The Fundamentals

By Micaela Wells

I spent countless summer days beside the little river that ran through the yard of my childhood home, watching the minnows grow, listening to the frogs sing, and getting bled dry by the mosquitoes. Whether the sun was shining or rain was hammering my favorite riverside rock, no day was complete without the outdoors—a habit I never lost. I only worried that the packed schedule and high demand of study abroad this year would take away my open-air retreats.

Instead, they’re now assigned! As part of our coursework for Fundamentals of Tropical Biology, students are required to complete field observations at each major site we visit. We must venture into the wilderness, find a spot to lurk for an hour, and take detailed notes on what we see, hear, and otherwise learn from the buzzing biodiversity around us. It’s partially an exercise to identify the most important aspects of each local habitat, and partially to brainstorm for the independent research projects that will be our capstone work this semester.

Simply because I’m expected to write down my observations, I find myself perceiving much more about each place. When I sat down in the gathering dusk at La Selva Biological Station, I scrambled to jot down a quick visual description of the spot so that I could swiftly escape the mosquitoes, but soon noticed that the area held greater complexity than what my eyes could see; beneath the whine of the mosquitoes, other songs rose and fell in wavelike crescendos. Cicadas sang in unison—each male attempting to beat its fellows to the next tone, as mere milliseconds make the difference in which one is deemed the best choral performer by the lady cicadas. Frogs chirruped out their dual-toned calls, each local species settling in its own niche of frequency ranges so as not to interfere with the others. Birds warbled out brightly from the canopy in the hope of attracting a mate, but quickly switched to their hushed, chattering soft song to resolve tricky territorial disputes. I cannot recall the last time an assignment demanded my full attention, or any time that I had so many questions by the assignment’s end.

I think I picked the right career with ecology. I am nearing the end of my undergraduate years but can still spend hours staring at a river—only now it’s considered useful! A few things have changed since I was a child on a rock; I can now put names to the interactions that I witness, the songs that I hear, and the plants that I meet, and in theory I know which characteristics to write down if I want to identify an insect later. Yet in many ways, this program has showed me that I’m still just a child, listening and learning. Here’s to a life of the same.