Arrival in San Jose

Last night we handed in our final papers (from the spider project) and we are taking a break from biology for the next couple of weeks!  Rather than staying at a biological station, we are currently at homestays in San Jose, where we’ll be taking Spanish Classes 5 hours/day until the 23rd.  

I LOVE my host family so far! I have my own room and bathroom, which is such an unexpected bonus.  Plus my host family has wireless internet.  Also very unexpected.  The  house is really nice and very big, and my family is super friendly!  I’m living with my host mother, Mayra, and her two children, Cristina (23) and David (20). David speaks a little English which is kind of reassuring.  Cristina and David had to go study shortly after I got here, so I talked to Mayra for a while.  Most of it was her talking and me understanding about 25% of what she said.  I think I played it off like I understood it all (though maybe that was a bad idea hmm), but I did warn them that I only speak a little Spanish! 

I have to unpack.  This will be the first time that the kids on my program are not living out of our suitcases, so this is really exciting!  We’ve spent the past six weeks in bunk rooms with at least 3 other people, which has been great, but I’m very grateful to have my own room and a bigger bed for the next couple of weeks.

I was kind of hoping my host family would have a dog. They don’t, but the cousins who live on the same property do! Anyway, off to unpack and here is a picture of my main man Elmer back home (just because I miss him)

Last week, our program took an overnight trip to some mangroves (Tivies Mangrove on the Pacific side of Costa).  We had just handed in the first draft of our reports, so it was a nice break before we had midterms.  The mangrove was really cool!  Mangrove trees have adapted to live in flooded, high-salt environments, so they had some cool adaptations.

Some trees have pneumatophores, root- like structures that stick out from the mud. They use them to get oxygen when the ground is flooded.  Here are pneumatophores of white mangroves.  They’re very springy when they’re stepped on, meaning they fling mud on whoever is walking behind you :)

Red mangroves were found further into the forest—closer to the ocean.  They have these huge, sturdy stilt roots where we sat and ate lunch.  Walking through these was interesting.  It was kind of like a cruel, muddy, biting insect-filled jungle gym.  Something you would have to cross to get to the center of David Bowie’s labyrinth.  Jonah was first to fall victim to the lightning-fast mud sinks…

And here he is trying to get out.  You can see everyone is reaching for their cameras, rather than extending a hand to pull him out. Hey, he did refuse help.

We spent the night at a biological station on the coast, and we had the next morning off to study.  But, seeing as we were on the coast and still had like, a day and a half before mid terms, most of us went to the beach instead.  It was awesome!  The water was wicked warm, the sun was out, and the beach was practically empty.  Continuing his streak of superb luck, Jonah was bitten by what we suspect was a very small crocodile (he’s alright).

Haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a bit about the independent project that my friend and I just finished.

We wanted to do something with predator-prey interactions, specifically, how one species reacts differently to predators and preys. We used the green lynx spider, which is really common on Ruellia inundata plants here in Palo Verde.  These spiders are really well camouflaged, so finding them (we sampled 250 individuals!) was half the battle.

For each spider tested, there were three stimuli: A predator (black wasp), a pollinator/prey (honeybee) and a control (brown clay).  The objects were attached to skewers and presented to the spiders in random order, with at least 15 minutes between stimuli for each spider.  We looked at males, females, and juveniles.

(lots of statistics)

As concisely as possible, here are our findings:

-Females tended to be found more on flowers than on the vegetation. This is likely because for females with parental care responsibilities, one of the two ways to increase fitness (aka number of offspring: amount of genetic material passed on) is to increase the number of eggs produced. Females that are larger can produce more eggs, so it would benefit the female spiders to stay near the flowers, where pollinators can be caught.
-Males, on the other hand, were found more frequently in the vegetation that within attack distance of flowers.  Several males were observed moving through the vegetation from plant to plant during the study, possibly in search of mates or territory. Males can increase their fitness by increasing how much they mate, so their priorities could be locating mates rather than feeding.

-Reaction distance (distance between the spider and the stimulus at the moment the spider reacts) was small for all stimuli for males, females, and juveniles. This can be explained by the spiders’ reliance on crypsis (camouflage) as an antipredator strategy. Cryptic animals can actually increase vulnerability if they move; they may spur an attack that might not have otherwise occurred.
-Additionally, reaction distance was highest for predators. This makes sense. Risk of predation is a very high cost relative to the benefit of catching prey, and when there is a threat, avoiding predation will dominate an animal’s decision.

-In general, spiders hid from the predator, attacked the pollinator/prey, and did not react to the control. It may also be relevant that females did not react to the predator more frequently than they hid, and they sometimes attacked. This could be due to size; female green lynx spiders are larger than males and, in some cases, were larger than the predator stimulus. Juveniles, on the other hand, hid more frequently than adult males or females for all stimuli. They also hid from the bee more often than they attacked it, again likely due to size.
—> This result, as well as the higher reaction distance to predator than to prey, indicates that animals can visually differentiate between a threat and a meal. As one would expect, individuals with vision keen enough to do so would be highly favored by natural selection, because the consequences of misidentification are extreme.

So that’s it in a nutshell! We presented on the project and handed in the first draft of our scientific papers today. Tomorrow we’re off to Tivies mangrove field and the beach for two days, then back to Palo Verde to get ready for mid terms.

It’s still hot here-I don’t think the temperature has dropped below 90 F in the daytime-but we’re much more used to it now. And it’s sunny every day, which is fantastic!

Adios! 

