Chris Anderson - Earth Train Panama
Week 4

                       I have come to the conclusion that scientists can be some of the luckiest individuals on the planet, with the biologists and naturalists among us being the most fortunate.  They are given the distinct and wonderful position of never really having to grow up. I am not the first person to have made this observation and will undoubtedly not be the last, but it has only been during the last year or so that I’ve come to fully appreciate how true it is. 

Last year, while I was working in the Smithsonian researching the co-evolution of plants and insects under Dr. Labandeira I was struck with how it never felt though I was going to work, per se.   I was there five days a week for 8 hours a day, but I never woke up in the morning dreading the day ahead of me.  I actually felt as if I was getting away with some great misdeed as I found myself enjoying the work before me each day.

            “This is a job,” I told myself, “I’m not supposed to enjoy this.”

            Yet each and every day I enjoyed it as much as the day before.  It seemed criminal to me that it was my job to do something I would have loved to do anyway, that is examine fossils, while so many people in the world are apparently stuck in the drudgery of unsatisfying and unfulfilling jobs from which they feel they have no escape.  Life seemed to have changed little from the time when I read about dinosaurs on my grandfather’s lap to examining fossils at the Smithsonian and that, I think, is where scientists really have the right idea.  They are never forced to stop being that little boy or girl who stared wide-eyed at the pictures of the terrible dinosaurs of yore or the one who would crawl through the muck and dirt to find a particularly interesting bug or rock.  They are never forced to stop asking “why?” They are, in fact, encouraged to do so, while many other populations of professionals are conditioned to accept status quo.  It’s almost scandalous how blessed most scientists are in this regard.

Now, once again, I am starting to feel those pangs of social guilt here in Panama after a week of particularly rewarding discovery and adventure.  I made good on my promises of the weeks before and was finally able to get out into the jungle to study ants.  I described at length in my field journal the characteristics of a forager belonging to a sugar ant species that I found at the bottom of a deep flower.  I even devised a little experiment to discover whether or not this type of ant likes nectar of that flower or Tang better. Perhaps the most striking observation I made though, is how unbelievably difficult it is to catch an energetic ant in metal forceps.  It’s damn near impossible.  I found myself poignantly reminded of a certain scene in Karate Kid as I flailed about wildly with the forceps while the ant marched defiantly around the table, undoubtedly mocking my ineptitude.

            The other important discovery I made this week was how much I truly like snakes.  On Wednesday night we were fortunate enough to capture a six-foot long, yellow and black striped (non-venomous) bird snake.  We brought him inside of our main cabin and put him in a clear plastic box so that we could study him.  He was a beautiful specimen with a completely black head and alternating tiger-ish black and yellow stripes about an inch wide.  After gathering my nerve, I was able to reach in and grab him so that we could carefully examine the snake before releasing him.  Even after his release, I watched for roughly 15 minutes as he made his way across the forest toward safety.  It was breathtaking to watch him rise two or three feet in the air with no support before finding a branch that he liked and then slowly slithering up into the tree.  I think the whole experience may have opened up a completely new path of study that I had never contemplated before. Of course, now I’m starting to sound like the little kid who wants to be an astronaut one week and a cowboy the next.  I suppose that’s okay, since in the end I’m only that wide-eyed little boy staring in fascination as a snake slithers off silently into the dark and ever-changing jungle.