For Monteverde pictures, click here.

Day 12: Monteverde Cloud Forest

So we’ve finally arrived at Monteverde. I can already tell that we’re going to be traveling so much this trip and it gets really tiring. Braden has pictures of every single one of us totally passed out on the bus.

Monteverde is….. well, another paradise. I thought things couldn’t get more idyllic than Santa Rosa but this certainly comes close. The biological research station is so nice; it’s honestly like staying in a hotel built for scientists. This place is a bird haven, there are hummingbirds and songbirds everywhere. The weather is cooler than anywhere we’ve been so far which is nice; the station sits at around 1500 meters and probably hovers around 75 degrees Fahrenheit during the days and is in the 60s at night. The trails behind the station lead into a dense forest with a waterfall nearby and access to the Continental Divide. We’ll be going out on a hike tomorrow to see more of the scenery. Oh and did I mention there is also coffee 24/7 here? I’m done for.

After dinner we met to discuss writing scientific papers. We then got feedback on our Palo Verde presentations, and we now need a first draft of our manuscript done by tomorrow night. And so the time crunch begins. Oh well. It’s amazing. I’ll try to get pictures up tomorrow; the wifi here is the best we’ve had so far so I might be able to avoid the frustration of constantly getting kicked off the internet.

Day 13: Getting Lost in the Jungle

So, once again, I won’t have photos to upload. The title of today kind of gives away the reason why.

Basically, almost all of today was unstructured time. After breakfast, we walked around the garden at Monteverde and learned about some of the native plants in the region. After an hour-long walk and lecture, we had no scheduled activities until after dinner. So, most of us decided to go hiking and explore the primary forest behind the biological station. I’ll need to add pictures to do this place justice, but these are some of the most beautiful trails I have ever hiked on. Cloud forests are gorgeous, with huge trees, epiphytes on almost every tree (basically plants that grow on other trees and spend their entire life cycle in the canopy) and an understory that isn’t so thick you can’t walk through it. We hiked for probably 2 hours down one trail then came back, spent some time at the station and then Braden and I decided to take another trail in a separate direction. We hiked past multiple waterfalls, a gorgeous stream, huge fig trees and basically just insane plants all around. We decided to follow this trail as far as it would go, because according to the trail map it looped around back to the station.

Long story short, the map was very deceiving.

We hiked for probably 4 hours down this trail, crossing side-trails that didn’t exist on the map, landslides blocking our path, and fallen trees that had destroyed sections of the trail. At some point we decided that the trail map was basically useless, and we looked at it only to determine that we needed to walk in a south south-west direction. As the sun went down we kept on walking, and walking, and walking, and walking…… The scenery was utterly gorgeous, but slightly tinged with the fear that we might not make it back before dark. Eventually, after crossing the valley and the river multiple times, we stumbled upon the road that led back to the station. We then found a 7 pound flower on the ground that basically looked like a giant purple artichoke. That was cool.

We had dinner at 6, then watched some videos about the station, the interactions of army ants and termites at one of our next station, game camera footage of a jaguar at Santa Rosa, and a rap battle from FSP 5 years ago.

Afterwards, the antlion group met to finish the first draft of our paper. We wrote and finalized our first manuscript in a few hours and submitted it to the faculty here.

That was pretty much the day. A ton of incredible hiking, some potential interesting research questions developed, and a manuscript submitted for revision.

Expect pictures tomorrow.

¡Pura Vida!

Day 14: Projects round two!

Today marked the beginning of our projects for Monteverde. We’ve had some time to explore the site, we’ve learned about some different ecological relationships and we’ve had ample opportunities for research at the station library (but who would do that when you can just hike to the Continental Divide and think of projects along the way). After breakfast we met upstairs in the research station to brainstorm project ideas. A lot like in Palo Verde, we sat as a group and put basic ideas on the whiteboard. Everyone had come up with a lot of interesting ideas, including looking at relationships between coatis (look them up if you don’t know what they are) and jays, army ants and their environment, hummingbirds in the forest, and more.

After flushing out some of the projects more, we were given free reign once again, the idea this time being that we would explore the jungle with some specific project ideas in the back of our mind and try to come up with some real research questions. I left with some others to go check out the nearby stream for macroinvertebrates (bugs) and also look at the phytotelmata (aquatic habitats within bromeliads, which are plants that generally grow on trees in the canopy. You’ve probably seen a Planet Earth episode about poison dart frogs that live in these). We hiked more along the trail I got lost on yesterday, but took a different fork pretty early on.

