David Reznick Comes!

Alright, so I fell a little behind so here is catching up!

When I returned from Tobago, Dr. David Reznick, the founder of this project and Guppy expert extraordinaire was waiting for us. He has been studying guppies in Trinidad since the 70’s and thinks about nothing else. He is a small wiry man in his early 60s but still has a kick in his step, leading us down the forest trails with the determination of a

He stayed in one of the boy’s bunkrooms and would help chop when we were cooking. He only wore old t-shirts with frogs, snakes or fish on them and drank espresso like it was his job. When he spoke he would use only the biggest words possible, and in the most scientific way possible. It has been rumored that he reads his 2 and 4-year-old daughters Darwin’s the origin of species as a bed time story.

He would spend literally 6 hours straight in our fish lab staring into the tanks of guppies, moving them around, treating them for fungus and just watching. When you would ask him what he was doing he would go on about the types of fungus and their different host organisms and life cycles, using only scientific names of course. He would often repeat these long lectures so after a few times through I could kind of understand what he was saying.

Although we technically had another week of break we where quickly enlisted to help in a number of projects. Now like most great minds in his field, he is very disorganized, flaky, and unfocused; so the few tasks that he wanted to accomplish managed to drag out for the rest of the off time and into our next recap.

That being said it was very interesting to spend some time with the man behind the whole program. I feel like I learned a lot about what we are actually doing down here: the projects that have come before and those to come and how our work fits into the bigger picture. I also have a better understanding of the research side of academia that we don’t see at the Claremont and how it changes the profession.

Some highlights: fishing for predatory fish that eat guppies and learning how to ID them, going out at night and catching frogs, and having one of his dry, dry jokes (that only came out after a couple days) go straight over everybody’s head…