Welcome to the Zoologist's Campfire, the podcast where animal professionals share their best,
funniest and most epic stories.
Today I am joined by Michael Jowers, a biologist with I think the best specialization you can
think of.
Pay attention here kids, this is how you do it.
You specialize in, drumroll, tropical islands.
Michael got his PhD from the University of Glasgow, but has since spent many years chasing
reptiles and amphibians and lots of other animals around the Caribbean, South America
and many other places.
He describes 16 species new to science.
He has written close to 100 articles, book chapters and even field guides.
He is now at the University of Granada in Spain.
So Mike, welcome.
Thank you very much, Arie.
Lovely to be here with you.
Well before we get into your stories, which I know are fantastic, I just called you a
tropical island specialist, but you actually do a lot more.
Can you perhaps briefly tell us what you do as a biologist and how you got into it?
That's a great question and a difficult one to answer to be honest, because I'm intrigued
by most things and therefore I've never had a very constant line of research.
But let's say that I used genetics or molecular markers to identify species and very often
species are cryptic and through genetics we can clarify if instead of one species it's
more than one.
So this is kind of what I do and most of the times you end up finding new species that's
sometimes thought to be actually quite common or widespread.
When you do this in islands, because animals become isolated, you end up finding a lot
of new species for science.
So this is kind of what I do.
That's how you find all those new species because you have a lot to your name.
That's really cool.
Most of the time, some of the times we actually do find with our collaborators new species,
but many other times are just unknown species, let's say.
So this is what we try to do and it has huge conservation implications of course.
And of course you enjoy going to all these beautiful countries and finding them, chasing
them.
Is that something you fell into or is that ingrained?
Actually I grew up in southern Spain in Seville and my desire to become a zoologist began
at a very early age by the nature surrounding where I used to live.
Me and my brother lived with my mother and she had a country house.
And then at the time it was not very built up.
So we would just spend our childhood riding our bikes and looking for reptiles and amphibians
because they were everywhere in southern Spain.
Big lizards, many snakes, turtles all over the place.
So my mother actually donated her big yard, the garden for us to actually have animals.
Kind of like Gerald Darrow in Corfu, it's upbringing.
And we ended up having a pond that we built ourselves.
We were maybe 10, 11 years of age, we had 200 turtles.
You name it, we had it.
And this is how we had it.
I even had a camera.
I donated it to the zoo.
Obviously nowadays I do not believe that people should have exotic animals, but at the time
I was quite young and fascinated by the zoo.
So beautiful.
And I had a monitor that's a big one.
And some chipmunks or ferrets or anything.
And it was known as the zoo.
People come around and just walk in the garden to see all our animals.
They had headshots.
And that's how it started.
That obviously the only viable progression from there was to become a zoologist.
My mom, when I was growing up, she would often say that I learned very quickly never to open
a box or a drill unless I knew what was inside.
Because sometimes you would have scorpions or lots of snakes and things like that.
So she was very worried of opening anything in the house.
There's always some creepy crawly running around.
So that's how I started.
And obviously I progressed to biology because that's the only thing I wanted to do my whole
life.
So natural progression.
And doing expeditions is just kind of a more sophisticated thing than what I used to do
when I was a child.
Yeah.
Once you get into it, you never get out.
Yeah.
Awesome.
And you have gone all over the place.
And as I said, you've picked your regions very wisely.
The Caribbean, not bad.
And you even worked on scorpions that, of course, are some of my favorites.
Right.
Favorites.
Absolutely.
And you had some adventures with scorpions in Trinidad, I believe.
Right.
Yeah.
In the island of Trinidad, where I spent over three expeditions, over a year there, all
in all.
I was working on amphibians and this professor flew from Venezuela.
Trinidad is very close to Venezuela.
The Repallio de Trinidad, Tobago, is basically a stone throw away from North and Venezuela.
And he wanted to capture these scorpions which are found in Trinidad, very, very dangerous
scorpion called Titus trinitatis.
And we'll spend the nights with UV lamps, black lights, trying to find the Titus, but
we actually never found at the time the Titus.
We found many species, but not this one.
And it was very hard to find.
And we wanted to capture some life specimens to isolate the venom gland and do the acid
composition of the venom.
But basically, after quite a long time, we managed to find a couple of large individuals.
The professor had already left and he gave me instructions how to euthanize the scorpions
to extract the venom gland to preserve the glands.
And you have to bear in mind that these expeditions, we used to go with undergrad students to Trinidad
20 at a time.
It's a big group.
A big group, yes.
And obviously, I'm not a scorpion expert as yourself.
So I had very detailed instructions what to do and what not to do.
And I thought, well, this is a great opportunity to show my students how it's done.
Obviously, I've never done it myself before.
I have never touched such a venomous scorpion ever, so I was very worried and actually quite
nervous.
It's like we're dealing with a very venomous snake.
So here we are.
We have a communal living room and a kitchen.
It's very big.
It's off campus at the University of the West Indies.
It's very basic, but we have everything we need.
As you may be aware, it's extremely hot.
