo samples!  We have fecal samples from each of our study animals and this week we are taking a very close look at the diet of our lorises.  The easiest way to assess diet is by looking at what comes out the other end of the animal...poo!  We made a very official laboratory in our common room and the analysis began! 

Volunteers Mark and Jennifer with PhD candidate Johanna taking a closer look at fecal samples.

At first it took a very long time to process each sample, but we developed a good system and started to move along at a decent pace.  With help from some interesting lighting arrangements, magnifying glasses, and a microscope, we were able to identify a few things.  The easiest to identify were insect legs and parasites (worms).  We also found evidence of gum, tree bark, and some other miscellaneous insect bits.  This confirms some things that we already know about the diet of our lorises.  We are not entomologists so insect identification from legs and bits of shell is not possible, but we are hoping to have an expert look at the bits we pulled from the poo.  Then perhaps we can get an even better idea of what our little firefaces are eating out there in the forest!

Our 'official' lighting set-up.

Up close and personal with loris poo!