a long overdue update from Ecuador

First, Ecuador is amazing :). I live with my mamí Christina my papí Jaime and my little one-year-old sister Paula in the bottom floor of a beautiful house in the northern part of Quito. I arrived in the night and spent several hours talking with mis padres before finally I became so tired I couldn’t speak any longer. The morning after I arrived I went with my family to see a little bit of the city. We went to this hill above the center of town where there is a huge statue of La Virgen de Quito who stands on top of a serpent signifying the dominance of good over evil and I suppose the dominance of Spain and its Catholicism over the indigenous people of Ecuador. We walked around the center of town with them at night and all the churches and old colonial buildings were lit up. We saw a bunch of chivas, which are these converted trucks that have a band playing on the roof and people travel below in a sort of parade. They played Quito’s anthem and my abuelo tried to teach me how to dance to it, but it wasn’t too successful. Most days, though I spend hanging out with my mamí and Paula talking about life and holding Paula’s hands while she tries to learn to walk. Paula is learning all the sounds of animals so I have been learning all the songs that she listens to in an attempt to participate in talking with her.

Papi and Paula at Mitad del Mundo

Mami and Paula

The university is amazing…a little, no very grandiose. There are tons of fountains all over the place and a lake (well, maybe a pond) filled with goldfish and koi. Needless to say I spend a lot of time at the pond staring at the fish. In addition to the carp, there are these black organisms that look like a cross between a tadpole and a fish larvae. I can’t find anyone who knows what they are.

Plaza at USFQ

Koi pond at USFQ

School is a little bit different than I expected. My lit professor is crazily strict, the exact opposite of what Ecuadorian professors are stereotyped as. On the first day of class she instituted a one dollar fine for being able to see a cell phone, let alone if it rings in class. We also have to be in class every day or we can lose up to 10 percent of our grade in the class. And if we are more than five minutes late to class it will count as an absence. Fortunately, the subject matter of the class sounds really cool. Basically what we are studying is the literature that is passed through generations of campesinos in Ecuador and for a final project we have to collect stories from an area in the province of Pinchincha and record the storytellers and present them in class and enter them into a competition of sorts in the city.
My tropical ecology class is in English :( and the professor can be pretty annoying. He asks questions as if he wants to start a discussion but then has a very specific short answer in mind that usually doesn’t follow the question he asked at all. But the material in the class is super interesting, and we get to go on a lot of trips on the weekends. We are basically learning about the ecology of the vegetation types that occur at all the different elevations in Ecuador. Because of Ecuador’s unique landscape, the only tropical vegetation ecosystem it lacks is savannah (dry grasslands at low altitudes).
Ecoanthropology is very cool; I learned today that I am quite the reductionist as far as anthropologists go. That is, I seek tangible/material explanations for symbolic aspects of culture. For example, many indigenous cultures in the east of Ecuador practice infanticide of females because they need men to fight wars with other indigenous populations. Soon, since they have been killing all the females, they need females to produce more men so they capture females from other tribes spurring more wars. The rainforest of Ecuador, while very diverse, is not very easy to live in and can only support small populations of humans. So while a culturalist would argue that the widespread practice of female infanticide is a cultural anomaly, I as a reductionist would argue that the culture of female infanticide probably arose as a method of self-regulating the population.
My animal nutrition and reproduction class is amazing, too. The professor is really friendly and we just chat about nutrition for the class hour. Yesterday he brought in samples of foods commonly used to feed livestock in Ecuador and we got to try them so that we can recognize them by taste, smell, and appearance. In case you ever are faced with the choice to eat fish meal, you might want to consider declining. It is pretty gross. However, crystallized methionine (an amino acid) is really good—it’s kind of sweet and tastes almost like sugary cereal :). We have to bring 25 samples of animal food into class soon so a few days ago I embarked on a mission to find animal food. Stumbling across a factory, I began talking to the owner who ended up being friends with my professor and quickly agreed to give me samples. He was not so satisfied with my intended containers: snack sized Ziploc bags. Instead, he sent me to a local pharmacy for “jars with tops”. I tried to explain what I needed to the guard at the entrance to the pharmacy but he didn’t understand what I was looking for so in an attempt to think of another way to describe them the first thing that came to mind was urine sample containers. Fortunately, he knew what these were and quickly led me to the counter where I had the pleasure of asking the clerk for 25 urine sample containers. The look I received was unforgettable. As he returned with a large shopping bag filled with urine sample containers, he managed to muster up the courage to ask me why in the world I needed 25 but my explanation that it was for a class to collect food samples didn’t seem to clear things up. The owner of the factory and I had a good laugh about the whole experience later that afternoon.
Finally, I am taking a class at the veterinary school called veterinary histology and embryology. This is probably tied with nutrition as my favorite class. There are six students in the class, all first year Ecuadorian vet students and our professor is a young veterinarian who just graduated from veterinary school in Venezuela and we spend the hour looking at tissue samples from different parts of the body. I am probably going to start an internship with the professor’s husband who is a veterinarian specializing in chickens. Overall, classes here are a lot harder than I thought they would be and I am kind of mad at myself for that preconception because I feel like I the assumptions originated in part from a hidden belief that schools in Ecuador could not be as good as schools in the US. Granted, if I was taking classes in English, they would not be nearly as hard as they are at Kalamazoo College but they are definitely challenging.
Between settling in to the university and now, I have been to the zoo and touched Galapagos turtles, been cleaned by an indigenous healer, along with many other adventures, but those are stories for another day.

