Ecuador!

Ok, so this year, our optional biology field trip was to Ecuador and the Galapagos. I can hear some of you saying already, “OK, that’s cool, but where’s the biology in that?” and I have to admit, there could have been more. We spent 3 nights in Quito, 8 nights in a place called La Hisperia, and 5 nights on San Cristobel, one of the Galapagos islands. 

In Quito, we did mainly touristy stuff, but that wasn’t a main stop of ours – we just stopped there when we were in transit. We visited the national culture museum, a market and went sightseeing. 

In La Hisperia, everything got a whole lot more biological. We did a fair amount of sampling – we did a river sample, an insect sample, a forest transect, and a whole bunch of treks. We even went “bat hunting” where we put up net, and checked them, and recorded the bats we caught. It was all very fun, especially learning a bit more about the samples we caught when we had out lectures in the evening.  We were in a research station which is open to volunteers, and every one of the staff there was lovely, even if they weren’t all fluent in English. The research station had a few cows (which I milked!), some chickens and some horses. It was very near a school and was part of an initiative which showed that the local community could live in harmony with the splendid and increasingly rare cloud forest environment which surrounded it. 

I saw some amazing things, like puma prints, blue morpho butterflies, and a hundred other things which I couldn’t begin to name. I saw a plant which was among the first in the evolutionary race to develop a vascular bundle, a tree which despite being dead looked alive and healthy because of the wealth of bromeliad on its branches. 

But it was in Galapagos that I had the most mind blowingly amazing time. We swam with sharks, snorkled with sea turtles and followed giant tortoises around their enclosure. We saw frigate birds with their impressive red pouches, sea iguanas snorting salt, and sea lions lying about pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t just the quality of the wildlife, but it was the quantity, and the fact that they would let you get so close you could touch them. We learned about how the tourism industry was important to the Galapagos, as it was the largest industry, but also how harmful it was to the environment, and the balance that had to be struck between letting everyone in, and the islands getting trashed, to letting a financially elite few in, and preserving it only for those with lots of money. 

All in all this trip was phenomenal and it is an experience which will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Me holding a snake in La Hisperia!