So I’ve been here in Trinidad for nearly a week, and I’m beginning to settle in. I’ve had 3 full work days at the time of this composition, and probably more by the time that this actually gets published. The rest of the group returned from their vacation on Tobago and our party of two here at the house quickly became a party of nine-plus. Stephanie, stayed home from Tobago to pick me up from the airport, Erin, Katie, Corinne, Nicole, Katherine, Will, Mike, and I have all been working on the Guppy mark-recapture project, and Brett, Karen, Keely and Andy have been working on other parts of the project. I’ve started to get to know everyone a little bit, feeling out personalities using my standard barometer of the poop joke. In my 23+ years I’ve found that you can find out a whole lot about a person by their response to a poop joke.
The living arrangement here is typical of a developing country in a tropical location, with our house having lots of large windows with screens and steel bars, mostly concrete/cinderblock construction. I share a room with two other guys, and I have a large mosquito net above my bed, which I haven’t used to date, but I think I am going to start, because I think that I’m getting a little bit up during the night. And speaking of getting bit up, I’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that I’m going to get Dengue fever. There isn’t any prevention and there isn’t really any cure except to wait it out. But I’m getting bit a lot during the day by the type of mosquitoes that carry it, so it might just be a matter of time… I hope not. We have a nice view of the ridge across the river, and although our view is a little limited it is really nice to see the jungle trees and some nice tropical birds. Sometime soon I’ll try to take a few photos.
On a side note, someone just turned on “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira as I am writing this. I just thought that everyone should be aware.
Anyway, here’s a little bit on what I’m doing here in Trinidad. I am part of a team who goes to a number of streams and catches guppies. Yes, the same guppies that you can buy at the pet store, although these are a bit less colorful, but I think that some of the ones we catch are way more impressive than the ones you can buy in the store. Once we catch the guppies, we put them in bottles and bring them back to our lab (just a room off the side of our house) where we mark each fish with an injection of colorful plastic under its skin, weigh it, measure it and take a photo. Once we do that, we take the fish back to the stream where we caught it and release it in order that we can catch it again. The most basic point of our project is to track the life history of the guppies over generations. I’m still a little fuzzy, but if I understand the most basic point of the project, it is to demonstrate that evolution can happen very quickly. We see the evolution in the changing of life histories. Females will have lots of small babies in an environment with high predation, and in areas of low predation they will have few babies but they will be large, with a better chance of survival. In biology this is known as R selected vs. K selected. (just the jargon for two strategies of reproduction). I’m getting the hang of what is going on, and I’m feeling not so lost during field days and in the lab preparing, which is good I think. It’s been a while since I’ve been the new guy and not had any company.
While adjusting, I’ve found it hard to have my camera out and taking photos, although I did get to the field and take a few.
