For Cuericí pictures, click here.

 

Hey all! I’m finally back on the grid, but, to be honest, I didn’t really miss it. There’s something to be said about completely removing yourself from civilization for a while and dedicating all your energy and focus towards yourself and those immediately around you.

Although, it’s definitely great to have laundry again.

For this page and the next, I will post the entries I wrote while at the field stations that didn’t have wifi. Some may be shorter than others (see Campanario, where I spent most of my free time floating in the ocean), but hopefully they are still entertaining.

Also, I finally figured out how to post photos in a reasonable timespan! What a fool I was to not think of the solution earlier. The good news, this means my Flickr account will now finally be caught up. On the other hand, this means I’m dropping in ~800 photos in a very short timespan, so it may be tough to look at them all in one sitting.

Now to get back to the adventure…

 

Day 19: Bye Mark! Hello Hannah!

Today’s entry will definitely be one of the shorter stories. What could possibly be the case for this? More Imperial? During the day? Nahhh, that can’t be so. Our star today is….

Dramamine. Yup.

The plan for today was to leave right after breakfast, hike down to the bus and drive to San Jose. Unfortunately, after breakfast I had a sad encounter with the corner of table, which quickly (at an acceleration of about 9.8 m/s^2) led to a broken glass on the floor. Yikes.

After sweeping, I had to finish packing. I just barely managed to throw everything in my bags and toss them on the luggage trucks before they left down the hill without my stuff. Luckily, I made it and we all hiked down to the bus. For much of the bus ride I listened to music, watched the scenery or slept. We got to San Jose without incident (ok, we almost hit another giant bus on the mountain road but our bus driver was a boss and managed to back all the way up a really tight section to give us both space). Once there, we stopped at the Park Inn (where we stayed night 1) to drop off Mark and pick up Hannah. The way it works on FSP is there is generally one professor for the first third, another for the second third and a final professor for the Caribbean section. Mark was training to be FSP professor for next year, so he left when we finished with the sites he would visit.

We met with Hannah ter Hofstede, an awesome professor who studies bats and katydids. After saying goodbye to Mark, we hopped back on the bus, at which point I took that wonderful motion sickness pill, Dramamine. And promptly passed out for the next three hours. When I woke, we were on a steep road in a cloud. And it was chilly! Well, compared to the rest of the trip so far. We waited for Don Carlos (the head of the Cuerici Biological Station) to arrive in his pickup and grab all our luggage.

Loading his truck was great. Hopefully I can get a picture posted here if I have time, but it was a pickup probably from the ’70s with a wooden structure over the bed he built himself to hold in luggage. I could not believe we fit the insane amount of gear onboard. Once loaded, we began the hike to the station. We walked down a 5 km road with an environment more similar to the Pacific Northwest than to Costa Rica. It was amazing; oaks lined the road, moss grew on all the trees and the clouds continued to sweep over us.

Also, I realize now that this is not at all shorter than many of the other entries. Oh well, you’re this far now, might as well finish right?

We passed small cow pastures and some unique-looking houses nestled on the side of this mountain. Upon reaching the station, I was totally flabbergasted. This place is gorgeous. It honestly looks like a scene pulled straight from Lord of the Rings. The station is quaint; it has a kitchen on the first floor, a dining area, and a bunch of bunks on the second floor separated by partitions. We had a quick safety talk with Don Carlos, and I need to describe this guy.

Don Carlos is one of the more amazing humans I have ever met. He doesn’t speak English whatsoever and probably didn’t go to high school. But, he knows more about this land than anyone else and is a true genius about getting things to work in the middle of nowhere. He has lived in Cuerici for over 45 years and knows the environment better than the back of his hand. He has already mentioned the many expeditions he has taken, bushwhacking for sometimes 3 weeks on end through totally remote Costa Rican jungle, in places where anyone not from here would definitely die. He also happens to be kind, caring and an absolute joy to talk with.

After the safety talk, we had some free time to explore, so I checked out the trout ponds he has. There are multiple levels of water where different sized rainbow trout are all growing, and some of these guys are pretty big, definitely breaking the 20-inch march. We had dinner around 6 (again, truly amazing food. Also 24/7 coffee made from local Costa Rican beans) and then a lecture from Hannah about evolution and co-evolution. After the lecture, the antlion group met to format our manuscript for publication, and my macro invertebrate group met to discuss writing our paper.

The rooms here are heated by wood fires, so it was great to write my paper in front of a blazing hearth. It gets COLD at night, fairly close to freezing. I honestly like the change from incredibly hot and humid. Tomorrow we’re going to explore this place and develop research questions.

 

Day 20: This place is magic.

