10 October
Today I spent the whole day at the Universidad Católica de Valparaiso. It is a very nice, newly renovated campus and my hosts were amazing. I met Gaston and his group and had a wonderful discussion about their projects. I learned tons about cacti, bird’s nests and the microbiome, hummingbird olfaction and many other things. I also spoke to Francisco who I had met in 2016 in Brazil and now has a permanent post here, and he told me about his many cool exciting and original projects on ecological interactions in the Valdivian forest. my favourite was his story of cave dwelling catfish in Bolivia and how we thought we could use them as models of adaptation and gene flow. In the morning I gave a buzz pollination seminar and had tons of keen and brilliant questions.
This evening I walked to the seafront and saw Valparaiso and Viña del Mar shine their lights into the Pacific. Then dinner at Hops, a rocky bar with what probably qualifies as ancient music including Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Metallica. Not a bad way to end the day. Tomorrow we will have our first expedition to the Andes.
