Antipode – Chapter 24

Antipode is a true account of my experiences while doing research in Madagascar from 1993 – 1999; it was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2001. We started with the Introduction, and here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

The beautiful little yellow and blue frogs that I had been tracking for so many months seemed largely oblivious to my presence. They did not yearn to be studied, or known. That desire lay wholly in me. When I went out on a hot dry morning, or a torrentially wet morning, and could not find male Z7 hopping around the edges of the bamboo stand, looking for an opportunity, or female B4, swollen with eggs, even though I had seen her the day before, I was disappointed. When I did not go out on a pale blue morning after a night of rain, because I was in town getting provisions, though I knew the weather was perfect for frogs, they were not disappointed. They did not need me.

And yet I put together their story, in pieces, with several reversals, in fits and starts. There are still holes in that story, to be sure, but there are threads of logical continuity between most of what I came to understand about these frogs, and these threads hold the narrative together in a cohesive mass. Before this work, science knew essentially nothing about these frogs. Now we have a set of ideas and hypotheses, some tested, some not. Hopefully, their behavior remains largely unchanged whether scientists have explained it or not. But, as physics has taught us, just the act of observation affects the outcome of any event. Nobody can know precisely what nature looks like when there’s no one around to watch.

Mantella laevigata are social animals. Being brightly colored and poisonous, they’re relatively free of predators, which allows them to be active during the day, when color-seeing, visually-oriented predators, such as most birds, are awake and hunting. Jessica and I did see one predation by a zonosaur. We also saw an attempted predation on a Mantella by a boa. Two males were simultaneously trying to court a female. She was hopping away from them, when the snake lunged at her from under the leaf litter and grabbed her in his mouth. The males scattered. The boa held her in its mouth, sometimes appearing to chew, but after twenty ...