Fish Copulation and "The Little Flying Furry Pig" (-Jess)

We´ve been pleasantly surprised thus far at how often people who have only known us for fifteen minutes or so invite us to sit in on activities that they are hosting or attending. We met with a woman who is in charge of the environmental education activities for IIAP (the major research institution for the Peruvian Amazon) in order to talk about the possibility of Andrew volunteering with her in the future and found ourselves on a school bus packed with kids at 7:30am the next morning, headed for who knows what.

Who-knows-what turned out to be an all day long draw-a-thon, in which middle and high schools all across the region send their three top artists and each kid is assigned one of three stories (the winners from the short-story contest) to illustrate with 8 to 12 drawings or paintings. All the illustrations had to be done on the spot, on officially stamped paper, within the 9 hour time limit. The kid with the best illustrations from each story is named the winner, and their work will be used with their respective story in three children´s books that IIAP will publish. (Other cool projects that the Evironmental Ed team sponsors include helping schools to start butterfly farms, orchid orchards, and artificial beaches where they transplant eggs of river turtles and guard them until they hatch in order to protect them from being... poached. They also teach them to make trash into paper which they decorate and sell as notecards, and work with some schools to give each kid a tiny plot of school yard where they can do whatever they like- plant a tree, grow medicinal herbs, make a flower garden, raise worms, you name it. This helps to foster care for land and creatures in a hands-on, interactive way. I´m a little jealous.)

Unfortunately, Andrew and I were only allowed to watch, even though all the art supplies were awfully tempting. The illustrations were amazing (we put up some videos)- all full of vivid color and beautiful depictions of the jungle. They gave us the stories to read and it was discouraging that it took us most of the morning to read 3 pages worth of children´s stories. They were all pretty depressing- in one a fish is separated from its mother and while looking for her he has to swim through oil spills and past commercial harpoons and deforested river banks, in another a little creature that was described to us as a little pig with more hair was slowly dying in a drought after his whole family was killed and right as he closed his eyes he dreamed he could fly, and the last was about a tree that went to the city to tell the people to stop their destruction but he was peed on by a sick and itchy dog. So. That was sobering. The children had amazing concentration, working almost non-stop from 8 till 5, meanwhile, Andrew and I were having trouble maintaining our attention spans and Andrew was threatening to give up on Spanish forever. Fortunately, we were introduced to a very friendly guy named Carlos who spoke English and gave us a tour of the whole campus.

IIAP has several biological stations. This one focused mainly on biotechnology (no tour of this part due to sensitive lab set-ups) and the farming and reintroduction of native fish species. We got to see the ponds and tanks where they raise and do experiments with Paiche- the giants of the Amazon that can grow to several hundred kilograms and maybe 10 feet long. We fed them little minnows and watched them suck them up (the food-fish themselves were pretty crazy looking actually), and heard about how, when they want the fish to spawn, they have to catch them, wrastle them down so they can give them a hormone shot, squeeze out the gametes, and then mix it up in buckets until they turn into little fish. Craziness! Andrew might go help with the process next week. We also saw giant snails that grow to several pounds in 6 months that people raise to sell to the French market. These somehow know when the river is about to rise, because their eggs have to sit out of the water for two weeks and then they need to be transferred to the water to continue developing, so the clever snail crawls out and lays its eggs a few feet up on the bank 2 weeks before the rainy season starts and the rivers rise. This is especially tricky since the start of the high-water season is supposed to be pretty unpredictable around Iquitos. Our tour concluded with a taxonomy room full of lots of weird fishy creatures in jars (I´m not so sure about this bathing in the Amazon thing), and a fish food making factory that was being throughly inspected by a small kitten. You just never know what sorts of things you might learn and do around here on any given day!