Day 4: Parque Nacional Palo Verde

Because WordPress is dumb and won’t let me upload more than one picture at a time, I am going to make albums for each place on Flickr and link them at the beginning of each page. I’ll post some of the highlights on each page though.

For pictures, try clicking……….here should do.

This is gonna be short for now because I have to be up in 6 hours for breakfast, so it will probably get edited later. I’ll try to bullet some things now just so I have something to work with for later.

  • We finally decided we liked the third group of students enough to let them join us in Costa Rica. They had a flight from Miami that left at 8 am (Miami time) and got in around 10:30 am (Costa Rican time)
  • Unfortunately, the CR government decided that today was a great day to do construction on the bridge connecting the airport to most of the rest of San Jose. Starting at noon.
  • We decided to get to the airport at around 8:30 in the morning. I slept on the floor of the airport for over an hour. Really, really would never ever recommend that to anyone.
  • The other group finally got in and we all piled on the bus and immediately left for the Palo Verde Research Station. We descended from San Jose’s 1000 meters to Palo Verde’s ~100 meters. This meant it got a lot hotter and a lot more humid. I don’t think I’m going to stop sweating for the rest of my time here.
  • The drive to PV was fairly uneventful; it lasted about 3.5 hours.
  • PV is an amazing place. The research station is on the edge of a HUGE wetland swamp with millions of frogs and a bunch of cool birds.Purple Gallinule

               Like this purple gallinule.

 

  • We met with Gustavo, the director here and he gave us a brief safety talk. Check your mattresses every night for scorpions, your shoes and bags every morning for scorpions. Don’t step on the multiple different species of poisonous snakes. Don’t pick up the scorpions. Avoid the big lizards that are really fast and will bite the hell out of you. This place is a paradise.
  • After that enlightening talk, we had around an hour to kill before dinner (oh yeah, the schedule for meals is unbelievably strict. Breakfast 6:30-7:00, lunch 12:00-1:00, dinner 6:00-7:00, and you better NOT be late). I went with some others to a bird-watching bridge over the wetland, where we saw one of the most beautiful sunsets and a ton of crazy looking birds. This is gonna be sweet.
  • We spent much of the evening in an intro lecture about CR in general. This place has a lot of species. Like, 5% of the entire world’s biodiversity in a country barely bigger than New Hampshire.
  • We then went on a night hike. Saw >5 scorpions, a few snakes, some nocturnal birds called Paraquis, and a clearer night sky than anywhere I’ve been in a while.
Katydid

Katydid on the night-walk.

 

Day 5: Continuing in Palo Verde

Today proved that this trip is going to be the experience of a lifetime (not like it hasn’t been already, but you get my meaning…i hope). We started off the day with that wonderful 6:30 am breakfast. Ok, so maybe it’s just a little early. Or a lot of early. But the chef, Romedio, is an incredible guy. We basically have some variation of rice, beans, a meat, salad and some fruit for every meal and honestly, I don’t think I would wish for anything else; this food has been amazing! Also the limitless,  jet-fuel coffee available 24/7 has already propelled me on a caffeine-fueled free-fall into Valhalla. After breakfast we met up for a quick learn-how-to-use-your-binoculars session on the front porch of the building. We spent some time identifying parakeets in a tree across the way, flipping through the hefty bird guides while learning the correct way to adjust and use birding binoculars (it’s actually more complicated than I imagined, there’s a lot that goes into properly sighting binos). With this newly acquired skill, we decided to put it to use and walked to the bridge/dock that extends into the marsh. From there, you can see hundreds of birds across multiple different species. For at least an hour we watched swallows, egrets, herons, gallinules, and jocanas. It was awesome taking time to try and identify different species of birds using just binoculars and a reference book.

Northern Jocana wading through the marsh.

Northern Jocana wading through the marsh.

After returning from the bird-watching, we gathered to go on an exploratory hike on a nearby trail. This is where the research projects began to take shape. As we walked, we would stop and look at plants that had different characteristics, such as fruiting bodies with guarding ants, roots penetrating through rock, buttressed trunks (as opposed to cylindrical trunks), photosynthetic bark, etc. and hypothesize as to why these characteristics existed. Some potential project ideas were generated on that walk. We returned for lunch, then sat through a lecture with the head of operations here, Gustavo. He talked to us about the land-use history of the park and the steps that have been taken over decades to preserve this crucial wetland habitat. Then, he really surprised us. It was time to go walking in the marsh.