And so all the students are in swimsuits.
They're all barefooted.
And we have this big dining table.
So I have my scorpions there in this tupperware.
And I have these tweezers to grab the scorpion, the first scorpion.
All those students come around, come along.
Everybody's just putting their head into the tupperware.
I'm surrounded by students barefooted everywhere.
And I'm just telling them, this is extremely dangerous.
This is a very toxic animal, venomous animal.
If you get stung by this, you may even die.
It's got no sense.
All the students are like, wow.
So I'm going to show you how to euthanize this thing.
I think we had to put it in warm water at the time or something.
So basically, I just grab these tweezers and try and grab the scorpion by the tail.
For whatever reason, this big scorpion just curls back on me on the tweezers.
And with his pincers, it starts getting my hand.
And I'm hurt.
Very short tweezers.
Yeah, very short tweezers.
Basically, I just didn't grab it properly.
And this thing just kind of released itself.
Maybe the tweezers were not the right ones.
So I just started scoping on the table.
And to my amazement, this thing runs like a lizard.
It's so fast.
So it starts running down the table and jumps out.
Imagine the students, which are barefooted.
And everybody runs.
Everybody starts running in opposite directions.
And I remember this student, he was a big guy.
He actually jumped and hugged the fridge.
And he was hanging to the fridge.
It's hilarious.
I thought, oh, God, this fridge is going to fall on top of him.
And I don't know how it happened.
Two other scorpions, somebody hit the container.
There's three scorpions running around.
Everybody's, one is on the chair, the other one is on the couch.
We can't find the bloody things.
Anyways, and I thought, oh, my God, they were so close to having such a bad accident.
Obviously, we managed to find them.
It took us about 10 minutes.
Because they run somewhere in the kitchen, in the pots.
They go under something.
Yeah, some of the students were still shaking for a while.
And it was hilarious.
You have to be there to see that.
I was like, oh, my Lord.
I nearly killed a student or two.
So anyway, that's my first encounter with a very dangerous scorpion.
Yeah.
It was fun.
I won't do it again.
Promise.
No, the treaser thing is very familiar.
Because if you grab a scorpion, its tail bends one way.
And if you grab it with treasers perpendicular to the direction of movement,
you're fine.
Nothing can happen.
But if you grab it in the direction of movement,
it can just flip itself away, and it will launch into the next person,
or your face, or something like that.
Well, that's what happened, I think.
But I didn't know scorpions were so fast.
This was so, so mad.
This thing wanted to get out.
Christ.
Anyway, so yeah.
So that was a lucky escape, I'd say.
Awesome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the chances of getting stung are not huge.
But I can imagine the students, after being told by you,
like this is the most dangerous.
So dramatic.
You know, like, oh.
The image of somebody climbing the fridge.
No, that's hilarious.
Yeah, hugging, like just floating in the air.
Just hiding in this big fridge.
It's unbelievable.
But in the end, the scorpions were used for science.
Let's call it that way.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, of course.
There were the many glasses and the tissue samples
were shipped to Venezuela.
They got some really nice scientific papers out of them.
Yeah, I saw your papers on them, of course.
But it's cool to know the story behind it.
Because you know, this is very dry paper title.
You know, the peptides and da-da-da-da-da.
And then this is behind it.
Yeah, that was some published, right?
Yeah, yeah.
OK, yeah.
So that's the scorpion.
I mean, there's other encounters in Trinidad
because we spend there so long.
Yeah.
You wrote one of the few field guides
on reptiles amphibians of Trinidad and Tobago, right?
Yeah, it's a second edition.
It's led by John Murphy, who's like the person who
started it, or his travel many, many times to Trinidad
and Tobago.
I work regularly with him.
He's a great guy.
And I actually met him in Arizona this summer for the first time.
So cool.
I was very, very, very happy.
Yeah, so we got this guide out.
But I mean, all credit to him.
He did most of the job.
He's amazing.
Wow, you spent a lot of time there anyway.
Yeah, for sure.
And we found lots of new species of snakes,
also to be named as biglissed.
And frogs, which are very difficult to find in the jungle.
They're very cryptic and conspicuous, difficult to find.
This frog, we took maybe like three expeditions to find it.
We could hear it calling from a swamp.
But when you approached it, it would just
disappear under the water and we just could not find it.
And it took us many trips.
It was a six-hour round trip to go to this swamp.
And this frog was only found in 1994.
Only one individual, one male.
Yeah, and for 10 years, we could not find it.
Nobody could find it.
Only we could hear a frog calling,
and we think it was that one.
And after three years trying, at least myself, to capture it,
just had to go into murky, swampy, black water.
And you have to understand this featherlands,
this pit viper's there, this caiman's.
You go to a tropical swamp.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's heavily populated with everything.
And you would hear the males calling,
and suddenly they'd disappear.
And there were some islets, like little islands,
on top of the swamp, very small, with lots of roots and mud.
Suddenly I'd realized that the males would call just
by the roots of these little islets.
And when you approached, they would stop calling and disappear.
