it still hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but we left costa rica yesterday and we’re now in the cayman islands for the rest of the term! i’m sitting on our front porch writing this right now, literally 10 feet from the ocean, but i can’t wait to share all that with you later on. 

our last field station in costa rica was really inspiring to me because it was the biggest OTS one (organization of tropical studies) and there were other legitimate researchers around, eating meals in the same dining hall as us and going out into the same woods as us. i felt like all this science stuff had finally come together as something real. my group did a project on some mites that ride on the skin of hummingbirds so that they can jump off on flowers with delicious nectar; our professor told us that a famous researcher named robert colwell studied the exact same mites years before, so i kept feeling like i was a part of something cool. 

i don’t have a lot of great pictures at la selva, so i don’t think i’m going to upload them just now, but i do have great stories, especially about the night that i went out with my professor to check on s.d., who was feeling sick. we were walking along the bridge and saw a great potoo, which looks like some kind of mythical owl creature with huge pixar character eyes. then, when we were walking right up the path to the cafeteria, my professor pointed out a meter-long snake in the grass, less than a foot from the path. it was a fer-de-lance, extremely venomous and the most dangerous snake in costa rica, accounting for the biggest % of snake bites. people who get btiten usually get a limb amputated. it was beautiful - brown with crisscrossing triangle or diamond patterns down its back, and a triangular head. when i held my hands out to try and gauge its length it cocked back a little bit and i remembered how easily it could dash out and bite me if it wanted to. i will never forget that. 

so, little cayman research center for two and a half weeks - hope i get better pictures of all the fun we have in the sun over here!

i can’t believe i’ve been to three field stations without blogging again! it’s been such a wild ride. 

after santa rosa we headed to monteverde field station for one more project and a whole lot of paper writing. i spent a lot of time on a hummingbird project, but didn’t get any decent pictures of hummingbirds, because my camera sucks. we looked at hummingbird size, territoriality, and foraging strategy, and i think that’s been my favorite project so far. we also got to walk around on beautiful mountain trails and work on papers at one of the most beautiful field stations yet: 

We also hung out at a neat butterfly garden where one of our TA’s used to work. Best butterfly garden visit ever - I learned so much about bugs and we got to touch so many of them, including some amazing blue morphos. 

The next field station, then, was actually a privately owned rainbow trout farm - Cuerici Biological Station, owned by Don C. It was cold, and the altitude really got to some of us, but we got to go on some excellent hikes and play around with the farm cat’s litter of kittens. My group did a project tagging Don C.’s rainbow trout, as well as taking data on their size and body condition - it was a whole lot of fun, and I actually got really good at handling the huge fish. Plus we ate fresh fish for lunch on the last day!

Finally, we headed to Corcovado, which NatGeo once called the “most biologically intense place on earth.” And, well… I’ve gotta agree. I actually didn’t take too many pictures because there weren’t a lot of opportunities to plug in my camera charger, but holy shit. First of all, we took a 23km hike to get to the field station, and the same hike back out in half the time - 4 and a half hours instead of 8 or 9. It was the most physically taxing thing I ever did in my life, but I am so so proud of myself.

At Corcovado, we saw spider monkeys, squirrel monkeys, and howler monkeys. We saw tapirs more than once. We came the closest I’ve ever been to crocodiles. We came across huge leafcutter ant colonies and smelly bands of peccaries. Some of the group saw sharks. We also saw a fricking anteater. I did a cute little project on anole lizard dewlaps, but I was so busy looking at everything else that I don’t even think of that place as a field station - just an unforgettable place where we saw animal after animal every single day. Here are the crummy pictures that will never capture how insane our stay was. I will never forget Corcovado.

Again: 23km hike! That’s about 15mi in the hot humid lowland rainforests of Costa Rica. I am so fricking proud of myself. 

