Some like it mud

There is a reason why Rhizophoras love mud.

In my undergraduate thesis, we found out that most of the Rhizophoras in our project site at Polillo Island grew best in silty loam to silty clay soil. The literature says that silty clay is the best place to find cations and all those good nutrients that Rhizos love; and to determine if our Polillo Rhizons did grow in silty loam to clay, I volunteered to do the soil fractionation analysis in the ES Department's bat cave. I felt like a real scientist pipetting those mud solutions over the Christmas holidays. I distinctly remember feeling a tiny Eureka! erupt in my heart when I finally fractionized our soil samples from the field. All that hard work to find out later that the soil analysis I did was not relevant to the other variables. Ah well, at least I felt like a scientist once in my life. It was well worth it.

This is exactly how I feel now that I finished sorting through my predescessor's paper files and magazine racks. I mined through several layers of Mangroves for the Future (MFF) history (and found some really great fashion magazines, by the way), only to realize that much of what I found was obsolete. History is good, but at one point, the historian must choose which is relevant for the present time.

So, wallowing in the MFF mud may have some advantage afterall. It just takes time, but soon, the Rhizo in me will get the nutrients needed to work well in this new post assigned to me.

Clear as mud, I say.