Galapagos turtles at the Quito zoo

So the real reason I started writing this letter was to describe an amazing trip with my medicinal plants class this weekend. My professor, Vlasti, smokes approximately a pack of malboro cigarettes daily and his skin clearly reflects his habit. He accompanies the cigarettes with copious amounts of coca cola (carried in his rubber boots while in the field) and coffee despite his doctors’ warnings against it (he has serious ulcers). He is extremely skinny because according to him he was bitten by a poisonous snake as a child and can’t gain weight. Despite his rather feeble appearance, he is quite adventurous. We left Friday afternoon to collect plants we will study for the rest of the semester. As we ascended to the páramo armed with pencils, field notebooks, plastic shopping bags and rubber boots it began to rain. Regardless, we all scrambled out of the bus and Vlasti’s supreme knowledge of plants began to impress me. He would pick out plants with medicinal properties and give us the family genus and species name as well as the common names and medicinal uses. Finally he would describe the identifying characteristics of the family so that I can now identify Asteraceae, Piperaceae, Solamanaceae and Euphoreae families with ease. In the páramo, I excitedly tested my rubber boots in knee-deep mud collecting Solamanaceae for people and became immune to the stinging power of nettles thanks to a prolonged wrestling match with the herb in which I finally emerged victorious with a two 20 cm sections of plant with flowers stuffed into my supermaxi shopping bag.
We began to descend into Guajalito, a cloud forest reserve owned by Vlasti and some friends, as the rain began to increase and the width of the road narrowed and pavement disappeared. Nevertheless, our bus (equipped with red and green Christmas lights, blue tasseled valences and several images of Jesus) valiantly traversed the mud at surprising speeds. After several hours, we arrived at a series of concrete buildings. That evening, we learned how to press our collected plants in a concrete room scattered with newspapers and discarded plants in various stages of decomposition. Much to our surprise, after a couple of hours of pressing, we were greeted by warm soup, spaghetti, and peaches by Rosa, a native of Guajalito. That evening, warmer and with full stomachs we went to bed with much anticipation of the next day when, according to Vlasti, we were going to get very dirty.
Between collecting plants, learning how to identify them, and scrambling up waterfalls while navigation through a maze of fallen logs and mud I realized I had found my favorite place in the world. The palms and piperaceae plants generally have leaves longer than my entire body, I spent the better part of the day inside a cloud, learned how to ward off bulls while eating lunch in the company of a small herd of cows, scaled a tree, swung from a vine over the edge of a cliff, and fell in love with my rubber boots. And Vlasti was right. After several falls in the mud, I did return dirty. After an entire day of collecting and hiking through the forest, we returned in the dark to press our plants. Honestly, I wasn’t looking forward to the hours it would take to press our collections but after the first few plants the process of positioning the plant just so it fit perfectly in the square of newspaper, adjusting the flowers and choosing a leaf to flip over became very calming and enjoyable.
Our final day I awoke well before the sun rose to embark on an expedition with some Ecuadorian students to see a lek of cock of the rock birds sing. We found the lek just before the female began calling the males and quietly listened to their songs. The birds are huge with brilliant red heads and necks and black bodies with white stains on their wings. Coloration aside, they rather resemble a rooster. On our way back we walked along the pipeline that runs from the Amazon to the refineries on the coast and I was surprised to find that the pipe was quite hot; apparently to keep the crude oil flowing. After rinsing off in a waterfall, we left Guajalito and descended further into a tropical rainforest in La Perla. Walking through a bananna plantation to arrive at the reserve, I picked a banana from the tree for a snack. While the size of the trees in La Perla definitely impressed me, I was most fascinated by the leafcutter ants who crossed the trail we were following several times.

