Some of you might remember my Panama posts from a few weeks ago (if you do, thanks for reading my blog!). One of those posts focused on my work in Bocas del Toro, which I've been daydreaming about ever since the temperature dropped in State College. I went to Bocas to collect conch shells and bring them back to PSU so I could attempt to extract DNA from them for my dissertation work.
But all fieldwork has unexpected issues. Mine was odor. For some reason it didn't occur to me that shells that had been hanging out underwater would be hosting algae and barnacles that would start to reek as it decomposed. I also evicted a few snails while I was at Bocas, but some slime and fleshy bits remained... And I brought everything back in my checked luggage. |
Needless to say, even though all of the shells were at least quadruple-bagged, all of my clothes went into the wash as soon as I got home and the snails needed to be stored in my garage until I was ready to work with them. I couldn't inflict this kind of stench on the lovely people in the Anthropology building where I work.