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: