December 2005

Ants in my pants

I can't believe it is already December.

I have been in Sri Lanka one full year!

One more to go and then i have to slog through putting all this data into some sort of cohesive piece of writing. Not looking forward to it.

So what have i done this year... made some new friends, saw some old friends, made sure my sister got married and got used to living at home with the parents. Oh and collected some ants, as well.

Speaking of which i managed to meet a whole bunch of fellow ant people at a workshop and conference in Malaysia two weeks ago. It was great! Re-affirmed my affinity for myrmecologists. And i apologise if i get a bit geeky for a minute but I sure do enjoy talking about ants, observing ants, collecting ants and learning about ants and what better people to do it with than with fellow ant enthusiasts.

This fact was made apparent one day at the field station. As most of us were confident field workers we were often off on walks collecting ant and enjoying the forest in general. Some would bring back live specimens and we would oggle and goggle and ask about what was known, sometimes we would compare our catches for the day and make mental notes for finding the species the next day. One afternoon a giant gecko was spotted on one of the buildings and by giant i mean it was the length from my elbow to my fingers (see above, it was behind a whiteboard) .

In the past, I have often been outnumbered by vertebrate enthusiasts; they run in with their cameras, someone inevitably tries to catch it and measures something about it and there is an all around excitement at finding a large animal in our midsts. With my fellow myrmecologists, we did the observing and photo taking but after about five minutes everyone was happy with their photos and that was it. We went back to our ants. I was indeed surprised there were no crocodile dundees amongst us being so used to herpetologists gung-honess in catching their subjects of interest.

I guess you pick your subjects and we all had picked ours.

And i really do like ants.