Immense Pride, Satisfaction, and Gratitude

March 1, 2015 rchock

As I now sit in my desk at home, I reflect back on the experience that I had while participating in the Field Biology Quarter (FBQ) in Nicaragua. It was all a great learning experience that I would not change anything about. I am extremely proud of myself for going through with something that was completely unknown to me and for persevering during those times when things became difficult. There were two things that I found to be the most difficult during this FBQ. The first being having to come up with a question, a project idea, and proper methodology to answer the question we worked so hard to ask. This process was one that definitely caught me by surprise. I was not expecting it to be as difficult as it was and it was probably the most eye opening part of this FBQ. The second was the distance. Being apart from friends and family with no form of communication was difficult. Although there were times when I appreciated the time alone, I learned to not take for granted the company of the people you care and love. These difficult moments were also my favorite moments because they allowed me to view things differently and they provided me with a new perspective.

From this FBQ, I had hoped to participate in an experience that would show me exactly what field research would be like and every small detail that went along with it. I feel as though this program met all of my expectations and provided me with a realistic experience of what being a field biologist entails. It will allow me to better make decisions about the potential career(s) I would like to pursue. It has also provided me with a stronger foundation and renewed mindset of what I truly find interesting and what I can see myself doing for the rest of my life. I am still undecided, but I am confident that this experience will play a significant role in my decision making process. I truly do appreciate having been given the opportunity to participate in the 2015 Field Biology Quarter in Nicaragua and I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Dr. Greg Grether, Dr. Debra Shier, Rachel Chock, and Adrea Gonzalez-Karlsson for their guidance and immense support throughout this learning process.

Blog, Final Thoughts, Vivien

Food for Thought

March 1, 2015 rchock

Being back at UCLA feels different. Again, there’s that word I keep using. Different. Now that I have experienced what it is actually like to work in the field conducting my own research, it’s going to be difficult to go back to a regular class schedule in the Spring. A regular class schedule with discussions and midterms. With multiple-choice tests. With three-hundred other students.

Being home and sleeping without the need of a mosquito net and not having our clothes covered in crusted mud, is a luxury I think I have not appreciated as much as I should. I think everyone needs an eye-opening experience to realize there are many things that we have, which we sometimes take for granted.

I think this experience has truly allowed me to grow as a person. To appreciate the small things. To overcome obstacles quickly and efficiently. To enjoy every sunny moment, because literally they can be gone within seconds, especially in the rainforest. Lessons I will take with me through all other journeys life will lie out before me.

Through this entire experience, I have realized that if I pursue a research career, I would want to conduct field research. I loved experiencing what it is like to catch dragonflies and sit in a meadow, painting them individually. The excitement you feel when you see that a marked dragonfly returns to your site is almost indescribable. Especially when said dragonfly returns for more than one day. I liked standing in streams, the waves almost entering my boots, while trying to catch multiple sizes of fish that inhabit the stream. I liked trekking through the rainforest finding new streams to analyze for our water project. Finding new species we hadn’t noticed before (especially the water scorpion. That one was by far my favorite). I am actually enjoying writing about my research and being able to determine if what we found is actually significant. Of course, data is data, regardless of statistical significance or not.

As I said originally, my personal goal by participating in this FBQ pertained to me looking for a revelation. An “Ah-ha” moment indicating things falling into place at exactly the right moment. Indicating that I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I don’t know if three weeks was enough time to permanently stamp my future into stone. However the small taste of this type of research I did experience, I can honestly say was quite addicting. Hopefully I will be able to return to Central America soon. It most definitely is a place I would like to visit again. Maybe the next time I venture there, I will be conducting my own research project pertaining to my PhD.

Blog, Caleb, Final Thoughts

Last Thoughts

March 1, 2015 rchock

Caleb with the giant flower of Dracontium gigas

As I find myself again in the proverbial armchair, which disappointingly happens to have no armrests, I’m curious: did my experience change my perspective on biology, or on science more generally? How did my first time out there in the field make me think differently?

First and foremost, I’ve come to realize how hard it really is to get things done when you’re out there – especially when you’re not well equipped with a background on your study system or on how to attack your problems in a methodological sense. However, I think that was part of the fun of this trip – knowing absolutely nothing, figuring out a way to figure it out without an extensive literature on the subject, and coming away with some new knowledge (even if it was less than we’d hoped). The limitations we had – for example, exhausting all our possible methods for marking flies, only to find out that they’re all lethal or a good method for turning craneflies into spider food, or finding out that your camera traps aren’t keeping proper time after being out at the sites for days – gave some excellent perspective on the challenges faced by all the researchers whose work I read – challenges that you never see in the final product. It’s easy to try to poke holes in someone’s work without seeing how it may be a triumph against many great odds. Although criticism is obviously part of the dialectical process of science and difficulty is not an excuse for poor work, this experience gave me another perspective that I may have been lacking – to appreciate of the ingenuity and simple elegance of many experiments, rather than just look for flaws as a knee-jerk reaction.

