Where in the World is Richard Rice?

On Monday March 8th, I traveled to the Solomon Islands one of the most pristine places on Earth, for an annual meeting of the Advisory Team. Traveling with me is Aaron Bruner from Conservation International (CI) and Chris Filardi from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Both of these gentlemen are helping me to develop our new Save Your World Foundation and the hope is that the Solomon Islands Project specifically Tetepare Island, will be one of our four exciting conservation projects to include in the Save Your World Foundation.

We are meeting with Keyvan Izadi and Emily Fitzsimmons who are the current staff of our local counterpart NGO, the Solomon Islands Community Conservation Partnership (SICCP). SICPP covers notably, the Tetepare project and a similar project on Kolombangara, an adjacent island, which is actually an enormous dormant volcano. The protected land there (also in community ownership) covers an altitudinal gradient from sea level to I think 1500m, which is the highest point between New Guinea and Chile, and largely because of that, extraordinarily important biologically. At ~30k ha, the reserve there is also by far the largest in the country.

Our group narrowly escaped getting slammed by a category 5 cyclone (i.e., hurricane). Cyclone Ului; definitely a bruiser. Fortunately, it passed somewhat to the south (on the 14th) so we got wet and it got windy, but we weren’t blown away.

Here is a link to a cool satellite image from NASA.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=43154&src=eorss-iotd

In the meantime, attached are a few pictures from the trip so far. Since it’s mostly meeting and planning with project staff, it’s been a pretty tame adventure. But there’s a great roadside fish market across the street from the office with lots of interesting fish. Below is a little fish photo essay. Included are tuna (the gray and silver guys, including yellow fin – all lined up; bonito – wavy stripes). The big one is a giant trevally, and the nice yellow-tail ones are grunts (prettier than their name). the red ones are snappers and emperors.