Third-year Trinity botany student Sarah Cahalane admits to being "slightly nervous" about her impending field trip to the rain forests of Guyana. It is not the heat, the hiking or the travel that troubles her. It is the spiders.
"I am a bit of an arachnophobic. Spiders are not my pet thing," she admits.
Third-year students usually spend a week in the Burren. But when the opportunity to travel to Guyana came up she jumped at the chance. "As soon as they mentioned it I was ready to go. It is going to be an experience of a lifetime."
There will be the excitement of finding new plant species but there are also the more tedious aspects of research, writing up the notes and details.
She knows there will be hardships and difficulties. "We have been assured by our lecturers that we will be eaten alive by mosquitoes and other insects," she acknowledges.