La Selva -- miscellaneous fun

As Carlos' and my month (actually a little more than that) at La Selva ends, I thought I would write one last blog post with some fun pictures of the random things I have encountered on this trip. We leave for Las Cruces tomorrow morning and I will be able to see new plants and animals at this high-elevation (~1200 m) pre-montane forest site.

This glass frog (Femily Centrolenidae) -- so named for its amazing transparent skin -- laid a clutch of eggs on the underside of a leaf next to the Stone Bridge. I have been watching the eggs and they are almost fully-developed. The small tadpoles are almost fully formed (after 2 weeks) and have begun dropping into the river below.

One of the researchers here is collecting dead animals that are found throughout the La Selva property and creating museum specimens. She showed Carlos and me her cleaned/stuffed 3-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus).

A White-necked Jacobin hummingbird (Florisuga mellivora) made a nest very near the CES trail and we have seen her incubating these eggs. Only one survived and now there is a scruffy baby taking up all the space in the tiny nest.

Here is a picture of me with one of the Astrocayum alatum palms that I grew from a seed during my dissertation. This tree is approximately 5 years old (palms are very slow growers)!

Here I experimented with my iPhone to take a panoramic picture. I had biked about 5 km down the STR trail and thought this was a nice scene of the river, my bike, and the trail.

One night I was invited to the house of one of the off-station researchers for dinner and we made  some delicious pad thai.

I like this cute little table sitting in the sun near the Lab Viejo in the lab clearing.

I found this cute frog on the sidewalk one night while walking back to my cabina from dinner.

I am not sure if the internet at Las Cruces will let me upload regular blog posts while I am there, but I will give it a try!

La Selva -- in the lab

While my artificial fruit field experiments didn't work out, Carlos' and my lab experiments have had lots of success!  We are determining the "Critical Thermal Maxima" (CTmax) for rolled-leaf beetles that are found along the Barva Volcano elevational transect. We will use this information to model extinctions (and co-extinctions) under the predicted regime of global warming. Carlos constructed some beautiful and sophisticated warming devices involving electric kettles, light dimmers, and thermostats. These devices carefully control the rate of temperature increase (~1 degree C per 5 sec) and allow us to see when beetles (in tubes in the water bath) are knocked down by the heat (basically when they have fallen and can't get up!). Don't worry, this doesn't harm the beetles and we let them go after their spa treatments.

 

Our findings so far are very exciting and we are going to try and submit these results to a high-level journal. We are also going to continue these experiments in Las Cruces (along with my artificial fruit -- SNAX -- experiments).

La Selva -- artificial fruit experiment

Carlos' and my time here at La Selva is winding down (we head south to Las Cruces, near the Panama border, on Thursday the 28th) and so are our two experiments. My experiment focuses on the evolution of seed size and how terrestrial mammal seed dispersers may influence seed survival through differential dispersal of seeds varying in size.

To explicitly address this question, I created artificial fruits and tracked their fates over time. Initially I used peanuts in my artificial fruit (or SNAX) recipe, but the peccaries here hated them -- they took one whiff of the peanut-flavored SNAX and ran away! Weird.

After that, I used seeds from fruiting native Dipteryx panamensis trees in the SNAX. I conducted some feeding trials (which is fancy science speak for "I threw artificial fruits at peccaries to see if they would eat them") and the peccaries really liked the Dipteryx-flavored fruits.

I deployed 9 depots (10 seeds each: 5 small and 5 large) with camera traps to detect dispersers. After about 20 days of exposure in the field, however, I had very few animals interact with the seeds. I think there are just too many fruits available right now and the peccaries are being very choosy, bypassing my SNAX. Bleh, that's how it goes sometimes.

I know that this experiment works really well with the agoutis in Las Cruces and there are just not enough agoutis here to make this project work. I scrapped the SNAX project here at La Selva and I am instead collaborating on an exciting project with Carlos. This project involves beetles, plants, and spa treatments. I will elaborate more about that in another post!

