News That Stays News

Bridge June 27, 2018

One of the easiest cool places here is the Stone Bridge, which is actually a metal suspension bridge named for a for past director. It crosses over the river that separates the administrative center of the station from the laboratories and the vast majority of the forest. As a result, the bridge is a highway not just for people, but all sorts of other animals. A few days ago, I saw four howler monkeys taking a break from crossing the suspension cable, each one resting over one of the vertical cables so that they could wrap their tails around them for security. Then there are the animals in the river, including so-called “fruit piranhas”, turtles, iguanas, apparently at least one otter (seen by someone else), and a goldfish that someone dumped in the river, which my supervisor insists on calling “MagiCarp”. I won’t even mention the birds and bats that fly by.

The bridge and the river also offer long lines of sight, which are very hard to find here, given the dense forest and low terrain. It’s not flat–in fact, there are a lot of steep slopes cut by streams working their way to the river—but the overall elevation change is small enough compared to how tall the trees are that you never really see very far. So I find it relaxing to stand on the bridge and run my eyes along the riverbanks. Of course, it also reminds me of the marsh at Palo Verde, which doesn’t hurt.

“I wondered if you’d disappeared” June 24, 2018

June 24, 2018

The immediate reason why my current roommate said this to me this morning was that this was the first time we were both awake in our room since Wednesday evening. One reason for that is because she studies howler monkeys: She has to get up before they do, so she’s usually leaving the room between 3:45 and 5 AM and going to sleep by 8:30 or 9 PM. Another reason is that I’ve been racing the clock to process all the samples from the trip up the mountain–since a lot of those plants don’t occur here, I had to work fast before the insects in them starved. I also put those two things together and decided that my roommate’s “later” departures (around 5 or 5:30 AM) were excellent wakeup calls and started heading to the lab to set up my first round of tests before breakfast. Each set of tests takes about four hours, so that let me fit in an extra set of tests on both Friday and Saturday. Which meant that I was able to finish my last few insects this morning and spent the rest of the day cleaning up my lab space and relaxing. Tomorrow, I’ll collect some more leaves and insects around the station to keep me busy before we head out on another trip even further up the mountain on Wednesday.

Storm watching June 20, 2018

June 20, 2018

Yesterday, another researcher and I went up to another research site at 1000 meters above sea level. The site is actually a cozy family-owned ecolodge and preserve, so we were able to stay the night there and save ourselves two rounds of driving up and down.

Which was good, because a little after yesterday’s lunch, the light rain that had been going for most of the morning turned into a thunderstorm. We immediately grabbed our stuff and headed back, but we ran into a delay when the shortcut we tried to take out of the forest turned into a dead end: The driveway for the boarded-up house on an adjoining property had been blocked off with an electrical cattle fence. Neither of us wanted to test whether it was live, especially since we were soaking wet. So we had to backtrack, then exit the way we came, which included crossing a stream which had been a trickle when we went out but had acquired several inches of fast-flowing water by the time we reached it again.

We made it back to our cabin around 1:30, but with the rain, thunder, and lightning still going strong, not to mention that proto-river, it was clear our fieldwork was over for the day. Which left us with unusually little to do, other than try to get dry and watch the rain. We were joined in this by a falcon and a hummingbird. For some reason, the hummingbird was convinced it needed to perch in the same tree as the falcon, even though there were plenty of others available. It tried to dislodge the falcon a couple of times with bouts of outraged and nearly earsplitting chirping (hummingbirds are ­loud), but when that failed, it settled down nearby, apparently ignoring the falcon.

This morning was rain-free and even sunny at times, and the stream had gone back to a trickle. We got a ton of work done, came back to the lodge for lunch, and watched again as an even bigger storm rolled in.

Close to home June 17, 2018

You may have noticed that a lot of the stuff I’m mentioning is close to where I’m working and sleeping, rather than off in distant parts of the forest. This is because the project I’m currently working on, while really cool, has an even higher lab-to-field time allotment than my dissertation research. I can collect enough insects in a couple of hours to keep me busy in the lab for a couple of days. And since the plants I’m collecting insects from are really common, I decided I might as well start with the ones that are nearby, at least until I get to the point where I’m targeting particular species rather than just grabbing everything because it’s all new.

