Home Again

I've been back since late Tuesday night... or early Wednesday morning. Overall, this last trip to CR has been refreshing. I'm back at science and life with new energy and optimism... and maybe slightly reduced focus. But who needs focus! Thank God for the tropics.

Friday Night! Woohoo!

It's Friday night at La Selva, which means we just finished our beans and rice and are sitting down at the microscopes for a few hours of pollen-counting. Hooray! Amanda and I have gotten faster, now we're a veritable assembly line of stained-stigma slide production. But we've fallen a little behind in processing the slides, so tomorrow might be a morning of counting, too.
I think I've acclimated finally. Today I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt against the mosquitoes. All my clothes were damp with sweat, but I didn't feel hot. I learned to carry a handkerchief for my camera, which fogs up for ~30 minutes after being in the air conditioned office all night. Now that I'm used to it, I can't believe I'll be leaving in another 2.5 days!
I have been getting better with my camera, though. I've been trying to get a good photo of the strawberry poison dart frog, and I finally managed it. They are super abundant here, and much more conspicuous in the wet season. Other summer treats include baby peccaries, frequent tree falls, and lots of red mud.

A couple of nights ago there was a big storm and a huge tree right next to the River Station fell on the electrical wires. I woke in the middle of the night to a sound like a gunshot, and I thought it was a little strange that people were shooting canopy leaves in the middle of the night. (Using a shotgun is apparently the standard method for sampling leaves in the canopy, and there is a group doing it at La Selva at the moment.) The next thing I noticed was that I couldn't see anything AT ALL; I thought maybe I might be blind, but it didn't seem important enough to lose sleep over, so I went back to my dreams. In the morning we found out that there were wires in the river and half the station had lost electricity. A crew was out early to work on it; apparently the tree was hung up in the wires, because they felled it just as I was walking out in the morning. It was HUGE and we were all glad it didn't fall on the River Station itself. Amanda and I were out in the field, so we didn't miss the electricity; they didn't get it up again until early afternoon. So all the people who needed to use thermocyclers and digital scales sat in the rocking chairs for a few hours, I guess.
That's the excitement from the rainforest for now! I'm having fun, and looking forward to coming home.

only one week left!

Here's the office where we've been spending the rainy bits of the last several days. The two walls behind me (the photographer) have bookshelves and lockers. The rainy bits have been few, however, and mostly we've been in the field collecting stigmas and pollen samples; we have ~70 slides to go through. Luckily it rained hard last night and just stopped in the last hour, so we'll have a few hours to actually look at slides while we wait for the rainforest to dry off as much as it ever does.


Of course, I'm not complaining about having to spend a lot of time in the field; it gives me the chance to see cool things like this eyelash viper, which is beautiful and deadly... like a tropical biologist...

We've also gotten to know the 10 species we're collecting quite well. Many of them have cool floral adaptations, like stigmas that are triggered when a pollinator comes (they wap the pollinator, hopefully picking up some pollen in the process), big thick petals that keep off the rain, or anthers attached to petals that hit the stigma when they fall off at the end of the flower's life (a last-ditch selfing mechanism, in case no one else's pollen lands on the flower.)

That's about it for now... our days are fun but all pretty much the same: beans and rice 3 meals a day, hiking through the muddy rainforest most of the daylight hours, processing data and planning when it gets dark. At meals we get a chance to meet other biologists and hear about what they're doing; plenty of people are short-termers like us, and there are also several people here for many months at a time working on dissertations. I can't decide if I'm jealous of them. But I know I'm glad I'm here now!

air conditioning

Today was an office day; this sloth was hanging out at the trailhead just outside the lab. It was hanging on a vine 6 feet over the trail! Lucky for us.
We spent most of the day identifying the plants we've been seeing, helped substantially by Orlando Vargas, the resident naturalist who seems to know every single plant on the property. He's amazing. We finished off by constructing a tree to tell us how the different species are related to each other. We'll use that to decide which flowers to focus our sampling on. Tomorrow we're planning to make our first pollen slides and count how much intra- and inter-specific pollen is on the m, i.e. we'll start collecting data! Hooray!
Our office is beautiful, with windows on two sides. It's a corner office; I guess we've arrived. But the air conditioning is extreme. I suppose it's necessary to maintain somebody's equipment, since all the offices are connected. I have to wear a longsleeved shirt and a fleece in here, but when I step outside my glasses fog up and I strip off all the clothes I can. I think I'll be bringing all my damp clothes here to dry, though. And it's probably better for the computer to sit in AC than to be lugged around from one hot, humid room to another in my moldy backpack on my sweaty back on a bike.
Pretty much the only other thing that happened today was our move from posh tourist quarters to a room in the River Station, which has its own legendary researchy charm. It turned out the sheets were even shaped into fans -- or at least the bottom bunk's were. And there is a fan, so it will probably be a lovely place to sleep.

A few favorite pics...

most of what we think about is flowers, but there have been a few cool fruits too -- this one is a palm, and Amanda loves it even more than I do. The orange part is squishy!

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, fancy-pants in central america is fans: toilet paper, kleenex, towels; but the is the first time I've seen the sheets too. Tomorrow we move to moldy River Station, where I'll bet you all an ice cream no one makes fans out of anything.