So I figured out that the only way to get this animal
was actually putting my whole hand in the burrows
and trying to grab over whatever was in there.
That's a bit dangerous.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So my first response, I put my whole hand in the burrow.
It's full of mud, and it's murky water.
Half is in the water, half is outside.
So you just can't see what's going on.
You put your whole arm, and you feel something.
But your first something moved and touched my arm.
The first thing you do is pull out, obviously,
because you don't know if it's a snake.
You don't know what the hell is.
And after a while, I actually took the courage
to just grab whatever that was.
You can imagine.
You don't know what that is.
And just pull it out.
And I managed to find four frogs in the first ever female
captured.
And so yeah, that's another thing.
So you did that trick multiple times
with the blind grabbing stuff.
A whole morning doing that and wishing for the best
not to get whatever it may have been, tarantula,
or maybe a snake.
And yeah, I was lucky.
So I managed to pull four out.
But of course, I had to dig in dozens of burrows
and just feel for whatever that was inside.
And no wonder nobody could find this thing,
because nobody was going to do that.
My students refused to do it.
Like I said, OK, guys, now you know how you do it.
When I called the first one, they all refused.
No way I'm not.
Yeah, no.
They're probably smarter than you, Michael.
Yeah.
Let's let Todactylus need CO2.
This is possibly the greatest challenge we have.
Yeah, cool.
Todactylus.
Those are pretty big frogs, usually, right?
I mean, they can be.
Yeah.
They actually, yeah.
There's a group of frogs that lay floating foam.
And they put the eggs and tadpoles hatch inside the foam.
But with this species, nobody's ever found how it breeds.
Nobody's ever found a tadpole.
So it's a mysterious animal.
And it's only found in this one swamp
in the south of Trinidad, in this little peninsula.
And the swamp is small.
It's maybe like 5,000 square meters.
That's it.
Nowhere else.
Wow.
It's unbelievable.
Wow, wow.
Yeah.
Aspiring biologists, pay attention.
Yeah.
This is just many of mysteries and still there.
Oh, that's the, I mean, the only people
I know that stick their hand down burrows to grab stuff
are people working in Madagascar,
because they know there is nothing venomous there.
Oh, OK.
Well, nothing dangerous.
I mean, there's some scorpions there and spiders.
But nothing that will kill you.
But yeah, otherwise, it's a bad idea.
Yeah, it's very not.
It's not wise.
Yeah, I think I was also with my flip flops there.
And I was stunned by something.
I think it was maybe a scorpion or a spider.
And my foot was like a balloon for like three days.
Or it's full of creepy cronies.
But you know what it's like.
Anyway, so yeah, to treat that.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah, and so you had the first female.
You described it, I presume.
And that all was.
And also, we took them to the lab alive.
We studied them for weeks.
And we recorded the course.
And we published more than one paper.
And one paper was, when they are mad,
they have this distinctive call.
So we actually published this while
that they have different calls.
The mating calls, and maybe male-male competition,
and then what we call an aggression call.
Cool.
But even in the lab, we had them in huge tanks.
You can never see them.
They were just hiding them.
It's even in the, you knew they were in a one square meter
tank.
And it would take you a while to find the frog.
They're extremely elusive animals.
Extremely elusive animals.
Yeah, so and then, yeah.
So that's all the stories of Trinity that, you know.
Yeah, no, and to know anything about an animal,
you need to first find it.
That's pretty basic.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, that was a very rewarding event.
Yeah.
And then to be able to study it in the lab
and get all that data out of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You increase the knowledge of that particular species
by a lot, I imagine.
Yeah, and it's extremely, it's an endemic.
I mean, we found other frogs, like golden tree frog
of Trinidad, which is one of the rarest frogs in the planet.
Really?
Yeah, it lives in two summits, in Tucuchan,
in the cloud forests.
And this is like, I think in the Edge website,
the Edge is A-D-G-E. Is that Edge?
Yeah, this is the rare evolutionary species.
This frog is like number 80 in the world,
as one of the rarest evolutionary species in the world.
Oh, cool.
It's only found in two mountain tops in Trinidad.
And recently, they found the population in Venezuela.
And it lives in a giant bromeliad, only that bromeliad,
nowhere else.
The top of the feeds on the microalgae.
So Trinidad is fascinating because it has these.
And this is a monogenes animal.
It's the only species of its genus.
It's called phytotriadus.
It's extremely rare.
And that's it.
There's no other close relatives anywhere.
First time I hear of it, too.
So yeah.
Wow.
Cool.
And you also spent some time in Venezuela, right?
I mean, you've had some trips there.
I mean, I had one trip from my PhD.
We had to go and fly over and meet some researchers,
local researchers, to look for this dendrobatic frog, which
I rather, I guess you're aware of because you published
with dendrobats, haven't you, your early work?
I think so.
Have I?
I think you have a big paper, isn't it?
I think you did.
No, I may be on a few papers.
But I just did a bit of sequencing.
OK.
I thought maybe you were wrong.
Sad thing as a grad student.
You're in the lab going through people's.
People like you go to the field, get all these fancy frogs.
