The cloud forest has fog like San Francisco!

I have finished the second leg of my trip in Costa Rica, and things just keep getting better and better. We spent a couple of days in the beautiful cloud forest of Monteverde, at the University of Georgia research station, which is basically a glorified resort. The hot water, lack of mosquitoes, rocking chairs on the porch overlooking the mountains, and wonderful butterfly filled jungle made a lot of us feel like we'd ascended to heaven after a hellish visit in Palo Verde. There were many not-too-fond reflections on poor Palo Verde. I do love the dry forest truly, but I think everyone on our trip can agree we like it a lot more when it is dry.

Colton, Shivani and Mike enjoying the rocking chairs on the deck at our Monteverde station.

Monteverde is one of the last protected areas of cloud forest in Costa Rica. This montane habitat is called 'cloud forest' because you truly are in the clouds. All of the life is adapted to living with the intense cloudy humidity, and moss covers everything. A lot of really unique flora and fauna are found in the 'sky islands' of mountain peaks. Just like an island in an ocean, the things living on tops of mountains are isolated from each other by deep valleys, and this can create some really cool patterns in species distributions. For example, one of the species endemic to (meaning found exclusively in) the cloud forest is this beautiful turquoise tiger beetle.

Tiger beetles are only found in the cloud forest- they are an indicator species of good cloud forest health.

Joining us at the Monteverde site was the eminent coleopterist Terry Erwin, who curates the beetle collections at the Smithsonian Museum. He directed the Faculty Field Project that I participated in, and we looked at (you guessed it!) beetles. Terry is such a wealth of neotropical knowledge, particularly when it comes to insects. He has lived for more than 15 years in the Amazonian rainforest. He's famous for his estimate that 30 000 species of insects live in the Amazonian canopy. Thirty years later, that number seems like a huge underestimate. Much of the collecting Terry does involves fogging the canopy- he sends up a spray of insecticide, and all the insects fall to the ground to be collected, sorted and counted. In Ecuador, there can be 400 000 individual insects in one square meter of fogged canopy. That is a lot of insects.

In the field with Terry Erwin near our field site under a fig tree. 

For our FFP we also dealt with a lot of insects, counting up more than 3000 of them. My winkling skills are really sharpening themselves down here, since we used the litter sifting technique for this project as well. We collected litter from underneath fruiting fig trees, and compared what we found there to areas of the forest not supplemented by the delicious falling fruit. Figs are what we call a 'keystone species' in this type of forest, meaning that the fig fruits give important energy to a lot of different species, including monkeys, birds, and of course, bugs.

We found a lot more predatory beetles under figs, and also some fig-specialist beetles who eat the seeds of these trees. Those 3000 individual creepy-crawlers came out of only 8 square meters of forest leaf litter, including 323 beetles. You would not believe the diversity and abundance of life you are walking right over everyday in the forest. A lot of the work I am doing here is analyzing the data we collect and writing it up, so I'm going to share a graph of our data with you.

Figure 1. There are a lot more predatory beetles inside fig fruit falls than outside. Science!

To be honest, I probably spend more time making graphs and tables than I do taking pictures. So it's always a welcome reprieve when I can be out and enjoying the forest and focusing on using my camera instead of my forceps. Thankfully, after all the long hours of sifting and sorting through insects, we got the chance to visit the lovely cloud forest preserve a few kilometres up the hill and enjoy the forest for the forest, and not for its data. I got some great pictures, so I'm going to just sum up with some photo captions.

One of the highlights of the trip so far- I got to hold a nestling bird!
One of our professors, Gustavo, is a bird specialist and he spotted the nest this little guy was in.
The baby felt super warm- a bird's ambient body temperature is around 40 celsius, so a fair bit warmer than us.
 

A blue morpho on the wing...

...and with tattered wings. This guy has probably survived a couple of bird attacks. 

Bromeliads are really important plants in tropical forests- the water pools they create are home to
all kinds of interesting life. They grow on other trees, usually in the canopy. 

This orchid is the national flower of Costa Rica. Beautiful!

Strangler figs grow around other trees to get up to the canopy for sunlight.
When the host tree dies, the fig remains, creating a hollow ladder you can climb.

Glasswing butterflies are really abundant at Monteverde.
The see-through wings help them avoid predators. 

Who wouldn't think this little grub is cute?

