At the end of February, Agnes travelled to Madagascar for an exploratory trip to prepare fieldwork later in 2025. In Antananarivo, the capital city, Agnes was warmly welcomed by Lalaina Ramiliarisona, our Malagasy team member and PhD student in the MountBuzz project, and Richard Randriatsitohaina, field assistant. Lalaina had done a great job in the previous months getting research permits ready and gathering as much information as possible to prepare the trip to Northern Madagascar to Marojejy National Park. Fieldwork at Marojejy is different from all other fieldsites in MountBuzz because there are no research stations, but the team will actually camp in the forest. We are very lucky, however, in that Mount Marojejy counts with a trail from almost sea level all the way to the summit, making our work along the elevational gradient a lot easier! Furthermore, there are camps established at three different elevations, and they feature basic cabins and roofed kitchen areas for preparing food and sorting specimens. And, a luxury: the first two camps are right next to beautiful rivers, which make for refreshing baths at the end of fieldwork days, while just a few meters away in the pristine primary rainforest, different lemur species forage on leaves and fruits (including from Melastomataceae!).

When we arrived, Lalaina had already made arrangements with a local guide, cook and porters who greatly helped us bring our equipment and luggage to the camps, find plants and keep us fed throughout the trip. We embarked on the first week-long journey into the forest, with many to follow in the coming months. In the course of her project, Lalaina will get to know Marojejy very well since she does not only study the Melastomataceae pollination and breeding system ecology in the frame of MountBuzz, but also will look into flowering and fruiting phenology as well as dispersal. To this end, Lalaina will return to Marojejy repeatedly over the next two years. In our exploratory trip in March 2025, our aim was to find and identify as many different Melastomataceae species as possible along the summit trail. We could locate many species of different genera, including Gravesia, Medinilla, Rousseauxia and Dichaetanthera. The genus Memecylon is notoriously hard to find since leaves don’t have the typical Melastomataceae venetation and resemble the leaves of other genera – we found some candidate individuals, but will need to wait for flowers in order to be sure. All Melastomataceae we found, we marked with bright orange tape to make it easier to relocate them on future trips, took GPS points, made herbarium collections, measured flowers and fruits and recorded the phenological state of the plants (so if they were flowering, fruiting, sterile, …). If flowers were accessible for experiments, we also placed mesh bags over buds to prevent pollination by animals – if fruits form in the bags regardless, this would tell us that the plants can actually reproduce without animal pollinators. The results of these pollinator exclusion experiments we will only have once Lalaina goes back to the field later in 2025. Well… hopefully we will have results! Although no detailed studies have been conducted, it seems like lemurs do actually forage on Melastomataceae fruits – thus, we are curious to see whether lemurs will remove the bags we placed on inflorescences to get to the juicy, sweet fruits!

Our exploratory trip was also interesting because it happened during the cyclone or rainy season of Madagascar, where usually not many botanists go to the forests. Preparing for our trip, we had been told by several colleagues that likely, we wouldn’t find any flowers because of the rainy season making it less likely for bee pollinators to be around. Our first interesting observation was that there were actually a lot of species bearing flowers, but obviously, if no biologists go to the field in the rainy season, no one knows. On the other hand, it will be very important for us to come back also in 2026, since flowering and fruiting phenologies in the tropics can be very variable and influenced by El Nino events, so multi-year data is a must. In the next months before returning to the field, Lalaina will be busy comparing the many herbarium collections we have made to existing collections in different herbaria in Antanananarivo to identify the Melastomataceae species we have found.