Return to CICRA

Armed with my map, the next day I set out on foot. I decided not to take any mototaxis so that I could learn my way around the town. This worked admirably, up until the trip home. I was within a block of my hotel when I walked through a group of kids playing. Just as I passed them, I felt something collide rather painfully with my backside. I turned around expecting to see a sheepish child with a knocked-over bicycle, but instead found myself face to face with a nondescript, black dog. Yep. A dog bit me. In the butt. I stared speechlessly at the little monster for a moment, and then, since I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I turned around and walked home. Thankfully, the bite didn’t break the skin so I wasn’t worried about rabies, but the next day’s 5-hour boat ride back to CICRA was, well, slightly less comfortable than usual. Also, you can imagine me trying to explain how I bruised my tush to the staff (who are all Peruvian men). It was pretty hilarious, especially since the only word I knew for that body region translates as “ass.” They really got a kick out of that one. And I got another vocabulary lesson.

My companions on the boat ride upriver were two ant researchers from the University of Wisconsin (they were studying fungus-farming, ground-nesting ant lineages, so their work was actually pretty different from mine), a Stanford undergraduate working on waste management practices at ecotourism lodges, and Graham, a recently retired Australian teacher-turned-photographer. For some reason, he reminded me a little bit of David Attenborough: great accent, great hat, great suspenders. Graham wanted to focus on photographing bats, so the next evening he set up mist nets and got to work catching them. Unfortunately, he was bitten by one of his subjects, and had to take the boat back to town the following morning to get a series of rabies boosters. They gave him a 7-day course of daily injections. It made me very, very grateful that I had no more than a bruise on my behind.

Otherwise, the past three weeks at CICRA have been relatively calm. I’ve been making regular checkups on my 52 mosquito-net-cloaked saplings in the forest, building a reference collection of the herbivores that eat our tree, and I just started a new experiment to test two theoretical models of mutualism. I also got to celebrate my birthday in the rainforest—it was awesome. The party started at 8 PM and lasted until 2 AM, and it only ended then because Sarah and I, the last two women standing, couldn’t dance anymore. (Peruvian dance parties are ridiculously fun because everyone knows how to dance! I’m slowly learning to stumble my way through lambata, regaeton, and a few other types.) I received the most wacky, hilarious, and yet appropriate set of birthday presents to date. It included: random leftover laboratory equipment from the Wisconsin ant team, such as sterile loops for fungal cultures and some water purification filters; a pack of ChocoSodas—a brand of chocolate-covered saltine crackers which are rare and highly coveted at the station; and a curled-up leaf that Claire found, which may (or may not) contain some sort of pupating insect. Everyone at the station has realized I how excited I get about anything that crawls, creeps, slithers, jumps or flies, so they bring me cool things like curled-up leaves, tiny snakes, and most recently, a tarantula. I couldn’t ask for anything better. :)

Megan’s former boss—so, in a way, my academic grandfather—arrived at CICRA on September 9th. Talking with him was fascinating because he’s been studying our ant-plant system for many years. Also fascinating: he hired two indigenous Matsigenka men to work with him as field assistants. They were amazingly skilled botanists; not only were they pros at finding our Cordia tree, but they also brought back natural dyes and medicinal herbs to show us. Claire and Luis both caught some sort of stomach infection while they were here, but the Matsigenkas gave them some leaves to chew and their infections disappeared within a day.

What else? Oh, Leslie and Daniel, guess what! A troupe of army ants marched through our kitchen and dinning room one day—it was pretty impressive. We were all really happy about it, actually, because they ate all the cockroaches and other bugs they could find. Though Pascual, our cook, warned me not to get too close to them in sandals, because 10 or 20 stings from them can give you a fever. Maybe there was a little seed of truth to Lenningham…

A couple nights ago Sarah found a tarantula in her bathroom. It was awesome. I caught it in a tupperware and we named it Fuzzy. Fuzzy lived on our dinner table for a couple days. We set him free today. It just so happens that a Peruvian film crew was here to do a piece on CICRA and the Amazon Conservation Association—they got a kick out of filming two gringa girls setting their pet tarantula free. It also happens that there are no principal investigators at the station right now—all of us are staff, field assistants, or (in Graham’s case) photographers. So I got interviewed about my project. It was a really strange feeling to be talked to as a “scientific expert.” I just hope I didn’t tell them anything incorrect by mistake!