Antipode – Chapter 23

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. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

If our trash was valuable to the local people, the stuff we brought with us was even more so. I woke up on what was to be the final day of my female choice experiment to an unwelcome surprise. Robbed, again. The dry bag holding all of my frog song playback equipment—several hundred dollars’ worth of scientific gear, including a tape player not designed to play music, though it would function in that regard—was gone. Some other items and cash had been taken as well, but the sound equipment was critical. Given my experimental design, that last day’s data were critical—without it, I could use none of the data I had. I had to get the gear back, or figure out a new way to record the digitized frog calls I had stored on the computer onto tapes.

The theft sent me into a tailspin, not only for the threat to my research. All of the details pointed to an inside job—the careful point of entry, the taking of an opaque dry bag that only people who were familiar with the lab would know contained sound-recording equipment. It wasn’t anyone on the island, either—Lucien, the only conservation agent there at the time, was as trustworthy as they come. The fisher family down at the remote camp couldn’t be thieves. I felt it in my gut.

Bret and I went into town as soon as we could—the radio was broken again, so we couldn’t communicate with the mainland, and had to wait until a boat showed up the following day. We wanted to get the word out, try to retrieve the equipment (the cash we assumed was a lost cause), and figure out how to get the digitized frog calls onto tapes.

Those first few hours in town were riddled with doubt and suspicions. Edwige quickly went into action, took notes on what had happened, and put together a message in Malagasy to be read on the air from the radio station at noon. Later, because we still had to eat, we went searching for le derniere fromage—our final interface with European cuisine. We found success, ...