Which pretty much spit us out on a road right away. Ha. Real funny.

We hiked down the road and saw the coolest caterpillar I’ve ever seen in my life. The road ended at the gas station we were dropped off at to hike to the biological station, so we decided now would be a good time to go into town and buy supplies. For me, that meant a 6-pack of Imperial. The Costa Rican beer is actually really good; I may try to bring some home (I’ll be 21 in 15 days so it won’t matter!). We hiked back to the station for lunch, then had more unstructured time.

I decided to do a project on macroinvertebrates in the nearby stream and was prepared to do it on my own (no one else had interest in bugs apparently) until Leah and Hannah asked to join with me. They had wanted to look at thermoregulation in hummingbirds, but found that it was nigh impossible to get an accurate temperature reading of a hummingbird in flight (we have a cool laser gun thing that can read the temperature of something from a distance, but getting a hummingbird to hold still is truly a difficult task.

I went and collected samples from the stream with Madi a little later in the day (we actually found some awesome bugs) then returned for dinner. After dinner, Leah, Hannah and I talked to Matt about developing our project and decided to look at whether or not community structures exist in macroinvertebrates or if they are just distributed randomly. It should be a fascinating study. We had a lecture by Madi about diversity and coexistence in the world, then ended for the day.

 

I am currently uploading pictures onto my Flickr. Even with good wifi, it still takes hours apparently. I may (in fact it is very likely) be doing something wrong, but I’m really trying here. I should have all the Palo Verde pictures up by tonight.

thanks for stopping by

 

Day 15: Stomping around in the mud

There is no way I’m making it back alive from this trip. The jungle absolutely has it out for me.

We’ll get to that. Breakfast comes first though.

After a breakfast of gallopinto and personal omelettes (think personal pizza, but omelettes), the groups met up to start their projects. Hannah, Leah and myself talked about data collection, gathered gear and hiked into the woods to check out the stream and look for obvious variables to manipulate. I took them down the trail that Braden and I got lost on, but this time I knew where we were going. Let me try to reiterate, this place is GORGEOUS. Tropical cloud forests are the optimal place to go hiking and explore the outdoors.

We got to the place on the trail that bordered the creek, and I got stung by that damn wasp that stung Braden the other day (not sure if I mentioned that, but he got stung by something black and angry that left a big red welt and now an itchy rash today. great). Before I could do anything it was on my calf chewing away (these wasps bite, and it’s honestly more frightening than a sting) and causing some serious pain.

After checking out the sight, we decided it was optimal for the bug sampling that we wanted to do in the river. We took a few kick samples (put a net in the river, kick up dirt in front of it and hopefully collect some bugs), checked for macroinvertebrates and then had to hike back to the station for lunch. The initial samples looked promising so we were stoked to get back and start taking samples for real. Lunch was steak tips grilled with onions and peppers, with rice, beans and an artichoke-cheddar-spinach sauce that was unbelievably good. The food on this trip is infinitely better than I expected and I can’t get enough of it.

After lunch we talked to Matt about our project for a bit and decided we wanted to look at community structure of macroinvertebrates based on topographic features in aquatic systems. This means we would sample above and below ‘dams’ in the river: basically any rock feature that causes a serious disturbance.

 We left the station again for the same section of river (this time I brought pants and a sweatshirt so those wasps couldn’t sting me). We got there and had to change into our Tevas in order to walk around in the stream and gather samples.

Can you guess what happened next? No? Remember those wasps?

Apparently the jungle has some vendetta against me.

As I changed from boots to Tevas, one of the wasps flew right up to me while I was nearly sitting in the river and stung my ankle. These things hurt! And apparently after the bite goes away you get a horrible itchy rash. Well, now I have two. Perfect!

We managed to sample different water features for a few hours and collected a lot of insects. As the sun dropped we decided to head back to the station for dinner.

Okay, now for a very small amount of backstory: Before the trip, we were all assigned ecological papers to read and prepare a presentation about in order to teach the rest of the FSP what was going on. My presentation happened to be after dinner tonight, so I left early to finish preparing. It went really well and I got to teach the group about why mountains in the tropics act as more stringent barriers against organism dispersal than do mountains in temperate regions. We then listened to Francesca present about warming temperatures in tropical regions and how this can seriously affect global climate change.