One of our instructors (Nacho) is an expert on harvestmen, also known as daddy-long-legs.
These guys aren't spiders, but they are arachnids.
Unlike spiders, they have no venom and no silk.

A lot of the understory plants have huge leaves, to collect more sunlight.
 Here, my Mexican friend Haydée stands next to a giant Philodendron leaf to show just how big these leaves are. 

The mot-mots are beautiful birds found throughout Costa Rica.
This poor guy got stuck in the greenhouse and I got Ana (the bird specialist instructor) to help him out.
The tail feathers don't naturally grow like that- instead, the males pluck out the feathers.
Apparently female mot-mots like the showy plummage.

Sheet webs like this one get really dewy in the cloud forest. See the spider on the right?
Just waiting for something to fall into the web.

Tree ferns are large tree-sized ferns. Very ancient plants, and pretty rare.

Hola raña!

The only thing wrong with this waterfall was the no swimming sign posted right next to it. Beautiful.

Cloud coming over the mountains reminds me of the fog drifting over the San Francisco Hills.

Now we're in San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, for the Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) conference which is going on until Thursday. I'm looking forward to hearing about cool tropical biology research happening around the world, and hopefully meeting some cool people. More soon!

Palo Verde Field Station

We have migrated from the swampy mosquitoe infested field station of Palo Verde to the beautiful montane park of Monteverde. This is the place where tourists zip line through the canopy, and where you can sit outside of your bungalow on your computer and reflect in your blog on the past 10 days of intense field activity.

After our Faculty Field Projects (FFPs) at Palo Verde, we started working on our IPs, or Independent Projects. Around the field station, there are a lot of acacia trees- these are specialized trees which have (you guessed it) ants that live inside of them. The plants grow hollow thorns which the ants live inside of, and in return the ants defend the plant from insects and parasitic plants. It's a very well studied mutualism, with both the ants and the plants benefiting from living together.

While walking around and looking at the forest, it's not hard to notice that there is a clearing around acacia trees. The ants basically trim the grass around their home- just like any good suburban dad. By preventing other things from growing around or on their acacia tree, the ants keep out a lot of predators like army ants. You can pretty easily tell that there are big differences in the leaf litter, the ground cover, around acacias. Inside of that leaf litter there are thousands of specialized species, so I was curious about what the litter communities around acacias look like.

At least half of my pictures have mosquitoes in them- it reminds me of when you take a picture of snow and snowflakes catch the flash.

Here is a good picture showing the clearing around a young acacia tree.
There are almost no small seedlings growing around, and there is not much leaf litter at all.

For my IP I was working with Kevin and Marcela, two of my new biologist friends (you'll be hearing more about the folks I'm with in coming weeks). We gathered leaf litter inside and outside of acacia clearings, sift it to separate the big and little stuff, and then put the smaller bits into a trap called a Winkler Sifter. Basically, the ants and other little things that live inside of the leaf litter get really disturbed and move out of the litter into a collecting cup at the bottom of the trap. Then we can collect them, count them, and see if there are differences in the arthropod community inside and outside of acacia clearings.

Winkling in style. Yes, winkling is a verb.
These are the insect sorters inside of which the dirt hangs for a few days, and then they fall into the collecting cups in the bottom.

Here is a diagram illustrating the basic Winkling method.
1) You gather leaf into a big sifter, and
2) shuffle it around so the small stuff goes through to the bag in the bottom.
    3) You pour the sifted dirt/litter into a mesh bag, and then
4) Hang it inside of the Winkler sifter and let insects crawl out.

Surprisingly, there are no differences in diversity inside and outside of these clearings. Even though there is twice as much leaf litter outside of clearings, there are just as many species inside and outside of acacia clearings. Amazingly, in a 1/2 square meter we collected more than 30 different species of insects and up to 6 species of ants.

So, that is what I was working on for the past four days. Going out in the mosquitoe infested forest and picking up all the rotten leaves on the forest floor to find out what lives inside. (It's full of delicious worms, and ticks and mites.) There was a lot of microscope work sorting out insects- most of the mites and ants are smaller than pinheads. I'll be writing up these results in coming days, just as with the remaining 6 or so projects I'll be working on.

