June 23 -30

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Boobies, no, not THAT kind!

Boobies - Red Footed ( Sula sula ), Brown ( Sula leucogaster ), and Masked ( Sula dactylatra ). These cute lil guys are the puppies of the sky. They have funny webbed feet with tiny little claws that are good for paddling in water AND perching on trees. They make nests for their chicks out of twigs between 1-6 feet off the ground and do not seem to have a preference of vegetation to nest in. Booby chicks are my favorite because they are cuter for longer and have more endearing quirks than Red Tails or Frigates. While they aren't the only plunge-divers the live here, I see Boobies hanging out on the water the most  out of all the pleagic seabirds on JA. I haven't been able to research it but I also think they have unique eyes for seeing above and below the surface. If we approach them while they're nesting or roosting they do a funny head bob, or "Booby Bow" while rotating left and right, which I think helps them establish depth or at least better perception, as th...
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Ants!

AIAS Each CAST does 3 days of collecting ants across the entire island (within and without the infestation area) with centrifuge tubes baited with chunks of SPAM. When I say entire island I MEAN entire island. That means putting down a tube every 50m even if the means climbing on top of the "sealed" bunkers. All the grid points, roughly 400 of them, where we place the tubes are divided among the 5 of us and we each have to cover close to 80 points a day, twice because we walk the route of points putting out tubes labeled with their corresponding grid location and within 2hrs we have to re trace our route to collect them in the same order we put them out. Because of the magnitude of this survey and because these routes are only walked twice a year, we have to spend a lot of time clearing our routes and locating the grid points which are often times in the middle of dense vegetation (the easiest ones to locate are on the runway but they almost always have faded l...
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This Johnston Life - Special Edition

Hi. This is a special edition of "This Johnston Life" because it includes Gross Facts of JA Life and Encounters with Johnston Natives. If you are squeamish about gross stories skip the first section and proceed straight to the cool animal stories! Also, brush up on your Harry Potter if you want to understand some of my references. Gross Facts of JA Life:    Bugs in (are?) Food  - All of our food is packed in air tight buckets or into two chest freezers. We have no real way of storing bread or bread items so we either make all of our baked goods from scratch or from dry mixes. Because of this we have a lot of baking supplies stored in buckets either in the Ant Cave (the bunker we live out of) or in Bunker Row (the row of bunkers our camp supplies are stored in). I don't know how they got here to begin with (most likely all flour has some amount of larvae), but Flour Beetles are found in every bag of flour that wasn't stored properly and there are quite a few of ...
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