Not many Costus blooming right now, but this species is just starting -- you can see why they're called Spiral Gingers in this photo. Or at least the "spiral" part. The ginger part is because of the vegetation, I think, which is similar to that of the closely related ginger family. Blah, blah, blah, I'm a botanist.

We think we identified this as a member of the family Gesneriaceae, but I can't place it beyond that. But they are beautiful, big flowers.

Here's this gorgeous bromeliad we found on the trail. Generally they grow way up in the trees, but like most epiphytes (plants growing on other plants) around here they occasionally blow down. It looks like a lot of these have been blown down, and now they're flowering on the ground!

sloggin' through the back 40

Today Amanda and I decided to check out the most remote parts of the La Selva property. It's only 2-3 km to the back, and we picked the straight trail out and the windy trail back. We could tell from the map that this choice would lead us through a mix of virgin and successional forest at different stages, and figured that was our best bet for maximum floral diversity. The straight trail (LOC for those in the know) turns out to be straight over the most extreme topography in La Selva. We didn't think to check the topo map until we were already 3 hours out, ha ha!

The first 40% of the hike took 75% of the time. Hills as steep as it is possible to walk on two legs, one hill after another, hundreds of feet up and down, up and down. Add to that heat and humidity that made our skin constantly slick with sweat and fogged my glasses. And all this in the knee-high rubber boots that are considered standard to deal with the mud and snakes out here. Some of the most challenging hiking I've ever done. I came out with blisters on the bottoms of my heels and mud all over my clothes. While we were doing it, it was not so much fun, but as soon as we came out into the flatter part with the picturesque river crossings and the abundant Hot Lips (a plant in the genus Psychotria), all that angst was translated into pride and enjoyment. The trail back was absurdly easy, longer but faster because it goes AROUND the minimountains.

Tomorrow we're taking the day off field work to nurse our blistered selves and take stock of what we have found so far; hopefully we'll be able to select plant species to focus on and start collecting pollen samples on Saturday.

Back in the CR

I'm back in Costa Rica, at OTS's La Selva Biological Station. I'm here with my friend and colleague Amanda Posto -- the one I wrote a postcourse grant with. OTS funded the grant, and so we're back at La Selva for two weeks. The grant covers our room and board. We're studying how flower shape affects rates of pollen deposition within and between species.

It took most of two days to get here, plane bus and taxi. We met up in the Miami Airport and spent one night in San Jose. Everything went smoothly, we were able to understand and be understood. We even found the grocery store with the essential items -- lighters and potato empanadas. The lighters are for preparing pollen slides, and the empanadas are very, very tasty.

Yesterday the taxi dropped us off by Reception here at La Selva. We checked in and then walked to kilometer to the building we're staying in now; after all that travel and with heavy bags it was a long km! But the room is beautiful -- obviously built for tourists, but currently accommodating scientist overflow. :) On Friday we move to the grungy River Station, which I think is the oldest building at the station. Moldy and apparently with some olfactory issues from the old septic system. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, yesterday we got set up with a little lab space and a locker to store our research equipment in. This morning we checked out a couple of bikes, which substantially shorten our commute from the distant lodgings; a lot of the trails around the station are bikeable, too. We spent most of the day today out in the field, looking for plants in flower. We found about 28 species, and are currently working on identifying them.

It's the rainy season here now. When we got in yesterday, they said it hadn't rained in two days. I told Amanda I figured it would rain today, and she said she thought it wouldn't, so we ended up wagering an ice cream on the question. I was surprised she did it, because (as noted) it is the RAINY season, in a rainforest. She lost in a big way. We had just finished walking trails for the day and were almost back where we'd left the bikes on the trail when it started to pour. We got out our umbrellas for the last few meters. Umbrellas work better in the tropical rainforest than rain gear, because you'd just soak in your own sweat under all that plastic. But they went back in the backpacks when we hopped on our bikes.

Biking in a downpour on the narrow leaf-covered trails of La Selva is hard core. Okay, I'm not a mountain biker, but I thought it was gnarly (as Jeff - the advisor - would say). My glasses were steamed up and covered in raindrops, but I was doing pretty well and having a blast. Then I heard a thump on the trail behind me; it was Amanda hitting the dirt after a small tree caught her left handlebar. She was laughing, which was good, but the bike didn't seem to be working quite right anymore, so we walked the rest of the way back to the lab where I could clean off my glasses and we could get a better look at the gears. It was an easy fix, and then we were back on wheels, speeding to our room where hot showers, baby powder, and dry clothes awaited. Bliss!

Now we're looking at all those plant photos I took, checking La Selva's online flora, and leafing through plant ID books to figure out what we have. That should keep us busy for a few more hours before we go to bed and sleep very, very well.

It's fun being a researcher at La Selva. Very different from being a visiting student in a big class. Now we make our own schedule, and it's just the two of us. It's easier to see cool things on the trail because there aren't 20 other people making noise and trying to catch every lizard they see. There aren't any lectures to attend (unless we want to) and no papers to write, just the two of us and our project. On the other hand, we have to be more focused, and we don't have boxes full of resources and people with diverse interests to ask about this bird or that mammal spotted on the trail.

Speaking of critters, I saw an armadillo and a 3-toed sloth. I'd better get back to work now!