My two-inch Frankenstein

Week 7, Day Two

It fell three feet to the ground. Again. The tail wriggled and momentarily stopped me from bending down to pick it up.

It was supposed to be dead.

I gave it another minute, but the tadpole lay lifeless in a tiny pool of water on the floor. My heart sank all over again and I picked it up gingerly. I scooped it up on the foil and lay it stomach-down on my palm once again. The beady black eyes were always motionless against the equally black, shiny body. But the nostrils don't flare and no suction on the ventral surface, the tailspin a far cry. I rubbed the pad of my forefinger against the bulgy part of its body, the slimy surface soft, pudgy. Carefully. As if it were still alive.

Less than two months ago, they were barely a centimeter in length. You could just make out the pin-sized head and wriggly tail. Three weeks ago, they'd all grown to more than twice that length, lateral bulk now added. A week ago, they were five to seven times that length; eyes, nostrils and suction cup-like mouths obvious. I got curious, and after handling them during wadi sampling, tank transfers and set-up construction, I got accustomed to the wriggling on my palm. So I scooped one up from the storage tank to have a closer look. I nabbed a rather feisty one because he jumped right off my palm onto the floor over three feet down. Oops. Took me long enough to find something flat yet thin enough to slide between its belly and the floor and once back on my palm, it wriggled and then curled into a jet black oval, motionless. A hint of moisture from the spray bottle, and it sprang back to life wriggling in the newly deepened pool. The suction began as it swam from crevice to crevice in my cupped hand. I opened my palm wide, straight, and then watched the eyes, the cheeks underneath bloating and sinking quickly with gulps of air. I lowered my finger and barely touched the surface. Satisfied, but more wary of the stress that may have been invoked with its high jump, I lifted my eyes off my palm, hunting for a beaker in which to deposit the creature.

I grabbed one and looked down, and there was no movement. No suction, no makeshift cheeks. Oh god.

I touch the sensitive tail hoping for a reaction. Nothing. I touch the head, spray some water and dunk it into the beaker, sitting still for a minute. Nothing. Nothing. I lift it out of the beaker and onto my palm, remembering the two dead tadpoles from the wadi samples that had to be dunked into the drain. I can't throw this creature there. I killed a tadpole. I killed the tadpole.

I must have killed a dozen insects every few weeks unknowingly. This one dead tadpole is making me more miserable than all those dead insects in two decades. Since I couldn't bare the dark, smelly burial ground, I dunk it into the storage tank instead, half hoping it springs back to life. Nada.

I follow it as it sinks to the bottom like a wisp of snow, my face wrinkled.

Two minutes later it joins the other milling tadpoles.

Grey checkered American Eagle ballet flats

(for SATURDAY, March 20)

Week 7, Day One

There's a part of the Muscat landscape we don't see much of. Industry. With all this open sandy land to use, the concrete maze grows horizontally here. And the mills get built far, far away. But on the impromptu trip to a new wadi, we take the Nizwa freeway from Al-Khoud towards the township of Sa'al. And I discover one of Muscat's industrial pastures on the way. Lone, white and steel structures rising from the sand, seemingly lost amongst the many orange mountains.

Sa'al is built near an oasis under the foot of a comparatively large mountain, the summit gleaming, sharp, sun-thrashed. The drive ends halfway up a dirt path and we get out into the crazy afternoon sun. It is deathly silent. There are no date palms in sight, no towering hills for shade. The fifteen-minute walk to the wadi is traumatic when you're not dressed for the occasion. My grey checkered American Eagle ballet flats have long run their course, but I had no other alternative on this impromptu trip up to the wadi. So I walk past the stinging needles of the desert plants that are hoping to land their seeds near the vernal pools by latching onto the thin, really thin, spun cotton on my feet.

The elephant grey rocks housing the intermittent pools of water run like frozen waves along the entire length of the stream. Somewhere beneath all those hard rocks must lie tiny gullets linking the pools. Red dragonflies buzz between pools, sampling their prey. Fish and metamorphosing tadpoles dart between pebbles, not much silt here anyhow. The pools are relatively transparent. We hunt for pools housing newly-spawned tadpoles. The terrain is death sentence to my cute ballet flats, and I'm afraid by the time I'm done with this little trip, my beloved American Eagles will topple into their graves. I don't care if they die bravely. I want them to be preserved.