Vlasti in a tree

Butressed roots in La Perla

Walking along the oil pipeline after bird watching in Guajalito

Downtown Quito at night

it just gets worse...

I thought I had my adventure with first aid on Thursday with the formalin incident. I was very, very wrong. I woke up Friday excited about rounds at the aquarium and quickly finished the water change on my fish (second day of no mortalities!) before heading through the blackberry-lined route to the aquarium. I spent a little time writing on my favorite palate of bricks while I waited for the veterinarian to arrive. I had even remembered to bring chai tea in my nalgene so I was feeling altogether good about the day as the veterinarian and I walked toward the otter enclosure. I wasn’t so sure how my nalgene full of tea would be received by the marine mammal keepers so I left it outside with the rest of my stuff and followed the veterinarian (who was still carrying his steel coffee mug—this detail will become very important shortly) toward the gate. Aialik, one of the otters, was in the water right by the gate entrance. I liked Aialik—I would usually shake his paw as he stuck it though the fence when I left the otter enclosure, but I knew he was going to try and escape. As the veterinarian walked through the gate Aialik started to get out of the water and I tried to quickly follow the veterinarian through the gate and shut it behind me to prevent Aialik’s well-planned escape. Unfortunately, this decision left me between Aialik and freedom with a wall on one side and water on the other. As soon as I pulled the gate shut behind me I realized my mistake. Aialik was out of the water now and climbing up my legs. Now otters look very, very cute but they are really vicious wild animals and I knew as soon as Aialik started climbing that I was going to be bitten. Aialik extended his hind legs, coming up to my chest. We made eye contact for a second as I froze in terror then he struck. After the first bite, I started to turn because I decided I would rather be bitten on my back then my front and as Aialik struck again the veterinarian saw what was happening and hit him on the head with his coffee mug, causing Aialik to slink back into the water. The funny thing is that there is nothing I could have done to prevent the bites. I had nothing to protect myself with when I entered the enclosure so once I was blocking his exit I was pretty much doomed. I now however have some pretty cool bite wounds on my chest and back as well as scratches from his claws on my stomach. The bites hurt but all I could do was laugh as for the second day in a row I filled out an accident report. At least this time I didn’t have to go to the emergency room, too. The response of the nurse I called at my insurance company to find out if I needed any vaccinations or treatment for sea otter bites was priceless.I think my phone conversation went something like:
Me: Hi, my health record number is 475 82 84 and I am calling because I was just bitten by a sea otter and I was wondering if there was any special treatment I should receive.
Nurse: You were bitten by what?
Me: A sea otter.
Nurse: Um, where did this happen, in the ocean?
Me: No actually all the wild sea otters in Oregon have disappeared due to overexploitation and the removal of their major food sources. This was, uh, at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport.
Nurse: Um, what were you doing to get bitten?
Me: Oh, well I was on rounds with the veterinarian and….
Nurse: Well, I have no idea what you would do for a sea otter bite.
Me: Well do you think you could check with someone who knows. I don’t know if I would need antibiotics or a rabies vaccination or something else. I have been cleaning it with chlorhexidine scrub but I don’t know if there are other tings I should be worried about.
Nurse: Well honestly no one here would have any idea what you would need. We’re not used to seeing sea otter bites. I don’t think they are very common. I am looking at your record and it says here that yesterday you splashed formaldehyde in your eye. Is that right?
Me: Yeah that was me. It’s been a rough week. Well, thanks for your help. I will call back if I start to see signs of infection.
Nurse: Yeah, I guess that would be good. Bye.

