Here's the office where we've been spending the rainy bits of the last several days. The two walls behind me (the photographer) have bookshelves and lockers. The rainy bits have been few, however, and mostly we've been in the field collecting stigmas and pollen samples; we have ~70 slides to go through. Luckily it rained hard last night and just stopped in the last hour, so we'll have a few hours to actually look at slides while we wait for the rainforest to dry off as much as it ever does.
Of course, I'm not complaining about having to spend a lot of time in the field; it gives me the chance to see cool things like this eyelash viper, which is beautiful and deadly... like a tropical biologist...
We've also gotten to know the 10 species we're collecting quite well. Many of them have cool floral adaptations, like stigmas that are triggered when a pollinator comes (they wap the pollinator, hopefully picking up some pollen in the process), big thick petals that keep off the rain, or anthers attached to petals that hit the stigma when they fall off at the end of the flower's life (a last-ditch selfing mechanism, in case no one else's pollen lands on the flower.)
That's about it for now... our days are fun but all pretty much the same: beans and rice 3 meals a day, hiking through the muddy rainforest most of the daylight hours, processing data and planning when it gets dark. At meals we get a chance to meet other biologists and hear about what they're doing; plenty of people are short-termers like us, and there are also several people here for many months at a time working on dissertations. I can't decide if I'm jealous of them. But I know I'm glad I'm here now!
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