Surprising Samsara

(Man throwing pesticides in a rice field. They get paid by the bag.)

Pues, ahora estoy en San Jose viviendo con una famila costarricense y estudiando el español. Pero, antes de esto, necesito volverse atrás. . .

(Well, now I’m in San Jose living with a Costa Rican family and studying Spanish. But, before that, I need to backtrack. . .)

The last thing I mentioned here was that I was about to start my independent project. Let’s start there, after I talk about our faculty-led projects.

Two professors from the U.S. came to lead projects for two days at Palo Verde. One project was on howler monkeys and one was on Ipomea carnea (Basically, morning glories, but a species where the vine is woody. The flowers only last for a day.). So one morning, we got up at 5 and followed groups of howler monkeys through the forest for about seven hours, recording the amount of time they ate, slept, played, peed, looked at us, traveled, you name it. How did we find them to begin with? Well, the howl. Google it and listen to them—they’re crazy, and would probably be terrifying if you were alone in the forest and didn’t know what the noise was. The other day (we had split into two groups and switched on the second day) we got up at 5 and counted how many bees went into flowers (one control, one with the stamen (with the pollen) removed, one with the floral display/landing area/whatever you want to call it trimmed back) for about seven hours.

On to the independent projects. Scott, another student in the program, and myself got the big idea to study a certain ant, Ectatomma ruidum, regarding its foraging energetics regarding amino acids. That is, we were going to see where it placed its energy in foraging, and whether it recruited other ants to a particular amino acid source over others. The idea was that since ants, just like humans, have essential amino acids (ones they have to get from their diet since their bodies can’t produce them), they would prefer to eat (and recruit other ants to) essential amino acid sources as opposed to non-essential amino acid sources.

Here is us working diligently. It was hot. My shins got sunburned.

For these projects, we have a few days to prepare, look up literature/download papers (on the extremely slow internet), and come up with ideas. So, Scott and I spent that time reading papers about ant foraging (and as much on this particular species as possible) and coming up with a methodology (which amino acids to use, how to mix them, etc.).

(Here is the scorpion that was hiding in one of my roommate's jackets that stung him when he picked the jacket up. Ha.)

Then the fun started. After finding ten nests—which you can only find if you happen to discover either 1) one of the ants and follow it back to the nest, or 2) the nest itself, the entrance of which is nothing more than a tiny (as wide as the ant itself), inconspicuous hole in the ground—we mixed our amino acid solutions (1 part amino acid, 10 parts sugar (sucrose), 100 parts water, by weight), and on the first of four days of data collection, were immediately given the middle finger by mother nature.

(Can YOU see the nest hole? I didn't think so. But it's there.)

This means that not only did the ants not even come out to discover our theoretically tasty treats, but they didn’t even come out to forage, period. We tried four times that day, including once at night, and these ants, which had been active the previous day, never, ever came out of their nests. We put the mixtures in petri dishes, soaked cotton balls in the stuff, even cooked rice in a beaker on a hot plate in the (horrible) lab and put the mixtures on that. Nothing worked. It was ridiculous, and we were screwed. With 25% of the time allocated to us for data collection thrown in the smelliest dumpster ever, we had to come up with a new project by the next day.

(Rice is quite difficult to cook in a chemistry lab with very little equipment. It didn't work.)

So after our final attempt, Scott and I sat down and tried to come up with other ideas for a project that we could start first thing in the morning. That was more difficult that it sounds, and I think it sounds pretty difficult. But, gracias a todo que es bien y santo, one of the Costa Rican students, David, was also having trouble with his project (our Tico teacher, Mau (Mauricio), had called him, and enacted, a fish dying out of the water earlier that day. It was funny.). He was working alone (you could work in groups of up to four people), and wanted to do something with lianas (woody vines that you imagine being in a rainforest; bejucos en español), but his ideas were too big to be done with one person.

So, at about midnight (late for us), we were coming up with hypotheses and methods that we hoped would fly by our professors and we could start working in the morning. At about 1:30 we went to bed, and at 6:30, after eating breakfast, we smooth talked our way into being able to do this project.

(Scott climbing through some vines in the old-growth forest.)

(An Acacia ant coming out of one of the thorns on, obviously, an Acacia tree. Ant-plant mutualism: the plant provides shelter and amino acids in the form of Extra Floral Nectaries to the ants, and the ants protect the plant from herbivores, lianas, etc. Cool.)

(David hugging a huge tree (122.5 cm in diameter) that had tons of prickles. Qué playito.)

