Cortni Borgerson brings out a series of pictures of a rainforest half a world away from Portland State. She points to a photograph of a bright-yellow tent staked underneath a blue tarp, which rests in front of a backdrop of deep green and brown forestation. “That one was my home,” she said. The Portland State biological anthropology major recently spent five months in a remote part of Madagascar as a field assistant for PSU professor Natalie Vasey. During their stay in the rainforest, the two had little contact with the outside world, bathed beside waterfalls and ate rice, beans and plantains cooked over an open fire for nearly every meal of every day. The pair were in Madagascar to study how distributions of resources within the rainforest affect population density among the red ruffed lemur.