While at Palo Verde there were a lot of other adventures too. We had four birthdays, so I ate a lot of cake. We finally started playing soccer- I think from now on that will be a regular pre-dinner activity. My GPS died in the middle of the forest, but I was able to find my way out pretty easily, and miraculously came across a pencil I'd lost the previous day. Marcela nearly passed out in the forest and I had to run back to the station for rescue. I saw a 4 meter long crocodile at the Tempisque river (not much swimming is going to happen on this trip...). We found an army ant bivouac, which was SUPER COOL. Army ants don't make a nest in the ground like most ants, but instead are nomads and every morning when they settle down for the day, they build a nest using their own bodies by linking up their little legs. It is called a bivouac and would terrifying to fall into.

All in all a great start to the trip, but man, the best is yet to come. More on that soon.

If you look closely, you'll realize this picture is just a whole bunch of ants all linked together.
Army ant bivouac!  

No surprise: Spiders like insect buffets

Field courses run by the Organization for Tropical Studies are generally intense research experiences. It has been a little over a week, and I've already completed one project and am making my way well through a second. Our first project out here was a faculty field project (FFP), led by Nacho, our class TA. Nacho's a Costa Rican (a tico) who specializes in spiders, so our first project was to investigate (you guessed it!) spiders.

The spiders we studied are Peucetia viridans, a type of lynx spider. For those not versed in scientific names, they are generally italicized, because they are in latin. The first part is the genus name- there are lots of species in a genus usually, and they have a lot in common with each other. The second part is the species name, and together the genus and species name make up a unique binomial for that species. Anyways- that was a tangent. I'll just refer to it as the green lynx spider which is the common name.

The lynx spiders associate generally with plants that have a lot of trichomes, which are little hairs on the leaves that can make the leaves sticky. The sticky leaves help trap insects, which the spider eats. We surveyed all of the plants we could find, to figure out why some plants have spiders and others don't.

A lynx spider female defending her plant.

Basically, spiders liked plants with more insects on them- they like to live somewhere with something to eat. No real surprises with that one!

The song of the zancudo

My first day in the dry forest of Palo Verde in Costa Rica, passed very differently from the last time I was in the dry forest. My last dry forest visit was in 2007 when I visited Chamela in Mexico, during the dry season. It was a turning point in my life as a scientist. In the dry season in the dry forest, all looks very dead. How could there be life in such a desolate looking place? Much to my surprise, a dozen leaf cutter nests surrounded the field station, and fed on everything from juicy cactus fruit to the kitchen leftovers. Every night, I spent hours watching those ants move along their trails, fascinated. Anyone who can recall seeing leaf cutting ants for the first time probably has a similar story- watching them carry their massive loads, wondering at what the different ants did in the nest. I caught not only a deliciously evil amoeba from drinking the tap water (cured thankfully!) but also caught a real love for ants.

Indeed, this time in the dry forest, in the rainy season, is very different. Why? Well, for starters everything is green. There is almost no rain here from January to May, but since the end of May, there has been a lot of rain. That means green leaves, wetland wonderfulness, and of course, MOSQUITOES.

The view of Palo Verde marsh just before sunset- beautiful reflections of the clouds in the water!

What this has meant for my ant watching is that I have limited it a fair bit more than I would have if the zancudos (as they are locally known) were not so voracious. I have only experienced them this bad before in Northern Canada. I also contended with black flies, no-see-ums, and horseflies in Canada, so I suppose I should consider myself lucky. Either way, I have resorted to using bug spray, which I am loathe to do. Usually I would try to avoid the stuff so that I can pick up cool amphibians, and not chemically destroy any ants I am collecting. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Despite the zancudo serenade at all hours of the day and night, I have grown to love this place in the short time I have been here. Our first day here we had two great orientation hikes, and I saw both howler and capuchin monkeys. (No pictures alas, but I'm working on it!). I saw agoutis, great curassows, frogs, lizards, snakes, and lots of other cool creatures.

Some insanely cute and fuzzy caterpillars!

A coati - the racoon of central america- says hello!

Ctenosaurs are everywhere- they run upright on two legs when they get really afraid.
They are a type of iguana, and love to sun on rocks outside our house.

Palo Verde used to part of a giant cattle ranch, and was made into a national park in the 70s. Unfortunately, after the cattle left major changes started happening to the area. The wetland became inundated with cattails, which prevented other plants from growing. This drop in diversity in wetland plant life had cascading effects on other species. There are 68 aquatic bird species that use the marsh of Palo Verde, and many migrant birds that stopover on their way to other parts of Central or South America. Once cattails started to dominate, the birds started to dwindle. What to do? Bring back the cows! Yes, there are a bunch of cows in this National Park.