Basic premise: we used GPS to locate three different successional stages of forest a few kilometers from the station—early secondary, late secondary, and old-growth (primary, technically, but not quite)—and, in six 2x50m transects, we counted, measured, and assessed the bark type and "deciduousness" of every single tree and liana. It took a long time; the jungle isn’t easy to bushwhack, and we couldn’t have machetes because it’s a national park. Essentially, we were trying to see the relationships between liana abundance and forest age, as well as their preference (a word I’m not supposed to utter since lianas don’t have “preferences” since they aren’t alive, said one of my teachers) towards certain bark types and the deciduousness of their hosts. The days were long (and hot), we ran out of water halfway through the first day, and not a single one of us knew anything about statistics.

(Sleepy white-faced capuchin.)

Bejuco grande.

(On one of the first days we were warned: "If you happen to be falling, don't reach out to grab anything." This was why.)

This was bad because in biology/ecology, pretty much everything you do is based around statistics. This meant that during our analysis we had to be fed the stats stuff by hand by one of our professors (I have typed “professors” twice thus far, and each time I’ve first typed “profesors.” Professors in Spanish is “profesores.”) We each had to write a paper about our project individually, got to turn in a first draft (for a few points), and then a final, revised draft after getting comments from the teachers (for more points). More on that later.

(Mau sitting on a red mangrove. Sweetest classroom ever.)

The day after we turned in our drafts, we took a field trip. This was bad timing, but you’ll see that later. We went to visit/explore mangroves at Punta Morales, en el Golfo de Nicoya (the Nicoya Gulf) on the pacific side, which was really cool. Mangroves are ecosystems along coasts that only contain a few species of plants, all of which are trees. They are only able to exist there because of their adaptations to living with salt. (Most) Mangroves get freshwater from inland sources and saltwater from the sea, and so they have to deal with both situations.

(Note the lack of understory. Also note the ground; an enlarged version of this is below)

They don’t like salt any more than other plants, however, and they have some pretty sweet tricks to deal with it. For example, most of the trees exude salt from glands in their leaves, forming crystals that you can lick. Some store salt in older leaves that will soon fall, and if you tear one open you can see how thick it is inside.

(Note the salt crystals.)

As the soil these trees live on is basically a very fine mud/silt, there is no oxygen in the substrate. Therefore, some species have roots that come above ground (lentisols) for gas exchange (see picture below), some exchange it through pores in their bark on the trunk, etc. Some species are on stilt roots, which can only be explained with a picture. The red mangroves basically form a giant jungle gym, which was pretty fun to “monkey around” on. Har de har harr.

There was a beach nearby, and ‘twas the first time I got to go to a beach at night, drink beer, and eat salsa. It was nice, but I also got sunburned (not at night; during the day, of course), and am still peeling. In the tropics, el sol es muy fuerte.

This is a tree (Bursera simarouba) whose bark peels off during the dry season. The green bark underneath takes care of the photosynthetic needs since all of the leaves have also fallen. Ticos call it the "gringo" tree. (Gringo=white person, most of which get sunburned and peel a lot. Hilarious.)

We also talked to a lady cleaning oysters; she worked with a group of women who grow/cultivate oysters near the mangroves as part of a project through el Universidad de Costa Rica.

Then, the “highlight” of the field trip, if you can call it that. We went to the Megafauna Park. Megafauna are big ole extinct animals—everything from dinosaurs to mastodons to giant sloths. At the Megafauna park, there were lots of statues of said animals. It was probably the largest waste of time ever, especially when we had two midterms to take, a dichotomous plant key to make, our papers to rewrite, and our insect identifications to complete (which, luckily, I’d done during the first week at Palo Verde), all within the next three days.

Back at Palo Verde, we had to study for our tests, but excitingly, some of us had to do ethics presentations. At Las Cruces, we all signed up to lead discussions on various topics relating to ethics in science—everything to altering data to unethical methodology—and mine, the first one, happened to fall on the day after we got back from the field trip and two nights before our midterms. So basically I wasted a day reading papers about shooting birds with shotguns in the name of science instead of studying for huge-ass tests that I was in no way prepared for. That was fun.

After our midterms (which were very difficult and covered basically everything we’d done since we got here), I did my plant key (also difficult) and started rewriting my paper. That night, however, was pretty entertaining. We took a break and celebrated Purim, a Jewish holiday (because there are about 4.25 Jews in our group), which celebrates—long story short and as I understand it—the escape of the Jews from a bad guy named Haman who was trying to kill them for various reasons. The thing about Purim is that it’s a drink-till-you-drop holiday in that you’re supposed to drink so much/enough that you can’t differentiate an enemy from a friend, and you’re supposed to be in costume. I wore a paper yammukah with a Star of David and a picture of Mau in the center that said "Mauzltov." It was pretty sweet, and I’ll stop there.

