I just flew in from Africa, and boy are my arms tired, or "I went all the way to Africa, and all I got was this stupid malaria

I'm pretty sure that the second part of the title is not true, but I am feeling a bit under the weather, so apologies if this entry is not as sparkling as you have come to expect.
Anyway, over the past week or so I was visiting South Africa in conjunction with attending the International Congress on Entomology in Durban. It was a bit of a strange experience, as I do not consider myself so much of an entomologist, but there were some interesting things. For example, there was a talk about polydnaviruses in parasitic wasps (I hate to keep harping on how cool these animals are, but I can't help it). The viruses are integrated into the wasp genome, and can't replicate on their own, but when a wasp stings its host, the virus particles made in the wasp reproductive tract go along with the venom and the egg. Once inside the host, the virus expresses genes that basically shut down the host immune system, allowing the egg to grow comfortably into a larva.
Another cool thing was there was a special session on the Mantophasmatodea (don't ask), which were "discovered" in 2002, and are the first new order of insects described in almos 100 years. Conveniently they are native to Southern Africa so at the end of the session, the chair invited people to come take a look at a live example. There was a lot of nerdy jostling to get a look at the creature, which in the end was pretty underwhelming.





I took a day off from the conference to go on a game drive in Hluhluwe park with some colleagues. We managed to see four of the "Big five", a kind of annoying term for the animals are hardest to spot, or are big or something. (Wikipedia tells me that the term comes from the 5 animals that are most difficult to hunt on foot. Fine.) We saw the cape buffalo, white rhino, elephants, and leopard, only missing lions. You can check out the pictures on the picture page link at the top left. My personal favorites were the warthogs. It was also cool to see cheetahs, I wonder why the are not hard enough to hunt to be included in the big 5? They're fast, right?
After the conference, I went to Johannesburg. For anyone wanting to go to South Africa, I will let you know that this is not a big tourist destination. However, we did manage to go to a cool place outside of the city (by "cab", the journey was an adventure in itself) called the sterkfontein caverns, where they have found several Australopithecine skeletons. Also went to the Apartheid museum, which was also pretty eye opening.