An Invitation
I have been invited to participate on my first real field trip, which is exciting on a level about on a par with the way I used to feel about field trips in elementary school. My boss at the museum happened to have teamed up with some other biologists at OU to teach a seminar class on the flora and fauna of Belize this semester, only to have none of their students elect to go on the research trip during the winter break. And so I get to be the token undergraduate among four professors and two grad students working on various research projects. So far, I've really only been given a packing list, a brief lecture about the history of the Mennonites that colonized most of the country, and a warning about botflies. A cursory Google search of botflies brings up a bunch of horror stories about larva picked up in Belize developing in tourists' scalps, along with sarcastic comments about how the infested person might have gotten them. In case you're wondering, yes! We're goin...