The next day began the rewriting of the papers. After all day and more statistical tests and more background reading (our papers were torn to shreds and I had to completely rewrite my introduction and discussion), at about 3:30 a.m. I turned in my paper. So, long story short, after three extensions and two up-until-4 a.m.-nights, I turned in my first ever scientific paper, which you can read here, if you’re interested. I’d say it’s manageable even for people who don’t know anything about lianas, the rainforest, or even science. Here it is:

LianaIndependentProject.pdf

At least I didn’t fall on a cactus, like one of the girls in our group, or drop my iPod in the muddy marsh, like one of the guys.

The day before this was March 10, the 50^th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising in 1959 after the Chinese invasion in the same year. As you may know, I’m kind of interested in this subject (see my previous blog if you haven’t already on my studies on Tibetan culture last semester in India/Nepal), and so I brought prayer flags to hang up with me to Costa Rica. I brought four sets, hadn’t hung any. After I finished my paper at 3 a.m., I decided there couldn’t be a better time, with March 10^th just passing and all, to go hang some. So basically, I stared hiking up a trail in the dark with flags in my pocket alone in the rainforest in the middle of the night. A bat almost ran into my face.

However, halfway up, the batteries in my flashlight decided that they didn’t feel like working anymore. In the tropical forest, the canopy is high and the light is low. This presents a problem when you’re walking in sandals at night on a steep slope and you’re a good few hundred meters from where you started. The next decision I made probably wasn’t one of the smartest ones ever: I decided to say “screw it,” and kept going. How’s that for dedication?

I hung the flags in a spot by some huge rocks where you could see out over the marsh and could see a city in the distance. By this time it was 4 a.m. (it takes a bit longer when you can’t see anything) and the moon was out in full force, thankfully. My eyes had adjusted some, which was good, and it was quite windy, which was bad for tying knots. But I did it, and I’m glad I did. I don’t have pictures of them, though I don’t really mind. It was an ordeal I’m sure not to forget, and I don’t need pictures to do so. My trip last semester, the people I met, the things I saw and learned, even the food I ate have been on my mind all the time since I’ve been here, so it was kind of a relief, in a way, to do that.

Entonces, after two hours of sleep, I ate breakfast, packed everything up, and left for San Jose at 8 a.m. So far I’ve lost my towel, my small keychain-like flashlight, and my headphones. Lame.

(Bye, Palo Verde Biological Station!)

San Jose is much louder, smellier, and has many more people than the forest, but that’s OK. My homestay family is nice. Rodrigo the husband is a mechanic and isn’t around much, the son/daughter aren’t here, and Maria Elieth, the mother, is really nice and cooks good food. I haven’t had a bean here yet! However, they have a small fat Chihuahua-like dog—exactly the kind of dog that I don’t like. Oh well. I’ve picked up a wireless internet connection here a couple of times, though it’s weak. I can use wireless at the school, so that’s good, but I’m not going to bring my computer every day for common-sense-in-a-big-city purposes. It’s odd to go to sleep with sounds of cars and motorcycles and people yelling.

There are two other students from the language school staying here: a lady from Wisconsin and an older, retired mining engineer who now spends his time traveling, reading, and being laid back, from what I gather. He’s pretty interesting. He likes going to/staying at monasteries because they’re quiet, and has an obsession with buying books. He mentioned that, and then I mentioned that I stayed at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in south India for a month last semester, and he asked where, etc., and I found out he’s stayed in Dharamsala for a while and a monastery close to Kathmandu as well (he doesn’t like Buddhist monasteries as much because they are so loud all the time, which I completely understand.). Finally, someone I can relate my experiences in the eastern hemisphere to! He also gave me a book, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Shantideva, which came straight from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, to which I happily said, essentially, “no, I haven’t read it, but I know a lot about it, and thank you very much.” He told me not to return it. I miss India.

Spanish classes are intense, and I’m in one of the advanced levels. It’s completely in Spanish, even explanations. Today we just reviewed some, but I can tell we’re going to be moving quickly. I’ve done my homework but am still reviewing grammar (though I took a rather long break to type this), and I’m going to bed soon.

On Saturday (tomorrow, I guess) some of us are going white-water rafting, and I may be going to Nicaragua for the week-long break we have. I won’t say more—gotta keep you on your toes.