You can usually see several cows and cattle egrets enjoying the cooling marsh.

We are working now on our first faculty field projects (FFPs), and soon we'll start our independent projects. I'll report soon on how that goes- we are working on a spider-plant interaction. Until then, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzancudo!

The jungle's bullet

This is a story I wrote for an Environmental Journalism class I took this spring. I have not edited it since I got feedback on it, but I hope you enjoy this first version. This is all true, and took place in summer of 2010 on my last trip to Costa Rica. Hopefully it gives a bit of insight into the sorts of things I’m doing this summer, and what I might be in for. Enjoy!





The bullet ant is aptly named -- with the most painful insect sting said to rival the agony of a bullet wound. Few, save perhaps the odd tropical poacher, have endured the pain of both. One of my fellow biologists had his first encounter with Paraponera clavata, while harnessed a hundred feet in a tree. “I thought I had been bitten by a venomous snake” he recalls, “but looking down saw instead three bullet ants stinging my leg.” A relief to be sure, but only in the mind. The throbbing would last for 24 hours, giving this ant another name- hormigas veinticuatro.


Painfully aware of this, I set out from La Selva station in Costa Rica, hunting for bullet ants. The second largest ant in the world, she shouldn’t be hard to find, right? I trekked the many jungle trails, ever mindful of the venomous snakes and golden Nephila spider webs which draped themselves off nearby trees. Partway down an overgrown trail, I spotted her – an inch long, sleekly black, with a long thin waist and huge mandibles. The worker bullet ant was foraging on a fallen log across the trail. I waited patiently for her to bring her grasshopper prey home. Where do you live little one? She clambered over to a sapling, barely two inches wide, and disappeared into the ground. My eyes lit up- it was a perfect nest for my mad science. My mission was crazy, totally insane. My goal was to enrage, and capture alive, hundreds of living bullets. And to do so, I would dig up this nest.


There are so many things we don’t know about these and other ants, particularly how they communicate with one another. I wanted to know whether different ants in the nest- foragers, guards, nurses, queen- told each other about their roles through different chemical labels. To get the nurses and queens, I needed to delve deep into the nest’s darkest chambers. And the ants needed to be collected alive for their chemical nametags to remain intact.


Such chemical nametags are commonly used by ants to communicate identity. Not quite ‘hi my name is Barbara the bullet ant’, but information such as occupation, reproductive status, and colony membership. The chemicals in question are called cuticular hydrocarbons, waxy substances on the exoskeletons of most insects. Initially used as a protective barrier against desiccation and microbes, ants have evolved to express a language of hundreds of hydrocarbons. My research aims to decipher this language, and maybe one day by manipulating their chemical vocabulary, talk to the ants.


The next day dawned as any other, but I had to take a deep breath as I prepared myself. I gathered my tools- a couple of buckets coated in fluon (a slippery substance ants generally cannot crawl up), shovels, and long metal forceps for grabbing squirrelly ants.


I tucked my two epipens into my backpack. Just like the honeybee, the sting venom of an ant can also cause an allergic reaction. And there is no telling how the body will react to a potent neurotoxic venom it has never encountered before. Uninitiated into the tropical biologists ‘stung-by-bala’ crowd, I was convinced today was the day to be baptized into the club. The mystery of the sting had bewitched me. But unlike most members, I would be facing not a single stray forager, surprised and scared, but hundreds of furious ants determined to protect their home.


Even so, I had miraculously recruited an eager, but also bullet-ant-naïve, undergrad helper named Walter. Together we trudged out to the nest site, buckets and shovels in tow. Our anxiety was palpable as we sweated through the jungle. We cut the tension with nervous conversation. Finally we reached the spot. A spindly tree, the smallest I had ever found a nest under, reached out over the trail. The plan was to collect as many workers as possible with our forceps, tossing them into our buckets and hopefully dwindling their numbers. Then we would dig.


We started our eagle-eyed capture of foragers. One, two, three, ten. Slowly ants stopped leaving the nest. We waited a few minutes without seeing any ants out and about. I took a long stick and plunged it into the nest. A few angry workers boiled out and we grabbed them. I probed again, mining for the black gold. A few more ants took the bait, but then nothing. No matter how much I cajoled, no more would venture out. They knew there was danger outside, and were crouched in darkness, waiting. It was time to dig.


