Week 2: Starting Field Work & Exploring: 6/3-6/9
An interesting difference I noticed in my first few weeks in Korea is how common drinking alcohol is. I've had it offered during dinner, at a biology seminar, and have even walked around in the middle of the day while drinking some publicly. I like that the stigma of drinking isn't all that heavy here and nobody is abusing it by being obnoxious or belligerent - it's just casual. Alcohol is easily purchased at most convenient stores and it's dirt cheap. One ubiquitous liquor, called "Soju" can be purchased in a green 500 mL bottle and is comparable to vodka but is only about 20% alcohol. Our local convenient store down the road sells it for about $2 a bottle (about the same amount of alcohol in 6 beers...). This stuff sneaks up on you; I learned this first hand!! Anyways..more about what I'm studying over here...haha
After being in Korea for a little over a week, it was finally time to start working on the research we came here for. Up until this point the details about what we were actually doing were vague and so I had been eagerly awaiting this day. The researchers we are working with come from a notable University in downtown Seoul, EWHA Womans University. The school itself is probably 95% women, no complaints here.
After being in Korea for a little over a week, it was finally time to start working on the research we came here for. Up until this point the details about what we were actually doing were vague and so I had been eagerly awaiting this day. The researchers we are working with come from a notable University in downtown Seoul, EWHA Womans University. The school itself is probably 95% women, no complaints here.
Led by Dr. Yikweon Jang, the "frog team" at this University is hosting us here to help them with one of their ongoing projects with tree frogs that live in Korea. Our work this summer in a nutshell is attempting to track the whereabouts of these little green dudes as they make the voyage from their rice paddy breeding grounds to their daytime homes in the nearby forest.
The methods of doing so include rigorous and dirty field work - that's where we come in. Our jobs are to survey a selection of 30 rice paddies (where they breed) near our Paju home as well as a forested region (where they live) nearby in efforts of finding them. Here's the kicker: the frogs are active during the hours of 8pm-4am, so that's when most of the field research will take place! Who needs to sleep, right? So, how exactly do we find these frogs? That's a great question, I was wondering the same thing. |
Basically, there are two ways we are looking for these frogs. The first way is by directly searching both the rice paddies and forest for them. We go out at night equipped with head-flashlights that allow us to see the frogs on the ground or in the trees. The second method is one they borrowed from a previous study. In the forest, they scattered these PVC pipe-houses they made for the frogs to live in. The pipes are placed on various trees and the goal is to make searching for the frogs easier by providing them with these artificial houses that we check periodically.
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Alright so, we know how to look for them...but what about when we spot one, what next? 5 STEPS:
1. FIND A FROG 2. CAPTURE FROG
1. FIND A FROG 2. CAPTURE FROG
3. ID & MEASURE FROG 4. TAKE PICTURE OF FROG
5. SAY GOODBYE & RELEASE FROG
That's basically it, pretty simple. Oh yeah but there are raging swarms of insects flying around your headlamp and blood-thirsty mosquitoes that bombard you throughout the night. The frogs are pretty cute though so they even each other out. Anyways, the goal here is to essentially capture and identify them. It was fairly easy to catch them in the rice paddies - being significantly more open and less dense in vegetation than the forest. The fact that the males croak almost all night in the paddies makes finding them significantly easier. Also since they rely on their camouflage as a primary defense against predators, you can get right on top of them before they decide to hop away. Our first night I caught nearly 100 frogs, I'm pretty sure that's my new record...ha
When we collect the frogs we are recording a few different things such as where they're found and their length (see excel spreadsheet below). We also took pictures of each frog - this is so we could identify individuals. Like fingerprints in humans, each frog has unique patterns on both the top and sides of the body. These patterns would be used to identify the same frog each time it's captured. One of our jobs is to look at each of these pictures and try to match them to other pictures taken on different nights, using the unique patterns of each frog. Between organizing all of this data and field work...we have our work cut out for us...this is definitely not a vacation in Korea...like the brochure said!!