Today started out with breakfast in the main station. We are so privileged to eat the way we do. We had eggs, rice, beans, toast, and plantains fried with brown sugar. So, so insanely good. And I don’t think I will be able to drink coffee in the US ever again. Getting to drink coffee brewed from beans grown within a 10-mile radius and in some of the best possible conditions really spoils you.

After breakfast, we met with Don Carlos to go on a walk around the station. He took us up a steep trail that led into a canyon going up the mountainside. It’s difficult to put into words how beautiful this forest is and my pictures definitely don’t do it justice. Two-hundred foot tall oak trees dominate the canopy. The brightest green epiphytes grow up the trunks and bright red bromeliads (where all the frogs here live) dot the branches. Don Carlos told us that some of the biggest oaks here are probably around a thousand years old.

Actually unreal. So, unbelievably, magically, unreal.

As we got to the canyon, we saw a quetzal! It’s an incredibly rare, beautiful bird. The males are brilliantly colored and have long tail feathers. They are apparently here to eat the ‘aguacatillos’, basically little avocados that grow naturally around here. Yup, you read that right. In this massive oak forest, there are two species of trees that grow mini avocados. We even got to eat one on the trail.

We continued hiking up the canyon, where we encountered one of the biggest surprises yet: bamboo. Yep. Bamboo. This is an ancient oak forest with avocado trees and forests of bamboo in the understory, with puma that frequent the area, toucans, quetzals and hummingbirds flying above, and some of the rarest tree frogs in Costa Rica.

I’m still blown away.

We reached the top of the trail after some serious exertion and came across a gorgeous overlook. We could see the Continental Divide, the tallest mountain in Costa Rica, and crazy cloud formations for miles.

We began hiking down the trail, and on the other side of the mountain from the station we reached another oak forest, this one filled with ancient giants and covered in bamboo along the floor. It was something out of Walt Disney’s imagination. We continued on and eventually made it back to the station, after Don Carlos told us all about plants that are natural anesthetics, antibiotics and toothpastes, showed us a fruit related to blueberry (which we ate), and a flower that was edible (which we also ate, it tasted exactly like a sour patch kid without the sweetness).

After lunch, Don Carlos and his daughter took us on a tour of their trout farm. As a fly-fisherman, I was enthralled the entire tour. He talked for hours about the difficulties in growing natural trout in a farm and competing with commercial farms that used hormones, chemicals and other products to increase fish production. Don Carlos has been raising trout naturally for tens of years and his wisdom was fascinating.

We had free time until 5:00, where we had to present our project ideas to one another in a “speed dating” session. I obviously decided to try a project on the trout; I want to find an optimal way to maximize DO (dissolved oxygen) in all the ponds to keep the fish healthy. Tomorrow we’ll see if it’s feasible. We had dinner at 6, then Louise and Leigh each presented about their papers at 7. We had unstructured time after, where my macro invertebrate group met to finish our manuscript. We finished by 11, and I ran off to bed to write this. Breakfast is in 6.5 hours…. I really need to sleep more. But, there’s also just so much to do here that I feel like sleeping is wasting time I could be using to explore the most beautiful landscape I’ve been in in a while. We’ll see how this works out.

 

Day 21: Night terrors?

Well, breakfast this morning was certainly interesting. I had a weird dream where I woke to total blackness and shouted “HELLO?!!! HELLO??????” at the top of my lungs.

Turns out it was a little more than a dream.

Apparently at some point in the night I did exactly that and woke a few people up. At which point I promptly fell right back asleep. Yikes. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again; it’s probably not great to cry wolf like that in the middle of the night. If something does end up happening (you never know with my luck at this point), I certainly wouldn’t want people to ignore me because I shouted in my sleep a bunch.

After breakfast, we had all dedicated an hour to fixing our data sheets from our first Palo Verde project. Apparently every group didn’t format them correctly, so we all had work to do. Unfortunately, with no Internet, this tended to mean that one person worked on formatting while everyone else did their best to be helpful. I re-worked the antlion data sheets to a much more professional level, then took a break on the patio for a while to enjoy the morning sun and a couple cups of coffee. Afterwards, Callum, Gabby and I decided to walk along the trout ponds and take preliminary readings with the dissolved oxygen meter to look for possible changes that we could study. It was great. We spent basically the rest of the morning hanging out with rainbow trout and sunshine on a beautiful mountainside farm.