The combination of the silence and the heat is shockingly calming. But it's still March. The boiling, blistering heat is yet to come. A goat bleats in the distance. But it's hard to see where, what with all the jutting mounds of grey blocking the only view spared by the blinding sun. I get back to the tadpoles and I hear it bleat again. I can't resist cocking my head up to look again. I get my fill of tadpoles, skip from rock to rock, and collect more stinging needles on the way back to the car.

My legs will be crying tonight.

Eureka! and other romanticisms in research

Week 6, Day Two

Research is four parts planning, two parts reading, one part experiment, two parts re-planning, and one part analysis.

The task at hand is understanding stress physiology in individual tadpoles exposed to predators. The actual experiment would be, at maximum, a 3-4 day vigil on the behaviour and metabolic activity of tadpoles exposed to chemical cues from predators. Prep time: four weeks. It's like cooking butter chicken. The chicken is doused in two marinades with dozens of ingredients and kept for over four hours, but spends less than thirty minutes on the flame. The raw chicken takes its time to soak in the melted butter, oil, yogurt, lemon and spices. It's the same with most Indian meat dishes. Hours go into preparing it for the short quick assault of hot oil.

In India, high schools spend no time, none at all, in preparing future research enthusiasts for a large chunk of their work life: preparation. Lab classes- in rare cases, field work-is about telling the students what they're supposed to be looking out for, and then showing it to them. There are those concentric layers in cross-sections of roots and stems of every imaginable plant; the ink blue colour after adding iodine on the succulent leaf filled with starch; the eight and eight legs only on the spider.

Science education is supposed to inculcate the joy of discovery. That means I should not be told how to place my transects in a four acre-field filled with patches of daisies whose numbers I need to estimate within a day or two. Or that I am going to find a larger number of metamorphosing tadpoles in the hot, exposed waters of a shallow pool rather than the deeper, clearer, cooler, possibly fish-infested ones. Or that there are four parts of a flower, because yes, I see the purple petals, the green sepals below them, the tall blonde stems with the creased bulbs at the ends, and the singular pale green structure with the bulbous bottom and the sticky head. I teach a young Omani girl in a school following the IGCSE curriculum, where it took them three months to teach basic ecology. But she can answer that transect question better than most freshmen high schoolers her age. They took three months to teach her about the dynamics of eating and being eaten, but they developed independent thinking. A component most developing nations lack in their school curriculum. By the time you work hard and get used to doing well by reading and regurgitation, developing critical thinking becomes harder than steering a bull by its horns.

Science is an extension of logic. Newton got curious about the falling apple. Steam engines were conceptualized on steam pots. Sure, it took longer then, and time is...well, everything, including money. But good science is more than in-depth information. It's curiosity and efficient, logical search for reason. And we're in dire need of those virtues in scientists. I'd rather schools spend some time initiating good search and critical thinking habits in students. There's always time for competition and mass accumulation of information. Even Einstein said that it wasn't that one needed to know everything, just where to find it. Knowledge is everywhere. I wish I could say the same for curiosity.

So anyway, after a weekend of scanning 1711 Google Scholar search results, I have accumulated 741 pages of literature related to my experiment. The idea is to read all of that in time for the piece de resistance a month from now.

First up: 48 pages on Amphibian respiration and olfaction and their relationships: from Robert Townson (1794) to present.

Gum Boots

Week 6, Day One

This land is merciless. Hot, parched. It's a wonder so many organisms survive here. Every nook and cranny with a hint of moisture is swept up by some amphibian, fish or insect. In a thirsty land, fresh water comes only from above, down the fortresses of fiery rock, collecting in vernal pools on flimsy floors of cobblestone and sand. And there are plenty of takers.

Hot red dragonflies buzz loudly in the silence of an uninhabited wadi. Schools of little black fish scatter with the eddies from my gum boots in their living space. A successful steer from the bright hot sunlight under an ample boater allows focus on the pint-sized leaping Arabian toads. They don't seem to like the water too much. Opportunists. Hard to imagine that in some places, they're seriously endangered. Near the mouth of the wadi are small stagnant pools abounding in metamorphosing tadpoles and more leaping toads. I spot some unusually large fish in the deep ends of the otherwise clear, shallow waters. Invasive cichlids, Tilapia, from Africa, introduced as aquarium fish and for aquaculture (Tilapia is a common food choice), that managed to escape and conquer the few fresh water sources in Oman.

