Aventuras en la selva tropical (2)

Well howdy there everyone.. Thanks for tuning into installment #2.

First things first - I want to publicly exonerate the Panamanian police and apologize for casting false aspersions on their character (see panama blog post #1).. I learned later that they were not, in fact, guilty of accepting a bribe from us. (Turns out my TA made that story up.)

Second, we're already done our first course! Crazy, right? Here are some cool/funny/ridiculous things that happened to us while we were in the field:

1) "Explosivos No Detonados": So we get to our third field site and we're prepping our stuff for the day etc.. And I happen to glance at a yellow-and-black sign that says "Important Safety Warning." So, figuring it's talking about like poisonous snakes (rare) or wearing hard hats under the canopy crane (really?), I lazily read the first few words. Then this sentence jumps out at me: "It is imperative for all researchers to be aware of the possibility of encountering unexploded live ordinance." I don't know what live ordinance is exactly (at this point), but my attention has been sufficiently won. So I read the adjacent sign in spanish which says "Es imperativo que todos los investigadores estén alerta a la posibilidad de encontrar explosivos no detonados." EXPLOSIVOS NO DETONADOS = UNDETONATED EXPLOSIVES! So of course I'm thinking "What the.." and I ask my TA if this is a joke and her response is "Well, you know, it's very unlikely that you'll run into anything.. But it is possible. Last year someone found a grenade." !!!! Translation = we're going to be walking around on a veritable mine field.

(Switch to past tense) I was also really worried because my group of three was going 150 m into the forest (farther than anyone else) over and over.. But we got together and prayed and braved the forest.. And nothing happened which is great. But I feel like seeing these kinds of signs is just one of those things that wouldn't happen in the U.S.. It feels so foreign to me for someone to know that ppl could get hurt/killed doing research and then put a sign up and leave it at that.. rather than safety-checking this park that researchers use all the time! (Ironically though, U.S. forces were the ones using the place for training..)

Anyway here's a photo:


no me digas!


2) This next topic touches on something I forgot to mention in my first post.. Which is that it's REALLY EASY to lose your way in a rain forest. I discovered this my first day in the field after I made a short detour to a nearby stream to get a rock for one of our traps.. As soon as I had turned a couple of times, I realized that I didn't know which way was which - all the forest looked the same! Luckily a friend was nearby and led me back to my group, but it was a good first lesson for me.

Building on that, last week someone in my group got lost in the rainforest for realz.. It was funny at first because the person in question is a pretty confident dude and generally good in the forest. Butt after over an hour of not hearing him, we all got pretty worried. Soon enough the prof was driving up and down the road honking his car horn super-loudly, and a bunch of students were yelling in unison to try to attract him to the road.. Still no luck. Eventually a last minute phone call (seconds before the lost person's phone died) reminding him that the sun sets in the west ended up saving the day..

Some reflections: We found him a little after 4:00 pm, but what if it had gotten dark sooner? This guy happened to be without a compass, without a knife, without food or water, and with only a dying cell phone.. With a tiny bit less luck, he'd just be chilling with the howler monkeys, jaguars, and mosquitos for the night!.. AAAH that'd be so bad. The whole situation makes me cringe and hopefully reminds you to not take nature lightly. And the crazy part is that he was just walking from 150 m into the forest to the nearby road (with flagging marking the way).. and ended up kilometers away! While my buddy made a few avoidable mistakes prior to getting lost, it's totally the kind of thing that could happen to anybody, so take note.. It's really true that the biggest dangers in a forest are not getting bit by an eyelash viper or eaten by a jaguar. Rather, it's things like getting lost, or falling & breaking something, or contracting malaria..

3) In typical Panamanian/not U.S. fashion, simple things fail to be executed properly. Locked gates that shouldn't have been locked (2x).. Guaranteed reservations that weren't guaranteed (and vice versa actually).. Poorly translated signs..

I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining.. B/c actually I think this laid-backness/tranquility is pretty funny and charming MOST of the time, but sometimes it just makes me shake my head in disbelief! Just like in Spain, the overriding attitude of most people here, I think, is something like this (don't get craaazy.. these are obvy generalizations):

US ATTITUDE
A) Was something done? I'll go check.
B) If not done correctly, we need to fix it right away
C) If it wasn't fixed properly, immediate and drastic response needed. And possibly a big apology. Ensure problem will never occur again.

PANAMA ATTITUDE
A) That something was probably done. No need to double-check.
B) If not done correctly, no big thang.
C) If something important didn't happen properly, then just chill and
smile anyway

--Again, not raggin on panamanians.. They're great. Just my observations of broad cultural differences--

Ok in other news: My splinters-caused-by-vicious-forest-plants count has continued to rise.. But that should stop since WE'RE GOING TO THE CORAL REEFS NEXT!.. Umm rice and beans are the staple food here, like no joke.. For two nights we stayed in a quaint little town that had this amazing relaxed feel to it (see "Panama Attitude").. People had chickens and cows and things in their front yards, and there were THREE CHURCHES on just this small little <1 mi stretch of road. Such an amazing, quiet place.. (Except for the brightly-graffitied party buses roaring by a few times a day.. Still haven't completely figured out this fascinating aspect of panamanian culture.)