We began formulating preliminary questions about dissolved oxygen and changes in behavior for farmed trout. I had a growing sense of frustration when I began to realize that I jumped on this project more because I wanted to work with the trout than for any interesting research question I had developed. We ate lunch at noon then the entire group met with the faculty at one to discuss the progress of our questions. When ours was written along the board with the others, I realized it needed significant work. The question we were asking didn’t have any interesting answers and didn’t tie into ecology well at all. Callum and I watched the trout for an hour or so after lunch to try and find some interesting mechanism to study, but I ended up being more interested in the huge black vulture that was hanging out not 15 feet from us.

After some contemplation, I decided to bring up my concerns with the rest of the group. Gabby, Callum and I decided that talking to the faculty was probably the best idea. We brought our concerns to Braden and Madi and began talking about options. After over an hour of great discussion, we had changed the structure of the project entirely. Instead of trying to work with adult trout in the natural ponds, we are going to study the alevin (baby trout) and their behavioral differences. We decided to look at the effects of schooling in baby trout on foraging in low-risk and high-risk situations. This will be much easier to manipulate and has significant ecological consequences. If we see large benefits for alevin based on schooling, then we could likely extrapolate the importance of maintaining suitable breeding habitats for trout in the wild such that large amounts of the baby fish survive.

After this awesome discussion, we had dinner, after which we celebrated Emily’s birthday with a cake. We had an awesome time talking for a while, but had to meet with the faculty again afterwards to talk about the finalized versions of our projects. Ours went over much better than in the morning. After this we met in our Monteverde project groups (macro invertebrates, remember them? Yeah, I don’t either at this point) to get feedback on our first version of the manuscript. Having done ours when most of the group was too tired to be functional, we had some unfortunate mishaps. The TA’s thought our content was great, although it had a few errors that indicated a lack of in-depth proofreading. But the biggest mistake?

We forget our entire methods section. Oops.

After some sassy remarks from the teaching staff, we retreated and laughed off the problems. They knew it wasn’t intentional (we had done the methods, it’s just without Google drive we had forgotten to paste it into the final document), and simply asked to see it in the next draft. I stayed up to write this entry, add in some of the main content edits to the manuscript and chat with Braden for a bit, but now definitely need to go to bed. It may have been the night terror last night, but I am feeling utterly exhausted. It probably would have been better to go to sleep some hours ago, but here we are once again on the dark side of the moon!

¡Pura Vida!

 

Day 22: Rainbow trout are the best

I developed an unbelievably deep respect for Don Carlos today. He has done so much on his own and put in such an amazing amount of work that you can’t help but be amazed.

Basically, after breakfast, we had promised Don Carlos to walk along his property and test the dissolved oxygen content in his streams and different sources of water. He doesn’t have an oxygen probe nor a thermometer with which to test the water, so he has never really known what he has been pumping for his trout. Amazingly, all his intuition about the amounts of DO in the different waterways was near perfect; he could predict the relative levels very accurately. He showed us things he constructed on his own to collect water, including a huge cement sedimentation basin (with some of the most ingenious engineering I’ve seen), underground aquifer collectors, and different systems for transporting water across his property. For years and years he has been constantly working to improve his operation and the level of dedication is fascinating.

After we helped him get the much-appreciated readings, we turned our sights back to our project. We had originally wanted to look at trout in a box. However, I had noticed on the tour on the first day that one of the cement canals had almost no fish in it. We asked Anna (Don Carlos’ daughter) if we could use it for our project and she agreed. We prepared the tank by netting the few fish in there, then draining and scrubbing the entire (probably 15 meter) thing. This took a ton of back breaking work. Then we grabbed partitions they had lying around and set it up such that we could run our experiment.

In short, we needed a section of the canal partitioned off so we could put different amounts of fry (baby trout) in with a food reward at one end and time how long it took them to feed. We also needed a section of the canal open downstream so we could push the fish out of the experimental arena when their trial was complete (if you move a baby trout after it has just eaten, it tends to die of shock. I don’t blame them, I probably would too in that situation).

We finally got it going after lunch. After working through a few hitches, we got a rhythm going and ran the experiment for a few hours. It was awesome, we basically got to play with baby trout all afternoon (including netting individuals from a tank with > 11,000. Netting fish in a barrel happens to be quite fun).

We split early to make revisions for the Monteverde papers. Right before dinner I went hiking along the canyon trail to try and find something cool. I think I ran into a dusky nightjar (cool nocturnal bird with crazy eye shine). After dinner we had a lecture from Hannah on bats. I used to think bats were cute but apparently I had never seen real pictures of them. Bats are kind of ugly to be honest. Cool, but definitely a little ugly.

Afterwards, Leah, Hannah and I stayed up way too late finishing our Monteverde revisions. Things get weird past 10:30 here because everyone is usually asleep by then. I of course am still used to staying up way too late so I got to observe the emotional crumbling from a safe mental distance. Suffice to say, it was pretty hilarious. Anyways, it’s already past midnight and I need to be up in 6 hours.