I look down at my gum boots. There's small chance of overflow from the wadi waters, so I inch closer to the deep end in my search for bacterial mat-infested stones. But there's been some heavy rain six weeks ago, and the disturbance from construction nearby for the development springing up as a by-product of the region's first botanical garden makes it impossible to find viable samples for the experiment. We return empty-handed.

On the rocky drive back, the landscape looks like one of islands of hard grey rock in shallow, almost-opaque seas, strawy green sprouting from the unexposed nooks between rocks. In between the sounds of the wheels over the pebble-laden ground and the construction trucks, there's the cawing of a few egrets. The bright red-orange dragonflies are clearly visible on their bare flat rock perches, and the heat amasses through the windows despite the air-conditioning in the four-wheel. I become conscious of my damp feet.

Damn gum boots are always leaky.

Transparent Accounting

Week 5, Day One

Sometimes we study so much as students of science, and work so much on our own in the initial (study) stages of our career that we tend to forget about scientists being human, subjective too.

Research is 60% individual work, and 40% collective effort, if not downright half and half. It is naivety to assume otherwise. This morning, I was faced with a little situation that had me wishing that research was just about identifying a question, generating a possible answer, collecting resources and designing experiments to clarify the accuracy of the answer. Period.

I sometimes find it hard to explain to my parents that thesis-based graduate degrees are just like a regular job. Only harder, longer hours with menial pay, and more ambiguous. For instance, you get a whiff of the tussle between individual interests whether or not you're the sole investigator, because there are vested interests. In most schools, particularly ones with minor budgets, grants are poured into a particular research team with expectations. Suffice to say that professors in turn would expect work of a certain quality to come out of their research teams, so you're walking on eggshells until you're sure what they want.

If there was ever a time I understood why Waterloo showcased a joint Bachelors in Accounting and Biology, it is now. Have you ever seen a grant application?? They have courses to explain how to go about that work! I'm certain it tops the list of the most tedious work done by researchers. But accounting classes might be beneficial in more ways than that, I think. Getting the prices of the glassware and chemicals down to the T is just log-keeping. Some relatively subjective accounting requires gauging interpersonal interactions, expectations. Even a simple Masters thesis is a major collective effort. The professor and department invest their resources in you, and it's a tough call between the process that had proven results and the other- always the more cooler, riskier- one you've been dying to test for hope of a mild eureka moment. Plus there are the undergraduates and technicians you invest in yourself. Clarity and honesty will go a long way in supporting your niche in that web.

In my experience, professors in North America are fantastically accustomed to the whole research process, glitches et al. You're treated like the adult you are, no overt displays of reverence necessary. That attitude helps if you're foolhardy, or impatient, or otherwise, since the responsibility for failure-like success- rests on your shoulders. Plus, there are very few professors who'll shoot down everything you think of, or do. So don't worry about sounding like someone lacking knowledge, or worse, downright foolish. Through all the fresh- sometimes unpleasant- reality-checks I get a dose of, I still maintain that science is rooted in curiosity. So long as curious George isn't latching onto broken vines. Do your background research before any discussions. Do it regularly, do it well. At the outset, be clear about the domains of the project. Be practical in your definitions, and always leave room for more. Don't binge, don't spread yourself too thin. Better may be less, but more is certainly not better, and that is the distinction between work that gets published and work that doesn't.

This clarity is doubly crucial when defining the roles of advisor and student investigator, and the expectations both have of each other. There's bound to be compromise by both, but never let the equation tip over. For either side. We're twenty-plus year-olds by the time we get to this stage, so gauging unvoiced issues is a skill I'd assume we've acquired. If there's something substantial not out in the open, get it out asap, whether it's something you want, or the other person. If it's significant to one, it's significant to both. Everyone is making a commitment, so you're just as much responsible as you are rightful. But like every right, you've got to know when the rope's stretched too far, when you're maxed out in terms of compromise. And be conscious of how much you're pulling as well.

Lack of clarity can be an awful situation, especially since time is an investment on which you don't get returns. I've had to move bases myself after this morning, so no more molecular work. Tomorrow I start a new project with tadpoles and dragonflies. On the bright side, there's more pictures! And I'm going to try and lasso one of the flying critters like my dad often did, and report my results on this blog, hopefully shielded from the animal police.

P.S.: Just in case there is a PETA enthusiast around, I'm all for ethics on this issue. Honestly, I'm better with dogs than babies!