Sheng Ri Kuai Le!

Yesterday started off with Kim, YangChiang, and I setting up traps for gerbils/jirds on a dune during a very hot day. Then Kim and I shaved the right toes of the jerboas to see if it would make a difference to how they interacted with the sand. I'm super excited about the results!

After a quick xiuxi (nap/rest), we were supposed to go with the driver to start work early and skip dinner. We heard that the cook was planning something special because it's our last night, and Sarah had gone in to look. When the driver hadn't arrived at his usual 20 min early, we got suspicious and decided to check into the dining hall. Awaiting us there was a huge banquet of amazing food that the cook had prepared for us. The banquet a few days ago completely pales in comparison to this one. There were apples, bananas, fuzhu tofu skins, cucumbers, bok choy with mushrooms, sprouts with jiucai, huge chickens, chicken feet, mushrooms, mutton soup, and many other things I couldn't identify. It was all laid out family style and everyone tried to sit around the huge table together, but there wasn't enough room, so we all stood up to eat. Then, Sarah and the cook brought us out 1 birthday cake each! Complete with birthday crowns and singing candles! They were beautiful!!! I couldn't believe that she managed to slip those past us even though we've been living together these past 2 weeks. Apparently she and YangChiang and the cook have been planning this since we got here. It was an incredibly sweet gesture and a wonderful way for us to all hang out together on our last night.

Part of banquet etiquette mandates that the guests of honor have to give toasts. In Kim's toast, my favorite part was when she said "I know some of you may not have very good English skills, or may have better English than you will let us know..." *huge laugh from the audience* "There's my answer to that! But we're still here for 1 more day, so please come talk to us if you want to!" After that speech, lots of people who we've never talked to came up and started conversations with us! I even got a confession of "like" from one of the boys. I wonder if public confessions like that are standard practice in China.

We got out to the desert a few hours later than we had hoped, but it was definitely worth it. We took all the data I need and were able to come back at a reasonable-ish hour. The plan for today is to pack up or discard all of our belongings. I'm really going to miss it here!

Winding down

Today is our last day and night of data collection! We were supposed to leave yesterday, but I got sick and set back our schedule by 2 days. I'm really excited to snip the hairs off the 3 toed jerboas today and see how that affects their interaction with the sand! We also want to run the animals on the harder substrate and maybe catch some more gerbils to increase sample size. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we have to do.

Looks like rigging the legs to a penetrometer isn't going to work since there is no resistance to bending in the ankle joint. My new plan is to CT scan them and do FEA as well as drag them through different kinds of sand back in a lab.

I'm pretty sad that we'll be leaving tomorrow. Our little agricultural regiment 222 feels like home now that everyone in the town knows us. There are a lot of people we'd like to meet up with one last time before we go, but it looks like we won't have enough time. I'm also going to miss the amazing view of the TianShan mountains we get every day.

New experiences every day

We've been catching many 5-toed jerboas every night. They just appear on the road as we're driving home and are fairly easy to catch. It's been really difficult to catch the 3-toed jerboas, so we decided to hire Wei shifu and his team to catch more for us. We met at the market for a 面谈 or face-to-face discussion to set a price for the captures. In the past they had been paying 40 yuan for each female they brought. They had caught males and females and had to release the male animals. Now we could use both males and females and only needed like 6 for my experiments. But Kim could use more embryos and 6 animals is not worth the effort for this guy. So we started by offering to pay 20 yuan each for 20 animals. He countered by saying that he needs to hire people to catch that many in one night and each needs to be paid more than 100 yuan for it to be worth their time too. So after many negotiations tactfully translated by Sarah, we decided on 25 per animal for between 20 and 40 animals. The next morning they brought 47, but when Kim said she would only pay for 40 they took the 7 back.