Secondly, it’s really fun to figure out new things. While out there in the field, I often reminisced on Richard Feynman’s “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” especially with the things that not much was known about, such as cranefly behavior. There was definitely a new joy I hadn’t felt before – that of having my speculation be bounded by experiment and observation. This, I think, was one of the most well-met expectations for this FBQ. I spent a lot of time simply observing and coming up with ideas, as I have often done before, but it was fascinating to then have to turn around wonder – well how should I test that? What further quantitative observations should I make? Although time constraints, and to some extent poor planning, kept us from really getting at many of our questions, this was just further motivation for me to improve my research skills (a favorite quote of mine is “the first step to being good at something is to really suck at it”) and also made me want my own questions – the ones that I can spend years on in that iterative process of speculation then experimentation.

Blog, Final Thoughts, Michelle

Always Learning

March 1, 2015 rchock

We have now been out of the rainforest for one week. Some mornings I still wake up expecting to roll out of my mosquito net, ready for another day on the trails. When I realize that I’m back in LA, part of me rejoices in the lack of humidity and the plethora of dry, cotton clothing. The larger part of me regrets the absence of beautiful and vibrant green. As I reflect on my time in Nicaragua, I am in awe of my good fortune. The beauty of the tropical rainforest will forever be imprinted on my memory and I am endlessly grateful for this opportunity.

In my first blog post, my goal was to learn something new every day during my time in Nicaragua. I can say with absolute confidence that there was not a day that I didn’t learn factoids about a new, fascinating organism, the name and use of a new food, personality quirks about a new friend, or a better technique for headstands. While this goal was easy enough to accomplish, my main motivation in its creation was to remain humble and to remind myself to be present in this amazing experience. This overall goal was harder to achieve than I expected. There were times throughout the trip that I let myself get wrapped up in my own head and stresses. Sometimes things felt out of my control. In those moments, I wish that I had slowed my pace and allowed myself time to absorb my surroundings.

Going into this field experience, I didn’t really know what to expect. Sure, there are things that I wish I could have done or approached differently, but this experience definitely taught me to roll with the punches. More than anything, this experience further showed me my passion for the outdoors and studying the organisms around me. I fell in love with moments when I was observing the behaviors of a little insect, finding an organism that I had never seen before, or walking into the forest with my measurement tools on my fanny pack. With the information I was able to glean from the organisms we studied, I was warmed by the small sense of familiarity I began to feel with the whole community. The feeling of learning something new and discovering something beautiful in the ecosystem around me – no matter the relative size or importance – is a high I will gladly chase for the rest of my life.

Love, hugs, and thanks for listening!

Michelle

Ben, Blog, Final Thoughts

Concrete Jungle

March 1, 2015 rchock

Ben practices a headstand at Refugio Bartola

As I transition back home to Los Angeles and UCLA I’m already missing Refugio Bartola. Waking up each morning to a serene Rio San Juan, a flock of birds singing, fresh squeezed juices, and a day of data collection in the rainforest. Overall, the trip exceeded my previous expectations and changed my outlook on field biology. As someone who has past experience in a wet lab environment, the necessity to constantly readjust my field experiments (because a lack of an item) was new to me and difficult. Challenges of not having a heat lamp readily available, for example, really made us think out of the box, literally. To address the confounding variable of not being able to control for temperature we instead performed our behavior trials at the same time each day and in the shade.

While in Nicaragua what surprised me the most was how people, myself included, handled the stress surrounding their projects and various situations. Being able to push through during the middle of the trip and wake up for early 5am hikes days on end was exhausting both mentally and physically. But, like most challenges in life it is how you respond that determines your eventual success and even happiness (both during the trip and after in my opinion). I personally like experiencing moments of exhaustion like the middle of the trip because it makes me realize what I’m truly capable of. For me especially I handled the stress by always trying to stay positive and keeping my day balanced (literally and figuratively!)––by sleeping enough, allocating time to work out and socialize with my peers.

The rainforest is an incredible, almost magical place that I will never forget. I can’t overstate how grateful I am for the FBQ and my eye opening experience. By far my favorite moment was hiking up to the end of one of the trails to a creek, then trekking through the water for another kilometer or so. Under tree falls and over waterfalls, with Blue Morpho butterflies flying around everywhere I turned, it was unreal and adrenaline inducing.

