Sloths, rockets, and gendarmes

3/29/2015

Sorry for the delay in writing since my last post, but la vie guyanaise took a strange turn over the past week. Some small children stole half our equipment from a locked building at the research institute, which to be honest wasn't especially helpful. It's been a manic cavalcade of police interviews and missions to Cayenne to restore our equipment lists, surreally involving five gendarmes combing the house with forensic brushes for fingerprints. There were a few furrowed brows about how to get our radio-tags working without one crucial element, but fortunately I encountered a very slimy man in downtown Cayenne who has sold me an improbable-looking plastic device. Miraculously, it works! So many thanks to the slimy man.

We're busy attaching the radio-tags to the wasps, so some photos of the lovely wasps themselves are coming in the next post. For now, a few snapshots of life in beautiful French Guiana. Even with child thieves making off with your equipment, it's a wonderful place...

Three-toed sloth in Kourou

Cattle ranches beyond Sinnamary

The Guiana Space Centre

The launch of a Soyuz rocket from Kourou

2 Comments

Yvonne Chadwick

4/5/2015 05:52:28 am

So glad you are up and running again Patrick, thanks to your slimy saviour! Appearances can be deceptive! Fantastic photos of the countryside - it is stunning. Keep up the good work - hoping the wasps are more friendly and are cooperative in the experiments. Yvonne xo

Anastasia

4/21/2019 02:26:09 pm

Hi, very nice website, cheers!
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Hi! I'm Patrick - an early-career postdoc in behavioural ecology. I completed my PhD in 2019, focused on Polistes paper wasps in South and Central America. I'm currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and Simons Society Junior Fellow in the Rubenstein Lab at Columbia University (New York) and the Radford Lab at the University of Bristol (UK), looking at the social behaviour and evolution of Africa's incredible wasps! I'm always keen to get involved in outreach to spread the word about these amazing animals.

Patrick Kennedy, University of Bristol

Sloths, rockets, and gendarmes

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