Anyways, let's get away from the research part of this trip! So after spending a few tough days doing field work and organizing boatloads of data, we thought we should explore some more during the weekend. Of course none of us guys planned any of this and also being "experts" on public transportation already, we decide to attempt to get to the islands west of our home one day by "winging it". Long story short the bus we thought we were suppose to take took us to the middle of nowhere and we ended up walking back to civilization. We've been lucky so far with most people we encounter in the city speaking decent English (most of the students/advisors speak fluent) but out here you're on your own, you get a real taste of the language boundary! Instead of going to the beach like planned that day, we spent the majority of our time riding the buses, subways, and walking in circles :). Luckily for us most public transit is open until 1 AM; we got home around midnight. It was not a day wasted though!! I learned that if you A. don't know how to read Korean and/or B. don't know which bus to take, you will most likely NOT make it to wherever you want to go! haha
On our next outting, we planned it a little better! We walked to a premium outlet mall in Paju that is close to our place; and yeah we actually made it WOO! For an "outlet mall" this place was sky high on prices, however most of the shops there were higher end anyways so I'm not sure what I was expecting. It was an open mall with all sorts of name-brand companies like Nike and Columbia Sports Wear but also many "premium" stores like Louis Vutton and other unpronounceable fashion designers. One aspect of shopping in Korea that annoys the heck out of me is the employees in many shops walk around the store and yell. They are yelling something in Korean so I have no idea what they're saying but even if I did it would be annoying haha. Another cultural aspect I noticed while at the mall is what couples do over here. It's VERY touchy-feely over here and you know when two people are dating. It's not uncommon either for the two to be matching shoes, hats, or their entire wardrobe - haha I've seen it a few times I think it's kind of goofy. Speaking of shoes. Koreans know cool shoes. Everyone has at least one pair of flashy shoes over here it seems, it's awesome! Most of the elderly people are even rockin' some sweet bright shoes, one old lady I saw on the subway had bright orange shoes with purple laces. I plan on buying a few pairs because they're really cheap too depending on where you go - I actually bought a sweet pair for 25$ from this nice old man, I'll throw up a picture on the next blog. Fashion in general seems to be a big deal. So many clothing shops, so many. One cool difference I've noticed is that each store is unique and has their own style of clothes - hard to find duplicates of some of this stuff. In America I feel many stores sell similar if not the same clothing in all their stores so finding clothes nobody has is not easy. I like this about Korean clothing stores.
We are working with some cool people at this University. The professor is an awesome guy and seems to enjoy that we are there helping. The students are all nice and we have a few regulars that we've been working with since day 1. Two graduate students: Jun-Young and Mi-Yeon are our two leaders of the project we're working on. Eu-Jin and Ye-Eun are two undergraduate students who are working on this project regularly as well. As you probably can tell, their names are not like American style names and yes it was/still is tough to get them right but we're trying! All of these girls can speak pretty good English so it's made the communication aspect a lot less difficult and we can focus more on the tasks and less on trying to understand what each other is saying. We recently had a group lab meeting about the research being done and decided to make some changes to the methods to hopefully get better results. After doing some field work today, we went to have dinner at an authentic Korean restaurant. This was a new experience for me...we sat on these square mats on the floor at a table that was probably no more than a foot off the ground! My dinner swam next to me in a fish tank, we were having catfish soup...or something along those lines?? I watched the owner grab 4-5 catfish with a net and about 25 minutes later they were in a big pot with other ingredients ha! My first ladle of soup I was the lucky one to grab two catfish heads, yum..! My dinner was literally staring at me. Not a huge fan of the meal but the experience was worth it. The food here is just way different from back home it's fascinating to me. Ending on a fun note, there has been a clan of cats roaming around our house since day one - we have been luring them into our house with bowls of milk and other treats haha. But today, we found they have kittens!