Many people know that I don't ride bicycles any more. Two very painful and expensive accidents made me not trust myself with steering anything 2-wheeled. However, in China there are some really awesome tricycles! They are either a bicycle or scooter in the front and a wagon in the back, so you can carry lots of things as you ride. So far we've seen them piled high with groceries, boxes, and even farm workers. Since we first saw them, Sarah, Kim and I have been wanting to drive or ride in one.

Yesterday we started collecting materials to build a sand trackway for my foot-sand penetration trials. I basically just want to look at how deep each type of foot goes into the sand. We think there might be a difference because the 3-toed jerboas have hairy feet, whereas the 5-toed and the jirds don't have hairy feet. We went into town to search for some large pieces of cardboard and learned that there's a recycling center. It was a hot day and we didn't know how far it would be, so we flagged down every motorized tricycle we could find until we someone agreed to let the 4 of us hop in and drive us to the center. It was a dream come true! I couldn't believe that Sarah stood up the whole time, especially because Kim calls these motorized tricycles "skull crackers." We tried to pay him 5 yuan for his trouble, but he really didn't want to take it, so Kim hid the money in his groceries. It reminds me of when Chinese families eat dinner together in restaurants and fight over who gets to pay the bill. At the recycle station we found some appropriate cardboard and realized it was very far away and we were late for lunch, so we called our driver, Chu Jian Fu, to pick us up. 

I needed some sand to fill the trackway, so he took Sarah and Yang Chiang to the desert to collect some. Little did we know, they would have an adventure of their own! Chu shifu said that he promised a Kazakh guy that the next time he was driving Americans around he would bring them by his house for tea. So Sarah, Yang Chiang, and Chu shifu all went and had camel milk tea, home made camel butter, and home made camel milk yogurt at this guy's house! They took a bunch of pictures and asked if they could go pick us up and come back. They said yes, BUT there's a horse race happening right now and we'd better go to that.

So we all get picked up and whisked far away to a field where horse races were just ending! Apparently these races were organized by a Kazakh family who's kid is getting married, and they have the races so that many people come to wish them happiness at their wedding. The horses are a natural breed that is smaller than common breeds, and their jockeys are children because they're lighter. They run 6 times around a 5 km unmarked "track," so they run 30 km in total. The horses are decorated and are all sweaty when they end and need to be walked down, so we got to take lots of pictures of and with them. Kim was instantly surrounded by a crowd of jovial pot-bellied Kazakhs who wanted to take her to Fukang and show her their houses. They loved getting their pictures taken by and with her. 

That night we put 6 jerboas in the enclosure together to collect tail data. It was pretty crazy. On the way home we happened upon a hedgehog scampering down the street, and Yang Chiang picked it up and brought it back to his lab in Urumqi to raise and collect genomic data from it's feces.

Today Sarah and I assembled the trackway and began taking 3-toed foot penetration data. At 5 we met Wei shifu's daughter in town and discussed why I'm studying jerboa locomotion and why seeing a chicken killed, plucked, and dissected in the market place is unusual for us. While we were walking around with her we met up with the middle school girls who have been hanging out with Kim and Sarah. They were so excited to see us! I spoke to the most enthusiastic girl a little and she told me that her hobby is to play the piano. When she asked me my hobby and I said it was Wushu, she got really excited and asked me to teach her some. Before I knew it, I was teaching the whole gaggle of girls the 5-stance form and all the other people in the park watched in amazement as the foreigner taught the Chinese girls kung fu!

Time for dinner!

Vocabulary lesson:

cha bu duo - more or less / almost

rong yi - easy

ru guo - if

dan shi - but / however

Things to smile about.

Apparently we have the reputation around the field station for being the happy girls who smile and laugh a lot. Well, we have a lot to be happy about!

We're getting some great data on the 5-toed jerboas. They're really bouncy and playful. And I hope we got enough gerbil data because they're nasty. We plan to get 3 toed data today.

To improve the reflectivity of our animals in the videos, we've been covering them in glitter! We have the most fabulous jerboas in the world!!!! They're really cute and sparkly and when they walk they leave a trail of glitter behind them.

