A School of Researchers - Feb 2014

A professor from Oxford. A researcher with the NSF. A Barcelona native in the employ of France's national science institute. Principal investigators from California and Colorado, Canada and Scotland. What do they all have in common? The Trinidadian guppy. This week, the Guppy house is crawling with giants of evolutionary ecology, principal players gathered here to sharpen the cutting edge of science. Some of the players are mathematicians, pure theorists rousted from dusty chambers to swap chinos for Chacos. Others are tropical field ecologists at heart, more comfortable in technical fiber pants and holey t-shirts than anything else. These researchers have schooled here together, for the guppies, the data, and each other.

Gathered on porches and patios and living rooms, this team of individuals, gathered from their home countries and labs, collaborate here over Stag beer and bug bites, rocketing forward the pace of progress of their collective work beyond the potential of endless strings of email threads. For the interns and students working here, it's actually a lot of fun. The PIs are a raucous group of friends, welcoming to newcomers to the field and, many of them professors at heart and unable to turn off the tap, happy to talk and to teach.

As we Guppsters have teamed up to play host, they have teamed up to be excellent guests. We've been assisting and facilitating everything from being field hands to scrounging up enough chairs, explaining the inner workings of the apparently (but not actually) broken laundry machine, doing airport runs at ungodly hours and cooking up huge Trini dinners. They've been involving us in their projects and discussions, about matters of import and of fun, buying cases of beer and huge runs of groceries, taking a genuine interest in us, our work, and aspirations, as well as offering nightly seminars and discussions on basically anything we've shown an interest in. These evenings talks, after long days of working and lounging, after dinner and fueled by black tea and coffee, are delivered to an audience of professors and students. The speaker will scarcely get through a slide before another professor will pose some difficulty, rocketing off a discussion of topics in evolutionary ecology. For our part, some of it is instructive, much of it is directly about the research we are conducting here, and some of it is ringside seats to the amicable spear throwing of dissenting opinions in the thick of the field.

Before the first of these talks, we volunteered to cook dinner. The PIs, gathered around laptops and deep in discussion, gladly accepted. We convened in the kitchen and hashed out a plan: Tobago style bake (a yeasted fried bread), cold veggie pasta salad, and geera chicken, a traditional Trini dish we were schooled in making by our bush mechanic. 

Cooking geera chicken begins outdoors, with a cutlass, raw chicken, and a cutting block. After the bird has been hacked up, leaving spatter worthy of crime series TV, the chicken is brought inside and rinsed off. Cooking begins with sugar, heated until it browns and bubbles but stopped just before it blackens. Into the huge wok goes cooking oil, minced garlic, minced onion, salt, pepper, and "peppa," in this case "Gangsta peppa," which is what LA, our friend and supplier at the market, calls Scotch bonnet. And roasted geera, plenty of geera. It's not yet clear to me if there is a difference between geera and cumin other than semantics and packaging. The spices cook together and the oil becomes hot and rich, then in goes the bird. The chicken is cooked until the liquid cooks off and the seasoning begins to stick and blacken on the outsides of the cubes, and the geera chicken is done.

All six of us are in and out of the kitchen and garden, pulling the cooking herbs we know from the ground, chopping and sautéing and grabbing each other beers, hosing down the fresh produce and paring off thick skins, and generally horsing around. Aromas begin to float through the house and out into the afternoon - everyone always knows when any house in T- V- is cooking for a party.

It's about this time that we pull the Tania root off the gas range fire, the pan chock full of cooked root vegetable pulled not hours before from our garden and cooked with garlic, onion, olive oil, tossed with sliced carrots, ready to cool and go into the pasta salad. We've been sampling off each other's cutting boards and out of bowls for two hours now, and everyone is eager to try the cooked Tania. We chow down on a cube or three, nodding to each other. It's delicious, similar to a potato in texture but full of rich flavor.

"I feel like I just swallowed fiberglass," K- says calmly, checking his watch like the consummate ER professional he is back home.

This is followed by some good natured ribbing but we are concerned that K- might be having an allergic reaction. I am slightly worried we've cooked something which is not actually food, and experimentally pop a few more pieces in my mouth. Then I say something impolite, and grab the glass of amber liquid on the counter, which turns out to be K-‘s Jack Daniels on the rocks. This is not sufficient to remove the feeling of splinters of glass in my throat, and I down the rest of my Stag. This still does not alleviate the feeling, so I find the bottle of Jack in the freezer and reappropriate K-'s ice. Feeling somewhat better, and mildly intoxicated, I take the sautée pan. A- and J- are discussing if we cooked it wrong. K- is still checking his watch at calm intervals. I unceremoniously dump the contents of the pan into the trash.

There is a consensus that poisoning all of the PIs might be an excellent way to terminate our funding. I cook up another batch of sliced carrots quick as a flash and cool them in the freezer. J- finishes turning out layers of bake, and the geera chicken is done to a turn. Everyone feasts, eating and drinking and making merry on the porch, swapping stories, catching up, showing off the new and fun. F- brings out her iPad with the newest set of photos from camera traps set in the jungle north of us, which instigates actual jumping up and down from a collaborator who wants to do a study on the ocelots, to determine if the Trini cat is different than the mainland species.

After everyone has feasted and drunk, it's time to adjourn to the common room, just inside from the porch (in fact, a sleepier member of the party actually stays out to watch the talk from the hammock), and the lecture series begins.