Una maravilla a un lado y un bosque al otro (4)

Hey! Thanks for checking out blog post #4 from Panama. It's hard to believe, but only 1 more month of Central America before I head back to Princeton. Wild.

Alright so this update picks up over spring break, when I had the pleasure of my parents, brother, and the bro's gf visiting for most of the break. It was great to see them, hang around the city, and even show them a bit of the rain forest. However, the coolest part was definitely crossing the Panama Canal..

Some fun facts:
>The French tried to build the canal first. They attempted to blast through 50 miles of solid rock. They failed.
>U.S. engineers developed a far more elegant solution involving two sets of locks that raise and lower ships across the isthmus, using gravity to move water.
>After its successful completion, the canal was billed as arguably the most impressive engineering feat ever and the 8th wonder of the world.
>In 1928, British adventurer Richard Halliburton - a Princeton grad! - paid a whopping fee of 36 cents and became the first (and only, it's now illegal) human to swim across the canal.
>The Panama Canal uses the same iron locks today as it did when it first opened almost 100 years ago.
>A current expansion project (due to finish in 2014) will allow the canal to handle the ever-larger container ships being built.

For more background on the canal, I recommend checking out my big brother's well-written, informative post here.

Getting back to our crossing: As we embarked, I was really excited to get a better idea of how a ship 3x as long as a football field could be hoisted up and down just by water power. Our trip started out on the Pacific (south) side of the canal, where our passenger boat steamed ahead toward the famous Bridge of the Americas. It was cool seeing (and passing!) all the giant boats patiently waiting their turn to enter into the canal, which saves them roughly 8,000 miles of travel and hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance costs by providing a direct conduit between the world's two great oceans.

As we got to the first lock, our guide explained how the immense amount of water in the Chagres river provides the incredible power that raises and lowers the dozens of monstrously big ships that pass through daily. Via vents in the bottom of each lock, water rushes in or out of a lock to move the boats 27 feet vertically in just 8 minutes. That sounds pretty slow, but having seen & experienced it, that's actually a remarkably fast rate!

Our boat shared a lock with a larger ship (the canal obviously tries to maximize the number of vessels that go through), so we were able to observe first-hand how a ship gets through. I'll spare you a detailed explanation of the process, but there's a cool little simulation here.

Some pics from the crossing:


me & the bro


the panama canal is the only place in the world where a ship's captain is required to relinquish control of his vessel.. he has to hand it over to a specially-trained canal pilot. here's the big-shot pilot for our boat, about to board


a big cargo ship coming the other way, 20-some feet above us


the boat we shared a lock with.. notice how close the edges of the boat are to the sides of the lock!


the lock gates are HUGE


Bridge of the Americas


Next topic - our third class is taking place on an island called Barro Colorado, in Gatún Lake. BCI is a sweet place, because there's really great rain forest and a ton of amazing flora & fauna that are super easy to study - they're literally right next to the field station. Our course is focused on the ecology & evolution of predator-prey interactions, and we're working in groups to study predator response in howler monkeys, agoutis, and tungara frogs.

My partner and I chose to study howler monkeys and see how they respond to different jaguar models.. The idea is to see if the monkeys exhibit different anti-predator responses according to the presence or absence of three-dimensionality in a predator stimulus.

Translation? We're scaring the bejeezers out of howler monkeys using a huge stuffed jaguar. As you might imagine, it's really really fun.. Here's the jaguar we've been using to scare the howler monkeys:


J-Diddy

We'll also be using a 2-D version of the stuffed jaguar and a flat, rectangle-shaped control to try to see just how good monkey vision is.

I'm not really feeling the writing flow too much today, so I'll spare you some verbage and leave you with neat videos of (a) a devil dance we saw at a festival in Colón; (b) howler monkey alarm call (showing monkey); (c) howler monkey alarm call showing J-Diddy the jaguar; and (d) leaf-cutter ants in Gamboa.. They're all short!

I have really bad luck with uploading videos to blogger.com, so I've put the videos on youtube.

Devil Dance
Howler Monkey 1
Howler Monkey 2
Leaf cutter ants