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Happy World Tapir Day!

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Image 1.1 - Tapir-themed jungle cake The 27th of July is world tapir day. Last year I became aware of this event through a tapir-obsessed friend of mine, Michael Natt (who's birthday it also happens to be – hippy barfday !). Now that I am living in a place tapirs are native to, I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate this day here at the Timburi Cocha research station with a tapir-themed jungle cake ( Image 1.1 ) and to dedicate these bizarre mammals a blogpost. Image 1.2 - Quick world tapir card to celebrate the occasion. © X O'Reilly
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Twelve and a half months in Ecuador

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· 00:20 GMT-5, 2nd July 2012 -  Arrived in Ecuador's capital, Quito, when the airport was still smack bang in the middle of the city. · 18:55 GMT-5, 22nd July 2013 -  Watched the sparkling night lights that sprawl over Quito's mountainous façade shrink beneath the plane that took me from the equator. In an attempt to summarise the uncompressable and spare you my rambling, I've selected five photos from each of the months I spent in Ecuador on industrial placement. They're not necessarily the best photos nor personal favourites, but they all mean or represent something.
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The bullet ants, the anteater, and the scaredy-cat

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Rainforests are brimming with life. Big, small, and smaller still. Camouflaged coats and colourful garbs. Picky specialists and opportunistic generalists. Dedicated architects and cumbersome foragers. Despite this, most of their most famous inhabitants are very hard to see, in truly untamed forest. Take it from someone who lived in the Amazon for a year   and has been going back for shorter periods for over six years. I am yet again back in San José de Payamino at the moment, this time for a couple of very brief visits between getting through some lab work in Quito. Although it will be great to get this lab work done and it will hopefully lead to more future collaborations with the Universidad de Las Américas, who are kindly offering me the use of their laboratory facilities, I can’t help but think about this time last year. In January and February 2018 I spent five weeks in Payamino, kicking off the first lot of field work for my PhD, which led to acquiring some of the s...
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