Written by Felipe Arcos Valencia Nov 16th 2020.
My story with BioSmart and the CIAT team began with a phone call from my tutor, who told me that they required someone who knew about arthropods in the Amazon region to support in the entomology fieldwork and taxonomic identifications. They told me that I would work with foreign people with little knowledge of the Spanish language, and knowing that they had me in mind for support in this project I was filled with excitement and I accepted without hesitation.
The day came and I met the whole team in a small meeting, after going through the schedule of the activities, I interacted with Mike Garratt (nice guy), we exchanged a few words in my level of English but we managed to understand each other. We talked about the methodologies that we would use and about the arthropod orders of interest for the project (Spiders and Flies), while we made a tour around Florencia looking for the material that we needed to start this phase of the BioSmart project, finally we made an appointment for the next day to start the fieldwork.
The fieldwork was not very difficult, despite that there were very hot days with a lot of sun and long walks, but finally we achieved the objective. Then, I returned to Florencia and immediately started work on the specimens collected in the first week, to be able to join Luis Miguel and Lois (the LULO team) in the field. We had fun together and developed a good camaraderie until the last day in the field and until the last day of the CIAT team’s visit to Florencia.
After almost a month of work, the pandemic began and lockdown measures were imposed throughout the country because of the situation due to SARS-COVID 19, and our work went into recess while the situation returned to normality. Finally, with the measure of working from home, we opted to bring specimens and stereoscopes to our home so to be able to carry out the work, fulfilling the objective by finding a large number of very beautiful and very interesting critters.