After the presentations, my antlion group edited the first draft of our paper (we had gotten feedback this morning, or yesterday after dinner. I can’t really remember at this point). We submitted a second draft and should hopefully have it ready to be published after the next manuscript.

I am currently uploading pictures to the Flickr. This is seriously annoying; I will try to upload pictures, leave the computer running during the day so it can finish the operation, but sometimes the wifi randomly kicks you off. Then I have to restart the entire upload process on Flickr. Hopefully I’ll get more up soon.

¡Pura Vida! (everyone says this here, it’s actually a very real thing)

Day 16: It finally rained in the cloud forest

Hey again world.

Ok, world is probably an exaggeration I bet only like two people read this but give me some creative freedom here.

Today was almost entirely dedicated to working on our Monteverde projects, except for the hummingbird garden in the morning. Yeah, hummingbird garden. After breakfast we went (I ran with a few others) to a nearby hummingbird cafe at the entrance to the Cloud Forest preserve. It was basically a gift and coffee shop where they set out nectar bird feeders every day, which attracts a BUNCH of hummingbirds. We spent around an hour and a half there and probably saw over 200 tropical hummingbird species. It was awesome because you could literally get within inches of them and they wouldn’t fly away. There were so many that you were constantly afraid of getting hit with a flying bird. It was an incredible experience and I got some pictures that are absolutely astounding. I honestly don’t know if there is anywhere else you can go to experience such an incredible diversity of birds. And the colors you see are unbelievable, everything from metallic green to turquoise to bright purple and orange.

After the hummingbird excursion we returned to the station for lunch. After that, we had unstructured time to work on our projects. I passed out on a couch by accident (I guess I should probably try to sleep more) but my group found me and woke me up so we could collect the rest of our macro invertebrates. We decided to walk to the stream right in front of the station (much closer, fewer stinging black wasps, easier to access) and began to sample. After about two and a half hours we had finished collecting the rest of our samples for the project and returned to the station to begin our analysis. We set up the bags of dirt (and hopefully insects) that we had collected in the lab and began the tedious process of sorting through the sediment looking for small bugs. We worked until dinner, then continued working afterwards.

At around 9 we decided to call it for the night, so I grabbed the bottle of wine I had bought the other day and brought it up to share with everyone. We all had an awesome time and stayed up talking for around an hour and a half. Tomorrow my group will finish counting bugs and will run some seriously complicated stats to test for random or non-random distributions of macro invertebrates.

In terms of pictures, I have all the Palo Verde ones uploaded now to the Flickr site. Go and check them out if you haven’t. I tried uploading the Santa Rosa and Monteverde pictures, but apparently these randomly downloaded onto my computer as .CR2 files and not .JPG files. This basically means they are huge files (each picture is around 25 MB) and can’t be uploaded to Flickr. I tried to convert them to jpeg online but that crashed my computer.

Twice.

So I’ve given up for today and will try again tomorrow. Hopefully there will be some awesome beach pictures up for your viewing pleasure soon.

Day 17: Counting bugs is so much fun

First off, I want to apologize for not writing this earlier. This is the first time I missed an entry! But I have a good reason, I promise (ok, so maybe it involves a 6-pack of Imperial, but I swear it’s legit).

After breakfast we had a little down time, then got right back to looking for macro-inverts. It has honestly been really fun. Hannah, Leah and I have been taking turns playing songs for one another, which has led to some seriously fun times, including almost an hour of Disney soundtracks. We finished sorting and took a break for lunch. We agreed to meet at 1:15, but when 1:30 rolled around and we were all still half asleep on couches we decided to push it back until 2. Or 2:15. Ok, fine, 2:30.

Well-rested, we decided that it was time to start identifying our bugs. We needed to figure out what family they each belonged to in order to tell what functional feeding group they fell in (predator, scraper, shredder, etc. It’s a way of classifying bugs in a river by what they eat). This tends to be fairly difficult for the inexperienced, so we eventually called Matt in to give a second opinion on our guesses. We had actually gotten most right and spent the rest of the afternoon counting each family, classifying the functional group and tallying up numbers on our data sheet.

We finished with some time to spare, so we cleaned the lab and relaxed a little before dinner. We figured we would leave the statistics for the next day. Dinner was insanely good (I have eaten better here than I ever have at school) and afterwards we had a special discussion planned. Highly relevant to the nature (ha) of this program, Matt had laid out an hour for us to debate over this question: What is the purpose of science?