And I get in the lab.
I got to analyze the DNA.
But you get the final story.
These days I do that.
To be honest, my expeditions to Trinidad
were quite some time ago.
Now I have amazing collaborators.
They send me the tissues.
They are maybe from Venezuela or Trinidad.
They've been working much more than I have there.
So now I rely on their expertise.
And they ship me the tissues.
And I'm like you.
I'm doing the genetics and writing the story, right?
So all credit to them for sure.
Venezuela, yeah, so I was working
with this dendrobatic, it's called Manufraine.
Trinitatis from Trinidad is an endemic species of frog.
Beautiful frogs, very colorful.
Yeah, but this one is the dark one.
It's actually the low pretty one, unfortunately for me.
But actually most of my PhD was on this frog.
And it was believed to occur in the north of Venezuela
in this beautiful place called the Paria Peninsula.
And so we ran some genetic work.
And we actually realized that the animal in Venezuela
was a different species.
So we called it Manufraine venezolensis, very original.
Nevertheless, we wanted to find a species called Manufraine
hermini, which is closely related to the Trinidad
and the northern Venezuelan species.
For this, I flew from Trinidad.
I got a little airplane, the propeller airplanes.
And I flew to Caracas.
I'm from Caracas, I got another little propeller plane.
And I flew down south to Maturin, I think it was.
It's in the jungle.
And this trip was terrible.
This little airplane, it had seen better days.
You could see the rust everywhere.
And I remember all my life that this guy from Galicia,
I don't know what he was doing in the airplane.
It was about two or three people, that's it,
in the airplane.
Me and this, maybe, I think the stewardess and this guy.
This guy was praying because the plane was jumping
and it was terrible.
And the clouds would come in the airplane.
It was freezing cold inside.
And he was, oh, what?
Why am I here?
My life, my job is not worth it.
This is not worth it.
He was cursing all the triads like, oh, Christ.
Anyway, so basically, this is a strip of land in the jungle.
We just landed this thing.
The guy from Galicia says, thank you, Lord.
Thank you.
It's just so thankful to be alive.
OK, here we go.
And so I've got a huge rock-sack because I'm
going to meet some local researchers to go and look
for this frog.
And they know where to find it in the jungle.
It takes about two days of trekking through rivers
to actually go to the summits where they're found.
Wow.
Because I end up walking to what you would call a little airport.
But it's not an airport.
It's like a room.
And they asked me, what are you doing here?
And I said, well, I'm a researcher.
I'm doing my PhD.
And I'm coming to work.
I presume this is a high drug area or a conflict zone.
And I immediately get a paramilitary with machine guns
pointing at me.
Right.
And I was like, oh, dear.
Maybe I should have said something different.
And so they put me in a room.
It's kind of a detention room.
I'm close there.
And I don't know what's going to happen to me.
They take my passport, they take my rucksack,
they leave me there, they close me in.
I don't know how long I was there.
And I'm young.
Why?
I don't know.
Because it's just very suspicious
that you have this European in the middle of nowhere,
alone, with no local researchers.
And so I'm OK.
So I don't know how much the time lapse is.
You were detained in the middle of nowhere in the jungle.
Yeah, but this weird dressed military, which
I don't know who they are.
They don't seem like national military.
It's just like, I don't know.
I'm confused, right?
Because I was expecting a normal airport.
I was expecting a little town.
Somebody stabs your passport.
You just walk through.
And I was looking forward to it.
And I realized, oh, OK, this is really not
what I thought it was going to be.
So basically.
And you were very young then, right?
You were a PhD student.
You were a kid.
Yeah, second year PhD or third year PhD.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I was not the youngest.
I did my PhD kind of late in life.
Maybe I was 28.
But you're not prepared to for.
Basically, so after a while, they take me out.
And they lay on this big table.
And they put my rucksack on the table.
And there's three or four guys pointing at the rucksack
with a gun and another one at me.
And they asked me to open and take everything out.
And of course, they have eppendals
to preserve the samples, tweezers, alcohol, ethanol.
I have all the equipment.
So kind of they start maybe believing my story
that I'm coming for research.
So they told me to pack everything in my big rucksack.
And they walked me through a room.
And this I will never forget.
It's like in the movies of Narcos.
When you see you open the room.
And I have to picture this room.
It's like an old table and a chair.
And there's this guy who looks like in the movies of Narcos,
a drug dealer.
He's got a sweat vest on.
And he's got a big belly, all stained.
He's got this mustache.
And he's smoking a cigar.
And he's holding his passport, my passport,
with his left arm.
And you have this old fan, which is all just
getting a bit of air.
He's all sweaty.
And he's holding the passport in the air, my passport.
And he's just smoking the cigar and just kind
of thinking about something.
And I'm at the door.
And I'm just thinking, OK, this is it.
This is what happens in the movies.
They all get killed.
That's me done.
My whole life is in his hand, his passport.
My passport.
If he decides to break the passport or throw it, I'm done.
I'm never getting out.
And so he calls me and he's just like that, come.
And to his surprise, I speak Spanish fluently.
