Schedual!

Ok, I have a tenative schedual for the next few monthes!!!! 

July 10th: Leave IVIC with half the class, and head west to begin sampling butterfly and dung beetle populations. We will be driving, then staying at various locations for 4 or 5 days each. For those of you not intested in biology, skip to the next paragraph. For the rest, we will be collecting dung beetles by setting, what else, but dung traps! So we all have poop into little cups from now on, and then we put the dung into a cloth bag and hang it above a pit with a yogurt container dug into the ground. In the container is a mix of alcohol (to kill the bugs) and water and soap (to maintain surface tension and keep the bugs from sinking). We will be checking those traps every day or every other day. For the butterflies, we are just wandering around with nets and trying to catch butterflies, then killing them by sqeezing the abdomon (harder than in sounds, I haven’t effectively killed one yet) and then storing them in little envolope slips.

During this time we will spend one free day in the city of Maracaibo (don’t worry, it’s far enough from the Colombia bourder to not be scary), which should be interesting. Maracaibo is kind of the ‘other country with a country’ of Venezuela… everyone from there talks really really really ridiculously fast… We’ll see just how good my spanish really is!

July 27th ish: Return to IVIC

July 30th ish: We will be heading out east in groups TBA (I don’t know yet quite where I will be going)

August maybe around the 13th?: Return to IVIC to take a test and get some results.

End of August: either lab time or more smaller excursions around the IVIC area. Will know more later!

In other news I have a lunch date with the big cheeses of plant biology at IVIC tomorrow… maybe I can get a job???? Or even a graduate school?????? We’ll see how it goes!!!!