Going Deep

     Yesterday we set out early to try and complete sample collection for the Palian group. Unlike the day before's ponds, these ponds were highly clustered on a peninsula to the southeast of Palian. The first pond we encountered from the sample selection was nonexistent. This is an example of a GIS error in which I created a polygon indicating the presence of a pond where there was actually only a field. Fortunately, this was the only pond that completely did not exist. The weather was awful yesterday; in the morning it was raining so hard I thought we might not be able to work. When it rains, the little side roads down which we have to drive to find most of the ponds become wet and muddy, and we do not want a repeat of the tow truck situation. Luckily, the area had better roads that where we were yesterday, and although there was some water pools, they were not deep and the ground below was well-packed.
     The people living around these ponds are always friendly. When one family saw from their covered deck that we were traipsing around in the rain, they called us over offering shelter and food. I climbed down to their pond, and when I stepped on the rickety wooden pier, my foot went through the wood inflicting minor scrapes to my upper thigh. They seemed concerned, but we decided to wash the cuts with our own water and soap, but the point here is that they do not distrust us like I would naturally distrust them if they were entering my land. This is a part of a general trend; there are not really any enclosures or fences, even around the ponds. I wonder what sort of biosecurity is present, if any. From all appearances, one could just walk up to one of these ponds and take a crap in it or dump a bunch of radioactive chemicals, and no one would ever know. I read a statistic somewhere from a customs agent at the LA shipping port where he said that only about 1% of all shrimp imports are actually tested by customs agents... SCARY!
     I saw mangroves for the first time today. From an untrained eye they do not appear to be in disrepair at all, but the ponds we were testing had obviously been created by straight up slash and burn clearing of the mangroves. While we were trying to find one of the ponds to sample, we ended up right next to the sea. The road we drove down had three ponds to our right, visible from the road, and to our left was a small embankment of mangroves that protected the road from the waves of the sea that washed right up to the wheels of the car at some points. The rain had slackened at that point, so there was mist hanging around the 'koh,' which are the typical Thai islands, and I was pretty awestruck by what was on both of sides of the car.

Mangroves on the sea, koh shrouded
in mist in the background.

     Finally, we arrived at a point where the road did not look safe anymore, so we set out on foot to find the pond that my random sample selection had indicated. The smaller side road we had located was densely covered with mangroves, and life was all around. Little crabs, birds, fish with legs (what), and all sorts of bugs and smaller plants. When we arrived at the pond, I looked out and saw an array of three that had obviously been decommissioned a long time ago because sea water flowed through one of the channels into and out of the ponds freely. Maybe I am too emotional, but I was being pulled in many directions at once. On the one hand walking through the jungle, I was so excited and brimming with misplaced pride for the structures that nature had intertwined with the earth, but then suddenly I was confronted by these ponds that just looked to me like gashes in the surface of an otherwise smooth surface.
     Despite this flagrant disregard for nature, there is hope yet. Some of the decommissioned ponds had evidence of mangrove cultivation. There are some people that recognize that nature is not the other, it is not separate from humans, and they are trying to take back what was robbed by the shrimp ponds. While driving down these side roads, I saw many people with nets and traps that they clearly employed for their own consumption purposes in the mangrove swamps and nearby sea. Although they are still harvesting from nature's bounty, these people are not destroying to consume.
     I am worried about some aspects of the study. My study parameters dictated that I only created polygons around the ponds that appeared to have aeration from the satellite imagery, but I certainly created many polygons that do not correspond to aerated ponds on the ground. The other possibility is that at the time the imagery was taken, the aeration was present and that ponds were since decommissioned. We stopped to check if the road was too soft to cross at one point and came across a man and a woman wading chest-deep in one of these ponds collecting algae, and we asked them what they had in their pond. They said fish. We had tested and collected samples from many pond that looked similar to this one. Although these figures should enter into any estimation of a nutrient budget, I am learning that the shrimp ponds are structurally much more sophisticated than these simpler fish ponds. The other problem I have encountered is with the water quality testing kits. When the nitrogen concentrations fall in the middle range, these kits are great, but at extremes I cannot tell if the kit is telling me that the nitrogen is at the highest limit of the test, or maybe even higher. These are things that I will attempt to account for when analyzing the datasets upon my return to the US.

