I was nervous to meet the man internationally recognized for curing an entire island of the devastating fungal disease I'm studying, but when he knocked on my door, there was nothing else to do but invite him for a seat at the table.
I was a bit nervous this past week and a half to finally sit down and converse with Dr. Jaime Bosch, the researcher from Spain who sanitized the island of Mallorca and cured it from the chytrid fungus. But after not knowing where to meet him and losing wifi to a torrential storm, he knocked on my door and I invited him in to sit at the table. He told me about the complexities of chytrid and the specificity of the site he disinfected (mentioning I should visit when I go) and about some new studies they’re working on with a new anti fungal agent that’s very promising. It was wild to have a world renowned herpetologist literally at my dining room table and to be conversing with him fully in Spanish about complex research and the social issues surrounding it, such as the lack of acknowledgement by the majority of people, but mainly a ton of researchers looking at isolates of chytrid and not developing field-based mitigation that could actually save global amphibian populations. It was an incredibly enlightening talk, that maybe I just enjoyed so much because understanding science in Spanish makes me feel particularly smart, but he mentioned some field work he would be doing this and next month in Panamá and casually invited me to join them at some point!
It was quite random: as the sun set, he was talking and I couldn’t really see him anymore sitting only a few feet apart. Not being able to read his lips made the Spanish a bit harder to understand, but I kept up well enough. Eventually I mentioned the lights and not wanting to keep him too long, so we made our way downstairs and flipped all the breakers. It felt silly but it was fun and more like the casual kind of relationship building that I hope for in this experience. I find it wonderful that I’m not only interacting with older people who are experts in the field telling me about their research experience in the past tense, rather these are middle-aged people who are actively looking for solutions and conducting field work with enough experience to know what’s realistic and what the future may hold, and they’re only about twice my age so I think they view me as the responsible next generation taking on their work. There’s an amazingly respectful culture among herpetologists of willingness to answer questions and invitations to see and partake in field work which is astonishing to me as somebody just entering this field. I think I’m going to have my hands satisfyingly full in Spain.
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