Hi, I’m Caleb, an ecology student here at UCLA. It’s still a bit surreal for me to think about the fact that in just a few weeks, I’ll be traveling up a river in a remote rainforest to build my research skills. Besides seeming like something from a childhood dream, there are few things I enjoy more than being immersed in nature and asking “why” – it’s the reason I’ve wanted to be a biologist since as early as I can remember. So it might be a bit of understatement to say that I’m excited and grateful for this opportunity – I’m sure that so many things that I can’t even anticipate await me there.

A big reason why I want to do this is that I’ve been doing research for the past few years now, but mostly from the perspective of treating ecological phenomena as some abstract idealization on a computer or in some equations. Although I find theory fascinating, it’s hard not to feel as though there’s something missing in my scientific education when I’ve never actually formulated and tested ideas that were generated by my own primary observations of the natural world. I guess you could say I feel like an armchair ecologist. This really struck me last year while reading Ernst Mayr’s “The History of Biological Thought” – repeatedly, I saw examples of how, since the origins of biological inquiry, movement away from direct observation into the realm of abstract reasoning has been a slippery slope, often leading to dead ends at best and harmful distractions at worst. That really made me start to think more seriously about the consequences of this significant gap in my training – a gap which I hope this time in Nicaragua will begin to fill in. Spending every waking moment surrounded by seemingly boundless biodiversity and getting my hands off the keyboard and my eyes and ears into the tropical rainforest will, I hope, inspire me and teach me to develop better ideas of how things are working around me in nature, rather than in abstract models of nature, and how to address and test these ideas in an empirically rigorous fashion.