Day 10: 9/4/2009

Today began with all of us waking up in the morning and eating breakfast at our apartments in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's (STRI) housing building in Gamboa. After meeting up for some healthy granola and fruit, we all headed over to our own personal research facility, a.k.a. Steve and Patty's house. After some quick announcements about the weekends events, we all began to examine the flies collected from the previous two days. After only looking at two of the over 20 vials filled with flies, Doug and Alec encountered a group of male flies that could not be identified using the keys we normally used for identification. Teri, who is the fly expert of the group, couldn't positively identify them either, and so we took some pictures and sent them to the Drosophila Stock Center back at UCSD to be identified. This was extremely exciting because it may mean that we have encountered a very rare, unknown, or completely new species.

We all went back to our apartments at lunch time to make some quick sandwiches and prepare baits for hanging that afternoon. Taking two cars, we ventured into Pipeline Road much further than we had the previous time we went. We crossed narrow wooden bridges over small murky rivers and drove through narrow roads so thick and lush with plants that we could not drive without scraping the car along palm fronds and foliage from trees that lined the side of the road. After about six miles, we turned around and began trying to find suitable places to hang baits.

We soon realized that placing baits would be the least of our worries. Alec noticed at the first bait hanging stop that the front right tire on one of the cars was making a loud hissing sound and leaking air. We continued to drive to see if we could make it back but it became clear that the tire was loosing air too fast to make it back. We had to stop on the small dirt road to change it....

Luckily, Alec had some experience in changing tires. Working under an increasing darkening and thunderous sky, he worked with Joel and Doug to quickly jack the car up, remove the bad tire, and replace it with the spare. Just as we finished, it began to rain. We all got back into the cars and drove back down the road. Our luck changed at the end when one car heard the loud calls of howler monkeys over the sound of the rainstorm. Although we didn't see them, we had more confidence that we might see some monkeys before the trip ended.

After relaxing back at the apartments, we headed over to the house in Gamboa at 5 pm to hear an interesting speciation lecture by Teri. She discussed the current thoughts of how the process in which new species are created, as well as filling us in with projects worked on by her and her lab. We then discussed a research paper by Sarah Pipkin about two Panamanian fruit fly species. After a long and eventful day, we returned to our apartments to get some much needed sleep.