Training Is Endless
Fire Ants; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) Big Pine Key; ©Google Maps Golden Orb Weaver; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) The toxic Manchineel Tree; Hippomane_mancinella; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-3.0) The east4rn Diamondback Rattlesnake, Crotalus_adamanteu; ©Wikimedia COmmons (PD-2.0) The Eastern Coral Snake, red-net-to-yellow; ©USFWS from Wikimedia Commons Red_imported-Fire-Ant (RIFA) mound; ©Wikimedia Commons (PD-1.0) RIFA bites on leg; © Healthlinedotcom American Alligator; ©USFWS from Wikimedia Commons (PD-2.0) Tropical hardwood-hammock on Everglades National Park Mahogany_Hammock Trail; ©US National Park Service Previous Next “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
Louis Pasteur; French chemist and microbiologist "I don't really think about the degree of difficulty or the possibility of making a mistake. I just try to relax and let my preparation and training take over."
Simone Biles; American artistic gymnast, with 32 Olympic and World Championship medals. "Luck is where opportunity meets preparation."
Seneca; Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist "Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."
William Butler Yeats; Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer "It's the preparation that's my favourite part of the process."
Ruth Wilson; English actress. "Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise."
Robert Baden-Powell; Founder of the Boy Scouts Previous Next
Training Is Endless
Confucius taught that #TrainingIsEndless; and so it is.
Wherever you find outdoor education you’ll find an intern program. They go together. It’s much easier to underpay your teaching staff when you can exchange them for a few free-workers, recent (or soon to be) college graduates desperately seeking their first professional field experience.
So it’s not surprising to find a fairly wide range of skill-sets and experience to deal with when you have to train 3 seasons of interns (Fall, Spring, and Summer). Our entire program was built on providing that very same service for the inexperienced layman, after all.
Our spot in the Florida Keys was packed with a variety of marine habitats for teaching the Marine Sciences, so we attracted many such students. But we also had a unique geology in the lower Keys that made a lot of terrestrial biology accessible to our programs, as well.
On Big Pine Key it’s possible to climb to the nose-bleed height of 12’ above sea-level, the highest point in the Florida Keys. Hardly alpine, those elevated areas have managed to build impressive forests, harboring an abundance of biota, plants and animals.
The Pine-Palmetto Fire-Climax Community drives most of the lower Florida Keys terrestrial-ecology.
People don't think of plants as being particularly competitive, a trait they routinely attribute to animals. But all terrestrial ecosystems start with plants. They set the stage for other species, plant and animal, that can find a way to eke out a living there.
In reality, plants are essentially at war with one another. They compete for space on the ground to take root, the water and nutrients that exist in that shared soil, and the space above the ground for they need to gather sunlight for their photosynthesis.
With Florida's hot climate and cycle of wet-dry seasons, fires routinely kill off any hardwoods that take root in the under-canopy. The palmettos, with their flammable leaves, tend to set them them fire while the much taller Slash Pines are hardly even affected. Until the fire gets so intense it tops them, too.
That's when succession occurs. Since hardwoods grow much faster than pine-tees, once a forest dominated by pines is wiped out by fire, the deciduous trees "succeed" that forest. In the Florida Keys these area are referred to as hardwood-hammocks. Trees like the mahogany, gumbo-limbo, autograph-tree, lignum vitae, manchineel, wax-myrtle, poisonwood, and pigeon-plum are most common.
So, that day, we were “teaching the would-be teachers”, introducing the various areas we used for the wide variety of science in our curriculum. The hardwood-hammock was that day's lesson.
Our students generally came for a standard two-day visit. But many groups stayed longer, so extending our program to include a variety of the scientific disciplines, and for which we had excellent access to specific ecosystems for field education, was mission critical.
For this story, that notion extends to a toxic tree called the Manchineel, the most toxic tree known in the Americas and the "Red Imported Fire Ant", named because of the burning sensation caused by its sting.
In defense of our two, soon-to-be victimized interns, the hardwood hammocks are havens for plenty of surprises for the unaware;
all growing amid an overgrown forest of hardwood trees like Gumbo Limbo, Autograph, Mahogany, Cypress, Lignum Vitae, and Oak trees, all substrate for epiphytes like Spanish Moss and native orchids.
Not to mention several forms of local toxic trees that gave a nasty poison-ivy like rash; the passive the Poisonwood and Manchineel.
In other words, there was lots to look out for. Good to know in general, but critical need-to-know information if you planned on leading groups of students in there to experience “nature”!
We warned everyone before we entered to keep their eyes and ears open since failing to so would be less dangerous than it was uncomfortable, unless someone stepped on a rattlesnake or sat down next to a resting alligator.
On this day, however, while discussing the role of fire in forming this community (the SouthernPine-Palmetto fire-climax community), two just such “educational” events occurred at once.
One of our Environmental-Education Interns managed to step on a fire-ant hill without knowing it, giving us all an impromptu but passionate demonstration of #TheStriptease, combined with #TheFireAntDance.
It varies from person to person, but is always characterized by frantic yelling, tearing one’s pants off as quickly as possible, repeatedly slapping at the lower legs, and dancing around in circles like a spaz with pants-around-ankles trying to extinguish the stinging “fire”.
Meanwhile, the Intern in a new program we started the year before, “Marine Archaeology”, had rather dreamily wandered away from the crowd. She decided to taste the fruit of the Manchineel Tree, teaching us all (especially her) that the burns one gets from its toxins can last for over two weeks.
They both “learned the hard way.” But now they “knew” several things they didn't know before the class started.
That there was a local fruit none they would never consider putting in a sack lunch. The intricacies of #TheFireAntDance.
And never, never wear long pants if there’s the possibility of a fire-ant attack. But, if you must, at least make sure you wear clean underwear that day!