Yanayacu

After our Galpageno adventures we all headed off on our own to do internships. I went to the opposite side of the country as everyone in my group and went to Yanayacu Biological Station and Center for Creative Studies --- www.yanayacu.org if you'd like to checker out. While I was there I helped on a project that was started by a man named Lee Dyer about 8 years ago. It is a called: Caterpillars and Parasitoids of the Eastern Andes. I helped collect caterpillas essentially with the gusaneros: Wilmer and Lucho. Wilmer has been working on the project for about 5 years I believe. There are about 1,200 species of Caterpillars that they have collected.

oh yes another thing. A parasitod is a organism that spends part of its life on or attached to a host and eventually kills its host.

We'd do transects to find caterpillars or just look for them on the side of the rode OR beat bamboo with sticks. :D

Then we would enter data on the lil buggers and try to make them adults. some made it, some weren't as fortunate (actually if they make it into the lab they all die :( ) then there are some...actually around 60% that are killed by parasitoids

this stuff is way cooler to tell w/pictures and it takes FOREVER to upload them on here so i will eave it at that for now.

Yanayacu was a really beautiful place but I had a difficult itme there because for 90% of the time I was the only English speaker. All of the Ecuadorians (all guys pretty much from ages 18-24 and one women 27 w/ a baby) were already friends and joked around all the time. I tried being apart of this and even though my spanish has improved it is difficult to speak and understand when it is a larger group of people. When it was a smaller group it was usally ok. I also learned how to play rummy and cuarenta. and I got pretty good at rummy and I enjoyed beating the boys everyonce in awhile.

tomorrow morning I'm leaving here at 4:30 am to get to the airport to fly to Lima Peru. i don't think we have time to go to machu pichu (or dinero) this time through but we still might visit cusco. On may 24 my friend jean and i are going to ARGENTINA