What?

Yep, time to go walk through the marsh he had said. After some discussion of what this meant for us (and our clothing…and well-being) a group decided they would participate in this crazy shenanigan. Of course I was on board right away, I would not have turned that opportunity down. After a quick change into hiking boots and pants (we apparently needed all these things to walk through it), we followed Gustavo to the bridge/dock where he handed out laminated ID cards for the different plant species that live in the wetland. Without saying much else, he climbed off the edge of the dock into the water and began walking away. So, we followed. I’m still not entirely sure why we did, but it happened. After multiple crocodile remarks (Gustavo seems to take a little too much pleasure in causing abject terror among groups of students), we began a scavenger hunt for plants waist deep in marsh-water. For around thirty minutes we waded around and gathered plants–still not positive why but I’ve learned to just accept most of the crazy stuff that happens here at this point (and we’re only on day 5, yikes).

We returned wet, smelly and generally unclean, so everyone ran for the showers before dinner. After an awesome meal of, you guessed it, rice, beans, vegetables, and tilapia (ok maybe you didn’t guess that one), we met with Prof. Mark Laidre for a talk about primates. What started as a lecture quickly turned into an incredibly stimulating discussion on the traits of 4 types of primates and the different research that has attempted to explain their incredible brain size. We broke away at 9 and some people headed to bed.

I went on a solitary night-walk to experience some of the nocturnal going-ons of the jungle (of which there is a LOT). After a while this just turned into me getting eaten alive by mosquitoes so I also eventually decided to turn into bed. One final exploration revealed a huge iguana sleeping under the walkway with most of his tail protruding; I’ll probably put the picture up tomorrow. It was so, so very tempting and I almost grabbed the lizard for a picture, but decided that grabbing one by the tail could really be an unfortunate business (if you’ve ever grabbed a lizard by the tail you know exactly what I’m talking about, if not, just take my word for it when I say it’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved).

We meet tomorrow morning to discuss the project ideas that we will be completing here at PV. These will be fascinating, I can already tell.

 

Day 6: The projects begin

As a forewarning, these posts will likely become shorter as we get more busy and I have less time to write. Already I have too many things to do just tonight and it’s already past ten (when you’re getting up at 6 am, past ten is most definitely getting late, so back off).

We started today with a meeting directly after breakfast where we pitched different project ideas to the group. It didn’t have to be anything specific, just something that we found interesting while walking around and observing the past couple of days. For example, why are there ants on some of the plants with bright red flowers and not others? How do the marsh birds organize socially/territorially? Why do scorpions curl up when you breathe on them? How do the fitness of acacia trees change based on which plant species does (or doesn’t) live on them?

What’s that you ask? How in the world could small ants help an entire tree live? Pick up ANY ecological textbook and look up ‘mutualism’; you’ll almost certainly find a long explanation on how the ants live in the hollow thorns, eat fruiting bodies specifically evolved to provide them with nutrients, and defend the tree from any plants that try to grow near it or insects that try to land on it.

Too boring? Do what I did.

Run up to an acacia and bang on it with your knife taunting the ants, then proceed to get swarmed with stinging, biting insects that won’t rest until you never, EVER want to get near ANY other acacia tree in your life. That lesson sinks in much quicker, trust me (seriously, please trust me. This is an unpleasant experience, to put it mildly).

Okay, so I said these would be shorter and I’m still rambling. Back to the day. After pitching these ideas, we gathered into groups slightly based off of what we were interested in and left to go on an extended exploration of the area and try to learn more about what we wanted to study, or to discover new interesting questions. I left with Matt and some others down the road towards the Tempisque River. What did we see along the way?

MONKEYS WE FINALLY DID IT WE SAW MONKEYS

Capuchins teaming up together.

Capuchins teaming up together.

It was awesome! We ran into a troop of Capuchin monkeys not 5 minutes from the station and got to watch them for a while. After this encounter, we continued walking up the road taking our time observing all the now-familiar plants and animals under close scrutiny. This is right about when I tested the acacia-ant relationship. Then, we found howler monkeys! Out of nowhere a pair of the huge monkeys climbed into the canopy above us. And promptly fell asleep. Apparently a diet of entirely leaves requires a LOT of digestion and these monkeys had just traveled from one tree to another, so it was obviously nap-time. We also saw a coati, which is a raccoon-like creature with a prehensile tail (it can grab things with its tail).