a stupid thing to do

This year my list of stupid things I have done has lengthened substantially. It probably started with my 80 mile bike ride with my roommate the day before finals for Spring Quarter where we did not bring a bike repair kit (and as a result I got a flat tire). Then of course there was the continued running after my vaccinations to the point where it was painful to walk. Today however, my stupidity rose to a new level. In a desperate attempt to save the rest of my fish, they are now being treated with nitrofurasone (a scary antibiotic) and formalin (to kill any protozoans) and each tank is on a UV sterilizer courtesy of Dennis. Since the antibiotic is killing my biological filter, I am having to do frequent water changes again so this morning I was going through the water change and everything was going really well until I went to add formalin to raise the concentration to therapeutic levels (every time I do a water change now I have to calculate how much water I removed and add the appropriate amount of medications to the water I put in). Anyway, the formalin is at a very low concentration so I was trying to get an accurate measurement and there was an air bubble in the syringe I was using to draw up the medication. I tried tapping the syringe and the bubble didn't budge so I did something I have done thousands of times before as the tried-and-true method of releasing bubbles from syringes: flicking the syringe. Well, there happened to be a small amount of formalin on the outside of the syringe and when I flicked the syringe the air bubble rose gracefully to the top of the syringe but some of the formalin on the outside of the syringe spashed into my eye. To make matters worse, this particular medicine is 37% foraldehyde, 10-13% methanol and the rest is an inert aqueous solution. Approximtely two seconds after the flicking, my left eye started to burn. To give you an idea, this particular mixture of formaldehyde and methanol has an OSHA health rating and contact rating of 3 (severe). According to the bottle, a spash usually causes blindness. Formaldehyde of course is a suspected carcinogen as well so things were not looking good. After I screamed for my supervisor, Pete, I was whisked away to an eye wash station (never mind that this station is connected to the same water that is likely poisoning my fish) I flushed my eyes for about 5 minutes (that whole 15 minute thing seems really long when your eyes are burning) and then was rushed to the emergency room. While my eyes were being flushed, the burning was so intense that I was gasping for air. If I thought the 5 minute flush at Hatfield was bad, I was in for a treat at the emergency room. I was hooked up to a wonderfully painful apparatus that flushed a steady stream of saline into my eye for over half an hour. They took the pH of my eye afterwards and it was still too basic so they had to reinsert the apparatus and flush again. I think my eye was starting to hurt as much from the flushing apparatus as from the formaldehyde. Finally, my pH was close enough to normal and I got the pleasure of going through an eye exam. Fortunately, I still have 20-20 vision and there are no abrasions on my eye. I keep closing my good eye and checking, though, because I am super worried I will wake up tomorrow and be blind in one eye.
Besides the scary contraption, the emergency room visit wasn't all that bad, though. My wonderful supervisor Pete sat patiently through the whole ordeal entertaining me and asking the nurses what if they would give me more saline to prolong the embarassing and painful situation I was in. The doctor was pretty cool, too. He quickly realized I was a geek and told me all sorts of cool stories about strange cases he had seen throughout his career and gave me the product information sheets for all the drugs I received so could read them tonight. Thanks to the other person helping with my eye flushing, the entire staff of Hatfield quickly knew about my accident and the story got embellished to the point where I pointed the syringe toward my eye and squirted the entire contents into my eye and there was some debate as to whether I got formalin or nitrofurasone or both into my eye. I think I spent a good portion of my day explaining what happened to people.
I spent the rest of the day at work, despite Pete's protests. I finished taking care of my fish and saw a seminar entitled: "snailfishes: why?" by the world expert on snailfishes. Where else can you eat cookies and drink tea and listen for an hour on someone's expeditions in the sub-artic searching for snailfishes? I love Hatifield :)

you gotta love research...