Blog, Final Thoughts, Kaylee

And then the Rain

March 1, 2015 rchock

When I started out the quarter I was hoping to gain some clarity on what it is I want to pursue in my career. I think the realization hit me when I was sitting on the forest floor, in the pouring rain, marking harvestmen with paint pens. Fieldwork is hard. Very hard. I think in an ideal world I would like to have a career where fieldwork comes into play during some aspects of the job, but not all. The FBQ was so much more challenging than I could ever have imagined. When you are thinking about how to carry out two projects you have these neat little ideas about how to do so. Once you try to take the ideas you have and apply them to real life you get some problems. For example, we decided our project required marking harvestmen for identification, so we got our paint pens ready and went out to mark them. Little did we know that when harvestmen are startled they secrete a liquid onto their abdomens. Trying to make a precise dot on a wet surface does not work out too well. The paint spread all over the harvestmen’s bodies, causing some fatalities. With some critical thinking we came up with a solution. The next day we went out with Q-tips to dry off their little bodies before we marked them—which succeeded. So there we were, in the forest Q-tipping harvestmen so we could paint pen tiny dots on their tiny bodies. Almost everything we originally thought would work for collecting data had to be tweaked and refined.

And then the rain. It rained for several days straight near the end of the trip when it was crunch time to collect data. I think one of the hardest parts about the trip was pushing yourself to get up, get on your gear, and go into the rainforest regardless of the weather. And of course you had your poncho on, but somehow you couldn’t escape getting drenched. But this was also one of my favorite things about the rainforest. You would be hiking along, sweating, exhausted, and suddenly it would start pouring. During these moments the rain was welcomed and seemed to cleanse you of all of your frustration. Overall, the FBQ was an experience I needed to have in order to appreciate what science is all about.

Blog, Final Thoughts, Joey

One Slice of Pizza, One Slice of Hard Facts

March 1, 2015 rchock

Joey sorting through bromeliad contents in the evening

It seems strange writing from the comfort of my bed in the land of warm showers and delivery pizza. While the change of scenery has its amenities, I did not anticipate an almost immediate sense of nostalgia. I miss Nicaragua. I miss being able to call a tropical rainforest my backyard. I even miss my muddy clothes; they told the story of my day, of a tumble at the difficult canyon ascent on the orange trail or a crawl in the leaf litter after some unknown insect.

I began my journey with a search for answers. While I may have romanticized the novel scientific question, I did come back with some exciting discoveries. I can now say that I speak fluent bromeliad. What I mean to say is that after three weeks of sifting through the innards of these plants I have an understanding of the complexity of my biological system. It is profound how integral bromeliads are in many different trophic levels; capuchins eat them, geckos hunt in them, rodents defecate in them, and much, much more. I’ve also come back knowing a lot more about myself. I am confident that the life of a field biologist is something that I could become quite accustomed to. To stand at the precipice of discovery (and hopefully cross it) with your feet planted in the wild earth is incomparable in my opinion. I also learned a lot from my colleagues and my friends. They challenged me to try new foods (I already miss miel de chayote), to improvise with the materials I had in front of me rather than what I had left behind (cut to Tinh’s ant arena, or Tinh’s tethered bullet ant, or Tinh’s pseudo-bird cutout), to appreciate the small things about my day that I would have otherwise overlooked.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this was one of the most incredible things I have ever done. My first time outside of the country also became my first time sitting at the mouth of a cave during dusk bat emergence, my first time pulling a coconut from the top of a palm, my first time having to dodge monkey projectiles, and so it goes. Some of my favorite moments of the trip were the smallest things. I’ll never forget being stranded under the trunk of a large tree when the large storms hit, or racing back down the Río San Juan in order to beat the setting sun, or even the indescribable call of the Montezuma’s Oropendola—underwater slot machines? While it’s sad leaving, being back at home means I have more questions to explore. Namely, will all of the hard work that I put into data collection yield anything extraordinary?

Until Next Time,

Joseph Nikko Curti

Blog, Final Thoughts, Tinh

A Farewell to Nicaragua

March 1, 2015 rchock

My time in Nicaragua has come and gone, but leaves a lasting imprint on my dreams for ecology. I remember clearly the feelings I had about Nicaragua prior to departure – a mixture of hopes and anxieties about venturing into this unexplored chapter of my life. I had hoped for awe-inspiring sights and sounds but was troubled by the prospects of understanding a system in only 3 short weeks. I thought it would be difficult finding an interesting organism to study. However, I was luckily very wrong. Strange and fascinating organisms emerged every single day, and it even became difficult to settle on the two systems for the projects. My fascinations mostly revolve around insects as their unique shapes and behaviors are full of mysteries left to be explained. I always kept an eye out for small movements, no matter how small, and was rewarded by finding a cascade of different insects performing all sorts of mesmarizing behaviors.

