Tag Archives: biology

Night Hike

Today we learned a valuable lesson in analyzing data. Statistics can help or hinder you and you must consider your question carefully to decide what kind of analysis to use. Different tests can give you different results, so you must be careful in considering your community and think about what will give you the most scientifically meaningful results.

After several lectures we took a short night hike and found spiders, cockroaches, insects and some people even saw a coral snake. The dry season has been particularly harsh and there is not much moisture, so I didn’t see any amphibians last night. They are probably hiding deep in the forest under the leaf litter or in other damp places.

Sophia Streeter

5-22

Pre-departure fugue

The night before a big trip never phases me the way it should. I pack, I sleep, and the next day I find myself somewhere else and just roll with it. I always feel like I lack the appropriate level of enthusiasm (whatever that it), but it beats travel anxiety so I don’t worry about it too much. The enthusiasm returns once I’ve settled in, and all is well. I worry and pick over everything else but travel is like “well, I guess I’ll get there somehow.” Perhaps this is some kind of physiological adaptive response to environmental stressors…

I look forward to returning to Central America in biological pursuits once again. During my 5 week conservation trip in Panama I really only worked with two species– Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and Hawksbill sea turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata)–so the breadth of my experience is limited (a generous way of putting it). I feel like I’ve barely skimmed the surface of all there is to know tropical field biology. I’ve read all kinds of books and primary literature, looked at pictures and diagrams, even experienced it first-hand in some of my trips abroad but it still feels like I know squat. There is just too much cool stuff!

Speaking of too much stuff, fingers crossed that we don’t encounter anything I don’t have on my taxonomic ID cards. Annelids and hydroid identification is fairly simple, but amphibians are a whole other story. There is clearly one very good way to avoid detection by predators because there are some pretty similar-looking frogs out there. Also I worry that some of my sources may have been a bit dated (2000 isn’t that long ago, right?). I tried to mentally absorb as much information as I could from a bunch of sources in the hope that some of it will be useful. Despite all this I genuinely enjoyed reading about amphibians even though I’ve never had any particular interest in them before. I look forward to developing even more new interests during this trip.

Sophia Streeter

5-16