Q & A: Gabriela Quirós, Deep Look Producer (Patreon)

Hey Deep Peeps,

Our very own Gabriela Quirós, a Deep Look producer and coordinating producer, has answered some of your burning questions about production, parasites and more. We hope you enjoy learning more about Gabriela!

What kind of degree(s) did you obtain in order to be in your current field, if any?

I studied journalism as an undergraduate at the University of Costa Rica, and then went to graduate school in journalism with a focus in documentary filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergrad, I wanted to double-major in biology, but my college wasn’t set up to do this. I did take a year of chemistry, which I loved.

Has science education always been your passion? Did you have a mentor?

I’ve always had a passion for covering science, broadly understood. I started out my career in journalism in Costa Rica, where I grew up, writing about urban development and the environmental impact of human activities. The first national story I covered there, in the mid-1990s, was the fight over where to build a large new garbage dump that would serve Costa Rica’s capital. Nobody wanted a garbage dump in their backyard and opposition to the project sometimes grew violent. I also started covering health, an interest that continues today. 

My first mentor was Richard Dyer, the owner of The Tico Times, Costa Rica’s English-language weekly paper where I worked from 1993 to 1996. Don Richard, as we called Mr. Dyer, would return my stories to me with a request for more “color,” which is newspaper parlance for more evocative descriptions. One day it finally clicked for me – I came back from visiting a shelter for survivors of domestic violence and started the story I wrote with a description of the steaming scrambled eggs that the women had eaten for breakfast that morning. Don Richard was very happy. He was in his 80s when I worked at the paper and passed away a few months before I moved to California in 1996. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to study at the University of California, Berkeley, his daughter Dery, the paper’s editor in chief, let me stay at an apartment she owned in the Bay Area. I lived there for two years, rent free. That support was essential.  

When and why did you first get interested in parasites as a subject? 

I started covering mosquitoes when I was a health reporter in Costa Rica. During that time I wrote about malaria and dengue fever, two mosquito-borne diseases. 

In this photo, Gabriela and Deep Look cinematographer and lead producer Josh Cassidy film the inside of a corpse flower at the University of California Botanical Garden, in Berkeley, California for our episode about these foul-smelling blooms. (Photo Credit: Vanessa Handley, UC Botanical Garden director of research and collections)

Is there any parasite or critter in particular that gives you the creeps? And did you ever run into a critter that you never thought scared you, but you started fearing it when you saw it up close? 

For me, knowledge is power. You might think that seeing a louse or a tick or a mosquito or a bed bug up close would make you afraid of them, or gross you out. But my reaction has been the opposite, somewhat to my surprise. The more I learn about them the better prepared I feel to deal with them. After I produced the episode of Deep Look about tick bites, I went on a hike with friends; at the end, a friend found a tick attached to her leg. From my research I knew that the best way to remove it was to use a pair of tweezers and just pull straight up. I did that and the tick came right off. It’s a great skill to impress your friends with.

Deep Look producer Gabriela Quirós patiently waiting to get bitten by a mosquito for her episode, "How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood". (Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Have you ever offered up yourself to these insects for the sake of science? Who’s getting bit by all these bugs you use in your videos? Have you ever contracted a disease?

The bed bug in our recent episode is feeding on my thumb and forearm. I tried to get mosquitoes and ticks to bite into me, but they didn’t like me. The arms that you see the mosquitoes and ticks biting into in our episodes about mosquito bites and tick bites belong to scientists at the University of California, Davis, the California Academy of Science and San Francisco State University. The bed bugs, mosquitoes and ticks biting into people in our videos were all reared in laboratories and were guaranteed to not be infected with any disease-causing agents.

Do you have a favorite parasite episode of Deep Look and if so, why?

My favorite episode about parasites that I’ve produced is the one about how lice move around on our hair. They use these amazing claws that fit perfectly around a strand of hair. Lice hold a special place in my heart. I had them twice when I was a girl. My father had bought me and my sister a microscope, and we examined some lice and eggs under the light. Looking at them up close was fascinating. 

Favorite insect or animal?

I’m currently very interested in bees and the ways in which they collect food for themselves and at the same time help the plants that they’re taking nectar and pollen from. I’m finishing an episode about alfalfa leafcutting bees. They wrap their eggs with leaf bits and literally get thwacked by flower parts in order to collect their pollen. 

How hard is it to gather research on these creatures, as many of them can be pretty small?

Thanks to microscopes and chemistry and genetics, scientists are able to research small animals and plants. Size isn’t an obstacle to learning about them.  

What’s the most interesting place you’ve gone to research/film videos for these projects?

A ranch next to a wind farm in the California desert where the owners keep reindeer. We filmed there for our episode on how and why reindeer and elk and deer shed their antlers each year, a personal favorite of mine.  

What's the best thing about your job and career?

After 25 years of working in journalism, the best part of my job is still that I get paid to ask questions. 

Portrait of Gabriela Quirós / Photo Credit: Lenny Gonzalez