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 bags that were poorly stored. Currently our bread flour is down right infested. SO, we have the choice of not having bread OR we make the bread and try to pick out as many of the bugs a possible. Luckily they're mostly dead and in truth they only eat flour so I am telling myself it isn't THAT BAD. More protein right?

The air tight buckets are to protect our food from the humidity and in case camp floods (we're 20 ft from the ocean, at sea-level, with only the sea wall to protect us from storm surge), as well all the other insects that would also like to eat our food. We have to constantly defend our food from cockroaches and ants and it's a rare day when we don't find something that they've gotten into. 

The quote "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!"  by Mad-Eye Moody comes to mind.

Dish-Washing & Slopping - Not necessarily something too horrible by Johnston standards but I really hate doing dishes (as my parents and old roommates probably remember), and not having running water, least of all HOT or FRESH water, makes cleaning dishes on Johnston that much less enjoyable. We have a double wash-water system with two catchment Rubbermaid totes and endless slop buckets that makes up our dish washing station. Basically we prewash and soap-wash our dishes with a water cooler full of salt water and then, if we have enough stored fresh water, rinse with a water cooler of fresh water before the "clean" dishes go to the drying racks. (Accepting that our dishes will never be sanitized by 21st century/U.S. standards is a necessity if you don't want to go crazy here.) All of it gets rinsed into the Rubbermaid tubs that serve as the "sinks". Obviously our sinks don't drain anywhere so we dump them into the slop buckets. When I say slop, I mean ALL of our biodegradable waste goes here; food scraps, leftover ant bait, even the samples of ants that we don't need to keep. The salt water bottles and the slop buckets are emptied daily at the "Shark Chute", a beach at the southwest corner of the island (sometimes the slopping attracts sharks, hence the name. There are always a school of chubs and mullet there to feed on our scraps.). What I find gross about this process is all the food scraps stewing in their buckets all day and having to hoist said bucket in and out of the Gator and dumping the contents into the ocean, all the while getting splashed!!! Yucky. Also the guys tend to fill the buckets to the brim and though I consider myself fairly strong, it is very hard to aim/toss the contents far enough to avoid the backsplash

Gnats -  With the unusual amount of rain we've received Johnston has an explosive gnat population and camp is definitely not immune. They like to breed on our (DRINKING!!) water filter spigots and die in the dish scrubbie holder as well as all open dish washing and slop containers! We've even had to avoid eating at the dining table due to being swarmed by the gnats. It's common practice to ask someone to fan your food if you have to get up from the table to get something because they will descend upon any unattended food with a vengeance. Ryan is the only one who doesn't care (same with the flour beetles) because he eats bugs on the regular as a hobby (this has been a topic of conversation MANY a time, I still don't fully understand).

The gnats also like to land on anyone who is sweaty (all of us, all of the time) and are incessant around the toilets. YUCK. 

Composting Toilets - I greatly approve of the concept, however, I have major beef with ours. Simply, Johnston toilets are gross and I hate them. The only problem I will write about is the fact that we're constantly battling huge frickin flys and gnats which make it very uncomfortable to use said toilets. We've had to employ RAID at the worst of times but have since been relying on diatomaceous earth to kill the larvae. Still waiting on the promise 99% reduction of pests! I'm also not entirely behind the fact that we have to empty the "compost" out every couple of months. Steven defends the process and I'll give him the credit of following the rules very well, supplying the compost with a carbon source, adding decomposing microbes, monitoring the temperature and moisture, rotating and venting. The resulting compost is pretty much indistinguishable from the mulch you buy at a garden store, but I KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM.

Anyway...moving on... 

Cattle Egrets - Cattle egrets are the most annoying bird and they don't even belong here!!!! They like pooping in buckets. Not kidding. I don't know how they know that the buckets I have sealed and stored next to my tent contain the fresh water I've collected! Every day I ambush at least one cattle egret at my tent and just this morning I found that they had pooped on EVERY SINGLE lid! Even the ones I had moved and hid after I cleaned them earlier this week. It's like they threw a tantrum because there were no open buckets. This is the second poop-tantrum that has occurred at my tent. The first one was just offensive: After finding the only bucket I'd managed to fill with fresh water from my tent catchment system had been viciously pooed in, I fabricated a lid that still allowed the downspout to fill the buckets without giving enough space for a cattle egret to get poop inside. As if in retaliation a cattle egret, or multiple cattle egrets, pooped on every available surface around my tent!! My lawn chair, my front door mat, the shelf where I kept my soap and tooth brush! Ugh. So rude. I have since been very careful to keep everything covered and my tooth brush now lives on my nightstand, INSIDE my tent.

