Again this year, I took College of Wooster students with me on a research trip to Trinidad and Tobago. Despite venomous snakes, landslides and fallen trees blocking roads, and locals that absolutely insist on driving on the left, we had a highly successful trip. Jess McQuigg (’13) completed the second year of a long term monitoring project on the Bloody Bay Poison Frog, Meredith Eyre (’13) obtained some interesting and hard-won data on the ecology of Fitzgerald’s marsupial frog and Jessica Pringle (’13) adeptly studied the parental care behaviors of the Tobago glass frog.
Henry McGee (’13) began an inventory of the freshwater fish of of Tobago and Patrick Brennan (’13) and Krista Koeller (’13) collected DNA samples for molecular phylogenetic projects on the origin of some of T&T’s lizards and snakes.
This year, we were based in the small village of Castara in Tobago where we lived and ate well, worked hard and made friends with Bingi the Fruit King among other Tobagonians. Congratulations to all the students for the successful completion of the field portion of their senior theses – now let’s analyze those data and/or get into the lab!