Dirty, Sweaty, Bushed and Delighted

For biology major and Duke senior Jennifer Rainey, the OTS tropical biology course she took in the summer of 2002 was a rigorous lesson in the realities of field research. As her independent-study project, she had chosen to record how white-faced capuchin monkeys at the Palo Verde station care for their young. Little did she suspect that the monkeys would be so, well, active.

Reflecting on the eight-hour days of chasing after monkeys, she declares that it “was really fun and grueling at the same time. At Palo Verde, it gets up to a hundred and twelve degrees, sometimes. So, we’d be out in long pants, long-sleeve shirts running after monkeys through acacia trees and thorns, and it was a mess. You’re not reading about someone who had to work really hard to follow monkeys and get this data—you’re the one getting this data. You’re the one who’s picking the ants off your arms. You’re the one who’s driving yourself out of bed at 4:30.”

Like her fellow students, however, Rainey learned that the effort yielded the kind of immersion in nature that forges scientists out of students. “It’s really neat to be in the park and watching how all the different organisms interact with each other.”

The course crystallized Christopher Martin’s lifelong interest in biology. “I’ve always wanted to be a biologist since I was two years old catching tadpoles,” says Martin, also a senior. He says he was worried that his experience in the wilds of Costa Rica might prove too grueling, that “maybe it’ll be too hot or whatever, but none of that’s true. I’m still a hard-core biologist.”

So hard-core, in fact, that for his research project, Martin explored, with painstaking care, the feeding habits of the ant lion--a peculiar insect that lurks at the bottom of a tiny pit it has dug, waiting for ants to drop in for dinner. “I wanted to look at what makes an ant lion most effective at catching its prey,” he says. “And the main thing I did was to go around with a tweezers and drop an ant in each pit, record whether the ant escaped or was eaten, and then measure the diameter of the pit to get an idea of how big the pit was and measure the size of the ant lion.” While his results did not prove any dramatic theory of ant-lion behavior, they did give him a fascinating glimpse into a peculiar corner of nature.

Martin’s project also gave him some modest notoriety as a talented imitator of the insects--a not-ready-for-Vegas act that involves opening his mouth wide in a perfect imitation of an ant lion waiting for its prey.