Also cattle egrets suck because they eat seabird eggs. BOO!.

Mud Dobbers - Mud Dobbers are a species of wasp that don't sting and don't cause any harm aside from the fact that their entire life's purpose is to plug holes in anything and everything. They lay their eggs inside any hole they find (usually with a max diameter of half an inch), add some spiders, ants or any other bugs that catch, and then plug it up with god knows what. We call it mud for lack of a better term, regardless it's some concoction they make that ends up messing up every circular port in our electronics. Obviously it isn't super impactful if they plug up drill holes in our furniture but if we aren't carefully they can destroy important things such as charging ports on cell phones or GPS units or the ceramic canisters for our water filters!

Hair Beetles - No one else seems to be affected by this!! It's possible that it's because I have the most hair in the group. Even though I wear a hat while working, I've found 3/4 inch beetles crawling in my hair multiple times and EVERY ant survey results in a ton of tiny beetles filling my hair. I can't decide which ones are worse. The big ones are gross because of their size but the small ones are impossible to get out without squishing them which results in bug guts spread across my scalp. The big beetles are usually hanging onto the small feathers on birds heads. The first time I found a big beetle I had been blaming Jake for pulling my hair because he was sitting behind me in the Gator. When he argued that he wasn't, I ran my finger through my hair and pulled out a wriggling beetle! Waaaa!

Encounters with Johnston Natives

Black Witch Moth (Ascalapha odorata) - The largest moth I have ever seen flew into the Ant Cave one night while we were preparing to watch a movie. It was larger than a chickadee but just a bit smaller than a robin, and super dark. It was difficult for us to figure out what what silently fluttering around our heads because night had fallen and all we had were our headlamps. Finally, Sarah could tell it was a moth and Ryan, the bug guy, ID'd it as the Black Witch Moth. It is still a memory we laugh at because it was so surprising every time one of us caught a glimpse of it that even Ryan, who isn't scared of being attacked by ANYTHING, jumped and looked around wildly when it would fly past his head.

Stage A1 Frigate Chick - I still can't believe that we saw such a small baby! Steven has been working around seabirds for years and had never seen a Stage A1 frigate chick. I probably wouldn't have known it was a bird if it hadn't been in the nest under the father. Sarah found it on the last Frigate MIC survey and even though we were separated by 150ft and the wind was whipping I could hear her yelling and could guess what she'd found by the way she was jumping up and down. We all abandoned our own searches and surrounded the nest while Sarah carefully tipped the adult so we could peek under it at the ugliest baby I've ever seen. This one was so new its eyes weren't open yet and it didn't have a single feather. I think it looked like Voldemort before he got his new body in book 4. We had to run away pretty quickly because we accidentally flushed the dad and since the baby had nothing to protect it from the sun it could easily get sunburned. Luckily the papa came back pretty quickly after we left and I still managed to get some (bad) photos of the pink blob baby. I wonder how many other people in the world have been that close to that young of a frigate!!

Sarah's Frigate fly-by - On the most recent Booby MIC I watch a female frigate hover over Sarah reach down like it was skimming a fish off the surface of the water and pluck at her hat! We're used to almost every species of bird on Johnston hovering over our heads when were out working so I didn't immediately warn her when it reached for her and missed. I thought I imagined it. After the second time it swooped low though, I definitely gave her a shout and she turned around preventing it from getting her. She watched it for a bit and then turned back to continue working and it went after her again but luckily only plucked her hat. Frigates have a gnarly hook at the end of a very hard beak so I'm glad it didn't cause her any harm or even freak her out too badly.

Eagle Rays - Sarah and I had snorkeled with a pair of Eagle Ray's on our trip to North Island during the change over, but Jake and Ryan had never seen one and Steven hadn't seen one since we got here. Surprisingly I noticed some during one of our bird surveys! I had just popped out of a bush at a beach I've swam at a good many times when I noticed a dark thing floating near the surface of the water which would have been at my shoulder height. A floppy triangle poked out of the water and then I realized I was looking at 3 separate Eagle Rays! There was one big one, about 3.5 ft wide, one medium and one small.

