WEST PLAINS, Mo. — Every year, Ana Estrella, Department Chair of Natural and Applied Sciences at Missouri State University-West Plains (MSU-WP), leads a group of students on a trip to Costa Rica as part of the Education Abroad program. The experience is also open to community members.
In May of 2025, Alexandra Graham, Director of Assessment and Accreditation, joined the group traveling to Costa Rica for the Leatherback Sea Turtle Expedition. Inspired by her journey, Graham wrote a travelogue detailing the experience and what they learned along the way. Here are a few highlights from Graham’s Travelogue:
Our first stop on the trip was to the Pacuare Reserve, which is beautiful and primitive. We did indeed have flushing toilets and cold showers, and we had beds in a bunk house and a kitchen cantina, but that was the end of the amenities. No electricity except for the kitchen generator. It was the kind of hot and humid that I laid still under the mosquito net and felt my pores releasing all the water in my body. In the mornings we woke up to the howler monkeys and the noisy cacophony of birds and insects.
During the day, we hiked in the secondary rainforest and observed strawberry dart frogs, spider monkeys, toucans, and all kinds of other flora and fauna. We went to Parismina to learn about ecotourism, and we played all kinds of games to help us bond.
In the night, we did the turtle census (the service-learning part of the program), which is the primary purpose of the education abroad . . . Our turtle census was participating in authentic ongoing research to find Leatherback Sea Turtles in the process of laying eggs in the dead of night. To do this, we had two 4-hour shifts: 8-1, 11-3, and we walked 8 km in the sand, in the dark (no flashlights because it might confuse the turtles), hoping to stumble on a turtle laying eggs.
When we found a turtle, the Research Assistant gave us directions to help dig the hole deeper, and assigned one student to be on her belly, arms outstretched, holding an enormous plastic bag in the hole under the turtle’s butt, catching the eggs as they dropped. Two other students measured the turtle’s neck. Two other students measured the turtle’s carapace. Two other students measured the turtle’s distance from the water and then from the sand cliffs. Then the research assistant checked if the turtle had already been tagged and added a tag to her rear flipper.
A student recorded all the data as part of a huge research project to measure Leatherback Sea Turtle movements and egg laying numbers. The eggs are kept in a hatchery, and when they hatch, they are indeed released to the ocean. I don’t know if the research assistants smile beatifically at them or not, but that was going to happen a couple of months after we were gone.
To read the full travelogue, please visit News.WP.MissouriState.edu.
The deadline to apply for the next Costa Rica Education Abroad opportunity is Dec. 1. For more information about this opportunity or application procedures, contact Estrella at 417-255-7710 or AnaEstrellaRiollano@MissouriState.edu.
