News That Stays News

Ready, set, pack! August 1, 2018

August 1, 2018

I allotted two whole days to packing, and that turned out to be just enough time to do it comfortably. It’s not that I’m bringing so much stuff—I’m actually taking back a lot less than I came down with—it’s that everything I’m leaving here had to be inventoried, packed, labelled, and stored with the help of the station staff. All in all, I’ve packed away four modified mini-fridges that are also doing double duty as storage cabinets, a giant box containing all the parts I’ve taken off the fridges, two large trash bags full of Styrofoam and cardboard, a big roll of window screen mesh, 100 meters of power cord, a stack of plastic crates, and one last box containing useful odds and ends like my rubber boots. And I won’t try to list all the other things I borrowed from our communal lab supplies or other researchers and had to find and return…. But I got everything squared away. As a bonus, there was a two-toed sloth hanging off the bridge this evening, and I got a pretty good photo. (The spiky hairdo is what happens when a sloth gets rained on.)

Winding down July 29, 2018

I’m leaving the station on Thursday, so I’ve started winding down my work here so that I have plenty of time to pack and work on my conference presentation. The station is also clearing out, since other researchers have started heading back home and the undergraduate students are holed up working on the write-ups of their research projects. In other news, there was a sloth very close to the bridge, and I saw one peccary chasing another at high speed. The pursuer was making noises that sounded so much like starting a lawn mower or weed whacker that I was trying to figure out why someone would be cutting grass in the lab clearing at 6:30 on a Sunday morning.

Hiding in plain sight July 25, 2018

One of my biggest concerns at the start of this summer was how I was going to get enough alone time on a station that would be occupied by, at minimum, thirty or so other people the entire time. The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple: hang out in the lab. In general, people seem to assume that if you’re sitting in the lab in front of a computer, you must be working on Very Important Science Stuff and shouldn’t be bothered. Presto: instant peace and quiet!

Even better, my experiments need to run undisturbed for 50 minutes at a stretch, so I can often relax for a bit while still collecting data for my project. Those 50 minute windows have also made a good excuse to avoid long meals and the flitting conversations that are par for the course when you have a changing cast of 6 people all talking to each other. I think it’s safe to say I’ll make it through the last week without going bonkers. But I am definitely looking forward to being alone for a few days between leaving here and arriving in New Orleans for a conference.

A meter of rain in July and counting July 22, 2018

Sometime early this morning, La Selva reached 1000 millimeters of rain for the month, and as of now, we’ve had 1055 mm (about 41 inches) of rain in July. In the same time, Palo Verde’s only received 33 mm (about an inch and a half). We got more rain today than Palo Verde’s had this month. Unsurprisingly, the river’s continued to flirt with the oh-shit stick, and it’s been rising and falling pretty rapidly all week. Today, it was at the base of the stick when I went to breakfast, into the first meter when I came back, and was partway up the second meter when I went to lunch. But by dinner time, the water had dropped fast enough that there was mud between the stick and the water.

After the flood July 18, 2018

I went into the forest again on Monday morning, and things were pretty much back to normal, as long as you weren’t too close to water. If you were, well…

things could still be pretty abnormal.

The best/worst/most ridiculous bit of flood debris was on one of the main trails near the river. Somehow, the flooding pushed part of a giant fallen tree back into place across the trail:

No one has come up with any plausible explanation for this; my favorite implausible one is that the ghosts of tropical biologists past did it.

“The forest is closed” July 15, 2018

July 15, 2018

Yes, this is something people say here. Or announce by posting a sign:

In this case, the forest was closed due to heavy rains and flooding. They evacuated the outlying dormitory where they stash students and unfortunate researchers at 4:45 AM on Saturday because the bridge connecting it to everything else was flooded. I first found out about the flooding when I looked out my window and realized that I could see a lot more river water than I had the day before. The big bridge across the river was fine, but all we could see of the four-meter floodwater measuring stick (which absolutely everyone calls the “oh-shit stick”), was the unlabeled top:

When I got ready to go to lunch, I made it across the bridge only to discover that the dip between the end of the bridge and the dining hall had flooded. I waded across thigh-high water to lunch, then talked the lunch ladies into making me up a bag lunch I could take back with me so that I wouldn’t need to come back for dinner.

This turned out to be unnecessary, since the water was apparently already receding by then, but I enjoyed a nice quiet (solitary!) evening doing nothing in particular, so I didn’t mind. I made it to breakfast today without having to wade through anything, and they reopened the forest after lunch. There’s been a bit more rain, but parts of today were actually sunny, and the water has made it all the way down to the bottom of the stick.