One morning I had to conduct a Marine survey at 7am to catch the incoming tide and as Jake and I were preparing to get in he noticed some splashing in the shallows 200ft to our left. Fins were coming out of the water and flopping back down in a big jumble. We ran with our masks down the seawall til we could clearly see 8 smallish Eagle Ray's in a feeding frenzy! Jake was surprised when I jumped in the water to get a closer look but he was right behind me. Unfortunately my splash caused them alarm and they bolted to deeper water SO fast it looked like they left a bubble stream behind them. Luckily they weren't as shy as I thought they'd be and they came back swimming past us. It seemed like they almost wanted to figure out what we were. I swear I will never forget the one who came within a foot of me and looked me in the eye. I could have reached out and touched him if I wanted to. It was enough to have it hold my gaze for so long. I felt like it looked into my soul.

Finespeckled Eels Hunting - I first noticed eels swimming along the shore when I went out at low tide to a outcrop of asphalt that had been poured over a beach because of the artificial tide pools it made. It was only 1 min down the beach from my tent and the cool over hangs formed by the erosion was the perfect place for rock crabs. When I was sitting watching a clump of sand moved and the crabs ran from it! Turns out I had been sitting a foot away from a Finespeckled Eel! They're crab eaters, opportunistic hunters  and blend in with the coral rubble amazingly well. The low tide meant the crabs were hanging out on the edge of their territory and because the crabs were trying to avoid me they were being pushed in reach of two eels. I was surprised at how far out of the water, up the smoothed rocks and towards me, the eels were willing to venture in an attempt to grab a crab. The eels were only 1.5ft to 2ft long so they couldn't lunge very far but when a large wave could carry them, they slithered 2-3ft up the beach and sent me and the crabs skittering. I once saw a big 6 inch crab zoom off at an angle into deep water when it felt too corned by me and the eel and I was sad the eels missed a feeding opportunity. BUT I couldn't find the biggest eel until I saw it swimming back toward the shore from the direction the crab had gone. It had the crab chomped in it's mouth and for some reason had brought it back into shallow water! I watched it swallow it whole and it was amazing. I watched the eels hunting for a while longer but didn't see either catch anything else. I wonder if my being there made it harder for them to catch crabs. Probably. I left when I saw the bigger eel bury itself under a cement block, flinging it's whole back half up into the air, out of the water, to get a better angle so it could wiggle itself straight down. I got a little creeped out knowing they hunt and hide under rocks I stand on when I shower in the ocean but I know they're at least a little more scared of me than I am of them.

Peppered Moray haunting the bathing area - Speaking of eels, Jake was threatened by a huge moray one evening at the designated bathing area. This area is closer to camp than my bathing area is because I use the beach directly out from my tent while everyone else's tents are closer to the designated area straight out from the Ant Cave (I hope that makes sense). Anyway, Jake said he was getting ready to step off the sea wall, the toe of his sandal was having over it, when a moray lunged out of the water at him five or six times! Obviously it never made contact or else the title of the section would be very different. Apparently he just waited for the eel to go away (I don't know how he could have seen that) and then jumped in and showered anyway. Brave? Or crazy? A week later Sarah said she saw the same eel or one similar to it in the very same spot. I saw one farther East on the North shore during a shorebird survey. Collectively we've seen at least 6 while snorkeling at different places around the island's reef. They're territorial, so in my mind I picture them patrolling all around the seawall at any given moment. We've seen a good number of other eel species while snorkeling and I spotted some Snowflake Eels hunting ON the seawall during high tide. There are eels everywhere!!

Shearwaters - Steven is still baffled by the wedge-tailed shearwater that just wandered through our lounge chair set-up while he was working on a report late one night. He knows that what it was because they have a distinct cooing-hum noise that they make and he said he could hear it's little feet slapping on the concrete as it walked. What's so surprising about this event is that Shearwaters are very shy!! I've only ever seen one other shearwater outside of it's burrow while here on Johnston. It flew into my tent because I left a solar lamp running one evening when I went back to the Ant Cave to watch a movie. I think it was stunned because it let me get super close and just sat on the little patio I had cleared in front of my tent door. After a while it scootched over to some trees to "hide" and probably recover from the trauma. In the morning it was gone. 

