3/3 catching butterflies

We spent the entire day collecting butterflies for our faculty-led project today. Tomorrow the actual experiments will start.

An interesting conflict has surfaced around our project. There are many different approaches to doing science, and OTS teaches the hypothesis-testing approach. They maintain the other approaches are fine, but we are expected to practice forming hypotheses and predictions to guide our projects. Larry Gilbert likes the natural history approach better, where you just kind of figure out how things are working in the system you've selected (e.g. "how many of the butterflies in this population are poisonous?") and then worry later about how to fit it into the framework of a broader ecological question. The course coordinators want to be sure we can frame this project in terms of a hypothesis so that a concise paper can come out of it for the course book. In terms of my own professional development, I'm definitely benefitting more from thinking in terms of hypotheses and predictions -- it helps me think more logically about what I want to know, why I want to know it, and how I'm going to figure it out. We'll see how it all resolves itself.

So the project itself: there is a big family of butterflies, the Heliconidae, with lots of poisonous mimics in it. (They all look very similar, so if a predator learns one tastes bad, it will avoid all of them in the future). One tribe in the family, Ithomiines, are fairly common around Corcovado right now. They collect their toxic compounds as adults from flowering plants that particularly like light gaps. Larry has seen lots of the butterflies, but not very many of the plants. He thinks there may be a lot of these aposematic (warning coloration) butterflies out right now that don't actually have toxins. But how would we test this? We don't have any fancy tools to measure chemistry. But we do have golden orb spiders, which have been used as bioassays for the chemical compound in question. So we'll throw butterflies in their nets. If the butterfly has the toxic compound, the spider will cut it out of its web. If it doesn't, the spider will eat it. We'll see how that goes tomorrow.

People have been coming in with stories about all the cool animals they've seen. The most prized is the tapir. They're fairly common, but not conspicuous. I've seen a shark in the surf and a big crocodile on the other side of the river, but no tapir.