Coati pin

I don't think I have posted about this shrinky dink pin yet.  I made another pin for my friend Deedra -- it is of a coati (Nasua narica), a tropical mammal she has studied intensively.  I really like making all of these shrinky dink pins!

back from Costa Rica

I am (finally) back in DC after some unexpected delays in Atlanta...yet again!  The first plane had "mechanical issues" so that flight was cancelled and I had to stay overnight in a hotel (which Delta paid for) -- I also received a whopping $12 worth of food vouchers!  I was re-booked on an early morning (0715 h) flight the next day, but (wouldn't you know it) THAT plane had issues too!  We boarded on time, but sat on the runway for 2.5 h because a computer was malfunctioning.  They tried about 5 different computers until one finally worked and we were able to fly out.  Sheesh.

After finally getting home, I took a shower and Carlos and I got ready to go out to dinner at Founding Farmers -- we celebrated our belated 3rd anniversary (because we were both really sick on our real anniversary earlier in July) and it was great!  We also enjoyed seeing the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics (my favorite part was Mr. Bean -- of course!).

Now that I am back home, I hope to be posting more interesting things soon.  I also have to work on getting a new passport (this one expires soon) because I probably have to go back to the field in a couple of months.  More details on that as the plan comes together~

Agouti SNAX™

I only have a couple days left of data collection here in Las Cruces, but I thought I would write a little post about the Agouti SNAX ™ (artificial fruits) that I made and am using in my experiments.

The idea behind the SNAX ™  was to create a food item that agoutis would recognize as edible and treat like a real fruit/seed.  Because I can make these SNAX ™  any shape and size, I can experimentally manipulate this variable and see how (e.g.) seed size affects agouti seed dispersal effectiveness (the distance they remove seeds from a source) and hoarding behavior (do agoutis preferentially hoard large seeds far away over small seeds?).  No one has ever tried making artificial fruits like these before to answer these fundamental questions.

Making the SNAX ™  was pretty fun, but time-consuming.  I used Sculpey clay (terra cotta color) into which I incorporated a fixed ratio of ground-up peanuts (shells and nuts).  Each large fruit is made of 21 g of clay and 4 g of peanuts inside (= 25 g total) while each small fruit comprises 3.5 g of clay and 0.5 g of peanut inside (= 4 g total).

I am very excited that the agoutis here in Las Cruces really enjoy eating these SNAX ™ and treat them no differently than other fruits they find in nature -- this trip has been a success!  Carlos and I plan to come back to Las Cruces in the near future to elaborate on this experiment and do some beetle/leaf herbivory work too!

in Costa Rica

Things have been busy...I have been in Costa Rica since 11 July and will return to DC on the 26th.  I came down here to work with some colleagues from Duke (OTS) on an assessment of the OTS education model and I have stayed behind to do some research.  For the assessment trip, six of us bounced all over Costa Rica for five days (San Jose, La Selva, Las Cruces) and I am currently in the Las Cruces Biological Station (operated by OTS), which is located very near the Panamanian border.

The interesting thing about this station (and how different it is from La Selva) is that the station is embedded within a large garden (Wilson Botanical Garden).  This garden is home to about a zillion agoutis -- they are EVERYWHERE!  That is why I chose to complete my 10-day pilot project here.  It involves a novel method to track seed fates and look at seed dispersal effectiveness.  Basically, I made artificial fruits (I call them Agouti SNAX™) that I mark with numbers and strings and wait for agoutis to interact with.  I track down the fruits and see what the agoutis did with them to learn about how they could affect real fruits/seeds and potentially forest-level processes.  I am glad to report that the SNAX™ really work well -- the agoutis love them!  This has some really cool implications for future avenues of research, because I can completely manipulate fruit size/shape/etc.  No one has ever done this before!  Here are a couple of cool photos from a camera trap I set at one of the SNAX™ stations:

 

Shrew train

For part of Shannon and BJ's wedding present, I painted them a watercolor.  At first, I was planning on painting a landscape of a beautiful lake scene with blue skies and fall colors on the trees.  However, as I started painting, it looked really ugly (I guess I just can't handle landscapes) and I had to destroy it.  So, instead of a landscape, I painted a cute scene involving a shrew mama and her babies.  This is typical behavior for shrews so that they stay together and the babies don't get lost.  They will even hold on when you pick the mother up off the ground!  I like how this painting turned out and even though it took a while -- happy wedding Shannon and BJ!

Fireworks on the 4th!

It's been crazy hot here for the past couple of weeks and also super stormy (we didn't lose power in the big storm last week, but many of our friends did -- and had their cars smashed by downed trees!).  Anyway, we have been trying to keep cool and managed to see the pretty fireworks show from our living room window on the 4th of July.  We also could see some of the other fireworks in the distance (DC is very flat) and it was nice -- I think this is the first time I have been in the states for the 4th in recent years!

I took some (admittedly pretty lame) pictures of the fireworks, but I also made a little movie.  I even added background music to the fireworks show -- hehe, I am such a pro video editor.  I hope you like it as much as I do!