I left Capetown about 8:00pm last Thursday (2:00pm EDT), and I arrived back in Hartford just before 7:00pm EDT on Friday (1:00am Saturday in Capetown, 29 hours after I left). The flight was long, but uneventful.

My personal bag and, more importantly, the duffle with DNA samples arrived with me. The trip was a great success.

The focus of this trip was to collect samples in a hybrid zone between Protea punctata and Protea venusta at Blesberg and to collect additional samples of both species in areas of Swartberg Pass where they are not known to be hybridizing.

Nora will use the samples to unravel the dynamics of this hybrid zone. She left dataloggers in place at Blesberg to record temperature and humidity for the next year. She'll use the results from analysis of RAD SNPs (more on that in a moment) to develop a hybrid index, look at performance of individuals along the steep environmental gradient, and relate individual performance to traits. In addition, she collected seed for half-sib families which she'll use for paternity analysis to determine whether there are asymmetries in gene exchange and to identify the causes of any asymmetry she detects.

The hybrid zone is also of great interest for the Dimensions of Biodiversity project. Justin will use RAD sequencing to identify a large number of polymorphic SNPs. We'll use those SNPs as markers in a genome-wide association study to dissect the genetic basis of traits that distinguish these two very different species.

Nora and Jane did remarkable work in getting all of the samples. Notice I said "Nora and Jane did remarkable work." I bagged out on a lot of it. I made it down the slope at Blesberg on the first day of work there. That's a Protea venusta in the foreground about 2/3 of the way to the bottom. What the photograph doesn't show is that the only way to where we were when I took it was down the cliffs in the background. We were about 200m below the top when I took the photo. The other thing the photo doesn't show is that it had rained heavily the day before so that the rocks and restios were slick.

On the first day of work at Blesberg, I know that I slowed things down, because I'm not as sure on my feet as Nora and Jane. On the second day, I started down again and was making progress slowly. But as I was clambering down a particularly steep pitch about 150m from the top my legs started to give out. It wasn't just that I was moving slowly. I was afraid that if I descended any further, I wasn't going to make it back to the top. I asked Nora and Jane to go on without me. I climbed back to the top by myself -- slowly -- and waited for them to return.

For the next two days I didn't even try to make the descent and help. I collected some samples of Protea montana and looked for more than the single individual of Protea pruinosa -- without success. But Nora and Jane made the trip quicker every day, even though the conditions got worse.

At least it didn't snow while we -- they -- were working on Blesberg. A few days later we were working in Swartberg Pass. I made the (short) steep hike to Waboomsberg without a hitch. It was cold and windy, but the trail was dry. We quickly found the 20 individuals of Protea venusta we went for and returned to the pass. Then I even managed to remember where the Protea venusta population in the pass was better than Jane. I was pretty proud of myself about that.

The next day, we were planning a longer, 14km hike to Oliewensberg (7km each way), but we passed a policeman on our way up to the pass, and when we arrived at Teeberg, we decided to turn around. The road was covered with ice and snow. I'm sure our 4x4 would have made it, but we were 200m or so below the summit, and the hiking conditions would have been even worse.

We left Prince Albert the next morning making contingency plans, since we didn't think the snow would have melted and we didn't expect to be able to collect samples. To our surprise, the drive to the summit was pretty easy, so we started up the path. At first, the going wasn't bad, occasional patches of snow, but the trail was mostly bare, although it was a bit wet.

Once again it became clear that I was going to slow Nora and Jane down, but since we had plenty of time, and I was only slowing them down a little, we kept going. At about kilometer 3, though, things changed. The going got very steep, which would have been fine had the trail been clear. Unfortunately, it was covered in 10-15cm of heavy, wet snow. I was climbing through it -- very, very slowly. Nora and Jane waited for me at the top of an intermediate summit, and just before I got there, I looked at my watch. We'd come about 3.5km in an hour, and we had another 3.5km to go -- under worse conditions. This time I could have made it, but I was moving so slowly because of my unsteadiness, it would have taken us another couple of hours to get to where we needed to sample. And once I arrived, I wouldn't have been able to help. I told them to go on without me, and I went back to the summit and waited in the car.

In the end, Nora and Jane got a lot of really good samples. We even picked up several taxa for the trait-environment analysis in Dimensions that we hadn't sampled before. So it was a very successful trip. At the same time, I began to wonder about my future in South Africa during the flight home.

Nora needs someone dependable, i.e. someone other than me, to help her when she goes back next year. We've collected samples and trait data from all of the taxa it's reasonable to imagine we can get for our trait-environment analyses. Jane doesn't need me as a field assistant for her polymorphism work. I can't think of a good reason that anyone should spend good money to get me to South Africa next year.

I don't like thinking this, but I have to wonder whether 2013 may have been my swan song.

