The view from our campsite. You can see the cacti, but unfortunately I didn't get a photo that really captures the amazingness of this place.
So the bare bones are as follows: we all showed up to our normal class time on Monday morning with our tents, sleeping bags, food, lots of water, and sunscreen. We loaded ourselves and all our gear into a hired bus and drove the 2.5 hours to Zapotitlan Salinas, a pueblo in the state of Puebla where there is a botanical garden famous for its wide variety of habitats and its incredible array of cacti (yes, it's a semi-desert). We camped behind the neighboring masonry shop which provided us with a bathroom and a bunker with 2 outlets, as well as a señora who provides the main meal of the day in an outdoor cooking/dining space (which has inspired me to put one of these in my future home). We worked in teams of four students and one profe/grad-student to plan and complete a research project. This basically involved the first half of the week working outdoors collecting data and the second half giving presentations and writing lab reports. We then returned to Puebla very tired, very dirty, and (for me at least) VERY content with the whole experience. Seriously, to the point that I'm pretty sure that I want to live there for at least a few years of my life.
Our study system, of the family Solanaceae. Note that these two flowers are opposite morphs, with mirrored carpels (the really thin structure) and anthers (the big dark structure). The light-colored ones in the middle are also anthers, but they're symmetrical (they are also fully functional, we discovered).
Our project dealt with a plant in the tomato family and its flowers that have a property called enantiostilia (that's the Spanish word because I don't know the English word; I suspect it's very similar) which is basically that there are two morphs of the flower, one with the carpel (female reproductive organ) to the left and the anthers to the right, and the other with the carpel to the right and the anthers to the left. The effect of this is that the pollen only gets on one side of the bee's body, so a bee has to visit a flower of the opposite morph in order to result in pollination. Our project was basically a determination of the proportion of the morphs, their arrangement within the plant, determination of any differences between the morphs, and a trace of pollination with fluorescent powders. Basically it was awesome and has re-affirmed my love of biology/ecology. (Sorry for this news, geologists, but if it helps I took pictures of mountains and soils, stole a rock, and want to know why the top layer of dried-out mud is a different color than its equally-dry lower layers.)
Tell me why, Bob, tell me why.
When we gave our final presentations of our research projects, only one person from the team could actually give the presentation, and I was that person. I was super nervous to give a 20-minute presentation in Spanish to a large group, but afterward I felt really proud of myself. Several people congratulated me, saying that it was one of the better presentations, which is good because I was so nervous I literally remember standing in front and taking a deep breath before beginning, and I remember sitting back down afterward, but I remember nothing else about the presentation.
It was so great to be out of the city and so great to be camping. I love Puebla but I had forgotten how amazing rural places are. Nature is my church and it had been way too long since I'd attended. Also this is a pretty breath-taking area; it's the middle of the rainy season so lots of things were flowering and the landscape was relatively green. That said, I need to come back during the dry season because this was most definitely the most arid place I've ever seen. Everything I brought with me is now saturated with dust and sand, including my skin. I basically drenched myself in moisturizer after taking a much-needed shower upon my return.
My skin afterward. Oh no wait, that's a cactus. Same difference, really, except the cactus seems less sunburnt.
We were 6 people in the tent, which was great because we could both feel a sense of community and keep warm during the cold cold cold desert nights, but which was bad because invariably some wanted to stay up until the early morning and others wanted to wake up in the early morning, which resulted in none of us ever sleeping more than a few hours a night. But it was the BEST sleep deprivation! (As a note for those at home: the previous statement was a "Sara Joke"; I'm laughing hysterically right now and everyone thinks I'm crazy. Clearly nothing has changed much.)
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