Hey y’all, my name is Sadhana! I’m a rising junior at Rice studying Bioengineering. Our trip to Belize is literally one day away (eek!) and I’m so so excited. We had an information meeting around the end of the spring semester, and since then I’ve been getting my snorkeling gear in check, and am about to start packing. Which… considering the state of my room, may take a while. Not to fret, a whole 24 hours await 🫡

Alongside gear, we’ve had a ton of pre-work to get ourselves familiarized with flora and fauna around Belize’s Las Cuevas Research Station and Glover’s Reef (representing portions of the rainforest and coral reefs respectively). I’ll be the first to say–I massively underestimated the time it’s taken me to get through it. But it’s been so, so worthwhile. In the rainforest, I’ll be scavenging for fungi and lichen, and in the reefs, I’ll be grazing for parrotfish (puns intended if you find them). 

Learning about the taxonomy and sheer variety of species has been insane. I am absolutely in love with fungi and I could barely fit all the species I wanted into my taxon ID sheet. As a tropical habitat, Belize has so many niches that the fungi occupy. And don’t even get me started on the cool cellular adaptations lichen have, merging algae and fungi into one superbody. On the other hand, I didn’t know much about parrotfish before starting on my reef taxonomy presentation. I’ve come to internalize how important parrotfish are as a keystone species, not to mention their interesting jaws. They serve the purpose of maintaining reefs, but they’re also so flamboyant, I love it. 

I think it would be amazing to find any of the species I have on my ID sheet, but I’m even more excited to find ones I haven’t seen yet. However, I have absolutely no experience doing fieldwork, so figuring out what to look for, what to remember, and how to maintain field notes will all be challenging, and I’m a bit nervous about that. But I did live in the tropics of India, so I’m used to similar climates. This is my idea of all the David Attenborough Planet Earth documentaries I’ve grown up watching, so I can’t wait to put in the work, no matter how intense it might get. We’ve got a lot planned, and I just know it’ll be a trip to remember.