I hear the sloshing of my boots being suctioned by deep watery mud in my sleep.  Then I see, amidst total darkness, endless sparking green and blue eye shines of the hundreds of spiders perched on leaves, branches, and roaming in the leaf litter glistening and sparkling like stars in the night sky.  I am then shaken awake by the deep rolling moan of the howler monkeys echoing through the canopy. A chorus of birds of striking colors of red and yellow call from the field and I find that I am overwhelmed with gratitude and passion.  This is what I am meant to do.

Four days have now come and gone at Refugio Bartola.  Many of us are still stressed about our project ideas and designs, but we all are working well with our respective partners and with each other.  I like to say that we are all lost in the right direction.  I remember being very anxious the first day while walking through the trails, thinking, “How in the world am I going to find something to study- wait, what in the world was that?!”  However, my partner and I work very well together and we have come to a decision about both of our project ideas: our behavioral project will focus on potential sex differences in the foraging and roosting behavior of harvestmen, a type of arachnid that looks too much like a spider and our conservation project will focus on looking at the differences in the soil and activity in leaf cutter ant colonies to see if there is a difference between colonies that live in logged areas and un-logged areas of the forest.

Perhaps what I have come to learn about this trip is that we are doing more than just vacationing.  What I have seen on every trip out into the rainforest is something many people can see.  I can talk about how I saw a river otter on my first canoeing trip up the Bartola river, or the myriads of poison dart frogs I see about my feet, or the strangely shaped and brilliantly colored insects I see landing on my clothes, or nearly stepping on a turtle in a mud puddle left by a boot because I thought it was a fruit, or having a spider monkey throw a fruit at my head and hit me, or seeing a fer de lance and a coral snake in the same day, or having to pluck harvestmen with my bare hands from a spiny palm, or having a bullet ant land on my neck.  What is different about this forest for me is that I am not just observing, I am interacting.  Placing my data collection equipment around ant mounds, marking harvestmen with paint pens, actually performing research, has made me a part of this forest.  Every venture has purpose, every venture has meaning and I cannot wait to see what lies beneath the next leaf.