A shrimp pond with aeration structure.
More ponds in the background
demonstrate the complexity of
these arrays

     After a long day of sample collection, we decided to test one straggler pond from the Kantang group because it appeared to be a far outlier from the rest of the ponds in the group. When we were on our way to this pond, we came across a flooded road that I waded through to make sure it was not too deep for the car to pass. This pond was at a much higher elevation than the others we had seen that generally populated lowland areas near the coast. The pond cluster that contained this pond was very sophisticated, and it was clear that a pump was bringing water up a pretty steep incline to fill the ponds, which would only add to the energy costs of producing the shrimp in those locations. I guess I do not fully understand the pricing structure for the crops of shrimps harvested from these ponds because to my eyes, the costs of creating and maintaining these ponds seems immense and illogical for the returns of the shrimp crop. I must be wrong.
     I am still trying to figure out the distributive inequalities I see surrounding these ponds. On one road, there was an array of highly sophisticated ponds that was either owned or managed by the family living in one relatively nice house. Basically right next door, however, there was another family living in a wooden hut. Why did one family benefit from this pond array and the other did not? CP foods and other large food corporations are the ones paying high prices for these shrimp, and I would assume that they have some hand in teach people how to build and maintain these ponds, but why do they choose some families over others? I do not think it has to do with land ownership because for the most part people in these areas do not have any concept of a 'deed.' Who owns the land?

     Today we are checking out of the hotel that has been our home base in Trang to go to a beach resort in Sikao, which is one of the towns that acted as a centerpoint for the 5km pond sample selection. It is a much better home base for the Kantang and Sikao group sample collections, and will also probably be much more comfortable. For today we hope to sample most of the ponds in the Kantang group, finishing Kantang tomorrow, and then completing the project by Wednesday with two days of sample collections around Sikao. This has already been an adventure more eye-opening and awe-inspiring than my words could even transmit, and I cannot wait to see what the coming days have in store.

Stuck in the Mud

     Now I know what I am up against. We had a late start yesterday because the rental car didn't arrive at the hotel until 11AM, and we got detoured for lunch at this cool market thing where they recirculated water over the tin roof to keep it cool inside. We then set out for Palian. The drive between Trang and Palian was beautiful; both of sides of the road where heavily vegetated. In most places, the vegetation looked like it was being cultivated in some way or another (because nature doesn't build in straight lines, lolz Prometheus). The trees were unlike anything I had seen before, however. They were tall and skinny, and they had these weird little ceramic bowls attached to their trunks about a foot off the ground. My dad said they were rubber trees, and he was correct! I did not know that there was so much OTHER agriculture going on in the same place as where these shrimp ponds would be, and I cannot imagine what nutrient budgets would look like if estimated for all the different practices taking place here... Probably would not be pretty.
     The ponds were not always visible from the road as I had originally expected. It took some searching with the GPS unit to find them, but, finally, after driving down gravelly side roads and weaving through rubber trees, we arrived at our first ponds. There were a few people milling around who appeared to be caretakers, but they just looked up at us and went back to work. I got the sample, and performed the water quality tests near the car. Testing the samples in the field proved totally unreasonable, however, because I felt rushed by the nearby caretakers' growing curiosity in us, and also because there were bugs swarming everywhere. We needed to come up with a new plan.
     We decided to wait and perform the water quality tests later, at the hotel. In order to do this, we needed to buy a bunch of bottled water, drink some of it, dump the rest out, and then fill each bottle with a different sample. I used the GPS waypoints that I took with the handheld device as labels for the sample bottles, and by the end of the day we had 10 hard-earned water samples rolling around in our trunk. Most of you reading this would not believe the things that I did yesterday in order to obtain these samples.
     The first challenge was at the third sample pond. The road was sort of questionable, but it seemed like we could make it close enough to the pond for me to jump out, grab the sample, and come back quickly. After collecting the sample, we started to drive out, and we just got totally stuck in this mud slick. We tried to push it out for a long while, we stuck branches under the wheels to provide traction, and we even tried lifting it. Finally, we were at a loss, and we trekked through a beautiful rubber tree plantation until we found someone to help us. The man we encountered had a bad knee, so he could not come help us push, but he did call his buddies that brought a TOW TRUCK out into the woods 20 minutes later. They winched us out of the mud slick, and only asked for the equivalent of $33!
     The next set of challenges arose from the different states of the ponds. Some of them were in the process of being drained, and as a result the water level was very low. The banks of the ponds were too high for me to just reach down and fill the bottle, so I had to climb down onto the slick black tarpaulin and slide into the pond. For the ones that were drained, the water was NOT pleasant smelling either, but science is sacrifice, right (lol)!? I also perched on a concrete outcropping at one point and lowered a bamboo pole with a bottle tied to it into the water a couple feet below. I spent a lot of time lying on my stomach and on my side trying to reach the water, and there was more than one person who came over inquisitively. I was surprised; my assumption was that the people would not want us near their ponds, but once they understood what we wanted, they were always okay with it, and oftentimes offered to help!
     After this long day of collection, I came back to the hotel and spent 2 hours testing all of the samples. The results were surprising in some cases, to be expected in others. I am a little worried that the range for which my tests can analyze nitrogen content is not expansive enough to capture how much there actually is in the water. To be clear; there were some readings that were on the highest gradation of the test, and I am wondering if the actual content might be even higher than that... We are setting out for day two of testing during which we will complete the Palian sample, and hopefully start some of the Kantang sample. Luckily for me, Trang is a small province, and the roads between the towns are relatively fast. Stay tuned!