Leatherback turtles slowly crawled along the Costa Rican shores to lay their eggs as Harvard students watched carefully nearby in the nighttime.

This year, three classes from the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department offered all-expenses-paid spring break trips for its students.

Twenty-seven students traveled to Panama for trips offered by OEB 51: Biology and Evolution of Invertebrate Animals and OEB 190: Biology and Diversity of Birds, while 21 students in OEB 167: Herpetology studied amphibians and reptiles in Costa Rica.

This year marked OEB 51s seventh trip to Panamas tropical coasts. Students spent each day diving into the water to collect and photograph specimens before bringing them to the lab for further investigation.

OEB Associate Professor Cassandra Extavour, who led the trip with OEB Professor Gonzalo Giribet, said that she hopes the trip helped students understand invertebrates and the importance of anatomical study.

Theres no better way to understand biology than to get inside itwhether its seeing organisms in the wild or seeing the inside of a cell through high resolution microscopy, said Extavour. That visual and tactile element is very important in cementing the students learning.

Diversity that had been enumerated in course lectures came to life for OEB 51 students once they strapped on their snorkels.

The underwater topography was steep, and it was amazing to see the distribution and sheer diversity of the corals, sponges, starfish, sea urchins, squid, snails, jellyfish, [and] shrimp..., wrote Emily A. Burke 14 in an emailed statement. The list goes on, and...its hard to just pick out a few favorite [organisms] or isolate them from each other because everything is so intricately connected.

In Costa Rica, OEB Professors Jonathan B. Losos 84 and James Hanken assigned their OEB 167 students the task of becoming resident experts in specific reptile and amphibian species before the trip. Throughout the week, the students shared information about their organisms as they encountered them in the wild.

We get to see the habitats and microhabitats that [these organisms] are found in, hear them calling, [and] see them eating, said Hanken.

Read more:
OEB Students Take Sponsored Spring Break Trips