Our trip has ended much as it began. In rain. We've just driven the six hours from Kamieskroon to the the Cape of Good Hope, or as it is more aptly named here, the Cape of Storms. I'm sitting here thinking about the numbers; 15 morphotypes, 102 herbarium specimens, 1020 leaf samples, 2807 macro-photos, and over 4000km of road. Aside from from collecting leaves for DNA we have also been trying to quantify the traits that occur across the different morphotypes, to understand the developmental forces constraining petal spot formation. So for each morphotype we have collected and dissected 40 flowers. Each batch takes 4 hours to dissect and photograph and about the same time to measure the photgraphed traits. That's 10,515 flower measurements in total. The tools and techniques are relatively simple, but the material and numbers accumulate at an alarming rate. This translates into long evenings and late nights, labelling and re-labelling, sorting, repackaging, and entering data into spreadsheets. The period of my PhD more or less spanned the time when plant biology moved into the post-genomic era. Almost overnight it seemed, we were grappling with the promises and challenges of Big Data. But field biologists have been coping with the travails of big data for much longer. So while I've been writing mostly about the context of this trip, the romance of working in a different country, and the variety of the physical and social experience, it doesn't quite explain why we're feeling so wrung out.
