Craft and Frogs

Today we had a lecture on Experimental Design and heard Dr. Thomas's Life as a Field Biologist: from Deer to Digital Book in 40 short years. The first lecture seemed a bit like statistics but Dr. Thomas's lecture was very interesting! He studied the Columbian white-tailed deer population along the Columbia River in North America between Washington and Oregon. This particular species in 1974 was placed on the endangered species list due to hunting. As a result the Columbian white-tailed Deer National Wildlife Refuge was established, the US government buying out and forcing 22 families to give up their land. Today there is still alot bitterness and resentment toward this action. It was quite interesting to find out that Dr. Thomas's research found was that there was a 1 to 3 to 4 male to female ratio both for when the deer were hunted and when they were protected. He explained the reason for this was because males spend up to 2 months looking for a mate, losing up to 30% of their body weight during the breeding season. In total Dr. Thomas worked on roughly 3 major projects in his lifetime even living in Costa Rica at one point in his life. He even said that his research team probably discovered the first recorded cases of sight fidelity in Bobolink (a type of bird) territories another research project focusing on this species. Sight fidelity means that a species returns back every year to the same area for their breeding season. However, and this is kind of sad, but unfortunately their publications to Science had to be reedited and as a result another group of scientists beat them. I think it would have been a great achievement to have had his work published and recognized, and have grasped the essence of time in science.

Later on that day we headed to the Yingge Ceramics Museum. This was very fun because each of us got to paint our own stars and they had alot of very beautiful ceramics. Everyone's came out so nice and the staff was even nice enough to provide us with little lights to put into it.

At night we headed to a part of the NTU campus for frog observations. This was pretty amazing and scary! It was very dark in the park so we had to use our flashlights to view and look for different species of frogs but happen also see alot of spiders as well (they had very long and hairy legs!) The professor who was showing us around was very skilled and knowledgeable on this subject and even made catching the frogs look so easy! I learned that most of the frogs were not poisonous to us unless we touched their glands near their eyes. My favorite part of this whole night though was being able to see the Taipei tree frog. This particular species is endemic to Taiwan and happens to be placed on their endangered species list, so I think we were very lucky to have seen this frog. I also met Fan today. He is very nice and adorable. As we were leaving from observing frogs, he crushed a snail (in Taiwan they are really huge) and there was a very loud cracking noise. He felt really bad but at the same time we were laughing. I hope I get to know more about everyone soon :) 

I apologize for the quality of these pictures. My camera batteries died  :( and so I had to use my iphone.