The other cool thing I saw on Sunday July 12, 2018

A climbing sloth.  Sloths are rather common near the station buildings, but they’re almost always hanging unmoving from a branch and are frequently difficult to identify as mammals. But as I was leaving the lab for lunch, there was a sloth crossing from one tree to another. Even better, it was maybe 20 feet in the air and crossing over the path I was walking along. It was so interesting that I stayed until it had made it into the new tree, which took at least five minutes.

A climbing sloth looks like a rock climber in slow motion. Unlike a squirrel or a monkey, they can’t move over flimsy anchor points quickly, so their combined hand- and footholds must always be able to support their weight. Instead of quick bounding, there were a lot of spread-eagle moments and maneuvering so that the sloth would be able to grab a particular twig or branch with the correct appendage. At one point, the sloth hung midway between the two trees and paused. We joked that it was taking a nap, but I can’t rule out the possibility that it was considering how to get a good enough grip on the new branch to cross over without breaking it: After that pause, the sloth repositioned itself so that it could grab the new branch closer to its base and successfully made it over.

Unfortunately, the rest of my Sunday was not as exciting: I realized that I was making gadget components with the wrong type of wire and had been since Saturday evening. Between needing to undo everything I’d done and redo it properly, I think I lost a day of work. But the gadgets are finished and we’re field-testing them so that I can set up an experiment with them during my next trip.

Boat trip July 8, 2018

July 8, 2018

I played hooky for a couple of hours this morning to go on a boat tour along the Rio Puerto Viejo—the river that runs through the station. It was neat getting to see the river up close, since the banks are generally high and steep, and we saw all sorts of birds and other animals. But the absolute highlight of the trip started when we passed another boat going in the opposite direction. One of the other researchers on our boat called out Algo caiman? (Any caimans?) The captain of the other boat replied No, nutria. This sounded exciting and a bit odd, since I thought nutria were only native to South America. I discovered my mistake when we saw a river otter swimming alongside the bank in quick arches*. The captain swung our boat closer to the bank, and as we watched, we realized there were two of them.

They headed towards a large fallen snag near the bank, and as we watched, one of them surfaced with a fish and proceeded to eat it while sitting at the base of a tree just above the water.

* The big semi-aquatic rodents known as nutria in the US are apparently called copyu in Spanish. In Spanish, nutria usually means otter but can also refer to the fur of the rodent. I suspect this means the latter was marketed as an alternative to otter fur at some point.

Curassow kids! July 4, 2018

When I was out collecting leaves yesterday, I came across a female curassow with two chicks. They were moving fast, so I didn’t get a photo, but they were ridiculously cute. The chicks were older than the ones I’ve seen before—instead of looking like giant fluffy goslings, they looked like quarter-scale replicas of their mom. In other words, they had dark heads with little mohawk crests, reddish brown bodies, and red-and-white striped tails. And that’s about all the news I’ve got.

An R.O.U.S. and the Cliffs of Insanity July 1, 2018

On Thursday and Friday, we went even further up the mountain than before to 6000+ feet above sea level. Instead of staying overnight, we made two trips, in part because the shelter up there is a bit primitive and was occupied by another group of researchers, but mostly because we hadn’t brought the requisite cold-weather clothing and sleeping bags to Costa Rica with us. It gets fairly cold up there, and it rains the majority of the time, so it’s easy to become permanently chilled if you’re not careful. But it’s gorgeous up there, especially when the sun comes out.

I spotted our Rodent of Unusual Size on Thursday, when I originally thought it was a termite nest in a tree, which would have been weird at that elevation. However, when I got closer, I realized it had ears and a tail.

We had actually walked right underneath it without noticing, and it reacted more to the rain picking up than to us walking, talking, and being generally obnoxious. That means it was probably nocturnal, but so far no one’s figured out what it was, and everything from a porcupine to an opossum to a giant rat has been proposed.

Just after the rodent were the Cliffs (well, Hills) of Insanity.

The trail we were using is one that goes all the way from the top of the mountain down to La Selva, so unlike most hiking trails, it generally ignores any ups, downs, and streams in the way. Due to poor planning on our part, we went down and up this one hill three or four times. Farther down the trail there were some stretches that were even steeper but trying not to fall up or down hills was a higher priority than photography, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.  🙂