Sometimes I wonder how nurses become qualified to practice any kind of medicine at all. I deal with animals where you sometimes can't even feel a vein, let alone see it yet I manage to draw blood with decent success and even though I don't have the lisence required to give immunizaitons, I know how to give them and could recite a list of side effects about each one. A nurse however, gets to draw blood out of an arm where you can clearly see and feel a large vein and can tell the patient to stay still. Yet somehow a nurse has managed to miss my vein hitting a nerve in my arm (this happened a couple of years ago, but I am still bitter) and on Friday, my opinion of nurses certainly did not rise. The nurse I saw for my second rabies vaccination started by not being able to find the vaccination in the fridge. When I asked her about the muscle pains I have been having, she looked confused, then walked out of the room. Turns out she was consulting the product information included with every drug and called me in when she saw muscle pain as one of the side effects. "Yep, looks like it's a possible side effect" she said, with an air of finality. Well, I knew it was a side effect, but what I was wondering was if it was normal for it to be this painful. She had no idea. But she did offer the following brilliant tidbit of knowledge. "You know, I was talking with a doctor the other day and he told me that sometimes right around where you get the vaccine feels warm and that is because your body is making things to fight the vaccine and he said that is a good thing." I tried to smile back but I couldn't help but think: yeah, that warm feeling might be called inflamation because your body is increasing blood flow to the area so it can make antibodies for the killed virus you are about to inject into me more quickly. But that of course has nothing to do with the pain I am feeling in my legs. Grrr. She seemed much more concerned about the small bruise the last vaccination left on my arm. We are talking about a bruise about the size of the top of a thumbtack, but she thought it was a big deal and made a huge show about giving me the new vaccination a couple of millimeters underneath the bruise so it wouldn't hurt as much. It was all very silly. I felt pretty sick after this vaccination too, so I think it is the rabies that is making me sick as well as sore. So much for the triathlon that I was going to run this summer...it just happens to fall on the day after I have to get my third and final rabies vaccination.
As far as fish go, this week has not been good. Everything was stable until Friday afternoon when I was gone and they started dying again. By Sunday they were dying faster than I could finish necropsies on them and neither Tim nor I could figure out anything. As a last result, we came up with two crazy theories and decided to treat the remaining fish in each of the two tanks with one of the treatments to see if any helped. Pete suggested that there might be toxins in the fresh water we were using to lower the salinity so in one tank we started to raise the salinity again and get rid of the fresh water. I suggested that maybe there was something to the parasites we were seeing occasionally on the skin of the fish so we treated the other tank with formalin. This morning, a day after treatment, the formalin-treated fish were all still alive and every fish in the higher-salinity tank except two had died. We quickly placed the other two fish in a formalin bath and hoped for the best. As of 5:30pm today, we had not lost any more fish but at this point it is pointless for me to continue with the rest of my experiment because the fish are obviously really stressed out and there will be way too many confounding variables. So I really don't know what I am going to do to show that I accomplished something with the grant I was given. Something to think about tonight, I guess. So goes the joys of research :)

the fortune cookie

Dennis gave me a fortune cookie from his lunch today and the fotune said "more effort and hard work is required to make a precious dream come true". So now even fortune cookies are asking me to work harder :) I laughed for a long time when I read the message. Things are stable here again as far as fish. I haven't had any more die since last Friday and I should get the histopathology report tomorrow and hopefully know why I lost an entire tank. My cousin Caroline is coming to visit Oregon tonight and I am going to kidnap her for the weekend and show her the aquarium and Hatfield and other quirks of Newtown such as Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum and the Wax Museum. I am so excited to see her!
A strange thing has been happening this week, though. I didn't run at all a week before my yellow fever/rabies vaccine but I was biking pretty much every day. I biked for a long time on Friday after finally getting back from my errands across Western Oregon then felt sick on Saturday so I didn't do anything. On Sunday, I went for a pretty long run that included a huge hill, but it wasn't any more difficult than other runs I have been doing this summer. I was really sore that evening and the next day--so much so that I had trouble walking because every step hurt so much--which was strange since I usually don't get very sore, even when I overexert myself. The next day, I was mad at myself for being sore so I ran the same route without the hill (making it 1.5 miles shorter and completely flat) thinking that warming up my muscles on something easy would be good for them. However, I was even more sore the next day. It's kind of scary--I have to use my arms to get out of chairs because my legs can't hold the weight. I didn't do anything yesterday then today I was still as sore as I was after my second run but I decided to run a flat course at lunch anyway. Then this afternoon I was just walking at the marina and fell because my leg basically collapsed from under me. So, I am getting pretty worried about what is going on and I wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts on it. I know I should probably stop running until it gets better and I am going to the doctor again for a booster of the rabies vaccination so I can ask the nurse then, but I have never been this sore/stiff in my life and I can't think of anything really strenuous I did to bring it on. I am kind of wondering if it has something to do with the vaccinations I got last Friday, but I don't know. Hmmm.....

