a day in the life of a fish hunter..

Here's a typical day of work at the station

• Wake up at 6:15. Yes, dear roommates and colleagues in NY, that's 6:15am, not at night.
• Get my act together, and head to the 'musmanni' bakery, where they are currently regretting revealing that can make cappucinos, because we order three every morning.
•  Pastries and bread have become an incredibly important part of my life...at every meal
• Marlon, our taxi driver shows up at 7:30 on the dot, and we hop in and drive about 45 minutes to the site. 15 minutes of this is by a highway, 30-35 is on a heavily bumpy gravelly road that does an excellent job of shaking up your innards before 8am.
• Get to the Lomas Barbudal Reserve at around 8:15, gather our equipment, and head down to either the stream behind the station, or hike about a kilometer and a half to La Catarata (the waterfalls)
• Hop in the water and survey for breeding pairs of Convict Cichlid fish. 
• The first day, we went to get in the water, and I realized I'd only been snorkeling once before 4 years ago, and had to have a quick tutorial on how to use a snorkel.
• We swim upstream and write down marked or unmarked pairs of fish on hand-drawn maps using waterproof notepads, and figure out which pairs we will observe or capture for the day.
• For capturing pairs we have to surround them with a seine net, and capture the male parent, then the fry, then the mother.
• Once we capture full 'families', we mark the parents so that we can recognize them later, measure and weigh them, and count and measure the fry, so we can get an idea of how parental 'fitness' is affecting how they behave as parents.
• Lunch break up at the station, back down by 1pm
• We are now able to capture about 5 pairs in a day, and then we get a cab home at 5pm

Watching the fish by the second week, we are able to very quickly recognize a pair with young. It took about a week to obtain useful data because our methods were...er...far from perfected (don't be fooled, they still are).

Currently on my way to Monteverde for the weekend with Ashley. She has to put up sensors for lizard research (luckily, or unluckily, neither of us know the slightest thing about lizards), and so I've decided to tag along. I went to Monteverde 4 years ago, but it is such a beautiful place, and the higher altitudes hopefully mean no insectos!

The most beautiful scenery on the way up that not even my camera can capture.

Just learned that my camera has the ability to take '3d panoramic images' Which is ridiculous- anyone got a 3d tv?

Hasta luego amigos

-bug (not beecho, I can't take that title from him)