|
La Selva - the first days... |
|
    |
|
|
|
these are the people i hang out with! for the most part they are great...sometimes we wear on each other... but that is the nature of biology boot camp. :) on this evening - the second night at la selva we gathered to compose a surprise song for our director - erika deinart - it is her birthday shortly. the song is great - it is a bi-lingual birthday song. i didn't participate too much in the song writing - i was busy working on a paper and beginning a grant proposal for the hood canal - which i don't know if i 'll have time to finish. i went over only for a few minutes to see how the song writing was going and provide moral support. the guy with the guitar is diego - our TA a frenetic tico with great group energy and an amazing brain for plants. we are lucky to have such a knowledgeable TA he sets the standard high for future want to be TA's (like myself?)...i wonder as i listen to all of the amazing people who stop by to give us lectures if i will ever know that much about anything? in some sense a ph.d. is a process about learning more about less - but then there are these emergent scientists - like canopy emergent they not only know more about their subject but also know more about yours....what the heck???!! anyway - it is a great learning experience and it is so neat to constantly be meeting people who have spent good portions of their lives here in costa rica studying tropical systems...it is like instead of having the collective knowledge of one professor we have the collective knowledge of 15 - the only challenge is getting to know them so you can really benefit from their experiences. i feel like i've really connected with a few and it is so neat to hear their stories of tropical biology. most of our time is scheduled and we have a lot of assignments so in our free time we spend a lot of time writing papers and revising our work and analyzing our data or designing new experiences. it gets a little bit overwhelming at times. today was a good day because we had 4 hours to explore and begin thinking about topics for independent projects. i'm going to do an independent project with some other people so that i will have a more useful sample size and hopefully benefit from the rigor that a good group can provide. during our exploration today we found a really big tree - it might have been a monkey pot tree - we are not sure, but it was definitely a canopy emergent! and it was big...real big. you know like taller than a big silo. :) julia decided to try to climb up it! so then we all tried you can see a picture of me thinking about trying too...i was unsuccessful - i had the memory of the time i climbed the coconut tree in guyana on a dare. i got all the way up and then shouted to everyone to look. as everyone turned to see me 20 ft in the air my foot slipped and down i slid...scraping all of the skin off of my inner thighs! today, none of us got very high - but it felt like we were really in the jungle! and we were! yesterday on the orientation walk we saw an eyelash pit viper...it is an intense a small yellow snake that can kill you - but it isn't any bigger than your hand... la selva is one of the most studied places in the tropics and has an amazing body of literature . on average every 3 days a new paper is published containing some data from la selva! so it is a good place to ask both big and small questions. there aren't many places in the tropics where the infrastructure exists to allow large studies that go for long periods of time. la selva is one of the only places in all of latin and south america where such studies can occur. it is really amazing in that way. today is valentines day! and also the day of peace in costa rica. this maybe the day that women won the right to vote, but i'm not sure it was a conversation in spanish and of course i only think i understand half of it which likely means i really understood 1/4 of what was said! robert hunter writes that to listen is to change places with an idea - we need three ears to hear the truth...i think he is referring to one's native language...i don't always have enough ears to hear english and i don't even have a reliable estimate of how many ears i would need to really hear what is said in spanish! Here is part of the poem: it is from an american adventure by robert hunter: We need three ears to hear
|
