Snake #4

This time, the snake was small with black and red rings. And I had Anna with me, so I was brave enough to poke it with a very long stick. Anna and I think that the snake may of been shedding its skin; on the end where its head should have been, there was just grey tissue. So I suppose that we were extra-safe: a snake with a covered head can't bite, right?

I spent the morning helping Anna find tree. I know, I know, that sounds a little silly. Finding trees in a rainforest, how hard can that be? Well, Anna needs to find the particular trees that are producing the fruits that she finds on the ground. With canopies 30 or 40 feet high and a lot of other leaves in the way, it can be a bit tricky. For a few of the species, we don´t have a great search image for the leaf; so we have to hope that some fruits still remain on the tree and that we can see those fruits. Even if she knew the characteristics of the tree species, it is really, really difficult to distinguish leaf shape and arrangement the leaves. We craned and stretched our necks.

Working with Anna has taught me that research projects with fruits are slow and tedious and uncertain. You have to desperately hope that, when you arrive, enough tree specifics are producing enough fruits for your study, figure out what is fruiting during your field season, then find the trees that the fruits fell from, then make sure than there is no overlap between trees, and then desperately hope that whatever is fruiting this field season will also fruit next field season. Anna's work will be very interesting and exciting when she finally gets all the data collection. However, I would not want to focus on fruits for my dissertation. Too tricky. Too much neck-craning.

Tomorrow morning, I will be helping Anna in the field again--she is a lot of fun to work with!--and waiting for Chris to arrive. Then my summer will really get going. He can explain all the details of his project and field methods to me (it apparently changed a bit since the proposal he gave me last March) and we can figure out how can insect herbivory study can fit in. So I am looking forward to the next week.

And Melissa, my new room-mate and Emily's field assistant, just arrived this afternoon. It will be nice to have someone else in the little cabina.