Upon arriving at the ranger station down the road, we encountered some serious ctenosaurs (pronounced teen-a-soars). These are basically big, bad, spiny iguana. Following in the footsteps of a certain friend of mine, I decided that it was necessary to catch one of these huge lizards before leaving Palo Verde. Two things though: they are fast, and they bite. No, like they BITE. It’s crazy. The scoreboard right now?

Ctenosaurs: 7

Eric: 0

But I’m feeling good about number 8. I’ve been trying to grab these guys by the neck (frighteningly close to the teeth) because where else do you grab a big lizard? The tail? Of course not! I mentioned in my earlier entry that a lizard would drop its tail if you tried anything funky with it (or insinuated that much). Then what does Mark do later in the day? Catches a ctenosaur right away…by the tail! Apparently these guys don’t drop them, so I now know what I need to do.

One of the ctenosaurs I tried to catch.

One of the ctenosaurs I tried to catch.

We returned for lunch then met again to flush out the final project ideas, at which point we broke into groups during “unstructured” time to begin planning them. My group is studying ant lions and their predatory behavior, trying to understand whether or not they are discriminatory hunters or not. After talking for a while, we went to collect some specimens along the road and brought them back to the lab for experimentation. After dinner (where we FINALLY got passion fruit juice, long story, ask me about it some time) Matt invited two of the world’s leading parrot scientists who are conveniently studying here at Palo Verde to talk to us about their work. Absolutely fascinating. Judy Diamond and Alan Bond have done fascinating work on parrots for over two decades and are known around the world for their work on the birds of New Zealand.

Callum and Leah gave their paper presentations on the dispersal patterns of Jicaro trees (Callum) and social intelligence in Capuchin monkeys (Leah), and now I’m here, again, writing up past my bedtime. I need to post some of these pictures, read my paper that I’m presenting on again/write some notes for it, shower and sleep. Hopefully before midnight. I can tell I’m going to be exhausted by the end of this trip (in a great way though).

These ctenosaurs are going to have no idea what hit them tomorrow.

Day 7: We’ve been going for only a week?

I’ve gotten a few questions recently that I want to answer here to clear up some confusion. First, this is my personal blog. I will include photos from everyone here and let others write things if they want but in the end it is my blog. I decided to do it, I’m not required to do it, etc. There is an official program blog that exists. I can post the link here when I find it if anyone is interested (ooohh a blog within a blog so meta), but you’re probably not. I say this because the FSP blog is apparently only for posting about the scientific research we conduct, the results we gather and other boring things like that. Apparently big foundations (I think the NSF is included) read this blog and we’re supposed to keep it ‘professional’ and keep up a ‘good reputation’. Ha.

Also, if you want to contact me, don’t use text. I hardly ever get texts or imessages. Facebook or email are probably the best methods. I am also almost never ever on my phone and it’s on airplane mode 100% of the time anyways so I just won’t see anything.

Anyways, on to today. After breakfast, we had unstructured time until lunch to begin our research projects and gather data on the systems we want to test. We are presenting RESULTS of the research Thursday evening, so there’s already a time crunch on making sure we get everything done in time. Setting up our experiment was very entertaining. We walked along the road and found antlion holes along the way, then proceeded to dig them up with a spoon and sift through the sand. Antlions are weird; they walk backwards, they’re shaped like pill bugs with big pincers and they have the strongest urge to dig down, no matter where they are (including the palm of your hand). We collected around 60 in the course of an hour or so, then brought them and some dirt back to the lab.

Where we then ran into another troop of Capuchin monkeys with some individuals that posed for absolutely stunning photos (I’ll put them up later).

After this, we set up our antlion experiment. A lot of time was spent discuss the fine details, but we ended up with three trays of dirt where we put 12 antlions of each size class (small, medium, or large). We then had to wait for them to dig the traps so we could test their responses to prey items falling in. At lunch I tried the weirdest fruit I have ever seen. It is tough to describe so I’ll try to find a picture, but the part you eat is surrounded by weird tentacles and also happens to look and feel like watermelon seeds bound together by a giant glob of mucus.

but i told myself i would try everything……..