Suffice to say there were a lot of different opinions on the question and we talked for over an hour and a half about why we do science and what the overall purpose is.  This happened to be a discussion where *mental lubrication* was encouraged, so I had a few Imperials while we talked. It was actually fascinating to hear the incredible diversity of opinions about science in general.

After the discussion came the reason I didn’t blog: movie night! We decided that it was a great night to watch a movie together as a group, so we put on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Where a few more Imperials were consumed. So by the time the movie ended, it was 11:30 and I was absolutely ready for bed. I’ve only been staying up till 11:30 anyways to write this thing so it was just an all-around bad situation for writing.

I’ll be able to write again tonight. I promise I’m still working on pictures. It is possible to get these uploaded, it has to be.

Day 18: Last day in Monteverde

Unfortunately, today was the last day that we had at Monteverde biological station. I’m really going to miss this place; it’s been incredible. Because my group had finished sorting through invertebrates, we basically spent most of today cleaning up and going through statistics. It was fairly uneventful up until lunch. We had a ton of bags and test tubes to clean and sort along with other miscellaneous gear to organize.

After lunch, I felt that I couldn’t leave Monteverde without exploring around at least one more time. So, I gathered a crew of people and decided that we would hike to the Continental Divide. The biological station sits fairly close to the Divide; you can see it from the porch. It just takes a decent bit of hiking and a lot of elevation gain. We left at almost exactly 2, and Madi, Leah, Hannah, Leigh and I began the hike. We had to walk down to the stream where we had conducted our project then back up along the trail that Braden and I had walked on earlier. We came to a dirt road and began to walk up. And up. And up.

And up.

And up.

This damn road basically continued at a 45 degree angle for two miles. 45 degrees is HARD to walk up continuously, especially on fairly slippery clay. It was incredibly picturesque but unrelenting and I was sweating bullets 10 minutes in. We walked until we reached a spot Leigh had said she was forced to turn around at (she ran the road earlier in the week, absolutely insane) because of a bunch of bees. What do you know, they were still there! There were a bunch of large, black bees flying around that apparently lived in the ground; there were holes all over that they kept coming in and out of. We decided to live dangerously and just walked through. Amazingly (especially considering my recent luck with stinging insects) no one got stung. Just past the bees, we reached the top of the mountain!

Basically, the top of the mountain was a spot used for TV towers, so we were walking under giant metal towers enshrouded in dense clouds. We passed a homemade sign for a souvenir shop (starting to get weird), then multiple other hand-painted signs advertising the “green hermit” and the large amounts of “homemade art” that were available to purchase. Ok. Right.

Definitely slightly more sketchy. Not at all helped by the fact that there was a fake eye glued to the door of the “souvenir shop” that had tentacles glued on around it.

Suffice to say, we didn’t make any purchases. After snapping some cool pics, we walked back down the road, through the bees and back to our original trail. We made it back to the station with an hour until dinner, so Leah, Hannah and I planned our presentation about the results we had discovered. Turns out, macro invertebrates tend to just distribute themselves randomly. They’re bugs, they don’t really care who their neighbor is.

After dinner everyone presented the research projects they had conducted during our time at Monteverde. It was cool to see what everyone had done and found.

We voted for the cool science projects, and after winning the award with antlions at Palo Verde, macro inverts got…nothing. Oh well, I thought it was fascinating. Leigh won with her project on nectar-robbers and their effect on pollination success in flower patches.

After the symposium we were given free reign, with the only caveat being that we need to be totally packed and ready to go by breakfast tomorrow. Am I?

Of course not! I probably have stuff left all over the station that I need to grab. It’ll work out though, I’m sure of it. It always does. Anyways, I need to go and at least begin packing. We’re off to Cuerici next, a spot even higher in elevation that is supposed to be just as incredible as Monteverde. We’ll be traveling for most of tomorrow to get there. Cuerici is also a rainbow trout farm, so hopefully I get to see some cool fish (I’d be very surprised if you don’t know that I’m into fishing and trout. Like a lot).

Also, very important note: At Cuerici and the site after, Campanario, I will not have access to Internet. From January 22 to February 5 I will be totally off the grid. So if these posts stop showing up (as they will), that is why. I’ll probably write every day anyways, but I won’t put anything up until I have access to the internet again. Also, I haven’t been able to convert the pictures yet so I’m not sure what’s going to happen. There definitely won’t be any new ones for a while. Hopefully I can figure it out when I come back online.

With that said, enjoy the grid! I’ll be back in a couple weeks.

Eric