As a grad student, Ari Daniel Shapiro has to tag some narwhals to collect data. The problem: it's in the arctic, the devices have never been tested, and if he fails he'll never be able to do research again.
This story originally aired on October 28, 2012.
When scientist Danielle Lee travels to Tanzania to study pouched rats, she finds she's more of an outsider than she'd expected.
Biologist Heather Hamlin leaves the safety of the lab for her first field assignment: tagging alligators.
With only two days to find and extract a sample from one of the oldest coral colonies in the world, Konrad Hughen finds himself at the bottom of the ocean with a broken drill bit.
When The Colbert Report calls about her research, marine biologist Skylar Bayer finds an unexpected collaborator and friend in the fisherman helping her get scallops.
As an undergrad, Beryl Kahn takes a semester at sea after a bad breakup and gets rocked by the swells of the sea -- and her emotions.
When herpetologist Joseph Mendelson gets his an opportunity to do fieldwork in Guatemala during his first year of graduate school, he struggles to connect with the locals.
Climate scientist Kim Cobb is exploring a cave in Borneo when rocks begin to fall.
After cave geologist Gabriela Serrato Marks develops fibromyalgia, exploring caves becomes a challenge.
Paleontologist David Evans and his team start to feel defeated after three days of searching fruitlessly for fossils.
Ecologist Cylita Guy finds unexpected adventure when she studies bats in the field.