Even though my name says Michael J. Chowers.
So this is, oh, he's, what, he says, what are you doing here?
In English, I think it was.
And then I started speaking Spanish.
And I said, look, I'm coming for a frog.
He could not believe it.
He said, what?
You're coming for a frog?
I said, yes, I'm coming to get this frog.
Really?
You're flying from the UK to Trinidad to Caracas here
for a frog?
Yes.
And he was like, oh, this is the best thing
I've ever heard in my life.
This guy is crazy.
So then he asked me, OK, who's picking you up?
Who are you working with?
What does a frog look like?
Everything.
And he laughed the story.
I can't believe it.
So he said, that's fantastic.
And he just did something to my passport, gave it back to me.
All the guys took company me out.
And several hours later, I met up with the researchers
outside this airport.
And I was like, thank you for the frog.
He was just amused by it.
He thought it was fantastic, fantastic.
I'm sure he went home that day and told his family,
this guy.
Yeah.
Well, I guess there's not a lot happening there
at that little airport every day.
You were the craziest thing to come by there.
Yeah.
It's been a long time.
So I was very blessed to get out of that place
and survive that little airplane thing.
It's like a little dragonfly, the airplane.
It was so dodgy.
Anyways, and obviously, we didn't find the frog.
We went to Helm back to find the earth, sleep deprivation.
We were sleeping in hammocks, eating alive by mosquitoes.
And it's the only time in my life
that I had to call it quits and say, I cannot carry on.
I have to stop.
I'm going to faint.
It's the only time in my life that my body was to its limit.
And we couldn't make it.
We couldn't find the frog.
Anyway, so.
No, but that's.
Never found it.
Yeah.
How long did you spend there on the mountain looking for it?
Oh, it wasn't long.
Maybe it was like five days, a week.
But I was slow enough to kill you.
Yeah, I was asleep, deprived, not sleeping at night.
The mosquitoes were just going for me like crazy.
And I was sleeping one hour a night.
The diet was terrible.
Having Yuka, try Yuka with tuna not to have diarrhea.
It was not right.
And yeah, my colleagues eventually found the frog.
But I think it took another year or something like that.
OK.
It's a good thing you didn't stay around for that.
No, no.
I wanted to get out.
But yeah, that was you know.
So was the guy disappointed when you came back and didn't have.
I never saw it again.
No, no, I flew out through another airport.
I think it's they dropped me off in Caracas and I don't remember
where I just flew out somewhere different.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Otherwise, it would have detained you because you couldn't show a frog.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, that was a defeat.
Let's say never finding them.
It's happened many times.
I failed in Martinique to find a dentrobacter as well.
I failed to find a snake again in another.
Sometimes they're just gone.
They just can't find them.
No, I know.
I mean, I've seen the really cool documentary on Ushuaia TV.
Oh, yeah.
You guys going to to Diamond Rock, which is small, almost vertical island
just sticking out of the out of the tropical sea to find a snake there.
But yeah, that was that was one of the hardest expeditions ever for sure.
I think nothing prepares you for that.
We me and my good friend,
Stefan Kuhl is a French researcher.
We work together in Doniana, a biological research station in Seville.
And we we we wrote a paper about this snake is believed to be extinct.
Leovis Curso.
This is a colubrid snake.
And we managed to get some samples from the Natural History Museum in Madrid,
in Paris, and I managed to sequence some genes and put it put it in an evolutionary
tree and we published a little nice paper.
And this snake is was believed to be extinct.
But there was reports that after the introduction of the mongoose in the island
of Martinique in the Caribbean, the snake population had been decimated.
Extinct mongoose eat, prey on snakes.
Yeah, famously.
Yeah, exactly.
And there are huge problems in the Caribbean.
But this small islet, maybe like 300 meters off the coast of Martinique.
Hasn't gotten mongoose and the last reports and the last captured individual,
which I sequenced, I believe, was captured from this little island in 1962.
Oh, that's a while ago.
Yeah.
So that's the last time that an animal was captured.
The specimen of Leovis Curso.
Leovis Curso.
That's it.
Yeah.
So we thought, hey, what about going to this place
and seeing if the animal is still there?
It would be fascinating.
Yeah.
And we got funding, I think, I'm not sure it was through National Geographical.
And I think, no, maybe another organization.
And we actually led an expedition there to look for the snake.
Now, we stayed in a house, preparing the expedition for three weeks
and in the island of Martinique, it's a very nice island.
It's a balance to France.
It's all very comfortable, beautiful.
And from the house, we could see diamond rock.
So we had binoculars and we could just plan.
OK, interesting.
We prepared traps, 40 traps that we released,
that we put in the island, in the diamond rock, eventually.
And we were organizing for three weeks.
It was me, my colleague, and a cameraman from Canada,
who Alex came to film because we were going to do a documentary out of it.
And basically, we got a boat to take us there.
And you have to bear in mind, there's no water in this island.
And we have filming equipment, cameras, well, you name it.
Yeah.
And so we are taking, I don't know, 500 kilos of equipment.