My projects centered around a golden ant and the leaf cutter ant, each with their facinating set of behaviors that allows them to thrive in the rainforest. However, I will never forget the diversity of insects which gave me a true appreciation for the rainforest ecosystem. It was this mesmorizing abundance of different colors, shapes, and behaviors that fueled my curiosity there, and has reaffirmed my passion for ecology and my pursuit to understand the mystical world of animal behavior. This passion for discovery helped me rise up early in the morning to carry out my two projects all the way until dusk. Despite the sore joints and the looming reality that the days are passing by, I felt envigorated knowing that my efforts every day will help build a clearer picture of the world they live in. It is this paradox that has always captivated me: our world and the animal world exist in the same place and time, yet it is the mysteries of their actions that creates this coded world of animal behavior. I aspire to gain the tools and knowledge to unveil the mysteries of this secretive world, hoping to bridge their world with ours through educating others about the wonders of animal behavior. Nicaragua is a blessed stepping stone in my pursuit in ecology. My transformation may not be apparent in my before and after picture, other than a moustashe, but Nicaragua has truly revolutionized my perspective on ecology. I entered the rainforest with my own set of hopes and dreams, and leave with even stronger ambitions to make those dreams a reality.

Blog, Brigit, Final Thoughts

There and Back Again

March 1, 2015 rchock

It has been a week now that I have been back in my safe and cozy Hobbit hole and I find that I have this overwhelming conflicting sensation of elation and emptiness; elation because of the energy that surged through my body while I was in the forest and emptiness because of how much I miss it. Walking around the city, around campus, I feel like it’s a barren wasteland that’s virtually silent. Maybe there is a bird chirping to my left, or the siren of a fire truck coming up from behind me, or, maybe, the occasional cricket scuttling past my feet. There are no spider webs to peel off of my face, no spiders to make me curse with fright (I mean the ones here are quite puny after all), no colorful butterflies to dart before my eyes, no chorus of high pitched cicadas or chirping poison dart frogs, no mud to get my shoe stuck in and need to pull out with both hands.

Looking back at my first entry, it is obvious to me that I knew what would happen- I knew I was going to fall in love with the forest but I did not expect how deeply this love would become. This adventure has been perhaps the most insightful of my life. I feel like I found out a bit more about who I am- who Brigit is. The trees taught me to always take a moment to look up and not be fixated on the mud caked at my feet, the manic bobbing of the harvestmen spiders taught me to never be afraid to pursue the next question or the next step because it isn’t known which will be the last, the immortal leaf cutter ants taught me to always keep pushing forward because my work in life will be directed towards the benefit of the colony- of the world, my partner’s effervescent and vibrant laughter taught me to always spend a moment laughing about the beautiful ironies of life, and the gentle moments of silence from my peers and instructors reminded me to always have faith in myself and in my ambitions.

I feel the thirst boiling within my bones to figure out how to get myself back out there again- I know deep within my body that I want to dedicate my life to researching life and all of its beautiful small details that are crucial to the maintenance and improvement of the planet and all of those who reside in it. Maybe I am not Frodo, maybe I am not the chosen savior, but I will do everything in my power that I can do to work towards protecting the essence of all that is life so that others can have their own experience of finding themselves in the solace of nature like I have.

Blog, Final Thoughts, Kathleen

Peace in the Wild

March 1, 2015 rchock

As a child growing up in cities, my main connection to nature was through a box of many wonders: the television. Even though the box was inanimate, I could always feel the adrenaline rush through me as the box brought me to valleys in the Sahara desert, or to the frosty Alps to document unique animals. I’m sure that many of my modern day peers have shared this similar experience. But this ordinary experience has driven me to seek more than what is around me; to have a craving for the things that exist outside of our walled up world.

Through the past years, I’ve been taking this golden opportunity of freedom to embark on quests for knowledge around various parts of world. Just entering a different biome is like being in a whole different world. Each place had treasures of knowledge that I took away with me. However, not everything that was dreamed of as a child have held true. I have been fortunate enough to have opportunities to assist in research projects previously, and certain aspects of field research made me question my passion for this field. How trustworthy are the conclusions made? How successful or tolerable would applying the fruits of the study be in real life? Would the study be used to benefit the greater good or someone in particular? The technicalities of research blurred the excitement I once owned.

At the beginning, I hoped that this trip to Nicaragua was going to help me clear the doubts that I had. And after spending 3 weeks in the midst of nature, I’m more than ecstatic to say that it had. I thoroughly enjoyed every part of formulating a project, to carrying it out and just being filled with curiosity and awe with every thing I saw. Even trekking out into the field in the dark, all sweaty with flies swarming in your face felt like the best place on earth to be. Once again I felt like I was at home. The rainforest taught me that it isn’t about producing theories and answers to everything, but just seeking the fascinating and immense possibilities that are out there waiting. Research is just the form it takes to share these discoveries with everyone around you.