Spring Break, sparknotes version.

I still need to pack for the next two weeks, so this is going to be the sparknotes version of spring break.

Kristie and I embarked on Friday night, catching the 9:45 bus from Gamboa to Panama city (which, thankfully, was late, as Kristie didn't finish her report until 9:30 and then packed in 15 minutes!). We took the 11:45 overnight express bus from Panama City to David, and then took the public bus from David to Boquete where we checked into our hostel. The overnight bus was more comfortable than I expected, but I still didn't sleep all that well, so I napped as soon as we checked in. There were books scattered around the hostel, so I picked up one that looked interesting: Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer (it had interesting aspects...I liked the story and the characters, but it was rather predictable and written strangely--switching between first and third person). Kristie and I walked around town...

The main road.

The iglesia (church), the prettiest building in town.

Across the road from the church this
cross was intertwined with the trees.

Boquete is a town in a river valley between mountains in western Panama. It's at about 1,200 meters elevation and so much cooler. That means fresh produce and pretty flowers!

These interested me because the flower itself is the little white
thing in the middle, while the colorful things are not petals, but
sepals (modified leaves surrounding the flower).

Bananas!

Walking along one of the back roads, I saw this line of old jeep-type vehicles that amused me:

Junk jeeps along the side of one of the back roads.

While we were in Boquete Wenley, Chhaya, and I went to a wildlife rehabilitation center and Kristie and I climbed Volcan Baru (a volcano, hence the name, and the tallest mountain in Panama at 3,474 meters). I'll tell you more about that later.

On Wednesday we traveled to Bocas del Toro. On the way back to David, we stopped at a second hand bookstore which made me very happy. I limited myself to six books (Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers).  Then we took a bus from David to Almirante (about four hours) and took a water taxi to the main island (Isla Colon). Unfortunately, due to a mix up at the hostel we wanted to stay at, they hadn't gotten our reservation, so we had to find somewhere else to stay. The first night we stayed at Hotel Casa Max which was taken over the next morning by a film crew for Paradise Lost starring Josh Hutcherson (when the hotel owner told us this, Wenley, Chhaya, and I had no clue who this was, but we soon found out...). Here's the hullabaloo from outside the hotel. They had a mule cart and kept loading and unloading wood...

Also, right across the street was a hostel run by Princeton alums (members of Terrace...can't you tell?)

Bocas was hot, but pretty, and I went to the beach and snorkeled. It was nice to get acquainted with my snorkel and mask and I got excited for the next course.

Alright, I'm off to Coiba for a week and then back to Bocas for my coral reefs course!

So much traveling!

Got back from spring break this evening after 12+ hours of traveling. Leaving tomorrow for Coiba, an island off the Pacific coast of Panama, for the first week of the coral reefs course. I'll try to post something about break before I go as it'll be another week without internet!

Spring Break!

I'm officially on break! I just turned in my paper and I'm heading out soon to catch the overnight bus to Boquete. We'll be climbing the volcano there, hopefully whitewater rafting, and then going to Bocas del Toro to spend the second half of the week on the beach. I'll be radio silent, but will be taking lots of pictures that I'll share when I get back!

Cute little parasites...

Some of you may be wondering what this parasite I've been studying is. Well here's a picture of the cercariae (a free-swimming life stage in the life cycle). Isn't it cute?

As viewed through a light microscope at 400x magnification.

I didn't find any evidence for direct modification of the host snail's behavior by the parasite. But I did find that those snails with the parasite did not have broods (small, developing snails that are inside the snail until they develop and are released), and that those snails without broods moved significantly more slowly than those with broods. This is interesting because it shows that behavior modification can be more complicated with such indirect effects.

Jumping Geckos

As I was sitting on my bed the other day, typing away at something or other, this little guy jumped onto my bed next to me.

I think it was some sort of house gecko, hence the characteristic toe pads (and it's presence inside the house). 

So cute! I was glad when it got off my bed, though, so I didn't have to worry about squishing it!

Felling a Tree (aka "Palm Dissection")

Today we cut down a palm tree. Officially it was a "palm dissection", but it basically consisted of felling a tree and chopping it into pieces with an axe and machetes. The point of the excursion was to study Chagas disease. The vector, the Chinche (Rhodnius pallescens), which carries the disease-causing protist (of the genus Trypanosoma), often lives in a particular species of palm (Attalea butyracea). Five trees, including this one, had been baited the day before to see if there were Chinches, but there weren't.

Checking the baited trees.

So we wandered for a bit until we found this tree...

The trunk was probably about 10m, and the palm
branches added another 4m or so.

First we (that is the men from Gorgas and one of our TA's) hacked through to it.

Our TA wielding a machete...

Then one of the men from the Gorgas institute cut down...

and we examined it for Chinches and other animals...

Whip scorpion

The most exciting find was a gecko.

Next to the tree there was also an interesting skull.

Tick Hunting and More Snails

The day started with a walk to "drag" for ticks. Luckily, none attached themselves to me, but they attached to our drag cloths. We also just turned over leaves until we found them. What's interesting about the ticks on the leaves is that the "quest", meaning that they actively try to sense potential hosts by CO2 and other chemical signatures. Questing basically consists of wiggling their front legs--which have special, chemical-sensing organs in them--in the air. It would be cute...if they weren't out for blood.

On the walk we saw howlers, an agouti, and some pretty butterflies, including ones I can now identify! I also went to collect more snails today, and this bunch was more active!

They all moved! It was very exciting.

Why snail mail is called snail mail...

Today was mostly spent working out the kinks with my experimental setup, camera, and software. My initial results certainly show differences in snail behavior, though I don't yet know if those differences correlate with anything. Here are the cumulative tracks of 13 snails over an hour:

Numbered left to right, top to bottom.

