I slept through the night and woke up just 45 minutes before dawn – time to climb the Station Dune and see the sun rise over Africa.  It happens so quickly, because we are in the tropics.  The sun just appears to shoot vertically into the sky.

There is lots of beauty, and interesting little animal tracks running all over the dunes; everything from beetles and lizards up to Jackal-sized animals.  They must do this every night.

Today is a day of conferences.  I gave a short talk on Drake High School’s World Wide Artificial Hypolith Project, and heard a lot of others.  Some highlights:  A bird biologist was doing a study on songbirds, weighing them all day long to find out how much body mass they lost from dehydrating.  So how do you weigh wild birds?  The easiest method was to place a tiny meal worm on an analytical balance that was sitting outside in the bird’s habitat.  The bird hops onto the balance to get the worm.  You read the weight while the bird is on the balance.  No need to catch the bird, which takes effort and stresses the bird out.

There was a fascinating talk by JB Raymond on Fairy Circles:  patches of ground in the Namib Desert where a ring of grass has nothing growing in the middle.  JB was able to show that there is a chemical poisonous to plants in the soil inside the circle, but what organism made the chemical, and why, remains to be seen.  Fairy circles haven’t been reported from the California deserts, but I am pretty sure I have seen some somewhere in my home state.  I am going to keep my eyes open for them from now on.

Sometimes hearing a talk reminds you of an idea you already had but forgot.  Brian Jones’ talk mentioned Winogradsky Columns, which are colorful bacteria habitats, and I resolved to build one and use it as a teaching tool in room 414.

There was even a talk on Petrichor, which is the smell of rain in the desert during and after the rainfall.  It turns out it is mostly a compound called geosmin, but which microorganism makes it and when is debatable.

Tomorrow: another half day of conference, then we are going to camp out in the dunes.  It is 40 degrees Celsius here, which is VERY hot. I’m too jet-lagged to figure it out in degrees F, but it feels like over 100.