david Henderson

Graduate Student

“I like working at a biological station, but a lot of the other biological stations [I worked at] were tropical. There's kind of a different mix of characters over there.”

Where were you?

“A bunch of places in Costa Rica and Barro Colorado Island in Panama. They told me about this guy who researched army ants in the 50s. They say he used to smear kerosene all over his whole body and then go out at night and follow the troop of army ants around crawling on the forest floor. I like meeting those kinds of wild, really dedicated people and you usually find them at some tropical research stations.”

So it's more mellow here?

“People go home and take showers at night.”

“I went to Costa Rica before I officially started graduate school. They take you to different sites and you do many studies. It's a sample of what your job is going to be, repeated over and over. I didn't know if I was going to fit in with any of these people who'd been studying biology and who chose to study biology. It turns out that I did fit in with that crowd.”

What has been the most challenging aspect of your work this summer?

“Definitely writing a review paper. I've never written a review paper. The reading’s kind of challenging because you just have to pound scientific texts and that's rough. But actually condensing it all and writing something meaningful and insightful, that's the main challenge.”

Is there something else that you're looking forward to?

“I want to see a rattlesnake. I haven't seen one yet. It seems like everybody else has.”

David is a member of Jonathan Myers' Forest Biodiversity team and a PhD candidate in the Evolution, Ecology and Population Biology graduate program at Washington University.