While in East Africa, we did take a full semester of courses; contrary to popular belief, this was not a three month vacation! Two courses span the entire time we are there, and then there are three modules that offer 2-3 courses while we are there. For the Uganda leg, I took the East African Ecology course.
Though the courses are between 2-3 weeks, they are full time courses, so the number of hours devoted to the course are actually more than what you would get in a normal lecture course. One of our modules within the course was the use of aquatic invertebrates as a bio-indicator of the state of an ecosystem. Many insects we see, such as dragonflies, have an aquatic larval stage, and are very sensitive to the environmental condition of the water. We used dip nets to sample aquatic invertebrates in a high oxygen stream and a low oxygen papyrus swamp. Except for the random army ant that managed to crawl up our legs while we were picking through our dip net samples, we had great fun finding and identifying all the different critters!
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