(sorry for the third separate response) Cchu518 and db both asked about where I was and what I was doing. I was working in Soberania National Park, mostly on pipeline road (this is a famous birding destination if anyone is familiar with it; gorgeous birds abounded). Pipeline road was constructed by the US army during the Canal Zone days to protect an oil pipeline they were planning to install, which never actually happened. These days it's a really rutted thin muddy track that cuts about 10 miles into the woods until it just ends (sort of slowly fades out the deeper you go). My housing was in Gamboa, a really small town that is about half the way up the canal and lies on its banks. It is the headquarters of the dredging division of the Canal Authority. I'm in the first semester of my second year of working on my PhD so I don't have a dissertation project totally nailed down, but more generally I'm a behavioral ecologist (my official program title is just a combination of Animal Behavior and Evolution) who works with the majestic myrmicines (ants). I'm interested both in nutritional and cognitive ecology, and both in Panama and now in the lab I've been working on a project that investigate foraging behaviors and nutritional regulation, another that studies how certain types of learning are adaptive, and have also started a few pilot studies looking at the links between the two (how foraging behavior of a species is related to learning capabilities). I thought about mentioning some of this in the original post but thought it might be a little boring, thanks for expressing interest!