I mean, just the water, I think we took 600 liters.
You can't be there without water.
Nobody lives there.
The food, hammocks, we're going to sleep on hammocks in the caves.
So we load the car four in the morning,
go to the port, load everything in the boat.
And from a distance, everything looks nice.
Like, OK, this is going to be easy.
Yeah, it's nice.
Yeah, little island 300 meters away from civilization.
How bad can it be?
No big deal.
I've done this before.
Oh, and we go with a climber, actually.
The first day, we take a professional climber
to open and put the ropes so we can actually
move around the island.
So we get there.
And as we're getting closer, Stefan and I look to each other
and we realize, oh my word, what are we doing?
This is impossible.
It's a sheer wall.
You have to bear in mind, we're not climbers.
We've been doing climbing for the last weeks to train,
but we're not professional climbers.
And we don't know how to work the equipment properly.
This has just been given to us the night before.
We get there.
And this is a sheer rock face, this island.
It's terrible.
And it's one of those times when you realize, OK, maybe
I've chewed on too much that I can swallow.
This is too much.
And of course, the boat is trying
to get to the landing dock, let's say, where
we're going to start releasing and putting all the equipment.
But this boat is moving up and down.
The waves are hitting.
And basically, we have to download, unload, all just
the water.
It's like 600 liters.
And through this rope, an old rope on the side of the wall,
we just hang into that with all the equipment.
And there's one cave.
We start putting everything in one cave.
At one point, Stefan, who is blind as a bat,
loses his glasses.
And they fall to the sea.
So I have to dive and look for them.
So I had to go down 8 or 10 meters.
And luckily, they were hanging on the wall
on top of a sea urchin.
And I meant it because otherwise, he would have been blind.
So this is the beginning.
And it's exhausting.
And we downloaded hundreds of kilos of equipment and food
and you name it.
And this is camp one.
And then from there, we have to take some equipment
to the next camp.
And this is, again, you have to go through a forest,
open with machetes, and to leave a second camp, which
is where we have the food and most of the water
and the hammocks.
And then it's when the climbing starts.
And then you have to climb maybe 100 meters or 120 meters
to go to the cave where we're going to sleep.
Because there's no other place to sleep.
Down in the base, there's no beach.
There's no sand.
It's all lava.
Or when it's all rock.
And it's full of mosquitoes.
It's going to rain.
So you need cover.
Yeah.
Most of all, the expensive filming equipment.
Little did I know that after the climber,
I think it's called Lawrence.
I don't remember.
He prepares the lines because the lines were just
all broken.
Just to get to the cave, I remember thinking,
how are we going to do this?
This is just terrible.
It's so hard.
So hard.
So heavy.
Anyway, so and then we had to do many trips to go to the cave.
It's an hour each way just to go up another 45 minutes
to go down.
And I remember clearly being exhausted after 16 or 18 hours
the first night.
And we're going to cook.
And we forgot the gas.
The gas valves at the very first.
Oh, no.
We had to climb all the way down again.
No, it was night.
So we didn't have the strength.
So we just ate packet noodles, the dry stuff.
That's what we ate.
That's the water.
Yeah, the rope.
Yeah, that's what we had.
And so basically, we went to look for this snake.
And this island used to be in the Napoleonic Wars.
It was an English colony.
And the French fought to take it back.
And after a long campaign, they managed to take it.
And nobody had ever spent more than one night in this place
until me and Stefan went, which is funny,
because the English fought the French for so long.
And it was two years later than a French scientist,
Stefan and myself, English, actually went together
to try and look for a snake for conservation, which is,
we made peace.
We made peace.
And of course, this reports that when the English lived there,
it was absolutely full of snakes.
Because they had to build a pool with fresh water.
And then there were snakes.
But when the pool cracked, the water, the fresh water
disappeared.
The snake populations disappeared.
So we spent 10 days there.
It was hard.
And it's full of cacti as well, which is so odd.
Like, huge, spiny cacti.
And we didn't find it.
We actually went back three years later.
You're right.
Oh, really?
OK.
Yeah.
We had to go twice.
The technology had changed since the first edition
of Dr. Metric.
And now it's drones.
So we had to go back with another team and use drones.
And we still couldn't find the snake.
We never found it.
Unfortunately, the snake is possibly extinct.
So wow.
So that specimen that you sequenced from the museum
may have been the last one.
The thing is, there's local myths by fishermen
that they still see the snake there.
We went to Martinique in the market,
and everybody was saying, yeah, I've seen it.
I've seen the snake.
Busting on the rocks.
And all these stories.
You know, that was like five years ago.
So it's obviously not true.
It's basically just myth now.
Yeah.
And it was very, I mean, it was a good experience.
But then the sheer size of these walls.
And also, nobody told us, you're going
to have to be climbing 16 hours a day.
And like, no.
It's so heavy.
No.
Fortunate enough to be healthy and fit.
But maybe somebody that hasn't got upper strength,
I'm not seeing.
I don't know how they would do this.
I mean, having seen that island on the documentary
is just a bit of rock sticking out straight
from the sea, it's a bit vertical onto the top.
