But this shit is tedious! The scientist in me has calculated the amount of time it will take to finish collecting all the data for every tadpole and the results are not encouraging. Over 100 hours of pulling tiny dead animals out of jars of ethanol, placing them on a piece of paper, measuring them, looking at them under a magnifying glass to count their toes, lifting them carefully onto a scale, waiting for the scale to agree on a weight, and then putting them back. This must be done for each tadpole in my experiment, so somewhere between 3000 and 3600 times! I think Jocelyn’s assistant (me) needs an assistant. This kind of science is not as glamorous as hiking through remote forests, jotting down notes and taking photos of rare frogs. I’m going back to just natural history observation type stuff after this.

But, once I ignore my future here for the next month and concentrate on what I’m doing in the lab during one moment it doesn’t seem so bad. I have an MP3 player again, and the lab is air conditioned (my room at the dorms is no longer, I broke the air conditioner somehow), so basically I get to hang out in an air conditioned room for 3-5 hours every day listening to music. If I bring in some coffee, it will go fast. Maybe.

My experiment has begun! This past week was spent collecting eggs, setting up buckets to raise tadpoles in, and finally, today, introducing tadpoles to the buckets. On a smaller scale it’s a breeze. I’ve raised dozens, even hundreds of tadpoles on my own in the basement. But now thousands?! This is a whole different game. Hours (days) of water changes, bleaching buckets, never ending prune fingers, and mud everywhere, on everything, regardless of how often I sweep or mop my bedroom floor and porch. This is how it should be.

Also, I got a new (borrowed) computer and Skype – username devin.edmonds. I’ll keep it open when I’m not in the field or at the lab, so feel free to say hi. I can only handle interacting with academics for so much of each day!

Some small creatures I caught recently:

A “new frog” (a species we haven’t 100% identified yet). It may appear to be a boring brown frog, but would you believe it does not have free-swimming tadpoles? We found a female full of eggs last night, and if it is indeed Ingerana liui, then she was on the lookout for a male who had dug a little hole in the mud for her to put her eggs in. The eggs then develop in the hole as the male guards them, and out of the eggs hatch tiny miniature frogs instead of tadpoles!

This is where I sleep

This is Menglun, the town across the river from the gardens where I eat every meal and go to buy things. It’s small, but not too small.

I walk across this bridge to go from the gardens to eat in Menglun. There is a cafeteria at the gardens, but it’s expensive and bad.

A view from the bridge…

The gardens

I climbed that mountain in the distance on Saturday, where I caught a bamboo viper.

These are the labs, one of many giant buildings the Chinese government has built inside the botanical gardens. I spend a lot of time on the roof, where I have a bunch of tadpoles in buckets to take care of.

On the roof, Jocelyn taking care of the tadpoles…

Tadpoles!

These are artificial breeding spots where we want frogs to breed. A lot of the time I’ll be walking around the gardens looking in them to see if there are eggs or tadpoles. So far we haven’t found anything.

Johny Worker Bushtit Whiskey