the day from hell

So three days ago, fish in one of my tanks didn't eat. I didn't think too much of it and Tim didn't think it was a big deal, either. However, late that night when I came in to check on them, a couple had died. That was weird, but it was close to midnight so I couldn't exactly call Tim or Pete (especially because I didn't want to admit to them that I was in there checking on the fish that late). I necropsied the ones that died and found white granulomas (spots) on their liver and spleen, characteristic of mycobateriosis (the same bacteria that causes tuberculosis in humans). Even more scary. But mycobacteriosis is a chronic disease so I checked my water quality and went to sleep. The next morning, I came in to change water in the tanks quickly before rounds at the aquarium and...only two fish were left alive in the tank. Of course, they had to die on the day I had rounds that couldn't be rescheduled and the day that someone was coming to pick me up all the way from Dallas to take me home so I could drive another hour to get vaccinated for Ecuador and return to the coast. It was five minutes to 8am, rounds started at 8, and she was coming at 10. I quickly removed the fish, placed them in a cooler so to slow down the decomposition process, jotted down some quick notes for Dennis and Pete and ran over to the aquarium. I finished with rounds around 9:30 and returned to Hatfield to find Dennis and Pete arguing over a dead fish--the two that were left alive this morning had died, too. I tried to perform quick necropsies on the fish and on almost all of them found the characteristic white granulomas. I didn't get it though, this was one accute disease, and it didn't mesh with the mycobacteriosis theory. I checked and re-checked my water quality and it continued to be fine. My friend showed up to take me home right on time so I had to ask her to drive me to the local vet clinic to get formalin to package the fish and send them to the veterinary diagnostic lab at OSU for a histopathology. She was really nice about it, but the clinic's mail had already gone out so we had to drive to the post office, too. Unfortunately, the post office refused to take the package because my kidney cultures were taped in an envelope on the outside of the box containing the fish and they didn't have any materials to repackage them with. I was so frustrated at this point, I just left the post office and decided to figure out how to send the package later. My friend drove me straight home so I could make the mail in McMinnville but on the way I decided that it might just be easier to drop off the package at the lab myself since it was kind of on the way back to the coast. Our plans for a leisurely lunch ruined, I made her a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwidch at home and left for Salem to get vaccinated. When I was finally seen by the nurse (after waiting half an hour) she informed me that they yellow fever vaccine I was about to receive was a live virus and would make me very ill over the weekend. Grrr. On top of that, the rabies vaccine I was also receiving often made people ill. The one good thing about the whole day was that I finally made it to the diagnostic lab before they closed and dropped off the samples before heading back to the coast.
Fortunately, none of the fish in the other tanks have died yet. I am feeding them antibiotics in their food and waiting to hear back from the histopathology report on what killed the other fish. I was pretty sick on Saturday, but not nearly as bad as the nurse made it sound like I would be, so I guess that is a plus. It just seems like no matter what I do I cannot keep the clownfish alive. I just keep hoping that the histopathology will come back with a definitive cause of death so I know what happened.
I guess this is just one of the many joys of doing research with live animals :)

Emergence at last!

For the past several days, I have spent evenings after work locked in a house with two dogs and two cats a block from one of the most beautiful beaches on the coast (with the bonus of having incredible tide pools). Grrr. It is all because I had to do a ton of research on the physiological stress response in fish for Tim. Don't get me wrong: I am probably one of the few people who find the topic "physiological stress response" fascinating, but I discovered shortly after I began my research that this response is a lot more complicated than it appears. After reading a few articles, my head was spinning with so many acronyms that I couldn't keep track of half of them. So, I got the great idea to make a diagram explaining the many feedback mechanisms involved. Two days and over 10 hours of work later, I had developed what I think is a pretty amazing diagram for only being able to use microsoft word. I think I will go tidepooling for a little bit with two stir-crazy cockerspaniels before doing a little more research on syngnathids.
Click the empty blue box at the top of the post if you want to see the diagram...and you know you want to see it ;)