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!