It ended up being decent, but I couldn’t get past the insanely weird texture so let someone else finish it for me. We had a small statistics lecture after lunch, had more time to work on our experiments. Before dinner, Mari, Caroline and myself hiked a trail called La Roca, which takes you to a huge rocky outcrop overlooking the entire marsh. From there we saw an incredible sunset. Another stats lecture followed dinner, then four of us (Braden, Sam, Mark and myself) went to catch scorpions…for science! Or for fun. One or the other. We want to see if scorpions prefer the scent of a used shirt over a clean shirt, so we’re leaving it overnight in an enclosure with shirts at either end. It actually could become a real experiment if this pilot test shows any plausible results.

I’m going to try to get up early tomorrow morning to watch the sunrise over the marsh. We have a riverboat tour along the Tempisque River planned for 8 am, so hopefully we see some cool stuff. Oh, and that is when I will attempt to catch a ctenosaur. Apparently I’m not allowed to scare the ones around here (don’t know if I mentioned that) because an iguana scientist is studying their behavior, and apparently if I’m constantly throwing myself at them they both move unnaturally and develop a fear of humans. Oops.

Day 8: It finally happened!

Today was truly an amazing day. We started off with the classic breakfast at this point, which includes rice, beans, eggs and some form of smoked cheese. I love the food but I probably love the chef even more, I think his name is actually Romelio, and this guy can do anything. He cooks absolutely delicious food, carves wood into some amazing objects (I’m probably going to buy something from him before we leave), he got me ants for my project today, he’s a handyman around the station…. The list goes on. After breakfast we promptly left for the riverboat tour. We walked 4 kilometers down the dirt road in front of our station to a small hut next to the Tempisque River and met our boat captain, Jorge. We all climbed onto a pretty long covered boat and began traveling downriver. It was breathtaking. The Tempisque is a wide river, filled with crocodiles and an unbelievable number of bird species. We saw osprey, roseate spoonbills, herons, egrets, cormorants, kingfishers, kingbirds, etc. For an hour and a half we putted downstream, pulling over to get some incredible pictures of crocs, or to check out a boat-billed heron (very rare bird that people come to Costa Rica from across the world to see). After a journey down to Isla de Pajaros (Bird Island), we had seen more crocodiles than we could handle and eventually just stopped slowing down for them entirely. We returned upriver and hiked back to the biological station.

On the way back, I decided to stick around at the ranger station and try my luck again at catching a ctenosaur. Today had to be the day. I spent probably 10 minutes following a huge male around, but he managed to evade my grasp multiple times. Our TA Brayden came wandering down the trail at that point making his way back to the station, while also taking far too much pleasure in watching me struggle to outsmart an iguana. Right about this point I saw some peccaries (I’ve been trying to get a good picture of these guys for ages) and decided to table the iguana wrangling for a while. I walked over to the pigs and grabbed my camera when I heard something in the trees… Great. More capuchins I thought.

I was so, sooo wrong and in an amazing way.

To my utter surprise, seven large, reddish-brown monkeys came gracefully swinging into view. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They weren’t supposed to exist in this park, Gustavo (the head guy here) said that it was foolish to even think they would come through. Yet here they were, right in front of me. An entire family of spider monkeys! These guys are SO graceful and very entertaining to watch. They have huge arms and a long tail and swing through the trees like it’s the easiest thing ever. Stunned, Brayden and I watched them for over 15 minutes as a troop of capuchins also moved in. We returned to the station for lunch. After lunch, it was time to work on our experiments.

My group gathered at our antlion setup and quickly noticed something was wrong. Very wrong. All the holes had partially filled in and it appeared that no lions were taking care to dig them out again… This is not typical of antlions at all. We tried digging some up and then placing some ants in the other traps and nothing happened. Great. We killed them all somehow. In semi-panic mode, we decided to split into teams and run the experiment on wild antlions instead, feeding an ant to the animal and then measuring the hole width, depth and antlion size. I decided to bring the experimental setups into the classroom just in case something could be done. Louise and I decided to test the large ants on the antlions, and so made our way back to the ranger station where there was a large cluster in a sandy patch I had seen. We worked for around 3.5 hours, tediously catching ants, feeding them to the antlions and taking the necessary measurements. To our surprise, the spider monkeys decided to make another appearance and we got to enjoy their presence once more. As we finished, Mark showed up and stuck around to see the end of the experiment and maybe an antlion or two. The rest of our group showed up, having finished earlier than us, and we decided to walk back.

Wait.

I still needed to catch a ctenosaur.

Today had to be the day.