Till next time. 

we finally finished our first independent project at palo verde after a couple nights of backbreaking work, so our professors took us to the beach for two nights - a well-deserved break and our first ‘weekend’ on this trip. we had to hike 7mi to get to playa naranjo, but it was definitely worth it. i’ve been to so many beautiful beaches in southeast asia, but this was the most isolated untouched beach i’ve ever been to, and it was great to be the only people out on the sand. 

anyway, took a lot of pictures, built some sandcastles, etc. etc. i’ll let you know when our next independent project starts, at our next field station - monteverde!

we’ve been breaking our backs with work, but we went on a river cruise today, on brackish water - got to see lots of mangroves and lots of cool animals! i also figured out how to take pictures THROUGH my binoculars to compensate for the noobiness of my camera: 

so things have really escalated for all of us on the FSP by now. we had our last day of just kind of hanging around and sightseeing, which was great because we spent our sunset on la roca, this lookout point with an amazing panoramic view. prof r told us that our hearts would explode when we got there, and he was kind of right: 

that day was also insane because we ran into a troop of capuchins, who took some time to hang out with us and give us very photogenic faces:

we’ve seen monkeys almost everyday after that - in fact, s.b. got peed on by a howler monkey on our way to la roca - but for the past couple of days we’ve been working hard on our fip’s - faculty initiated projects. my fip2 is on antlions, which actually build little pitfall traps to prey on ants, but fip1 (the paper i’m writing tonight) is on acacia ants or Pseudomyrmex spinicola, which live in acacia trees or Acacia collinsii.

acacia ants live in mutualisms with the trees, attacking herbivores in exchange for food and shelter, so we tested the effect of both physical and chemical disturbances on ant activity, as well as the effect of a combination of the two. we thought that ants would conserve energy much like multiple burglar alarm systems do, and respond to the combination of two different signals in greater force than any of the ‘alarms’ alone, or in greater force than just a sum of the two. so we spent a day in the sun making these ants angry, and i took a lot of pictures. 

things are going to get pretty busy with our first sip or student initiated project or independent project, but i hope i can keep writing, if only to keep recording the little things that happen along the way. 

by the way, here’s a few of those little things:

-prof r asking why there are vegetable meats (like veggie burgers) but no meat vegetables

-j.b. finding a scorpion in her bed and j.d. being completely unhelpful. “some species sling venom into your eyes!”

-more than 10 coatis casually coming to drink from the watering hole right next to our field station:

good night, everyone!

hi all. we’ve literally been in palo verde national park for a day and already we’ve literally seen so much wildlife it makes me want to cry (no, really, i teared up a little on our way back from our orientation hike). the fun stuff started even when we got off the bus and were just hanging around waiting for our room assignments - we kept seeing Ctenosaurs, or spinytail iguanas. they’d do their head bobbing thing and run around (they have a really funny run!) and hide under the cars parked at the field station. 

after lunch we had our orientation walk into the dry forest for the first time, and it was amazing - it took around 15 minutes before one of us (e.s.) spotted this big beautiful owl. professor r was leading us through and talking about important things like acacia tree - ant mutualisms (a reminder to myself to not brush up against one!) but we kept getting sidetracked because we saw so much! we must have seen monkeys at least 5 times, mostly capuchins and howler monkeys (which make such hilarious noises) but once we saw a spider monkey and her baby which was ridiculously cute. we also had a run in with a Norops or anole lizard, which prof. r picked up for us, and which is also s.d.’s assigned “spirit animal” (we all have assigned animals that we’re supposed to yell out in alphabetical order when we get on the bus so that we know that everyone’s on the bus. mine is a gallinule which is a beautiful bird - google it). prof. r also picked up a boa constrictor for us, which we petted and cooed over for a while until s/he got a little pissy (but we did get to see his/her vestigial hind limbs - too cool!). 

there was a little clearing where the trail met the road again and prof. r told us that monkeys always hang out there, so that means i’ll be back all the time, naturally. best of all, the road led us to the wetland part of palo verde, and we got to walk out on this dock in the middle of the marsh, where migratory birds were just flocking and being really loud and beautiful and awesome. that was my favorite  part of the trip - suddenly being surrounded by all this amazing open space, with marshland stretching out in front of you and mountains in the background and all these birds like jacanas and egrets just landing a few feet away and crocodiles sunning themselves - it was incredible. i am definitely going back out there in my free time, maybe even alone. 

we had dinner and a lecture tonight - this is going to be one of our most relaxed nights, so i’m getting as much casual internet time in as i can. we don’t start projects tomorrow yet, but we have more lectures and another hike. we’re going to get into more of a routine now. today was just such an incredible introduction to all the wildlife we were going to see that i felt i had to write a post about it while i had free time! 

here’s a photoset for you all - till next time!