Also, we got the 3rd camera back up and running!!! A thing I would suspect takes mucus out of babies' nostrils when they're born allowed me to blow the sand out from the lens parts. Hopefully this greatly improves the quality of my data.

We went into Fukang the other day and had fresh camel's milk (luo tuo nai) and naan. Delicious! And while there we happened up on a Kazakh fabric store and spent the next few hours just going through her whole inventory and buying a bunch of intricately hand-embroidered things.

The company continues to be magnificent. This cements my opinion that the personalities you have on your field expedition really make or break your trip.

In other news, China continues to block my computer from accessing the internet, so no pictures this time.

Best taxi driver ever!

What a great day!

It was really hot today, so after soldering my LED's (which later broke for some unknown reason), we got jiao zi for lunch and picked up some hats over at the market. One of my 3 cameras is still not working and we're going to try to blow the sand out of it tomorrow.

Then we went and set up the enclosure and set traps out behind the Kazakh's field station. It was just us 3 American girls and the taxi driver, so when Kim and Sarah went to set traps, the taxi driver came to help me with the fence! I made sure to get Yang Chiang to tell him that it's fiberglass and it will give him splinters, so he knew he had to wear gloves. Otherwise, with my extremely broken Chinese abilities and a little scherades, we built a magnificent enclosure! He even designed a working door for us to get in and out. I asked him his name to acknowledge him in my publications, and he wrote it in the sand for me. On the way back we tried to get him to tell us what sounds the animals make, but he really really didn't want to sound silly.

Also, Sarah and Kim found an awesome lizard! It curls its tail up like the Bahamas Curly Tailed lizard. It's some kind of Phrynocephalus agamid, but I haven't identified the species yet. Either axilliaris or versicolor. I'll post a video of its locomotion soon!

At night we set up a bunch of IR and headlamps and ran the animals. We found that it was best to put the lights on the ground instead of above the jerboa. The 5 toe guys are crazy amazing! I never thought I'd say this, but I can't wait to track this video tomorrow! Yang Chiang went off on the motorbike with the Chinese guy who catches our jerboas, and they caught 5 more!

The sad note of the night was that one of the 5 toed jerboas we caught last night died today. We have no idea what's wrong with her besides his tail being broken. She seemed super happy up to this afternoon. At least she will still be useful for genetics work.

When we came back to the field station, there were 2 boxes in the foyer that were moving. Each one was filled with 10 chickens! Guess we know what's on the menu for the next week or so!

Some wacky phrases we learned today: lu mao zi = (lit. to wear a green hat) cuckold. 

Studies in desert ecosystems

We spent most of the day in the desert. There are a few sites that we think will work well.

Desert 1 is along a highway and has huge soft sand dunes with plants and harder ground in between the dunes. Apparently there are lots of 3 toed jerboas on the top of the dunes and 5 toed jerboas in between with gerbils and jirds (shashu) everywhere. 

Desert 2 is a tilled and abandoned field. It had really hard ground and small shrubs everywhere.

Desert 3 is a flat field where there are supposed to be a lot of 5-toed.

Desert 4 is a place with a lot of small dunes out behind the large forestry station.

Desert 5 is the field near our field station. It's very flat and hard and has a few intermittent bushes. We set traps there and only expect to get gerbils and perhaps a 5-toed. We will probably set up an enclosure there.