And yeah, covered with nasty spiny.
Don't let the tropical island biologists think this is stuff.
Yeah, but it was fantastic.
It was a beautiful place.
And you can see Martinique at night from there.
And there's obviously some funny stories.
We took three liters of punching rum,
but we had no ice and no lime.
So we just treated it straight.
And that wasn't a good idea, because we
got very intoxicated one night.
And you're by a cliff.
And you need to go to the loo very quickly.
And you're looking for a spot.
And everybody's looking for a spot at the same time.
And it is kind of nasty.
And you would go to the toilet, but there are very limited
places, so you can only go once to the same spot.
You cannot repeat, right?
You cannot hammer it or anything.
You cannot dig, so it's all rock.
Yeah, so three liters of rum.
And it's actually over 75% alcohol with no lime, no ice.
Not a good idea when you dehydrate.
Terrible idea, Michael.
Terrible idea.
But that was like our thing at the end of the day.
It was like, let's have a rum.
And even though it felt terrible, it was like,
it's going to be done.
And I think we drank it all, actually, or most of it.
And then obviously, to have a swim or to clean yourself,
you had to climb all the way down to come base one.
And there we would swim.
And we had some emergencies, like the director,
the person who was filming suddenly went down.
He came up, and his eye was so red.
Like a vein had burst inside the eye.
And it looked like a complete, not pink, I mean, red,
like blood.
So we had to leave a day soon, go straight to the hospital.
And Stefan, I think, cracked a vertebrae or something.
So yeah, so from there, we had to go straight
to the hospital.
And you can imagine how we smelt or how we looked.
There we are, not good, smelly, and wearing the same clothes
for 10 days.
Anyway, but we couldn't find it, like other species
as we can't find them.
Yeah, that's very sad, isn't it?
A lot of human-introduced animals.
There's problems everywhere.
Yeah.
But yeah, and this was Martinique.
I went again 10 years before that.
I think I went to Martinique with a colleague of mine.
And we were on the main island.
We were looking for a dendrobatic frog.
And we just went for a quick swim in the sea at night.
It was very hot.
And she got stung by a jellyfish.
And we're in the middle of nowhere.
We're sleeping in a cabin in the forest somewhere.
We have no car until the day afterwards.
And suddenly, she's choking.
Ooh.
Yeah.
And real strong reaction.
Yeah, basically, she had a terrible,
I thought, I don't know, she's going to die.
And she was freezing cold.
And so I had to put six blankets on her, hugging her all night.
And she was still freezing.
She's having a shock, so I gave her antihistamines.
And she had a burn on her back.
And I thought she was not going to make it.
And thank God we had so many.
She took three or four antihistamines.
And that was my first experience in Martinique,
and looking for this dendrobatic.
And then she was too sick to help me.
So we went there four days, but we couldn't find a dendrobatic frog.
It's just I needed two people, and she was too sick.
And bless her.
Yeah.
It's not her fault.
At that point, you're just grateful she survived, right?
Yeah, so basically, I've been three times to Martinique
to look for two species, and I never found them.
So do you want to go back at some point?
I don't know.
I think maybe Martinique, my strike of lucky strikes there
has been three trips, nothing to show for.
I'm not sure.
So I mean, you've traveled a lot of places.
Are there places you still want to go?
Is there something that's on your top of your list?
Of course.
I mean, there's so many.
I actually want to go to Trinidad.
I haven't been there since 2004.
That's the last time, 20, 19 years ago.
Imagine.
I need to go back there.
I've been.
I would like to do some other Caribbean islands for sure.
Northern Venezuela is extremely interesting,
but it's too dangerous.
Yeah, Venezuela is just the most biodiverse country
in the world.
It's amazing.
There's so much there.
But recently, we did another expedition in Cape Verde.
We spent a week in St. Lucia.
It's non-habitable.
It's uninhabitable.
And we went to do a species inventory there for a week.
We mooted throughout the island.
That was pretty cool.
We lost most of the water when we were landing the first time.
The zodiac has almost flipped in the waves.
So you have to bear in mind that St. Lucia
is like an island, a volcanic island, and there's no shade.
So there's no trees.
There's no cover.
There's nothing, which we kind of knew.
But until you're there, you don't realize
how much you need shade.
And it was unbearably hot.
And we lost most of the water.
So we had to rush in the water.
When they came to pick us up, we had like a liter left,
me and Stefan again.
And yeah, that was really bad.
And every three days, we'll move like five kilometers
from the north of the island.
Then we move to the center and then to the south.
And I remember the first night we camped on a beach.
And there was a local guard there.
And I said, can we camp here?
And he said, yeah.
I said, are you sure the waves will not hit us here?
Because it's all rock.
So it's the only place where you can put the tent.
I said, no, no.
The water never comes here.
I said, are you sure?
Yeah.
So it's 4 o'clock in the morning.
And suddenly, I'm sleeping in my tent.
And I hear a wave just hitting my tent.
And it's taking me in my tent.
I was like, I'm shouting, Stefan, get out.
