I suppose I should try to do at least a little recap over what's happened over the past month and a half, since there hasn't been that much of excitement happening recently. The main two consuming tasks that I've been dealing with since my last post have been searching for jobs, and getting my housing sorted out for next year (what a nightmare). I spent the entirety of March frantically applying to any remotely interesting job I could find, panicking that I would have nothing to show for my most internship-able summer in college and worse, nothing to show to the people who spent so much time writing me recommendations this year.
Through some miracle, my efforts paid off recently with an offer for a position in Panama! I'm tremendously excited because it's an interesting job with a really successful and famous PI and I'm hoping that I will be able to both develop scientifically (I'm going to ask about doing my own project on the side) and get some guidance in terms of future career options. The main focus of the internship, though, is with these itty bitty frogs, called túngaras, and their mating calls, which vary in complexity and have the unfortunate effect of attracting both more females and more predatory bats as the complexity increases. Here's a photo I found on the internet:
The photo makes it look gigantic, but apparently they're about thumb-sized. My job is going to be to go out every night, track down as many of the little suckers I can find, bring them back to the lab, and do experiments with the females which basically involve playing two different male calls from speakers on opposite ends of a room and seeing which ones they prefer.
I've also had some more challenging classes recently. Our first class was a basic introduction to evolution, ecology, and the Galapagos Islands, and I knew most of the material already. Our second class in the islands was a phylogenetics class, which I had been wildly excited for because I've been really wanting to learn how to do more phylo work. Unfortunately, any class for which twenty people have to download a dozen programs on USFQ's maddeningly slow internet and then use them all successfully with no prior experience is bound to be riddled with technical difficulties and we spent most of the first two (out of three) weeks just trying to get enough of the programs working on everybody's computer that we could do the project at all. Still, despite the time crunch at the end which came from my getting almost nothing done the first two weeks, it was an interesting class and I enjoyed getting experience with more programs. Our professor from that class has the distinction of being in David Attenborough's most recent special on the Galapagos, where he is shown doing some work on a finch population which appeared to be on the brink of speciating into two new species with differing beak shapes but has been rehomogenized by the recent surge of available human food, which apparently can be consumed with any style of beak. That set me to having fantasies of meeting David Attenborough walking down the Malecon (waterfront) that still linger...
The class after that was called Evolution, Medicine, and Health. The first two weeks were fairly dull, with classes consisting of outdated films and line-by-line student presentation rehashes of the day's assigned reading followed by a little discussion. We did get to watch the film Powaqqatsi, though, which features images of people and societies around the world but more importantly, is set to the music of Philip Glass, whom I have a certain affection for. The best part is the opening series of images, featuring miners in the now-defunct Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil carrying bags of dirt uphill by hand. The sheer number of human bodies present in the images, and the history of the mine itself, are fascinating and I definitely encourage everyone to check them out. (After that the film is still powerful, but just not to the same degree.)
For the third week of that class, we returned to Santa Cruz (our first visit was during our spring break island hopping tour) and got a new professor, actually the co-director of GAIAS and currently teaching our last class here as well. In Santa Cruz, we spent an afternoon at the Charles Darwin Research Station, listening to some lectures about conservation activities and other research in the Islands. I poked around the center during our breaks and found a research garden and a "laboratory" that was really just an unwalled, open air room with racks of animal skulls and tortoise shells all over the place and a giant whale skull on the floor. Other people managed to find the tortoise and land iguana pens. I was disappointed that we didn't get an actual tour, especially since we haven't had a chance to see land iguanas anywhere else. I got a photo of the lab, but my SD card reader bit the dust a couple weeks ago, so I need to hunt down the connector cable that came with my little camera before I can upload any more photos.
Anyway, now we're into our last class, which is called Human Ecology and Maritime Communities. Our professor is Diego Quiroga, the aforementioned co-director of GAIAS and one-time Olympic competitor (Swimming, Moscow, 1980), and he's by far the best professor we've had in the Galapagos, in terms of lecturing ability and desire and ability to provoke discussions. In my opinion, his facial features also bear a striking resemblance to those of a marine iguana. The class is very philosophy-based (filled with -isms, as the former student who lives in one of the apartments in the rear attachment of my house pointed out), and we're talking about really debatable, theoretical points, like how best to model the history of the Galapagos in terms of hypothetical cyclical patterns. Unfortunately, though I respect Diego's skill and enthusiasm for the topics, I am completely uninterested in the material. The class also involves 50+ pages of reading per night in the form of two gigantic papers.
The highlight of the class is the book that we're reading on top of the other papers. It's called Evolution at the Crossroads, and it's fascinating. I burned through the first 86 pages tonight and will probably finish it over the weekend. It offers a loving but somewhat unsettling look at the Galapagos today and is honestly the best book I've found if you want to understand the current state of the islands. I'll bring my copy back to Rochester if anyone wants to read it and I'll try to give it a more thorough review once I've finished with it. We also have to do a research paper, because two tests, the book, and all the readings definitely aren't enough to fill our days. I decided to survey tourists on the Malecon about their motivations for coming to the Galapagos, with the hypothesis that since its original opening as a tourist destination, the islands have shifted from being more of a destination for scientific, naturalistic inquiry to one of recreation.
To be perfectly honest, that was actually one of my biggest misconceptions about the Galapagos before I came here. I genuinely thought we would get here and all the other tourists/foreigners here would just be a bunch of biologists nerding out about walking in Darwin's footsteps and whatnot. I had no idea that it was actually a huge surf spot and there are people who just come here to hit the beaches. Walking around the Malecon, it feels a lot more Miami Beach and a lot less Field Camp... Regardless, I'm actually getting pretty excited about the survey I'm making for the paper, which is weird, because I'm sure once I'm stuck writing up the full ten pages on the 2-hr flight to Guayaquil I'll start to resent it a little more.
That's about all I've got in terms of academics for now. We also went on Spring Break in the interim, but that story deserves its own post. The other long-term, time consuming thing I've been dealing with is an ear infection that I've had since spring break. Apparently they're pretty common here because the water is fairly unclean. Unfortunately, since it's the water that's the problem, I've been told to stay away from the beach until the infection is gone and I've been dry for a month now, since the infection is apparently antibiotic-resistant or something, and I've just been on stronger and stronger antibiotics with the hope that something will get it. The current medication seems to be having a decent impact on it, though, although we'll see tomorrow when I hit the hospital for another check with the lovely (and English-speaking) doctora there! And hey, because this isn't the US, the government pays for a substantial amount of medication, meaning that my treatment has been mostly free! The only thing I regret about it is that it's prevented me from finishing my scuba diving certification and going snorkeling. I'd sort of been rationing the snorkeling spots here, putting off going to some of them so that I'd still have new places to explore throughout the semester. But now it looks like I won't be able to get to one or two of the ones I really wanted to see... Oh well.
To do list for tomorrow:
1. Go to the hospital to see if my ear is better.
2. Mail packages to my recommenders. I bought them each a magnet, a mug, and hot chocolate or Galapagos coffee, for a total of $15 each. Unfortunately, postage out of the Galapagos will probably be at least twice that, which is something I probably should have thought about before getting them so much stuff.
3. Make inquiries about how to travel to Floreana, since apparently my super clever idea of going for free in one of my family's tiny boats is not going to pan out.
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