So that's pretty much all I can think of for now. It's so nifty to have these three-week courses. They're cool because you can focus intensely on something for awhile and then be done and go to the next thing.. HEADED TO DA REEFS THIS WEEK BABY!

Finally, some fotos below. Thanks for reading!


hawksbill sea turtle.. pretty endangered

so these ants will just bite your hand and can't get through the skin.. except when they find a soft spot (this one eventually did)


nice!

kickin' it w/ the prof in the canopy crane

got to check out the panama canal on the water today.. yehea

prof tryna hack through lock that was keeping us from leaving ha

sweet little church

Panamá: ¡Qué guay! (1)

Watsup everybody! After a January hiatus, the update blog is back, but this time it's Panama-style.. I probably won't be posting as frequently this spring as I did last semester, but I'll shoot for at least biweekly blurbs. You'll notice that the box w/ Barca's Liga standings (on the right) has been replaced by a growing "Cool Animals Spotted" list, but otherwise the blog's layout is pretty similar.

Cool, so let's get to it: our group of 18 Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) majors got here a little over a weeek ago. We'll be moving around to different parts of Panama throughout the next few months, but currently we're in Gamboa. Gamboa is located in both the middle of the country and the middle of the Panama Canal (directly next to us), and it's also known as the world record-holder for most bird species counted in a single day: 385! While it's a quiet town, Gamboa also boasts a new resort, a cool church right next door to us, and a friendly population of local people. (I knew I was outside the U.S. when I found a pick-up soccer game within my first 3 hours here.) Our home base is affectionately called the "schoolhouse," which is actually a historic building operated by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (or STRI). We're lucky to have (mostly) hot showers, (mostly) decent internet, and an awesome Panamanian lady named Frances who cooks for us.

For our first class, Tropical Biology, we have a French professor, two Panamanian TAs, and a Panamanian student who's studying with us. Class is a lot of fun: the first three days we just had a few hours of lecture and then went hiking through various rain forests. Now, however, we've started our research projects, so we're in the field most days and then come back for dinner and a 1-hr lecture in the evening. In my project, I'm using ant pitfall traps to see how the diversity of ants changes between forest edge and interior habitat. Basically my partner and I place these cups in the ground and bait them with tuna surrounded by a moat of soapy water. The ants fall into the water on their way to the tuna and drown. A bit morbid, I know, but it's kinda fun to see all the different ants that end up in our traps.


looks like a pair of lips, right?


da rainforest!

The other thing about my project is that it requires walking 150 meters into the rainforest, over and over. I quickly experienced first-hand just how ultra-adapted tropical plants are for protecting themselves.. Evolution has blessed some of the plants here with huge thorns, fearsome spines, super-sticky seeds, ant armies that protect their hosts like it's nobody's business, and a variety of other ingenious characteristics that are no fun for humans. The flora seem to take great delight in deploying their defenses at the expense of the rainforest explorer, as my cuts, scrapes, bruises, and other assorted wounds (physical and psychological) can attest to.. As for animals, I've noticed that my initial impression of rain-forest fauna was incorrect: it's not like there are snakes dripping off every tree or frogs jumping over your boots non-stop. The biodiversity is absolutely present, but many animals are nocturnal, or come out more when it rains (it's the dry season now), or hide when they hear people coming. I keep waiting to step on a poisonous snake or get bit by one hanging overhead.. the possibility is always kicking around in the back of my head as I stomp clumsily through the forest.


gecko guy


one of a number of wonderful & beautiful flowers in the forest

Ok to wrap up I will tell a story. We had a rest day today, so we went to a beach on the Pacific side of Panama. The beach was over 2 hrs away, but when we had finally almost arrived, we were stopped in front of a police station by five Panamanian rifle-wielding officers. After our driver spoke with the policemen for a few minutes, we were told something about how a law passed "moments ago" would prevent us from driving the remaining 6 miles to the beach in our bus. Now, Panama isn't exactly known for enforcing its laws perfectly, AND it was a Sunday, so the idea of a law passed just an hour ago or whatever seemed absurd. (I suspect something was lost in the translation we were given by our TA..) Then our TA told us that the law had to do with whales, walls, or waves, but we couldn't understand which he was talking about since he had problems with that particular word. As you might imagine, our whole group was very confused by this point. Eventually, a $100 bribe from our driver seemed to satisfy the officers, and after a passport check (no idea why) and a second, unexplained stop, we finally hit the beach. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is.. but where logic fails, money seems to speak.