Morning Coffee

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I can’t lie, long field expeditions have a tendency to wreak havoc on your body. Not only are you in a constant state of exhaustion, but also you often have to deal the occasional absence of showers, laundry facilities, and yes, mirrors. There is little point to this entry other than Jason having too good of a hair day to keep it secret. So without further delay, please let me introduce you to my friend and field companion Jason Fernandez.
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Mystical Forest Creatures

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One of my favorite aspects of doing fieldwork in the Philippines is learning about the local folklore and beliefs. The Philippines actually has a strong history of believing in spirits and forest-dwelling creatures, and adhering to superstitious beliefs. They even have an island in the central Philippines (Siquijor Island), which is famous for its sorcerers and witchcraft. The island celebrates an annual witch festival where you can buy all sorts of potions.

Legend of the Hot Springs Resort

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One of the first sites I had on my schedule while in the Philippines was an island called Marinduque. It is actually just south of mainland Luzon Island (not that this description is helping for the 99% of you that don’t study in the Philippines). All you have to realize is that it is one of the closer islands to Manila. So as you guessed, it only took about 12 hours to reach our destination. Unlike our Aurora bus trip though, the Marinduque voyage was broken up nicely into four, three-hour segments—Bus, Boat, Bus, Jeepney...and water buffalo.

Fun with Tropical Diseases

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I thought that I should at least give you some background in the amazing world of tropical diseases, from my own experiences of course. It never ceases to amaze me how many stomach problems I develop on any typical trip to the Philippines. For instance, it took me all of 4 days here on this trip to be back on antibiotics. Four days! I mean, come on, that is ridiculous. For the most part I try to stick to bottled water as much as possible. When we are surveying mountain sites, the pristine river water is just fine, and it is usually the city water that gives me problems.

Post-Expedition Chills

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The return trip last Friday went smooth and the first 2009 expedition has come to a close. I was not eager to rejoin the cold, but was very much looking forward to hot showers again. In addition to the factoids in my 27 January post, here is another one: nearly 2500 miles driven over the course of 33 days. Now that we’re back in the lab, the real work begins: sorting and preparing the specimens for study, which will take my several months. We expect to prepare about 20,000 specimens from this trip. In this case, “prepare” means to mount, label, and database each one.

The wrap-up begins

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The coffee is good here in the museum, but I think it would take about 8 of these to fill my normal office mug.

Cactus

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After our rain day on Tuesday, we finished off the last two days of the main expedition by driving a circuit from Biscucuy to Trujillo, and then winded out of the Andes in the state of Lara and back to Maracaibo yesterday evening. The rain was a bit more widespread than I had hoped, and the condition of many of the rivers was less than exceptional for collecting—recent rain also can throw off our water chemistry readings. Nevertheless, we still made good progress and had a few surprises.

A rainy inauguration

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We awoke this morning to heavy rain. Not a passing shower, but a uniform grey sky with flooded streets. Aside from a 20-minute squall while we were in the llanos, this is the first time it has rained on our expedition. By 11 am with no end of the rain it sight, we decided to write the day off and relax. I’m not opposed to working in the rain, but the bigger problem is that all of the streams and rivers have been converted into a slurry of mud, water, and debris. While having my coffee at the local corner store, I sat and watched the ongoing coverage of the inauguration.

New Animals and Ant Heads

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We arrived in Puerto Ayacucho yesterday, the capital of the state of Amazonas. We will be staying here for a few days while we scope out streams in the area. This area has been particularly productive on past expeditions as there are a lot of  rock slides --  rivers that flow over large expanses of exposed granite, and do not have any substrate. These create very unusual habitats that foster very unusual insects.

Crossing the Orinoco

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[ibimage==671==270-scale-rounded==none==self==ibimage_img-left]We decided to leave the Llanos station a day early (today) as we were able to get the data we needed in the two days we have been here. We headed south where we reached one of the world’s great rivers, the Orinoco, at about 11 this morning. The Orinoco splits Venezuela almost in two equal northern and southern portions.
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