I've seen a ton of shearwater burrows all over the island. The nests are just holes the birds dig out with their little webbed feet. They're super cute if not the most functional of nests. Cute because you can see little shearwater butts poking out! The nests don't seem very functional because Johnston is in the MIDDLE of the Pacific, there are HURRICANES and even when there's not, it rains A LOT at once. How do they not flood? I do not know. They're obviously successful but I still want to know how they survive!

We received training on what to do if we collapse a shearwater nest. Basically you just dig until you find a bird or are certain there wasn't one. I've only stepped into one nest since coming here which I count as a win. I was in the middle of a survey and had to stop everything to dig the poor birdie out. Shearwaters aren't very good at making angry noises and I hadn't destroyed the nest too badly so there was only a faint cooing coming from the hole. I stopped digging when I could see the tail feathers and the walls had stopped caving in. 

There is a 1/2 mile long "hill" that runs adjacent to the runway and the entire south face of it is peppered in shearwater nests. We always have to tip toe around them while surveying.

Sharks - We have seen a decent number of sharks in the past 3 months. The first sighting was day 4 of the changeover week. A group of people from the CAST crews, the boat crew and the biology crews went snorkeling after dinner just west of the wharf. It was sunset and perfect timing for sharks to be out and about, even though we didn't purposely go in search of them. We were barely 10 ft from the seawall but the dredged channel is the closest to the island in this spot, so we were hanging over the edge of the shallows looking into the deep when a pair of grey reef sharks swam up and circled us twice before zooming off to the west. Absolutely nothing was threatening about them, I think they just wanted to check us out briefly and then lost interest and swam away. 

There was also a bunch of shark sightings during the changeover slop sessions. Because there were so many of us to feed, a meat item was always on the dinner menu. This meant we usually had plenty of meat scraps to dump which drew in at least one small blacktip reef shark daily. 

In the first month, during a downpour that was making a MIC survey miserable, we were returning to camp along the seawall and I glimpsed the caudal fin and back half of a grey reef shark thrashing about for a good 2 minutes. It had obviously caught something!!

A couple times at dusk I have been standing at the seawall just off of camp, preparing to take a shower or just reading a book and appreciating the ocean view, and have seen some shark activity. One of the times the fins of a shark came to the surface multiple times during a half hour time span as the current pushed it westward. It was curious behavior and Steven and I think the only possibility was it had been feeding on something, otherwise it wouldn't have made sense to hang around for so long. 

The other time was at sunset just after Tropical Storm Eric missed us and Johnston was plagued by doldrums. There was absolutely no wind or surface currents for 3 days and our shallow reef was smooth as glass. It was insane to see the ocean so incredibly still when we're used to seeing huge waves break and throw massive sprays of water over the reef and against the seawall. I had been standing in the first 3 inches of water when a sixth sense told me to look at this one spot 10 feet in front of me. A first tiny ripple broke the surface moving swiftly around the coral tables I knew were 3 feet below the surface. A second ripple, about 4 feet ahead of the first, would pop up and disappear every 10 seconds or so. I watched the shark fins speed around in circles, travel straight East or West and then go back to circling for a least 20 minutes. It was a pretty magical sight and felt very special.

Turtle(s) - We survey for turtles every other week and I love spotting their little heads popping up out of the waves but they're always so far away and the water that they hangout in is so wave tossed and close to a current that could whip us out to sea, that we can't safely swim in it. It so frustrating to me! There are so many goliath turtles so close but still so far away! Just this week however Sarah noticed a huge guy had come up on South Beach. We were in the middle of a bird survey farther East on the south shore and she had luckily brought binoculars in hopes of spotting some turtles swimming. After each pass of our search pattern we would pause at the seawall facing the direction of South Beach and check to see if he was still there. He was! Obviously we were motivated to work super efficiently and finish as quickly as possible so we could go get a closer look. When we were done we hurried along the seawall and quietly stood behind the trees that are at the edge of the beach where the turtle was. It was so big! Just being lazy, soaking up the sun. Probably 3 ft wide and 4 ft long, his noggin was just laying on the sand and he was busy snoozing. Somehow, even though we were being so quiet, he opened his eyes and saw us standing there watching him. He obviously did not appreciate it so he turned and made a quick break of the water. It took him 5 minutes and four rest breaks to travel the 6 feet to the surf. It was funny to watch him "race" to the water, he was so slow. I was surprised at how big his tail was. My turtle, Mike, has a very small tail in proportion to his body. After he had gotten back to the ocean and was swimming away I went and laid down in the sand right next to where the turtle had laid, his tracks were still visible.