Well, it’s been a very long week of staring at the computer and trying to figure out the small problems in the many, many lines of code that make my program crash each time I try to run it. Pretty tiresome, but when I remember how I narrowly escaped getting committed to a stuck-in -the-lab project working with pipettes and solutions in microliters, I feel quite cheerful. True, even for this project I have spent more time in front of the computer than collecting data on the beach, but at least I have fun and fond memories of seeing the jaguar, dealing with field assistants, enjoying the stormy weather, experiencing a soupy beach, scaring myself………I think I was spoilt by my first project in the Andaman and Nicobar islands - it was a very unusual place with some very unusual people. I was still very green around the ears then about the world, about sea turtles, about all the different aspects of fieldwork, and the islands gave me quite an education. I gathered data, but I also learnt about island travel and how to cross creeks and collect data in a desperate moment, how to search for crabs and mussels in the mosquito-infested, knee-deep mud of the mangroves, and much more…And of course, I met some very unusual people whom I have yet to blog about. Certainly since then, wanting more than data has remained an unwritten objective in my projects…