Most of them didn't move at all. Number 12's maximum speed was 0.7 mm/s. Hence snail mail.

Back to snailing...

Though I had no particular desire to work with snails, it seems that they are the most feasible system for my project. I am interested in parasite-induced behavioral changes in hosts. Particularly, I plan on tracking host movement and comparing that of infected to uninfected individuals. While this could be studied in monkeys, birds, crocs, fish, crabs, and many other organisms, snails seemed the most feasible for several reasons. First of all, there is a site nearby where the snails have a high prevalence of parasites. I spent my morning there collecting snails. I only found 25 live ones (and lots of empty shells), but it's a start. In addition, the snails are small, making it easy to video (or take timed interval pictures of) several at once. Also, I know something about the parasites in snails already since we've been talking about them in class.

While I was snail-collecting this morning I noticed several lesser kiskedee (Pitangus lictor) flitting about, including one with a nest.

On the walk back to the schoolhouse I saw three large ships in one small section of the canal at the same time. It was quite impressive for two reasons. First, the maneuvering of such massive ships was masterful. Second, it was a powerful visualization of the truly global nature of shipping, with each of the ships coming from an entirely different region: Singapore, London, and the United Arab Emirates. 

All three ships. Also a black vulture in the foreground.

Chaperoned by their tugboats.

The Panama Canal

To get to Barro Colorado Island we took a ferry from Gamboa (where we are staying) up the canal. Given how close we live to the canal (150 m/500 ft), it was nice to actually see some of it. The ride was about 40 minutes, with some interesting sites along the way.

Tugboat!

There are always boats, both small and large, going through the canal. Out of curiousity, I looked up how many vessels transit in a year and found that 14,544 transited in 2012.

Panama Canal Railway locomotive and cargo.

The railway runs between the canal and the schoolhouse, so we often hear trains go by.

The hill shows signs of canal construction, and the barge is hooked up to move sediment along the pipe to the right.

A barge that acts as some sort of hammer, according to my TA, and aptly named Thor.

Buoys demarcate the main channel of the canal. Buoys on the eastern edge of the canal are green and on the western edge are red. Also, the pylons in the background keep reminded me of horses...with two heads...

Pipes and building materials along the edge of the canal, perhaps for the expansion project.

I had not known before I came here that the Panama Canal is currently being expanded. The project began in 2007 and is expected to be completed by 2015. The idea is to expand the canal to allow more and larger boats to transit, particularly supertankers. This involves widening and deepening various parts of the canal as well as building entirely new locks at each entrance to the canal. As one might expect, this will have a considerable impact on global shipping. Interestingly, it's even been in the American news recently regarding some consequences close to home: apparently ports along the east coast are all trying to attract the increased shipping traffic. Including Newark. Plans are in the working to raise the Bayonne Bridge and deepen the channels to accommodate larger ships, but there are also concerns regarding the effects of increased shipping traffic such as pollution from increased trucking. Another instance of the interconnectedness of all things.

Barro Colorado Island

Barro Colorado Island is an island within the Panama Canal. The damming of the Chagres River (1907-1913) caused the flooding of a large area, including the formation of Lake Gatun--the largest lake in Panama (at the time the dam was built, it was the largest dam, and the lake was the largest man-made lake)--and separated Barro Colorado Island (BCI) from the mainland. The island was protected as a reserve starting in 1923, and has been administered by the Smithsonian since 1946. This has provided a long history for scientific study, and is particularly useful due to it's relative isolation (due to being an island...though apparently puma's swim over sometimes...) and limited area (15.6 square-kilometers or 6 square-miles). In addition the history of research informs and enables further research, as is often the case. Yesterday we had the opportunity to take a guided tour of BCI. Here's the rundown of what we saw.

Two poison dart frogs (they hopped pretty fast, though, so all my pictures are blurry), a large katydid (a type of grasshopper)...

...several tiny frogs including this one (they're all over the place once you start looking...usually you don't see them until they move though),

...a deposit of red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) eggs...

Don't they look bizarre?

...lots of the golden silk orb-weaver spiders (genus Nephila), including some webs across the trail and only narrowly avoided...

...a crested guan (Penelope purpurascens), a large bird with a striking red dewlap...

...a small colony of greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata)...

...a trogon...

...a caiman...

Seen right next to the ferry dock.

...and a green vine snake (Oxybelis fulgidus). Can you find it?

So now that I (hopefully) have you interested in the fauna, let me tell you about some of the funky flora. You may have noticed that I keep mentioning these things called lianas. Lianas are woody vines and are very common in tropical rainforests. Some common temperate plants, however, are also lianas, such as certain clematises and wild grapes. Lianas in the tropics, however, are often much more abundant and larger, and can even compete with trees. This only happens in the tropics because for lianas to grow that tall they need to have large vessels in their xylem to transport water through their entire length, but in temperate areas these large vessels freeze, causing embolisms. Smaller xylem vessels, however, can be better protected from the negative effects of freezing. Lianas are very strong, as seen here, where the tree trunk has grown after the liana grew around it, leaving scars.

Most lianas have wind-dispersed seeds, but this species has very large fruit which drop to the ground around it.

What's interesting about this is that no animals eat the fruit and disperse the seeds, which means all the seedlings are in competition. Not only is this an abnormal state of affairs for plants, but if the seeds were supposed to just drop to the ground, why expend the energy and resources to produce such large fruit? One hypothesis for why this might be is that this species coevolved with now extinct megafauna (think mastodons and gomphotheres) which would have dispersed its seeds.

Perhaps the most impressive sight of the day was a tree of the species Ceiba pentandra. Apparently the Maya considered it sacred, and you can see why. This particular tree is over 500 years old.

Maybe that looks normal to you? Think again...

(Thanks to Lee for taking this picture for me!)