While this means I’m unlikely to see a cat or anything else really dramatic, I’m still seeing cool stuff. It just tends to be small (like the leafcutter ants) or so fast I don’t get a chance for photos. This morning, as I was crossing the suspension bridge from the labs to the dining hall, a clueless and possibly young broad-billed motmot* stayed sitting on the handrail with an insect in its beak until I was within a couple of feet. What was really amazing is that I was walking and talking with someone else, until we got so close that I noticed it. If this is a typical example of its survival instincts, I suspect it may soon receive a Darwin Award.

*I couldn’t get a photo of this one, but broad-billed motmots are beautiful. They have rusty orange heads that fade into olive green bodies and turquoise tails, with a little black bandit mask around their eyes. They really like the bridge and the riverbank, and since my cabin is close to both, I’m sometimes woken by choirs of motmots before dawn. But they’re much easier to sleep through than howler monkeys, so I’m appropriately grateful for them.

Ant trails June 13, 2018

June 13, 2018

One of the easy cool things to see at La Selva are leafcutter ant trails. They’re not quite everywhere, but they’re very common, especially along the edges of human trails. The ants fill the space so uniformly they might as well be obeying road signs declaring that particular strip of concrete or earth a designated ant lane. (The trails are certainly “painted” with pheromones, but I’m not sure how the ants know to put them right along the edges.)

Right now, the trail outside the lab I’m spending most of my time in looks particularly cool because the ants are mostly carrying tiny fig fruits rather than leaves. That makes it easier to see the trail over long distances. (It’s the reddish-brown line along the right side of the trail continuing into the distance.)

I was going to post a video that’s almost shot from an ant’s eye view, but it looks like WordPress wants to charge me for that. So I’ve put it on YouTube.

Snakes, crabs and bats June 10, 2018

June 10, 2018

La Selva seems to be to venomous snakes what Palo Verde is to mosquitoes. Except the worst the Palo Verde mosquitoes will do is make you scratch yourself bloody, while the venomous snakes at La Selva are, well, venomous. Two nights ago, the professor who’s basically my co-supervisor came into my lab to tell me that, FYI, she’d been struck at by a young terciopelo* right outside my cabin. It missed, but people are reporting two or three snake sightings a night around the labs and cabins. Apparently, this is worse than usual, and people are saying it’s probably a combination of it being time for young snakes to spread out, a bunch of wild rodents in the lab clearing, and the extra leaves and branches on the ground from the storm. Personally, I haven’t seen any snakes other than one terciopelo that was curled up behind a building that someone pointed out to me, and I’d be happy to keep it that way.

I have seen some less alarming animals. That same night, a land crab got into the lab:

I love how it looks like that beetle is backing the crab up against the wall. 😀

And today, I was getting ready to collect this rolled-up leaf

to look for insects when a bunch of disc-winged bats flew out of the top! I didn’t get a good look at the bats, but they have little suction cups on their wings that they use to hold onto smooth surfaces like leaves.

*This is basically a fer-de-lance, except someone seems to have decided that ‘fer-de-lance’ should only be used as the name for a closely-related species that only occurs in the Caribbean. On the other hand, that part of the Caribbean includes islands that actually speak French, unlike Costa Rica and the rest of Central America. Terciopelo apparently means ‘velvet’ in Spanish, which is a pretty good description of how its skin looks, even if it isn’t your typical scary venomous snake name.

And now for something completely different June 6, 2018

June 6, 2018

This summer, I’m doing research at La Selva, which is a wet forest* on the other side of Costa Rica from Palo Verde. It’s a lot more like what people think of when they hear ‘tropical forest’:

La Selva is not just different from Palo Verde, but also different from when I came down briefly in March. A few weeks ago, there was a microburst storm that did a lot of damage. A microburst is apparently the opposite of a tornado: fast winds blow down to the ground, then move outward. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but tons of trees were knocked down, along with the station’s canopy towers and various bits of infrastructure.

That last photo is of a blocked trail that I scouted out in March and decided would be perfect for my project. They say it’ll be clear by Monday, so here’s hoping.

*Technically, La Selva isn’t a ‘rain forest’ because it isn’t humid enough, although it’s difficult for me to imagine being someplace even more humid…I left a dry shirt on the foot of my bed last night and it was damp when I woke up.