The Night They Saved Christmas Drinking Game makes Christmas a special time with family

Number one, if you haven’t seen the Night They Saved Christmas, it may make your whole year, or maybe your whole lifetime.  Jaclyn Smith, snowmobiles, elves, overly expressive children! The whole made for T.V, 1984 awesomeness is available on YouTube! In fact, the only way to make this movie better is to make it a

The world, it is a-changin’ (and I don’t like it)

Earlier this week I was discussing with a few friends how easy it is to become out of touch with what’s happening in the real world while living at La Selva.  Field work can be so all-encompassing, and generally our conversations are geared toward science, complaining about the food/station/parasites/failure of experiments/whatever, instead of recent events.

Neotropical Spider Outreach

Happy Dancing

I’ve been back at La Selva for a little more than a week now, getting settled in, finding office space, etc.  And mostly I’ve figured out all that normal moving in stuff. I’ve also wandered around a bit to look for webs, and discovered there aren’t many.  I’ve recorded how many sites that normally have

The danger of being bored

About a week ago, I started to feel the weird sort of suffocation I start to feel after  too much daily repetition.  La Selva is an amazing beautiful place, but sometimes it gets weirdly monotonous.  It isn’t because the rain forest becomes somehow less amazing, or because I dislike anything specific about the place, but

Buenos dias!

Last night I fell asleep early. I woke this morning at a few minutes before six, to the pleasant ching, ching sound of a machete cutting off branches.  It’s not a sound I’d hear at home, and luckily here it doesn’t make me immediately think of murder. The howler monkeys started to yell and shake their

Mr Rabbit

The collecting jars I brought from home aren’t quite big enough for the largest Nephila spiders that I need to collect. While in theory you could fit a large spider into a 4 oz jar, in practice it tends not to be so easy. Shockingly, those spiders don’t actually want to go in the jar. And

Bullet Ants

I think it’s possible that bullet ants (Paraponera clavata) are the one thing that universally strikes fear into everyone in Costa Rica. From the seasoned researcher to the field techs who’ve grown up around them, everyone who knows what they are dislikes Bullet Ants. Let me explain why that might be. You may think that something

On how to stay in the moment

First, I know not all people agree that this is paradise.  In fact some people seem to only see the parasites, the bug bites, the scary snakes, and other crazy things. To them this beautiful morning looks more like this: They aren’t wrong, at least not entirely. However, the last thing I want is for

On being lonely

Loneliness is an odd thing. I’ve been here at the station for a full week now.  I’ve found more than thirty of the spiders I’m looking for, practiced marking them, measuring them, though for hours about how I’m going to deal with trying to answer all my questions about them. I’ve watched a ladies soccer