The first week of entire-class field trips done, I'm starting to feel very, very anxious. I get the sense that everyone here feels that way, but somehow for me it all seems much, much more daunting.
Here's the issue: At the end of our “work-week” (by Sunday, our day off) we have to hand in a project prospectus. This past week has been all about taking us to places where we can do our projects, essentially exposing us to different ideas/habitats/flora/fauna. Great, fantastic. I'm an entomologist, so I know my work will be terrestrial (about 60% of the people here, on the other hand, are focusing on marine projects). I know I'm interested in parasitic insects, beetles, and the Strepsiptera (a whole order of insects). But the timing restriction makes things difficult, in a way that may be specific to only the entomologists here: It takes more than a week to effectively collect. Most of the traps entomologists use are passive ones, like Malaise traps and pit fall traps. There are active traps like blacklighting and sweeping, but these are problematic. One, the Gump Station students aren't really allowed to go out and do night trips at this point. And two, when you're sweeping, you're limited to catching what you can see and what's close enough for you to catch. This leaves out a lot.
I set up a Malaise trap today- there's only one that I can use. I'll leave it up until Friday, a total of four days, which is relatively short for a Malaise trap (which is basically a big, open tent with a vertical wall that a bug flies into and instinctively crawls up, getting caught in an alcohol trap). So I'm expected to come up with a project by this Saturday even though I'll have done very limited collecting. Meaning I'll barely know what I'm studying about.
I don't like that I'm being forced to say something so soon. I need at least two weeks to visit places and set up traps. It would be the bulk of my work, in fact. I could easily spend six weeks collecting and then the last two weeks describing what I found and that would be my project. Most of the people here are answering specific questions or manipulating experiments. I'm interested in taxonomy, the description of new species and relations, this puts me at odds with most of the other students here.
Really, right now, I'm kind of guessworking and saying I'm doing a survey of the flying hymenoptera here, but I'm just as equally keeping my hopes of finding Strepsiptera. If I did, crapshoot chance that it is, I'd drop everything to describe them. But other than that, asking me for a prospectus right now is asking me to do a study on insects that may or may not even be available.
More fancy hike pictures continue tomorrow.