Identifying what I don’t know

By Laura Naslund

We are doomed, I thought, and it’s all my fault. How are we going to be able to finish this project? As I stared down through a microscope containing the first sample for our independent project, the horrible realization that I could not recognize a single invertebrate swimming around in that petri dish washed over me. After spending the last two years working with macroinvertebrates for my lab at school, I promised myself I wouldn’t do a project on macroinvertebrates. I wanted to expand my horizons maybe to plants or mammals or, heck, even frogs, but as idea after idea kept getting rejected, I decided to go back to something I know, and my project partner Karen was willing to go with me. We settled, finally, on assessing the invertebrate communities of heliconia bracts along a gradient of light availability. The flowering structures of many heliconias fall into a category of plant structures capable of holding water known as phytotelmata. These plant-held waters often contain communities of larval aquatic invertebrates such as mosquitos and midges. After a successful day of tracking down our plant species and sampling the water from its bracts, I wanted to take a quick look before dinner at the communities our samples contained.

            As I turned the knob of the microscope, hundreds of tiny organisms darting around the petri dish came into view. Every invertebrate I saw was orders of magnitude smaller than what I had ever seen before. “Do you recognize anything?” Karen asked. An internal debate sparked in my head. Should I be honest about the panic building up inside—after all, I was looking at only a tenth of one of our thirteen samples—or stay positive and, perhaps for the sake of my pride, reassure her that I felt confident we could figure out their identities? In my typical fashion, I shot the middle and mustered a weak, “Um, not at the moment but with more time it will come back to me.” I briefly considered if three days into the seven-day project we could start over with something completely different. This didn’t seem feasible, so I went to bed that night wracking my brain for a plan. In the morning, I admitted to Karen that I was worried we wouldn’t be able to identify anything. She, with her characteristic can-do attitude, replied that we should go through more of the samples to start to recognize patterns and begin identifying invertebrates to morphotype before doing a second pass with greater taxonomic detail. By the end of the three days of we had just four larval macroinvertebrates and four microinvertebrates sitting on the lab bench without an ID. With the help of Station Director and aquatic ecologist, Dr. Carlos de la Rosa, even those misfits were given a name too.

            With this project, I once again got to experience being thrown into a depth of what I don’t yet know and somehow learn to tread water. While the thought of facing more experiences like this one are met with some dread by my type-A brain, the realization each time I emerge with an expanded knowledge about our world is perhaps the greatest lesson I will take from my time in Costa Rica.