The way home is through Huapapa

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"For about an hour, the social and biological teams stood before the gathering in the simple meeting house and described our preliminary findings.... In our prep session the night before we had talked about the risks of putting the room to sleep with scientific jargon, so Max was under strict orders to avoid the word “Pseudoplatystoma” in his talk, regardless of how excited he was about it. Likewise, Rudolf made do without “Brachycephalidae” and Bob without “beryllium-10.” The cultural diversity in the room was already so great, though, that a little Latin would hardly have seemed out of place. The first question from the audience was addressed to us in Huitoto...."

Read the whole post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo