Goodbye Costa Rica!

Our final destination was Las Alturas, which is part of the largest protected area in Central America. It’s down close to the border with Panama, and a lot of large mammals hang out there- jaguars, tapirs and the like. I only got to enjoy one night there (because of a friend’s wedding), but it was truly fantastic! We went on a nice long hike right after arriving, up to the high elevation elvin forest. Yes, you heard that right- elvin forest. I did not see any elves, but there is a magical feel when you are hiking through stunted trees and surrounded by beautiful orchids. Literally, orchids everywhere.

After the lovely hike, my herper-friend Mike and I ventured to the river. I took a swim in the cold waters of the Rio Bella Vista. Not quite the glacial waters of Canada, but still a nice refreshing chilly dip after a long hike. There was a beautiful waterfall, and I spent some time thinking under the vines and flowers of tropical forest.

Our final night we had a nice campfire, and all cheered when the generator was shut down for the night. The full moon was bright as a lamp, giving off almost enough light to read by.

Now I am in San Jose, preparing for my flight home after nearly two months away. The strangest part is being alone for the first time in nearly eight weeks. I am so used to having friends around all of the time, that it is really lonely to not have anyone to talk to. I’ve never been one for long goodbyes, but the hug-chain the final morning still felt a bit short. I have truly made some great friends on this course, and I am really excited to see everyone over coming months and years. To my new OTS family, thanks for a great summer, I will miss you all! 

Cuerrici- some vertebrates at long last!

The final long trip of the course was to a montane field station called Cuerrici (named after the turtle shaped mountain of the same name). The higher elevation means another change in vegetation, and we got treated to two types of very interesting habitat. The first was the very interesting oak-bamboo forest, which can feel surreally like walking through a kunfu movie. The tropical oaks have much rounder leaves than the wavy-edge oaks I’m used to in California, and are evergreen so they don’t lose their leaves in the winter. The bamboo grows in thick stands interspersed with the oaks, and sometimes it certainly feels like there should be pandas roaming around.

The second type of habitat we visited is called paramo- it’s the high elevation shrub-land of the tropics. All the vegetation is short and knarly, kind of reminiscent of the desert scrub you may have seen in the States. The dryer, higher paramo is really fun to walk around in, and it reminded me a lot of time I’ve spent at Red Rocks near Vegas. I kept seeing bouldering problems everywhere! It was a bit chillier though, and although I didn’t get to experience it, my friends felt some horizontal rain on their wanderings in the paramo. A truly Mars-esque landscape, very very different from the hot humid and loud greenery of La Selva and other lowland locales.

While at Cuerrici, we were joined by Bob Timm and Deedra McClearn, two faculty who have worked a lot on mammals. I was in their FFP group, and we got to capture mice for our project. It was a lot of fun working with vertebrates!  I even got to handle a couple of animals. You have to hold them by the scruff, like a mother cat picking up her kittens, and then you can mark them (hair-dye on the armpit, nailpolish on the toenails), measure them (tail and foot length) and weigh them (some as small as 20 grams)!

We also did some mist netting to catch birds, which reminded me a lot of my summer working with warblers in Ontario. I didn’t get to handle any birds because we didn’t catch many, but it was fun to see them up close when other people had them in hand. It really made me want to work with birds again- maybe I’ll try to get some time in at a banding station in the next year.

The third and final vertebrate we handled was fish. Cuerrici is a finca (farm) for truchas (trout) and mora (blackberries). The main owner, Don Carlos, was generous enough to serve us from his own trout stock on the last night. The trout are kept in a series of ponds and pools, moved from one to the other as they grow. We used some heavy nets to catch the fish, keeping only the bigger ones and throwing back the little guys. Once flopping around on the grass, the fish needed to be butchered, and I helped out. It is nice to know how to catch, kill, gut, and filet a fish, because I feel this is an essential survival skill. Although gruesome and sometimes gross, I prepared the fish from killing them through filet. (Well, I watched Don Carlos filet -so my colleagues wouldn’t have bone-filled fish- but I think I could do it on my own after watching him work on quite a few).

While watching Don Carlos filet, we also enjoyed petting the kittens at his house. They were super cute!

Of all the stations we visited, Cuerrici was one of my favorite, reminding me of time I’ve spent in the Sierras at friend’s cabins during the winter. It had the same cozy feeling, with fireplaces and good sleeps under warm blankets on cool nights. If I come back to Costa Rica, I will be sure to try to find time to come back to the oak-bamboo forests, and enjoy some more time rocking in rocking chairs and sipping hot chocolate. 

Monarchs abound at Las Cruces

OTS owns and operates three field stations- Palo Verde, La Selva and Las Cruces. After La Selva we spent a lovely week at Las Cruces, so I have now collected the trifecta of OTS field stations. Las Cruces is at a much higher elevation than La Selva (1400 m), and so is both cooler and less snake-filled. The station itself is surrounded by the Wilson Botanical Garden, one of the largest and most extensive botanical gardens in the world. The Wilsons started collecting plants for the garden in the 1960s, and OTS acquired the station in the later 70s. There are some thousands of different tropical plants here, each conveniently organized by group – you’ve got the palm patch over there, and the bromeliad hill over there- you get the idea.

My work here was mostly focused on another type of ant-plant. At Palo Verde I worked on the Acacia trees which housed Pseudormyrmex ants inside of hollow thorns. Here at Las Cruces you can find a whole lot of Cecropia trees, which house Azteca ants inside of hollow stems. The plant not only houses but also feeds the ants with food bodies it makes near the leaf stems. To pay the rent, the ants defend the plant from insects that want to eat it.

One of our faculty resource people, Cindy Sagers, introduced us to the Cecropia-Azteca work her group is doing. She brought us out to the forest with her eight foot sling shot, which they use to pull down large branches of the Cecropia trees. It’s harder than it sounds, getting a good slingshot-shot up and over a hundred foot limb that is surrounded by other vegetation. It is also a lot of fun to fire.

With my classmates Natalie, Haydée and Rick, we worked on Cecropia peltata, a species that lives along most roadsides in the tropics. By accident while trying to inspect a small sapling, I broke it off at the base, so Rick and I decided to dissect it and see if we could find the queens inside of the hollow stem. Amazingly, there were a lot of queens! In one of the hollow internodes, we found four queens of two different species. This seemed weird to us, since most large mature trees are thought to have only a single queen.

After our random discovery, and the fun of dissecting the saplings (it’s like opening Christmas presents since you never know what you’ll find inside), we changed our project to look more specifically at how ant queens were founding colonies.

The next day, with the queen founding in mind, we happened upon another incredible discovery- some queens actively founding a new colony! Because their colonies are inside of the Cecropia trees, they have to dig a hole using their teeth to get inside. This activity can be quite energy consuming, and so it would make sense to cooperate to dig a hole. That day was kind of crazy- I was doing a lot of running around, trying to capture all the activity of the ants. In total, we saw 13 fouding events, a third of them being cooperations between multiple queens. We watched three queens cooperate in digging a nest entrance for almost 6 hours- it sure took a lot longer than we’d expected! They kept digging and digging with their little ant teeth, and made very slow progress getting into the plant.

Aside from spending a lot of the day watching ants and dissecting their nests, I had a nice time at Las Cruces hiking around in the forest. There was a beautiful river trail, and lots of beautiful flowers everywhere.

I also enjoyed some delicious meals with friends in the comedor- we would sit down and eat family style, which is a nice change from cafeteria style serving. My favourite part of the day is sitting down to eat with my OTS family and enjoying some good laughs. They had some great bread for breakfast at Las Cruces, which was a nice change from the gallo pinto (rice and beans) of the past six or so weeks. I have had a bit of a gas baby lately (from too much gallo pinto I think), which has been the subject of many jokes. I hope the due date is soon! I am tired of having a bloated hurting belly! 

Return to La Selva

A long overdue update, but alas a necessarily less visually pleasing one because of the slow internet connection. (ie: Pictures to come once back in America).

It's been a couple of weeks since you've heard from me, and much has happened. We have been at three different field stations- La Selva, Las Cruces and Cuerrici, and I'm going to dedicate a post to each in turn. So, first off, La Selva! 

La Selva Biological Station is one of the most frequented tropical field stations in the world. It is the only field station in Costa Rica that I had visited prior to this trip, so I have a lot of fond memories of being there. First I visited in January 2010 for an OTS short course on plant animal interactions, which was fantastic, and then I returned in June of that same year for a short stint of field work, and had a lot of fun with my friend Erin CB who helped me deal with bullet ants. 

Returning to La Selva, while a bit nostalgic, was also a great opportunity to explore new parts of the station property and to do new things. We had some great resource faculty at that site. One of my favorite faculty was Mo Donnelly, the advisor of my course-mates Mike and Michelle, and a real firecracker. She gave a couple of lectures while at La Selva (one of which she delivered with beer in hand), about her work on the herps, or the reptiles and amphibians of La Selva.

Her dissertation work was on the insanely cute strawberry poison frog, which has a red body and looks like it has little blue jeans on. A tiny creature with a very interesting reproductive strategy. The males defend a territory full of bromeliads and tasty leaf litter creepy crawlies, and calls all day for females. The females show up, assess their man, and if they decide to mate they’ll lay some eggs in the litter. The male guards the eggs in this young stage until a couple weeks later when the tadpoles are ready to hatch. At this point, the female returns and encourages the freshly hatched tadpoles to wiggle up onto her back. Once they’re piggy-back ready, she climbs a tree and drops the little tadpole into a bromeliad full of water. The incredible thing is she puts each tadpole in its own bromeliad and also remembers where each of them live, returning to lay unfertilized eggs for them to eat. Every day she climbs up and down a dozen or so trees, feeding her tadpoles until they are adults. Truly incredible.

I’ve always thought herpetologists were a special breed, and the week and a half at La Selva certainly offered more ammo for that observation. For example, one random day while hanging around the lab, this guy walks out of the forest with a ten foot long boa constrictor wrapped around his arm. While most people’s instincts are to run from snakes, there are folks out there who pounce instead. It was an impressive animal, with a terrifyingly angry gurgling hiss, and you would have to be crazy to NOT consider this guy crazy. That snake was one of the most scary animals I have ever seen up close. Not venomous, but very strong- imagine ten feet of solid muscle, in some places as large as your thigh.

While not quite so crazy (‘I stay away from the venomous ones!) Mo is a lot of fun in the field. She took us on two very memorable night hikes. The first was along the boardwalk in the biological reserve swamp. We heard an awful lot of frogs crawling, and I saw (among many things) a bunch of red eyed tree frogs, the most photographed animal in Costa Rica. We also saw a snake eating frog eggs, which was really cool- it’s not often you get to see those types of interactions in person.

Our second hike was a bit more adventurous, because instead of walking along a nice boardwalk in a swamp, we actually walked IN the swamp. I’ve done a couple of swamp walks before- one memorable one in Argentina as an undergrad comes to mind- but it’s been a while since I’ve been waist deep in swamp water. A couple of my colleagues braved the cow-paddy muck of Palo Verde, but I kept my feet dry. The research swamp at La Selva though, that was a whole other experience. Definitely the most memorable moment was when Kevin started shrieking and grabbing his rear- he had a baby iguana in his shorts. Later when Mo asked if we had fun, Kevin replied ‘I had faun-a in my pants!’

All in all, the nights were a lot of fun at La Selva- some of the faculty field problems even involved 24 hours of sampling. They were looking at the respiration of trees over a night, and some of my friends, notably Paulo and Michelle, were pretty out of it for a few days afterwards. Fortunately my faculty field problem was diurnal sampling only. For our project, we looked at palm tree demography (ie: the age structure or number of seedlings, saplings and mature trees) in old growth and secondary growth forests. Lots of transects and bush walking through bullet-ant invested understory. Natalie, one of our team, did get stung on the finger but made a remarkably good recovery. Fortunately I still haven’t experienced the sting of the bullet ant, but I sure am curious. Our FFP was a lot of fun fieldwork- biking down the STR trail, hiking an hour or two out to field sites, getting lost in the forest, having a field lunch of omelete sandwich, egg salad sandwich and hard-boiled eggs.

At La Selva I also collected a lot of ants (surprise!), a couple hundred or so from at least 40 species. One of the highlights of my fieldwork (aside from the jungle biking, ant-lion wrangling, and spider monkey watching) was to visit the canopy towers, in search of arboreal ants. I only got a couple of ants, but man, the view was incredible. As promised, photos will follow shortly.

The recreation at La Selva was also quite different and memorable. As a field biologist sometimes you need to make fun for yourselves. I have heard a lot of fun tales from old-timers and the crazy antics they’d get into (Mo Donnelly has quite a few of these stories). I’m not sure how far back this tradition goes, but on the fourth of July, in celebration of the founding of La Selva (and America), there is a toad race. The toad race is set up so that a pair of toads race each other across a span of about 15 feet or so, and the first to hop over the finish line wins. I entered a toad last minute with Ty (our toad was named ‘Frog), and from our class there was also Courtenay’s toad (Gallo Pinto – the breakfast mix of rice and beans), and Rick’s toad (Camel Toad – no explanation required). Your toad would start at the start line, and using a spray bottle of water you would spray its butt to make it jump. Our little Frog got pretty far but was knocked out in the quarter finals. In a surprise victory, Rick’s toad won the whole race, and he was given a homemade sloth sculpture made of beer cans and aluminum foil.

I really hope I get to return to La Selva someday- my third visit there was just a great as the previous  two. It’s a lovely forest to work in, and there are a lot of conveniences for researchers, as well as a great comraderie (the forty person soccer game on Wednesday was super fun!). We’ll see what is in store for me, but I’m hoping I can return one day and make more memories there.

***

No toads were harmed in the making of this blog post.

The Association for Tropical Biology

Last week, we were in San Jose for the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC). It happens to be the 50th anniversary of both ATBC and of OTS (the Organization for Tropical Studies, or in spanish OET, la Organizacion para Estudios Tropicales). It was quite interesting being at a 50th anniversary meeting because everyone was in a very nostalgic mood, and I got to hear a lot of fun stories about 'the good ole days'.

One of the people I was most looking forward to meeting (but alas, it did not pan out) is Mary Jane West-Eberhard. She is one of the foremost authorities in wasp social behaviors and is also a really kick ass female biologist, who has lived in Central America most of her life. She works in both Costa Rica and in Panama. On the historical panel a few days ago, she shared a very interesting story about how she started out in biology in the early 60s.

Field biology, especially in the tropics, is very different today than it was in 1964. Back then, most work was done in a very exploratory way, on a series of expeditions. It was true exploration, working in very new and (literally) uncharted territory. A far cry from our air conditioned lab and high speed internet situation at La Selva today.  Mary Jane was a grad student and interested in traveling to the tropics, but since the only women allowed to go were the wives of expedition members, she was hard pressed to get herself invited. One day, a student she'd tutored mentioned that he was looking for biologists to visit his home country of Colombia, and invited her to live in Colombia and do research there.

She packed everything (but the kitchen sink) for her trip to Colombia - from 50 pound machines to measure temperature and humidity, to a little black dress for social outings. (Just for comparison's sake, the 50 pound thermo-barometer she used has been replaced by tiny dime-sized iButtons.) Apparently the little black dress got used only once- for a funeral and alas, not for a date.

One of the most interesting proofs of the gender differences of the time was the fact that women weren't allowed to wear trousers in public. Poor Mary Jane, who would take the bus to her field sites everyday, had to wear a skirt or dress on the bus, change into her field clothes for work, and then back into a ladylike froc for the ride home. She also wasn't allowed to have a backpack (how unfeminine!) so she used a giant straw purse to carry all of her field gear.

I must say, I sure am glad that times have changed!