After a small nap, we went out to a place with small dunes to look at jerboas and gerbils. The location we went to was supposed to have a whole bunch of 3 and 5 toed jerboas, but we only saw a handful with lots of gerbils. Sarah spotted one and kept it in her light while Yang Chiang and I ran after it. Yang Chiang is really really good at netting jerboas. When our driver saw what we were doing he turned on his headlights to illuminate the field in front of us. After another hour of no captures we decided to start home. Along the way we saw a whole bunch of jerboas along the road! So Yang Chiang took a net and walked along outside the car while we rode behind and watched as he caught so many 5-toed jerboas! The driver was even weaving back and forth along the road so we could see off to the sides of the road. I think now that we have a few 5, 3, and gerbils, I want to set up an enclosure in the field and do some day vs night performance studies.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to fix one of my cameras that got sand in the workings of the lens while we were exploring desert 1 yesterday. It's a good thing my professor told me to bring 3 cameras instead of 2.

I have found my phenotypically equivalent ethnicity!

To say that a lot has happened in the past few days would be a drastic understatement.

I flew past the Tien Shan (天山) mountains to get to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, and stepped into a whole new world. I was welcomed by the cheerful team of researchers that are letting me work with them here at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Quick intro and dinner, and the next day we went into town!

It was a beautiful sunny day. We wandered around the north side of the city to shop for supplies. The equivalent of a hardware store in China is a strip mall of tiny shack-like storefronts along the street. You can get lots of things, but sometimes it's easier to ask the laoban to make something for you if you can't find exactly what you want. This system actually works better for me, who needs really weird and specialized equipment and has someone to translate for me. We ended up getting the x- y- and z- axes calibration object made for me out of metal, and the calibration wand I'm going to make myself with the soldering iron we got for 2 dollars.

Sarah took us to a great Taoist restaurant for lunch that served 4 types of fake meat. It was really amazing that each of them tasted different and had unique textures. At that restaurant it is imperative that you take your leftovers (da bao), because they don't want anything to go to waste. 

After lunch we explored the south end of the city, which is a very Uygur place. Usually when we walk around town we get lots of stares, to which we smile and reply with "Ni hao!." Here they smile at me and say "Yakshmosis!" because they think I'm also Uygur. The architecture is different here- lots of pointed arches everywhere, and everything is intricately decorated. We each got our heal examined by a medicine man. He takes your pulse, looks at your tongue, and squeezes your fingertips to find out what's wrong with you, then sells you the medicine. I would hesitate to do so because there are snakes, bull penises, flayed lizards, deer horns, etc hanging from the ceiling. Kim's friend showed us around and together we had a delicious dinner. I think that being vegetarian is easy in China when you have good friends to help you order.

The next day, one of the professors we are collaborating with took us out to the Przewalski horse breeding center. This species of horse has never been domesticated, and is critically endangered. This center, started in 1985, has been breeding these horses in captivity and releasing them to the wild. They told us that the horses had stables from the beginning, but the humans taking care of them didn't have a house to sleep in until 1995! They look so fuzzy because they're just starting to shed their thick winter coats. These horses have a very stiff mane, and a tail that is more flat like a feather than radially symmetric. We got video of the horses kicking each other and biting each other over food.

Then we made it to Fukang and ate pulled noodles for dinner. Apparently these noodles are unique to Xinjiang. The noodles are made out of a local flour that is different from common flour. Also, the dry climate of the area means that if you take the special flour elsewhere, then it won't stick together in the right way.

That brings us to today. We went shopping for equipment and realized that there are some things that you can't get in normal markets in China even though everything is made here. Plexiglas, rebar, and some PVC pipe joints are impossible to find. Instead we bought a pane of actual glass, wooden stakes, and completely rethought our PVC pipe contraption. Also, the toilet paper here is stretchy and doesn't have a hollow center. The paper goes straight to the middle.

We scoped out the desert in the afternoon and I got my first soil samples and penetrometer readings. Kim showed me what jerboa tracks look like and how they differ from those of the gerbils. She really knows a lot about the ecology of the area, and I'm so glad to have her to learn from. It's surprising that even though it's the desert, there is still so much life.

On the way back to the station we stopped by a Kazakh family's house because we saw baby camels. Little did we know, they also had baby sheep!

I've been learning a lot about China the entire time we've been here. But that's a post for another day. Wan an!