mllemusketeer:

fierceawakening:

@mllemusketeer

*Evil cackle, laces fingers together*

So I worked in a herpetology lab for a while in college, and we were studying chytrid fungus.

In frogs, specifically.

In an endangered frog, even more specifically.

To study chytrid fungus in a frog, you must swab the frog. First you have to catch the frog, which is best done up to your ass or armpits in water at 2 or 3 in the morning in the rainy season–in California, this is February and March, so that water up to your armpits is fucking freezing. Then, since you can’t swab the damn thing in the river, you put it in a ziplock bag and then either a) into your backpack or b) into the inner tube you’re towing along for stability and frog storage. 

Then, after getting a metric fuckton of frogs, you go back to the truck with them and start swabbing, after rinsing them with deionized water so you get a pure sample. You swab the sides of their bellies, the insides of their thighs, and the bottoms of their feet. They do not like this. This particular species made the fact it did not like this by emitting a strong odor of rubber bands.

In the meantime, all the other frogs are waiting their turn in their plastic bags in the Inner Tube Jail for Unlucky Amphibians. 

And this night was the night we learned about the true capabilities of our study subject.

Imagine this: it’s two-thirty am. It’s me, the clueless undergrad, and the slightly less clueless grad student, (the professor having wandered off…somewhere, which we would have worried about more had he not been basically Hagrid’s evil twin) dutifully swabbing frogs by headlamp in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere, CA, sopping wet and gently dripping. The frogs are yelling indignantly about this and kicking (and they can kick really hard and it actually kinda hurts) when there’s this rustling noise.

This was after the field encounter with the mountain lion so I immediately turn to look.

Fortunately it’s not a mountain lion.

It’s the frogs climbing the inner tube, still in their ziplock baggies, and booking it for the river.

Not wanting to explain to California Fish and Game why there were a bunch of endangered frogs gently floating down the Santa Ynez river in ziplock baggies, I took off running after them.

They can move surprisingly fast.

We did catch all of them, eventually, and then finished swabbing, and then found the professor happily camped out about ten feet behind the large, prominent NO CAMPING sign. At that point, we just joined him.

Better the wrath of the Forest Service than that of the professor.