‘Are you ready Walter?’ My eager helper was white as a sheet, anxious like me to get this over with. We both took a deep breath, and on the count of three, plunged our shovels into the rich black earth.


Instantly, the furious workers started boiling out. As I dug further, Walter stalked the workers with his forceps, grabbing ants before they could reach our boots and attack. He tossed dozens of ants into our buckets, black ants flying through the air one after the other. The provoked ants were making a huge racket, squeaking as loud as any forest frog or horny cricket. They were actually speaking to each other! The alarm signal, a high pitched squeaking sound, came from rubbing two parts of their hardened exoskeleton together. ‘Attack, attack!’ seemed to be the message. Quickly our buckets began to fill, and the squeaking was audible over monkey calls and parrot guffaws. The war cry of the bullet ant filled our ears.


Ever deeper we dug, and yet the queen kept retreating further under the tree, deep into the curving roots. A flash of white amidst the waves of black workers- we had just opened a brood chamber, where the immature ants were raised and protected. The nurses carrying worm-like white larvae and cocoon enshrouded pupae were quickly tossed into their own bucket. We had the foragers, the guards, the nurses captured for chemical analysis. The queen must be close!


‘Walter’, I said, eyes never leaving the wave of ants, ‘I’m going to pull the sapling down.’ It was the only way to get to the queen, and the reason I had chosen this nest, for its accessibility. The tide of ants had ceased, with the queen and her last entourage retreated into the deepest of their tunnels. I grabbed the tree, careful that no ants were along its length, and pulled down, hard. Suddenly, Walter screamed, and convinced he had been stung, I turned to see a huge bullet ant crawling up his mosquitoe netting right in front of his face. Staring cross-eyed at the squeaking horror, Walter froze as I swatted the stray ant off. That was close.


Alas, the Pentaclethra roots reached too deep. We could not reach into the deepest tunnels with our small shovels. We gathered our buckets of ants, about two hundred in total, and hiked back to camp. Deep in the jungle we left the queen in her ruined nest, her chemical brand still a mystery. And there too we also left the mystery of the sting. For we had escaped unscathed, for today.

Paraponera clavata- the bullet ant.

The view from 10 000 feet

This fall I met a bakery owner, a large and boisterously bearded man, with a verve for life and an undeniable energy. He told me about an interesting interviewing technique. ‘Baking is quick business’, he told me. Bakers are always on the move, having to juggle multiple trays of croissants, cookies and other goodies. Early morning deadlines mean delays are out of the question. So, to make sure his new pastry chefs can keep up, he would take all potential bakers for a walk, and let the interviewee set the walking pace. If they walked too slow, it was an automatic no. “I only hire fast walkers”, he explained.

            As I fly over the Gulf of Mexico, I have derived another interview question with a rapid rejection response. “When you fly on an airplane, where do you choose to sit and why?” I think that any answer other than ‘at the window seat, to look out’ should earn a good many demerits. I have flown a lot, especially over the last couple of years, and despite the many times I’ve been at 10 000 feet, the view from up here still amazes me. As we left Houston, the clouds were incredible, like giant peaks in a bowl of freshly whipped cream. Ships dotted the water like a life-sized game of battleship. Looking out there now, the wide ocean water stretches out to the horizon, and sets the scene for a new travel adventure.  

           

            I guess a good alternative answer would be ‘in the pilot’s seat’. The view from up there must really be something else.

A new adventure- in Costa Rica!

Hola!

I am going to be in Costa Rica for an Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) field course on Tropical Biology for June and July. It will be 8 intense weeks, which I hope are as fun and rewarding and I am expecting.

Here is my basic itinerary for those who are interested:

Palo Verde                           7-16 June
Monteverde                        17-22 June
San Jose                              23-27 June
                           Association of Tropical Biology Conference (I may meet EO Wilson!)
La Selva                             28 June- 7 July
Las Cruces                           8- 14 July
Cuerici                                15-20 July
Las Cruces (again)              21 July
Las Alturas                          22-24 July
Then to Ontario on July 26th!

Please follow my adventures on this blog, which I will try to update as regularly as I can.

Much love,

Virginia