Day 4

First Year Update by Sophie

This morning was started with a pleasant, melodious sound pattern of a toucan. After a night full of thunderous raindrops clattering against our metal roof, it was refreshing to wake up to the sound of  this early bird. Just a couple days earlier, Pablo had asked us, “Why do toucans fly in pairs?” “Because two can!”(haha) Unfortunately this morning I only spotted one toucan.

Our morning science began with checking our bacterial cultures, Escovopsis cultures, tend to our foundling ant gardens and a conduct a team meeting. Our team task was to prepare our experiment proposal for our peers, as well as our resident experts. Each of the three groups was tasked to present their question, hypotheses, complete with rationale, experimental design, and expected results. We were given two hours, a set of colorful markers, and one large sheet of paper to complete the seemingly impossible task of preparing a professional presentation and make a group decision. When the time came, we presented with the noise of deafening rain in the background, inciting the presenters to use outdoor voices! All feedback was much appreciated. We then received a sneak-peak of the lab notebooks, full of experiments, from previous first-year students. The insight was much needed. After a tense morning full of decisions, we were grateful for a riotous ride down the canopy of the rainforest , presented by our afternoon activity, the zipline. Upon arrival to the Canopy, we took a short walk across many wooden bridges and up many stone stairs to the first of eleven zipline launch-pads. As the wind blew the hair off our faces through the helmets, we looked around the forest for the winged, gliding, leafcutter ant. There were no sightings, so we enjoyed the rest of the wires by going upside down, in pairs, and finally super-fast in the final ride.  During the final two hours before dinner, our team collected one more Atta colony for our experiment and education. Our last scientific activities of the day were a brief summary of a bacteria highlight, another check of our bacterial cultures and colonies, and a rough draft of our team experiment procedure plan. Because it is not raining, it is safe to go back to my cabin and I bid you goodnight.

Second Year Update by Caroline

We began our day by making progress our projects.  Gabriel was constantly trolling around our work table answering questions.  After a solid hour and a half of working, we got a lecture on Omics from Gabriel.  Thanks to our bed sheet screen and projector, we were introduced  to various forms of visual representations that we can use in our own projects to represent our data.  We also learned about many different applications of bioinformatics, ranging from studying a single gene to a strand of RNA.  Our lecture was interrupted by a power outage, which caused the Wi-Fi do go down.  We finished the presentation by crowding around Gabriel’s laptop.  After the presentation, we were unable to continue with our projects because of the absence of the internet.  Instead, we played a few games of Cribbage before going zip lining with the first year students.  After flying through the forest canopy via harness and cable, we returned to the ranch only to discover that the internet was back on.  We made up for our lost time in the morning by working for a few hours before dinner.  By the end of the day, many of the second year students are suffering from, as we call it, bioinformatics blues.  Tomorrow we will attempt to straighten out wrinkles in our projects.