The Amazonian Jungle, Un-simulated

Just got back from a vacation, a real vacation, where my computer stayed at home. We were in a remote lodge in the middle a small lake in the Brazilian Amazon, surrounded by tropical forest, and not much else. Not an internet cafe in sight. There was one pay telephone at a village one hour's boat ride away, but that was it for connection to the outside world. If you're reading this blog, I suspect it's been as long for you as it was for me since being that out of touch with work.

We went to the lodge to see the jungle, and even though I'm a biologist, I was still looking forward to all the cool critters that would be running around everywhere — it's the Amazon, after all, hotspot of biodiversity, snakes, poison frogs, monkeys, bugs of all manner and description. We weren't going to be able to sleep at night for fear of what might drop from the ceiling into bed with us.

Actually, aside from the bats that came out each night to pick off generic bugs attracted to the lodges lights, and the pet parrots near the kitchen, wildlife was rather scarce. No snakes at all. Hardly a toad, and the couple we saw were small blandly camouflaged types I could find at home. We could have foregone the malaria drugs as you had to look hard to even find a mosquito. All those nature specials and Nature papers on incredible Amazon diversity were balderdash.

Over the 5 days we were there, we did eventually see more. In many hours of boating around through the flooded forests, we saw several species of monkeys. Free-living parrots. Toucans and macaws and vultures and hawks and a number of other less identifiable birds. Dolphins in the river. A couple of pretty butterflies and some hanging ants nests. Iguanas and caimans. A squirrel-like critter that fell in the water as it tried to run away from us. As a sum, it started to add up to meet expectations. But it took patience and many hours of looking.

And that's got me thinking about the simulated labs we write. They are demonstrably good at teaching concepts in biology — better than other teaching methods, and I would argue in many cases better than wet labs on the same topics. One reason simulated labs are so effective is that you can do many experiments quickly without worrying about details of how to actually collect data. That allows the student to focus at the conceptual rather than the technical level. But it comes with costs, and one cost is not learning the patience it takes to study the real world. My impression of the amazon from 1 hour nature videos was essentially a simulation of the real thing — I got a good idea of the diversity, but a poor idea of what it's really like. The latter took 5 days of canoeing with sharp-eyed guides. Much as I wish I could sell everyone 15 simulations to fill up the 15 weeks of their class, I've got to admit those students would be pretty poorly trained. They've got to get frustrated with the slow, snail-mail pace of the real world before they will be able to add much new to our understanding of life.

Of course if I just slowed down the simulation a bit...