A blacklight, some starlight, and a great many sleepless nights
Field Research. It's romanticized. It stirs emotions of excitement and opportunity. At university, like all ordinary biology majors, we learned of Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" and how his visit to the Galapagos Islands, and his meticulous collections and observations of tortoises and finches and other uniquely adapted wildlife contributed to his thinking on the origin of species. Later, he famously revolutionized the field of evolutionary biology with his groundbreaking theory of natural selection when he published "Origin of Species." At the same time, Alfred Russel Wallace tromped through rainforests in South America and then the Malay Archipelago collecting myriads of birds, beetles, butterflies, and other animals and plants, and he discovered the "Wallace Line" between Bali and Lombok, which separates the faunas of Asia and Australia. He too arrived at the same conclusion as Darwin, and they jointly published works on the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858. Mesmerized by these groundbreaking works, I was ready to go on my own adventure.
My junior year, opportunity struck. Dr. Kenneth Mantai, a botany professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, offered a field biology course on Tropical Biology, which culminated in a 19-day field trip to Costa Rica during the semester break in January. The summer before, I worked 3 jobs to exhaustion to pay for the trip: an early-morning shift as a summer cleaner at my old high school, refereeing football in the afternoon, and then working a late shift at a restaurant as a bus boy clearing tables. I slept only a few hours a night, but when classes began that fall, I'd managed to make enough to register for the course and pay for the trip that changed my life forever.
The first place we visited was Caño Palma Biological Station, a Canadian-run field station deep in the Atlantic lowland rainforests, which can only be accessed by a long boat journey. The station is situated on a blackwater canal - the water's very clean and appears black from the tannins leached from rainforest leaves. It's only 100 meters from the Caribbean coast and the most important Green Sea Turtle nesting grounds in the western hemisphere, so it was paradise for a budding biologist. I fell in love with the tropical rainforest, and I knew I wanted to be an ecologist.
The following summer, I took another Tropical Field Ecology course in Costa Rica with my mother, who is also a biologist, and then my dreams came true when I returned to the Caño Palma Biological Station as an intern for the 5 months of the final semester of my senior year. I spent a field season characterizing the biodiversity of tropical hawkmoths. The moths were nocturnal, so my project required me to stay up nights. But the days were too hot and humid to sleep, plus I had to lead tour groups in the rainforest to earn donations to support the station. My hobby of butterflycollecting kept me awake the rest of the day, so I don't think I slept for 5 months! At university, just before the trip, when someone asked me if I was ready for the rainforest, Dr. Mantai quipped, knowing how ready I was, "Is the rainforest ready for Jake?"
Field Research is hard. Getting research permits can be even harder. In Costa Rica, it required a proposal to be submitted in Spanish to the Costa Rica Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE). I made two collections of moths: one voucher collection to donate to the University of Costa Rica, and another to take home with me under permit that allowed me to export 5 specimens for every species that I donated to the museum. Some nights required me to hike up an extinct volcano, known locally as the "Cerro". It's only 80 m high but nonetheless a hard climb. This was because I had to carry with me with my UV "blacklight", a white sheet to attract moths (they navigate by starlight and are "attracted" to UV lights), a tent, a backpack, a Honda generator, and 4 liters of fuel to power my "blacklighting" equipment. Mosquitos were plentiful, and in my tent, I had to contend with bullet ants: giant 3-cm long ants with a sting so powerful it feels like getting hit by a bullet.
When you're doing something you love, you forget about the minor inconveniences and sleep deprivation, and the long hours spent collecting data pass by quickly. I returned the following year to Caño Palma as a master's student. I completed the research project by conducting a structured biodiversity survey of the hawkmoths and then went home to write my master's thesis.
Dr. Wickham, Managing Editor of the journal "Integrative Zoology", is a Senior Scientific Researcher at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Entomology at Rutgers University. An awardwinning and celebrated zoologist, Dr. Wickham has over 15 years of experience in academic publishing and has published several papers in high-impact journals.