Animals I’ve seen in the past 24 hrs in Palo Verde National Park (dry forest and wetlands)

White-faced capuchin monkeys
Spider monkeys!!! (my goal today was to see some and I did!)
Caimans (like crocodiles but smaller)
Crocodiles- some small, some huge. Yikes.
Parrots and tons of other birds
Scorpions. Lots of them at night
Tarantula
Koati- looks like a raccoon/lemur mix
Peccaries (wild pigs)
Black ctenosaurs everywhere aka iguanas
Geckos and lizards
Curacao birds - like giant crested turkeys
Snakes
and about 28957 spiders 

Camp Costa

long post

Costa Rica is still awesome! Tons of hiking, and even better, a plethora of tropical fruit that I would normally never eat at home. I had no idea papaya was so good! The seeds are good too-they taste like wasabi-but people look at me funny when I eat them.

Last Thursday (Feb 9) we left the premontane tropical forest of Las Cruces for Cuerici. Cuerici is up in the mountains right near the continental divide, at an elevation of 2600 m. It was cold there but gorgeous. We got to check out two rare ecosystems: the paramo and the oak forest. Paramo systems are found here and in the Andes above the tree line (at the mountain tops). Lots of short, shrubby plants adapted to living in intense sunlight, high wind, extreme weather changes, and eroding soil. LOTS of thorns and spikes. 

Here’s Savannah chilling in the paramo. Way above the clouds which was really cool.. 

Our professor told us that the oak forest would likely be the most beautiful forest we’d ever seen, and I think she’s right. Who even knew there were two species of oak native to Costa Rica? It was really pretty. Tall oaks covered in lots of moss, with tropical plants like bamboo and Aracaeae (palms) living in the understory. Plus butterflies everywhere. There were lots of birds that could be heard but not easily seen. The black-faced solitaire has a really pretty metallic-sounding call kind of like a chime. 

When we got to the top of the Oak Forest Trail, the view was insane. From where we stood, we could see the highest peak in Costa Rica. We looked DOWN and saw clouds. Crazy.

As amazing as the oak forest was, it wasn’t the best part of Cuerici. The most exciting part was the litter of two-week-old puppies that we discovered on the farm. They were so cute! There were four of them plus the lovely mama who tolerated twenty-one students crowding around her babies The puppies were HUGE for only being fifteen days old. Playing with them was a serious highlight of the week, since we’re all pet-deprived. 

My favorite puppy. We called her Brown, but we should have called her Sucks-at-walking. Two weeks old she should be an old pro by now.

Monday morning at 5 am I woke up to my bed shaking (I was on a top bunk at Cuerici). I was about to yell at my roommate who is known to shake my bed when she’s bored and decides she wants my nap to end, but then I realized it was an earthquake! It wasn’t scary. It was kind of fun. The house shook and jerked around for about 30 seconds then it ended. Nothing fell over, and there was no damage or injury in Costa Rica. It was a scale 6.0 earthquake though which was cool!

Now we’re in Palo Verde, which is a dry forest region in Guanacaste. It’s super hot here. My thermometer (the internet) says it’s 93 degrees F. Wowwwza. Like all our other sites, it’s beautiful and I’m taking it all in. So far I like it a lot (wicked hot though), especially the big giant iguanas everywhere. EVERYWHERE. My friend Kailey and I figured out that if you roll a coconut past them, they might chase it. Lizard Fetch?

Don Roberto’s coffee farm

Friday, the group took a trip to a small coffee farm near the station. Don Roberto, the owner, took us through the whole process from Rubiaceae seedling to ground, roasted coffee. Don Roberto was really cool; he’s a small farmer with little disposable income, yet he set aside part of his property and dedicated it to reforestation. He said that since he makes his living off the earth, the least he could do is give back to it. Along with coffee, Roberto grows bananas and cane.

Don Roberto’s shade-grown coffee (and banana plants)

And Roberto himself with his adorable granddaughter

night flight

Sunday (was it Sunday?) six of us went on a night hike in the forest. We set out with bug spray, nets, and lots of flashlights. The good news was spiders’ eyes light up at night, so they’re really easy to see. The bad news is spiders’ eyes are really easy to see, and there are LOTS of them. Every meter or so on the trail we saw at least a couple spiders. Most were small…most. Not too long into the hike we came across what looked like a big mama spider eating a smaller one.

We saw tons of bugs. There’s a whole different world in the jungle at night. Animals are eating, hunting, and living their lives in the pitch black. So cool.

After we came out of the forest, the group sat on the soccer field (after checking the ground for snakes, scorpions), turned off all our lights, and didn’t speak for about ten minutes. It was awesome. We just listened to all the animals and watched the moon come up. A huge bat flew over us too. Good stuff.

Welcome to the jungle

Today we took a six-hour bus ride through the Costa Rican mountains to get to our first biological station, Las Cruces.

Driving through the mountains meant crossing the continental divide, and we were so high up that we actually drove through clouds.  When we stopped at 10:30, it was really cold, but when we stopped for lunch later (and further down the mountains) it was wicked hot.

^ I tried taking pictures from the bus with variable success. ^

There’s a lookout point at Las Cruces that looks over a really beautiful valley. The amount of green is almost overwhelming. But Las Cruces is amazing! Right outside our building there is a bromeliad garden, and Las Cruces has a huge diversity of plants and some really funky animals too. We finished up the wicked long day with our first class, which was a lecture about the many, many, many dangerous plants and animals here in the tropics. And as soon as we finished, we encountered our first Costa Rican beast:

This guy was just hanging our bathroom. Cute. So glad I wasn’t the one who discovered it!