It’s been awhile

Not updating one’s blog becomes a habit. The rationale becomes, well, I just have too much to say, to say anything at all. It’s that same embarrassment of riches that keeps one from arguing that the bag-lady isn’t Napoleon. Where to begin?

I went to Costa Rica for a week. A tourist visa in Panama gives you three-months. After three-months, you can get pulled out of a bus (during one of the mandatory check-points when entering Chiriqui from Panama), stopped while driving, or have your passport demanded by a policeman, and they will rifle through your travelogue for the Panama Stamp, perform a mental calculation for the given date, and you get into trouble. What kind of trouble? I don’t know. The main thing to avoid in such a situation is ever to lay yourself so deliberately into the hands of a policeman.

I was pulled out of a bus on my first trip from Panama to Chiriqui. They wanted my passport. They couldn’t understand why I might not have it on me. The other passengers couldn’t either. I’d left it at the research site deliberately, as I fear losing it. Luckily I was travelling with my Smithsonian ID tag, and when I showed them that, and indicated I had a “passporte especial diplomatica”, they were satisfied and let me back on the bus.

The alternative, I like to think, was torture.

So what can you do? You can go to Costa Rica after three months. You stay out of the country for at least 72 hours, and you can return for another 3 months. A company called Tracopa operates out of the bus terminal in David, and they take a medium-sized bus into San Jose once a day.

I have little to say about my trip to Costa Rica. It rained the entire time. I took online exams on my computer, ate at the hotel restaurant, and watched movie after glorious movie. Sometimes from the bathtub. The wonderful phenomena of reliable, high-speed wifi, seemingly endless hot water, and fresh linens everyday made the trip enjoyable. I’d left Carlos in charge of feeding the plants their regiment of hydroponic growth solutions.

Then I returned to Panama fairly refreshed and thought to myself—you’ve been going about it all wrong, Brian. You can’t work at Fortuna and not know you’ve got a ticket out every three weeks or so. Three weeks on, one week off, was about the maximum rotation a person with a reasonable grip on sanity can handle.

So there was a whirlwind time. With Carlos’ help, I found and trained an assistant to run the experiment. I ran around doing all the field work the growth-experiment needed at the moment, which involved hunting down species of interest to replace the waves of seedlings bound for the after-grow. Then I split. I went to Panama City, where I started setting up the next data-set of interest.

In a nutshell, I am looking at whether plants form ecological niches around different chemical forms of the same soil resources. All plants need phosphorus to grow, I’m just trying to see if they are specializing to acquire that phosphorus from different sources. The big picture is to find ways all these species manage to coexist in a world where, according to every mathematical model we have, even the most infinitesimal (and consistent) competitive advantage would lead to a one-species monopoly. There are other angles I can talk about, and in grant-form the research is presented to emphasize the qualities that appeal to the mission of the granting-institution, but to me the above is a fairly decent synopsis.

My plants are growing hydroponically limited to different chemical forms of phosphorus. My adviser has data on the relative abundance of these plants across plots on different soil types. My current lab work is aimed at determining whether these plots have different fractions of the phosphorus-compounds I’m feeding to my plants. The end goal is to present a story that sounds like this: Species A grows better than B,C, and D on phosphorus form A, and is most abundant in forest plots with soils rich IN phosphorus form A.

If you don’t understand that, you’re a child, and I forgive you. Try to think of plants as dragons and chemical forms of phosphorus as flavors of ice cream. Now: I want to figure out if different types of dragons stick to certain flavors of ice cream, so I’m feeding dragons only specific types of ice cream and seeing how fast they grow. In addition, I’m exploring the magic ice cream glades where these dragons live to see if they choose caves where their favorite ice cream is most readily available. Right now, I am paying someone to feed my dragons their ice cream, while I look at the ice cream in the dragon’s native environment to see what type it is.

But I won’t strain that analogy any further. You don’t want to know what happens to the dragons come harvest time.
Ah, and what else! As my gift for reaching the half-way point in my research, I am coming back to the United States for two weeks! This trip is a strong motivating force in my life right now. When I return to Panama, I will be thinking of wrapping things up, getting all the additional data I need, and even thinking about what’s next in my charmed life.

So I’ve left lots out, no doubt, but you’ve heard from me.