With a belly full of ants:

The last couple of weeks have been good and working as usual. Life in the community is good and rather quiet and uneventful. Nathan, Lucio and Benjamin (my research team) and me have basically been banging out transects for the last couple of weeks and things have been just plodding along. Day 1 usually starts with travel to the site where we will be doing a transect and getting an interview. Day 2 we cut the transect, collect the ferns and lay the beetle traps. Work usually starts at around 9 or 10 depending how far away the site is and usually finishes at 4. Then its back to the community to put the ferns back in the press after which we usually start prepping for the next day. Day 3 we start at the same time as the previous day and walk the transect looking for frogs and collecting the traps. We finish at about the same time as the previous day and then we wait for a couple of hours and walk the transect during the night. We usually have 1 day of downtime to get everything back on track and then start again. 

The days are long and involve alot of walking. We did 18km the other day. Nathan and my fitness levels are pretty good at the moment and working at 28 degrees and 90 percent humidity is not so much of an issue any more. We are planning to be finished with the 1st community at the end of october and then it is on to the next one. Where we are not entirely sure.

The highlights from the last two weeks have been eating queen leafcutter ants which are really good and very more-ish as well as having to eat large weavil grubs raw. The raw grub i was less excited about. It´s not the taste as much as the texture and the explosion of the wriggleing grub in your mouth when you bite on it. I have to say that I prefer them barbequed. Ali and Sumiko the guys from Glasgow that come and take care of the project in the community are a laugh and we get on very well. 

We were also witness to the community voting for the new constiution, which the current president of ecuador, Rafael Correa, is trying to put through. The whole things was pretty interesting. The voting process was observerd by the military and the police. A couple of rather insalubrious soldiers and two very happy-go-lucky, friendly policemen arrived by helicopter a couple of days prior to the voting. We made friends and charged their mobile phones for them, which I think bought me the right to take some photographs. The voting itself was rather uneventful. During the day people trickled in to cast their vote and nothing happened. The ballots were organised by the community members and the votes were counted too. Overall, the community voted with a clear NO despite the fact the in the end the new constitution was approved. I think whole thing was a shamble, nobody really read the old constitution or the new one, and as a consequences nobody really understood the changes and the whole thing was more a vote of support for the president, rather than an informed one. That my opinion anyway.

Lucio, his wife and eldest son.

Counting the vote

The `Dream Team´