Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences

I am very thankful for the financial support GLOMAR provided me to attend the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) Conference held in San José, Costa Rica from the 23 to the 27 of June 2013. It was the 50th year anniversary of the conference and it was quite remarkable to see so many of the scientists working on very diverse topics. I had the opportunity to listen to many presentations related to many fields in tropical biology, from plant and animal distribution along South America, new technology used for tracking mammals, to the identification of individual bat echolocation.

Besides networking, I was happy to attend the ATBC conference as most of the colleagues from my working group were also present including our supervisor. We were able to discuss and support each other with our posters and presentations as it was the first scientific conference for most of us. On the 25th of June, I was able to present my PhD work in a poster entitled “Site fidelity and homing behavior in the four-eyed fish Anableps anableps revealed by radio-frequency identification and visual census”. Although I did not gain too many insights from the public during the poster session, I was happy to be able to present my work to people that were unfamiliar with the topic. This will for sure come into practice for upcoming presentations as well as my PhD defense.

I must say that what I enjoyed the most about the ATBC conference was listening to the great diversity of topics and seeing the passion many scientists have for their work, many of those talks were quite inspiring.

Having the opportunity to attend the ATBC conference gave me not only a first impression on how international scientific conferences work but I was also able to see my own work in a different perspective which allowed me to continue writing about my work in a more motivated way.