So, Mark and I stayed at the ranger station and began hunting. After 20 minutes, we succeeded!! We got one! We managed to corner a fairly large male and capture him. I have photo evidence, I promise. It will show up some time. Unfortunately the wifi is not fast here (I’m amazed we have wifi, definitely not upset) and it takes sometimes hours for me to upload photos. I find time when I can. But, we did catch one and it was just as gratifying as I had hoped. We then decided to walk up the road and see if we could find anything interesting.

Boy, did we.

As we hiked slowly back towards the Tempisque, a huge bird suddenly ran across in front of us. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and reached for my camera. At that point, a second bird ran across and then a third. They were incredible! Probably 2.5 feet tall with red wings and a crazy crown of feathers. We heard a fourth in the woods but couldn’t find it. And I never managed to get a good picture, just a leg disappearing into the woods. They turned out to be curassows, some huge ground birds that live in Central America. We looked into the woods for them and ran into a group of howlers in a tree about to bed down for the night. Jokingly, I tried to mimic a howler monkey call as we walked back down the road towards the station, and it actually worked! All the howler monkeys woke up and began calling back to me in an attempt to defend their territory. It was hilarious.

We returned for dinner and discovered that all our antlions hadn’t died! They had just gotten hot and went dormant. Phew. We’re not evil antlion killers.

After dinner we got to talk to the lady here studying iguanas, one of the few scientists in the world currently studying ctenosaurs. Once again it is far too late and I need to get to bed, so the pictures will have to wait. I may have time tomorrow to upload them as we work on crunching the data we collected today.

Day 9: Statistics statistics statistics

Today’s entry will be a lot shorter than the others for a multitude of reasons, the least not being the fact that I’m really damn tired and really need to go to sleep. But that’s not important.

Not a ton happened today. After breakfast, my group met to start crunching numbers and looking for statistically significant trends in the data that we collected. We played around with the data on JMP for a bit and found some trends that we weren’t expecting at all. In fact, they were the total opposites of our prediction, which didn’t make sense. We had thought that larger antlions could catch larger ants more successfully than small antlions, but for some reason the analysis we did seemed to show that smaller lions with shallower, flatter holes were most successful.

Right.

That made absolutely zero sense, so I went to Matt for some professional number-crunching help.

You know, I haven’t yet said who everyone is, have I?  Ok here’s a quick list:

Matt Ayres, professor. Mark Laidre, professor (in training, will be the next FSP professor). Madi and Braden are the TA’s (both absolutely incredible people, I don’t think we could have gotten a better pair). Then there’s me, Sam and Callum. Also on the trip are Francesca, Mari, Emily, Becca, Leigh, Leah, Amber, Gabby, Louise, Hannah, and Caroline. It’s an amazing crew of people.

Back to the numbers. After some help, Matt showed me how to properly analyze the data and we got some amazing results! Turns out, it’s not so much antlion size that determines success or not when attacking a large ant but the steepness of the angle of the trap that the lion digs. Larger antlions tend to dig steeper traps, so we saw correlation there, but the major variable controlling success wasn’t lion body size. It was fascinating to find out and leads to a lot of different possible research questions, like why don’t all large ant lions dig steep traps? If it works better, they should all do it, right?

Anyways, after lunch we planned our presentation for a bit, then we had the vertebrate practicum. This is pretty much the midterm of the FSP. It involved walking around the jungle with the TAs for an hour and writing down the names of the cool animals they pointed out (we just had to know the names, that’s what we were being tested on). After the practicum was dinner, then we began presentations. Four groups presented in total; there was a project on jacanas (birds in the marsh), snails, bursera trees (supposedly have photosynthetic bark) and, of course, antlions. After the presentations (which the famous parrot scientists attended; that was awesome) I went outside to release our antlion prop and ran into a snake! Finally! I saw one! Turns out it was poisonous (even better) and we all gathered around to watch it. We’re all packed now and will leave for Santa Rosa beach tomorrow morning at 7:30.

Santa Rosa will be AMAZING. We basically spend two days camping on the beach (no project, it’s just free time) and looking for nesting sea turtles at night. I won’t be able to write anything during that time; we’re not even bringing our computers because of how remote the place is. I cannot wait. Palo Verde has been so incredible, but it will be nice to get on the road again.

Anyways, I’ll probably write again in three days. I’ll try to get as much in as I can about Santa Rosa because I expect it to be one of my favorite spots on this trip.

¡Pura Vida!