¡Pura Vida!

 

Day 23: I’m finally significant!

Today was heavily focused on collecting data for the current Cuerici projects. After breakfast, most people split up right away to do their own thing with their groups. Gabby, Leah, Callum and I ended up in the fish nursery at 8 am.

From 8 to 11:30 we ran our experiment, putting different-sized schools of fish in a canal and recording how long it took them to get food without a predator present. We took a break for coffee and lunch; Leigh and I threw a disc around for a bit beforehand. It felt awesome to be throwing again because it’s been a long time.

Also before lunch we saw some people doing laundry in the outdoor sinks and Callum and I decided that was a great plan. We both grabbed some dirty clothes and washed them in the sink as well (I only have shampoo, not detergent, so all my clothes will now smell like my hair). About this time, Callum looked down and shouted! He pointed at a green flash running along the cement and exclaimed how incredible this thing was. I looked for what he was talking about, and saw a fairly large green lizard climbing up the post next to me. What do you do when a totally unknown lizard shows up near you?

Catch it of course! So I grabbed it as fast as I could, and it tried to bite me but luckily couldn’t break the skin. This thing was crazy! It was green on the head, green-yellow on the back (this is like bright green, not a dark shade whatsoever), and green/teal on the tail. And when you turned it over…

Its belly was basically neon blue. This thing was completely nuts and looked like it belongs in Willy Wonka’s factory. After a few photos, I let it go and returned to the more pressing matter: laundry.

After lunch, we returned to the fish to run our trials with a predator. We put a large rainbow trout in the experimental arena with the fry to simulate this situation. Luckily, the big fish are habituated to eat fish food, not fish, so no fry were harmed. However, the fry are still mortally afraid of larger fish (as they should be), so this setup worked perfectly. From 1-530 we continued working, then stopped for dinner. After dinner the FSP met for around 15 minutes in the classroom, then we had free time for the rest of the night. Leah, Hannah and I worked on revising our newly edited macroinvertebrate manuscript. That continued through the night and included an unfortunate incident where one manuscript with a few hours of new edits got entirely deleted. Ah well. That’s life sometimes.

¡Pura Vida!

 

Day 24: Research Symposium

In the morning, we talked to Hannah about potentially running more trials for our experiment, but learned that we didn’t need to. The data we had collected previously showed significant trends, so we were set to go. That just meant we needed to clean up after ourselves. We also collected ten of the fry randomly to measure their average size (gotta be professional here) and seven of the large fish we used. That part was fun. Scooping huge trout out of a canal with a net is actually pretty cool.

It wasn’t yet time for lunch, so Hannah, Leah and I decided to hike the canyon trail one last time. It was gorgeous enough that we needed at least a little more time there. When we got to the top with the lookout, we decided to take a side trail that went north towards a trans-country trail running all the way to the Atlantic. We ended up finding it and taking yet another side trail, hoping to find a different outlook that had been described to us on day 1. As we hiked into the forest, it came time to turn around so we could make it back for lunch. I was so enamored with the trail that I decided to skip lunch and continue hiking. Hannah and Leah weren’t happy with the idea, but I called Hannah on my phone to make sure I had service (we were on a mountain ridge, so I did). They turned back and I kept hiking.

Big mistake. Would not recommend to future FSP’ers.

Long story short, I didn’t find the lookout. The trail (beautiful though it was) continued with seemingly no end, so I had to turn back to make the cutoff time I had stated. I ended up worrying a lot of people back at the station and upsetting the professors (we were told not to hike that trail on our own…. and I did. Suffice to say they weren’t happy with me). Things have smoothed over (this is current Eric right now, not Cuericí Eric), but I’m still pretty upset that I caused so much strife.

(Back to Cuericí Eric): After returning from the hike, the Gabby, Callum, Leah and I analyzed our data from the project and prepared for our presentation that night. We worked until dinner, then held the research symposium immediately after.

We really thought we were going to win the cool science award, but another group looked at thermal rewards from flowers and the affect on beetle mating (basically a project on beetle sex) and the people loved that. Kudos to them.

Unfortunately, the macroinvertebrate group was a little behind on our paper, so while everyone else socialized and got ready to leave the next day, I worked on the final revisions for the Monteverde project paper. I got to listen to some great music while working (I only have Phish and reggae downloaded, for those that care to know) so it worked out well. After finishing, I packed my bags for Campanario and sat on the porch watching the moon rise.

Everyone else had gone to bed, so I got to relax a little on my own and think about life in general. Reflection is great and I wish I did it more often.