One of my favorite things about travelling is seeing new plants. In Tanzania, I’ve seen lots of interesting plants and here are a few of them (I’ve named the ones that I know).
Baobab (Adansonia digitata) is my favorite tree. It’s known as mbuyu in Kiswahili.
Baobab bark
Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia sp.)
Marigold (Tagetes sp.)
Cut this vine…
Get drinking water!
Euphorbia of some sort
A Cordia sp. I believe
This week featured some pretty routine research activities: culturing pathogens, planting tomatoes, and entering data. Although in Tanzania, things are never quite routine, so there is always something a little different or a new challenge that pops up that needs to be addressed before research can proceed.
For example, if there is no electricity, just enter data by the light of your headlamp until you laptop battery dies.
In other news, we had the first successful webinar for our iAGRI project (given by Dr. Miller on tomato disease diagnostics.) There will be more of these webinars on tomato disease management and we’ll be posting them all in one place online. I’ll be sure to link to it on my blog once we start posting.
A few more pictures from this week:
Tomatoes are starting to grow!
Screenhouse gecko!
A lovely sight to start one’s day
Week 7 is a quarter of the way through my research trip in Tanzania. This week I was able to plant some tomato trials in a screenhouse and also worked on my bacterial isolations in the lab. Seeding pots is one of my favorite things to do, so this was a fun research activity for the week. Aside from data entry, there’s not too much to report for this week (but do see the safari megapost below!).
Grow tomatoes grow!
Ralstonia! (Two lines is a positive for this test)
This past weekend, I took a break and went on a three day safari. It was totally worth the 10 hour bus ride to Arusha. We went to Lake Manyara National Park and Ngorongoro Crater. Here are some of the things that I saw on safari!
Lake Manyara
Baboons!
Elephant!
An elephant taking a dust bath!
I think this is a crowned eagle
A gazelle of some sort
Giraffes!
Sunrise!
Breakfast (we had our own cook for three days!)
Scenic overview of Lake Manyara with my safari buddy Aarati
Klipspringer (the tiny little tan thing in the center of the picture)
Dik-dik, the cutest animal on safari
Dik-dik from another angle
Pelicans!
My favorite part at Lake Manyara was the hot springs, and this was mainly because there were some awesome microbial biofilms!
That’s a bit intimidating
Steaming hot springs!
Biofilms and other assemblies of photosynthetic microbes!
There are even hot pink ones!
Which complement the pink flamingos in the background
Investigating the biofilms
Getting a closer look
Ngorongoro Crater
Landscape outside the crater
Ngorongoro Crater
Wildebeests
Zebras
Kori Bustard
Cute gazelle
Ostriches
An antelope or gazelle?
Safari traffic jam…
To see the leopard (look on the horizontal branch)
Jackal
Warthogs
Elephant
Rhino!!
Lions!
Sleeping lionesses
At this point I began to roll up my window
Hyenas and vultures cleaning up after lions
Hippos! We ate lunch and watched the hippos pop out of the water.
Another view of the crater
This week, we finished up the final village for this stage of the disease survey. The remaining village is in the mountains, so its season starts later than other villages. As always, the tomato fields were located in a beautiful setting, and we found lots of diseases.
Beautiful surroundings
Not so beautiful disease: late blight (Phytophthora infestans, and lots of it!)
With the disease survey winding down, I have some more time to work in the lab.
Assembling my culture collection of bacterial pathogens of tomato
I love bacteria, especially when they look this awesome!
I also have more time to enter and look at my data.
Data entry is very difficult when distracting monkeys are around
This is the first time I’ve taken a work break to look at monkeys
Time for a second post on plant diseases that I’ve encountered while in Tanzania. All the diseases in this post are caused by obligate pathogens. Obligate plant pathogens are pathogens that can only grow in a living plant host. Unlike many bacteria and fungi, obligate plant pathogens cannot be grown in petri dishes or flasks in the lab.
Viruses in maize
Purslane white rust (pathogen: possibly Wilsoniana portulacae)
A strange looking rust on a weed
A rust on a native grass
Sunflower powdery mildew (pathogen: Erysiphe cichoracearum)
Tomato powdery mildew
Powdery mildew on a Euphorbia (pathogen: Podosphaera euphorbiae)
Root knot nematodes on tomato (pathogen: Meloidogyne sp.)
Striga (with red flowers) is an parasitic plant that gets nutrients by tapping into roots of nearby plants
You can’t make it through a post on obligate plant pathogens without any downy mildews! We saw some downy mildew on cucurbits here, but I don’t have a picture. To make up for that, here’s my favorite picture of quinoa downy mildew (Peronospora variabilis)!
Flashback from a trip to Bolivia
The past week was quite busy. We worked in three different villages in three days, and on Friday, I went to Dar es Salaam for a meeting.
Here are 10 things that happened this week (in no particular order)
1. Hiked through gorgeous scenery to a farmer’s field
2. Crossed a stream to get to another farmer’s field
Barefoot plant pathology!
3. Hiked past Maasai cattle to get back to the truck
4. Used a log to cross a water pit to get to a farmer’s field
It was like a Tanzanian edition of Wipeout. Can you guess who wiped out?
5. Had my shoe stolen by a dog
While my boots were drying out from the water pit, a dog decided one boot would make an excellent chew toy. I got my boot back, but now have a lasting reminder of the dog.
6. Double O-H-I-O
Last time we visited this village, we made the O-H-I-O. This visit, the farmers wanted in on the action!
7. Applied tomato leaf samples onto FTA cards using a meat tenderizer
It’s a multifunctional kitchen tool. Make sure to use the flat side!
8. Bought 100 empty pop bottles
The bottles are for a greenhouse experiment
9. Successfully demoed bacterial streaming
My first field demo of Ralstonia streaming from a tomato stem
Bacterial streaming (the cloudy strands coming from the stem are bacteria)! If a clear glass isn’t available, pop bottles will do the job!
10. Had a giant millipede climb on my hand
Something I don’t think I want to do again!