I got up at around 9:30 after going to bed a 10:00 and I STILL felt tired. I hope I'm not getting sick. Anywho, I met Jose at 10. We got all of our stuff together and went to Jaime’s house. Jaime is the brother of Joel (one of our guides the first time we came to Costa Rica as tourists) and cultivates medicinal plants. It was incredible. I was expecting a garden of sorts with rows and labels. Boy, was I wrong. The plants were just growing in the ground everywhere. To an untrained eye it would have looked like an overgrown pasture, but between Jaime and Joel they were able to identify almost every plant. It was incredible! Anywho we collected 14 plants. I think that might be our record. In total we have 46 out of the 60 that I need.
After walking around in the heat with pants and boots on we came back the lab and tried to straighten out the huge mess that I had made from the labels… I am labeling each of the plants with their number from my list and then with an “m” or an “r” depending on if they are medicinal or random. So that was all fine and dandy until I decided I would erase the plants from the list that I wasn’t going to be able to collect. Such a mistake. By doing this, I moved every plant up one number. Plus, some plants appeared on both lists, and oy vey what a disaster. But we figured it all and then went and ate lunch. (beans and rice again, surprise surprise).
Then I went to the cabin and worked on my lab notebook, took a nap, and updated my plant list until it was time for dinner. After dinner I worked until about 2am in the lab putting the plants that we collected that day in solution. It was quite a productive day.
O, and my brine shrimp finally survived!!!!!!!! I believe that it was the salt. They really need aquarium salt, not just plain NaCl. So I have some aquarium salt from the fish guy, and hopefully next time that they go into San Jose they can find me some…
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