Finally, six months after returning from South Africa, I am starting to process the photos I took while I was there. It will take me awhile to finish all of them. I've only posted ones from the first two days of fieldwork. That leaves about 25 days of photos to go. But if you're interested in seeing them, I'll be putting them all on Flickr. Just head over there for the South Africa 2012 collection. More sets will be added over the next week or two.¹

Some of you know that I've been putting lecture notes for my graduate course in population genetics on-line for many years. This year I finally took the small amount of additional time I needed to pull them together into a single PDF, complete with title page, table of contents, and index. It's formatted in such a way that it can be printed double-sided and bound. It's available on Figshare with a CC-BY license.

I've been back in the States since last Thursday night, and I finally had time to collect my #dimensionsZA tweets into a storify post. Here it is. The bit.ly links return to blog posts from here that were tweeted. All of the photos (except for the one of The Crack in KwaZulu Natal) were taken with my iPhone 4S. The one of the crack was shot with a Nikon D200, 3 exposures, and merged to HDR in Photoshop.

Click through for the story.

I'm sitting in the Premier Lounge at Capetown International as I write this.¹ My flight doesn't leave for another 2 1/4 hours, and I've been here for nearly 3 hours already. It's not that I'm that paranoid about getting to airports early for international flights.² It's that Jane and the rest of the Protea team had to get to De Hoop tonight. They had hoped to drop me off a couple of hours earlier, but their errands in town took a bit longer than planned.

This has been a very successful trip. Thanks to Jane's careful planning, data from the Protea Atlas Project, and advice from Tony Rebelo, we collected every species of Protea we were hoping to, except for P. simplex and P. lorea. We sampled between 50 and 60 species of Protea throughout South Africa, with 2-5 populations of some of the widespread ones - not counting the 19 populations of Protea repens we have in the garden at Kirstenbosch.

In addition, data we just took in Kleinmond³ involved trait measurements and DNA sampling of 88 individuals (white and pink morphs of Protea longifolia, pink Protea compacta, and white Protea repens) and detailed physiological measurements (photosynthetic rate, chlorophyll fluorescence, mid-day water potential) on a subset of 47. The physiological measurements are a repeat of those Jane and the crew made a month ago before I arrived. And they'll make the same set of duplicate measurements in De Hoop, having made the first set in early June. All in all, a very successful trip.

And that's just the Protea part of the work.

Cindi's and Carl's teams are collecting and measuring Pelargonium, and John's team is collecting community data, first in the vicinity of the Kogelberg, now in the Cederberg.

#dimensionsZA is the hashtag I'll be using for posts I make to Twitter while I'm in South Africa for fieldwork on our Dimensions of Biodiversity project. My plane leaves Bradley this afternoon, and after stops in Philadelphia and Amsterdam, I'll arrive in Johannesburg Monday night (Monday afternoon East Coast time). One post-doc will be traveling with me, and we'll meet another post-doc, her husband, and her brother when we arrive. We'll spend a couple of weeks in Mpalunga and Kwa-Zulu Natal collecting both Protea and Pelargonium before moving to Capetown for work in the experimental gardens, participation in the annual Fynbos Forum (in Cape St. Elizabeth this year), and work in the Kogelberg and De Hoop.¹ I'll try to make a few blog posts while I'm there, but Internet access is liable to be a bit spotty, and even when it's not, I'll be spending nearly all of my computer time updating spreadsheets with data.

So if you want to see what the Protea team is up to while I'm in the field, you can either follow me on Twitter (@keholsinger) or follow the #dimensionsZA hashtag.

Our work isn't organized the same way as it was last year. Last year we had a community team based in Baviaanskloof, and the Protea and Pelargonium teams traveled and worked together the whole time we were in the field. This year the ecology team is sampling community diversity at several different sites in the western Cape, the Protea team is collecting both Protea and Pelargonium in Mpalunga and Kwa-Zulu Natal as well as collecting detailed trait data on some species we've studied before in the Kogelberg and De Hoop.

There will be two different Pelargonium teams. One will collect detailed trait data similar to what we'll be collecting in the Kogelberg and De Hoop. Late in July, we'll overlap with them for a few days in Kogelberg. The other team will be traveling through parts of the Western Cape and Northern Cape collecting species of Pelargonium that they weren't able to collect last year. Another Pelargonium team will return in late October and early November to collect taxa in the Eastern Cape, and one of the post-docs will stay in South Africa until then collecting additional data from the populations targeted for detailed trait measurements this July and August.²

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you've read a few references to #arseniclife. If you're interested in hearing a discussion about the whole among four articulate microbiologists, including Rosie Redfield, Episode #32 of This Week in Microbiology has a podcast I highly recommend.

And I'm delighted to learn that the American Society of Microbiology sponsors This Week in Microbiology. I don't know how wide its audience is, but it's the kind of outreach effort that more professional societies should engage in.

Related articles

• We've received the #arseniclife reviews from Science (rrresearch.fieldofscience.com)
• Latest on our #arseniclife manuscript (rrresearch.fieldofscience.com)