So we're looking for the ship.
And there we are.
The ocean is just hitting us.
And we got out, luckily.
Everything is soaking wet.
4 o'clock in the morning, first day of the expedition.
I was like, oh, this is not good.
Oh, that's a really bad start.
And were you able to communicate that somebody would come pick
you up or were you?
No, actually, no.
I mean, the cell phones did work occasionally.
But we actually managed to be OK.
We rationed everything.
And we were fine.
And it all worked very well at the end.
But then I remember I took a sheet, a white sheet,
that's going to do like an insect trap with a light
behind for maternal animals to capture insects in vertebrates.
We're doing an invertebrate survey first in the island.
And we're putting traps to capture insects.
And luckily, we took this sheet that we
could put between the two tents.
And it was basically 1 and 1.5 square meters.
And we could be there sitting in the shade
like in the whole part of the day.
When the sun is scorching down.
Because you cannot be in the tent.
The tents are polyester.
It's an oven.
And I remember just being there, just praying for a cloud
to come or something.
And yeah, no shade for a week.
And it's not ideal.
And so that's not the last expedition
we did about two years ago with Stefan.
And now we are actually trying to go back
and do some other islands.
OK.
Do that again.
Why not?
Yeah, why not?
But this time, I'll take some other.
Yeah, bring a hat, maybe.
I'm going to take a big red eye.
The ones you take to the beach, one of those.
And yeah, so that's it.
Yeah.
And so many other things I would like to do, of course.
But it's a lot of time, is there?
No, no.
But well, I know you are keeping very busy going everywhere
and with science and conservation and taxonomy.
Yeah, we try.
We try not to get too bored.
Yeah.
So basically, in a nutshell, that's
kind of what I've been doing and some of those stories.
Yeah, no, fantastic.
I know you've developed more where that comes from.
Yeah, there's many.
You get stopped at gun points often in those places.
And we got stopped at gun point once in the jungle.
We were looking for frogs.
And these guys wanted our money.
And anyways, we had to.
So that was really a stick up in the jungle.
Yeah, I took a team and we were doing in Mountain Benedict,
we had these traps and frogs would deposit tadpoles
on the little, not traps, on the little plastic containers.
And we were studying that for three months.
And this guy just with a shotgun just came along.
And I knew he was, he wanted no good.
So I just walked straight to him and I said,
what are you doing here with a gun?
And it kind of broke the ice.
And what's your name?
He said, my name's Luis.
What are you doing here with a gun?
And I'm looking for anaconda.
He said, oh, interesting, interesting.
I knew there was no anaconda in that part of the jungle.
So I knew he was lying.
And Luis said, bush meat?
You want to eat it?
Yeah, yeah, bush meat, bush meat.
Yeah, OK, OK.
So I told my team, we picked up everything.
And I told my team, look, the students, I mean,
there's this guy around, just beware.
Take $100.
Trinidad and Torrego dollars in your pockets.
If he stops you and I'm not there with you,
he's giving the money, so he's happy.
So I had to go down south to look for another frog.
And my team went there and they actually
got stopped and gunned by this guy.
And we knew the guy was lurking around.
So when I went to remove the final stage of the experiments
after three months, I had to take the police
with machine guns and everything.
We needed protection.
So I had the option of losing the experiment
for three months or taking police and saving all my data.
And of course, I was not going to leave my data, three months
of work.
And so we took a team of professionals, police, I mean.
And the guy was around, but he saw the police arrived.
And so he just left us.
And we picked up everything.
So my team was stopped at gunpoint.
That was not nice.
No, no.
But you already spotted him beforehand.
And I'm sure that didn't end up in the paper, right?
So these are real.
No, of course, no, no.
This is exactly what I love so much,
because that's why I started this podcast.
These stories behind the papers, that's
really what makes the biologist life very interesting.
Let's put it interesting.
Yeah.
It's always the hardest part is what you never write about.
No, no.
It's a little paper about the eggs and the deadpoles
and never about the guy with the gun.
Exactly, exactly.
And it's also the months of funding
to get there and the logistics.
And you get sick, like everybody.
And when you're there, you get dengue or something
other than it's not present.
But at the same time, at least.
Yeah.
I really have to love those deadpoles
to go through all that.
Mike, if people want to know what you're doing
and follow you around with your science or anything,
where do they go?
Where can we find more about you?
That's a good question.
I mean, I have a personal website.
You can just type my name, Michael Chowers.
I will link it with this podcast, for sure.
Right.
That would be great.
Thanks.
And you can just find me there.
Michael J. Chowers, Michael Joseph Chowers.
And it's a Wix homemade website where
I put all my papers and some pictures of expeditions,
things like that, animals.
And I suppose that's just putting my name on Google.
The website will come up.
We will find you then.
We will find you.
Awesome.
Mike, thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Well, thank you for inviting me.
It's an honor.
And I hope you're going to go around and survive and come
back to tell us about it.
Absolutely.
I would love to.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you so much, Adi.
Bye bye.
I'm talking for you.
Cheers.
Bye bye.
Bye.