Having a field day

Greetings from beautiful Manhattan Beach!

Unfortunately, it's not as glamorous as the name would imply.  Instead of a beautiful, scenic beach with palm trees gently wafting in a perfect first-day-of-summer breeze, I got a sweltering downtown parking lot surrounded by a sea of asphalt.

Sure it was hot and a long drive through hours of LA traffic, but I'm not complaining; it got me out of my dark little hole and I got to experience the sun on my face and shoulders for several hours, instead of minutes as I walked from the lab to the neighboring building (or vice versa).

Today's expedition was spent hunting down an elusive insect that I'll be testing in August.  Along with a couple techs from the lab, I was able to gather up several hundred adult insects from a tree in the middle of a strip mall (Urban Entomology: We Have Exotic Destinations!) that I can now mate in a controlled environment so that I have a large population to utilize once my experiments begin.

I really do love fieldwork.  I am never as satisfied as when I've spent the whole day outdoors doing research, sweating, and getting sunburned.  All in all, it was a good day, and we were able to find exactly what we were looking for.  Something I'm still getting used to, though, is the public interaction.  Since we were working in a strip mall right outside one of the more popular shops, we had plenty of curious patrons stop and ask why we were shoving ladders into a planter full of waist-high lavender, climbing into the tree and shaking things off the branches into small buckets.  Thankfully, one of my coworkers is far more social than I am, so she was able to field a majority of the questions while I just stayed in the back and continued to beat on the tree with my stick.

There was one thing that perplexed me, though (and this is not the first or even second time this has happened): most of the people that stopped to ask what we were doing had no idea what my coworker was talking about (this is not the perplexing part, FYI), but they all listened politely, since they did ask, and then every one of them nodded and said, sincerely, "Wow, thanks for doing what you do." (This was the perplexing part.)  Not to bee (too) cynical, but this is really never the reaction I expect.  Honestly, I would think reactions like "Oh, interesting." or "That's cool." or "Huh..." or even a blank stare would be more common.  But it seems like, without fail, people seem to pick up on the fact that this is important research, even if they don't understand exactly what it is.  I mean, I know I'm doing important work, I guess I just don't really expect other people to understand it's important, too.

Then, there are the people that try to pass off as knowing exactly what you're talking about (I'm looking at you, fast-food-server-lady we met at lunch).  And they're just funny.

Pro tip: instead of acting like you're super smart (like looking at the cage with the clear top and saying, smugly, "Those are plants, aren't they?  I studied those when I went to college.") admit you're not entirely sure on the topic, but you're interested and want to know more.  Otherwise you just end up looking like an idiot to those people who actually do know what they're talking about.  And then they laugh all the way home and write a blog about it.

And I think I'll leave it there for today; I've plants to tend and bugs to mate now that I'm back in my little hole.  Maybe I'll see daylight again someday...