Boat ride down Rios Puerto Viejo & Sarapiqui

A little over a week ago I took a boat ride with some of the other researchers on station and their visiting family members. This is a very touristy thing to do, but I had never seen the Rio Puerto Viejo (which passes under the large suspension bridge at La Selva) or the Rio Sarapiqui via boat! The 3-hour tour (sounds like the start or Gilligan's Island?) was only $10 so I thought this would be a good opportunity to see things from an aquatic viewpoint.

The day started off very sunny (we left the little La Selva dock at 0700 h), but we did see some clouds and a few sprinkles at the very end of the ride.

The river was very beautiful and the trip itself was very relaxing. We also saw lots of wildlife -- mostly birds (e.g., a sunbittern, sungrebe, kingfishers, swallows, anhingas, herons), but we also saw some bats roosting on a tree trunk overhanging the water (Saccopteryx bilineata), a turtle on a downed trunk, and a couple of caiman!

 

This was a very fun morning trip and a nice way to see different parts of the riparian forest. This would be a great trip to bring visitors on!

Agouti and peccary key chains

Before I left DC for Costa Rica, I made a couple of key chains (out of shrinky dink plastic) for the keys of the camera trap python locks so that I wouldn't lose them. I named one of the locks "agouti" and the other "peccary" so that I could make two key chains of my study organisms.

These key chains are pretty sturdy (I use them almost daily when I change where I place my camera traps) and I really like how they look!

MagFest 2013

On 2 January 2013 Carlos and I took a shuttle out to National Harbor, MD to check in at the ultra-fancy Gaylord National Hotel for MagFest 2013! MagFest is an annual music and gaming festival and lasted from 3-6 January this year. There are concerts, video games (console and arcade), panels, and tons of other things to do during the convention/festival. Every day was so much fun and Carlos and I spent lots of time in the arcade playing (for free) all of the games that were there. I made a little collage of the signs from some of our favorites (at the top of this post). There was also an entire room full of TVs and every console known to man, which were open to play. The arcade and console rooms were open 24 hours a day for the entirety of MagFest and we went down one night (around 2 am) and played in our pajamas -- it was so much fun!

We went to some concerts (my favorite was the Triforce Quartet -- a string quartet that plays songs from all the Zelda games). It was so much fun to be surrounded by my people and Carlos, even though he really isn't a video game nerd like me, had a lot of fun too! If we are still in DC during January of next year (which we probably won't be), I would love to go to MagFest again!

Whew, and with this post I am FINALLY caught up on everything fun that I did over the holidays. Next I have some things to post about from here in Costa Rica!

Meteorite hunting in Lancaster, CA

Well, this post will conclude our adventure in California over the holidays. Next I will need to catch up on MagFest (which we went to in National Harbor, MD after returning to DC) and some of the adventures I have had so far in Costa Rica (where I am currently).

Carlos, BJ, and I spent a gorgeous sunny day outside visiting the landscape and later hunting for meteorites off the beaten path. First, we drove to the nearby Prime Desert Woodland Preserve where we walked the well-maintained trails and saw plenty of Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia). We even saw a couple of black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus californicus), which we were very excited about.

After touring the preserve, we drove around trying to find a good place to hunt for meteorites. We tried visiting one dry lake bed, but it was inaccessible on the Edwards Air Force Base. BJ took us to an area where he and his friends ride dirt bikes and as we stopped (after driving off road for a while), we saw a Greater Road Runner (Geococcyx californianus) run into a bush right in front of us!

We had brought two hand-made (by Carlos and BJ) push/pull contraptions with industrial-strength magnets to locate small meteorites. We didn't end up finding anything huge, but we did collect a lot of small magnetic rocks (and metal debris bycatch) with these devices! We also found some pretty rocks for Shannon and BJ's yard, which we brought home.

After combing the desert, we stopped at In-n-Out for a late lunch, hunting for meteorites in the desert really works up your appetite!

We had so much fun visiting Shannon and BJ in their natural environment -- Carlos and I can't wait to go back to visit. Maybe we will be able to overlap with the Antelope Valley Poppy Festival!