Back into the forest.

Today we returned to the forest to collect figs. I'll explain more about all the cool mutualistic and parasitic interactions that occur within the tiny microcosm of the fig once we've talked to the fig expert, but today I'll tell you about the forest. It was really nice to be back in the forest just walking, talking, and looking around. The first fun find was a large frog. It camouflaged pretty well with the leaf litter and I almost stepped on it, but noticed it just in time! Lauren, a classmate with a particular penchant for frogs, caught it, though only after a few tries--it jumped fast and far.

Frog! Doesn't it have a content smirk on it's face?

We also saw the coolest ant trail ever. The first interesting thing was that there was a trail where the ants were carrying small pink flowers, and there was a trail where the ants were carrying leaves, but they merged and split a couple of times.

Flower-carrying ants merge into leaf-carrying traffic.

So that was cool, but what was really impressive was the length and complexity of the trail. It started on one side of the path, with the flowers and leaves coming from separate sources up the side of the embankment. Then they merged, crossed the path, went up a tree...

...across and down a liana, across a log over a small creek--where they were joined by more leaf-carrying ants, and out of sight. The mixture of flowers and leaves made it just that much more spectacular and pretty to watch, as splotches of pink and green trickled down their trail.

As I mentioned, the goal of the walk was to collect figs, and we found some on the walk out. The walk back was pretty fast as we had seen everything along the path already. At one point, however, we noticed several figs falling from the sky. Literally. Looking up, we saw at least five howler monkeys in the fig tree above us. At first we thought they were throwing the figs at us, but they weren't vocalizing at all. It turned out that they were just having a morning snack, and some of the figs were falling as they ate.

Mangroves, boats, and a bat cave!

It's been an eventful two days. Yesterday we went to the Caribbean coast again, but instead of a rainforest, we walked through a mangrove forest. Mangroves, by the way, are trees that grow along the shore and are exposed to salt water. The soil of the mangroves we walked through was not currently submerged, but apparently it floods with the highest tides. Many mangroves also have very interesting roots, as shown here.

A section of mangrove forest on the Caribbean coast of Panama.

The shore itself looked like quite the stereotypical tropical paradise:

The shoreline.

We were right near the Caribbean opening of the canal which meant that many large ships were in view.

A ship emerging from the canal.

Although in some ways they ruined the beautiful natural view, it was interesting to me to see them all about evenly spaced but beginning to turn towards their own routes. Here are just a few, but there about ten ships on the horizon.

Post-canal ship divergence.

Don't worry, we also did work. We spent a few hours intensively collecting snail (making sure you've found all the 1-2 cm long snails in a 25 cm square quadrat is rather challenging), and then spent the whole evening dissecting them.

Today was both exciting and unexpected. We thought we were going to a lake to sample more snails to compare with previously sampled snails (specifically, the first day we sampled from a lake with a sport fishing industry that might be affecting the parasite life cycles, so this lake with a commercial fishing industry would serve as a comparison) and were told that we might have some time to look at a bat cave nearby.

So we arrived in an indigenous village and boarded two motorboats in which we were going to cross the lake. The lake itself, Lake Bayano, was very impressive. It's the second largest lake in Panama and man-made. The Bayano River was dammed in 1976 with a hydroelectric dam flooding a 350 square-kilometer region. Interestingly, there are still many drowned trees standing and providing perches for interesting birds (including egrets, multiple species of herons, and ospreys). I was surprised that they were still standing, but was told that the high pressure and anoxic conditions have preserved the wood somehow.

It was wonderful to be out on the water. I love boats, and it was a lot of fun. It was also a painfully slow crossing as our motor kept giving out. The other boat even towed ours to shore so we could switch out motors, but the next one wasn't much better.

There were a few houses where we unloaded, and there was a very sweet (and remarkably sleek and well kept) dog who led the way and was very friendly.

 The area was beautiful. Here is the opening just before the cave itself.

And then we entered the cave. At first we trudged through a little water and admired the rock formations.

Rock formations near the entrance of the cave.

And then we got to a point where the water was about neck-high. We placed our packs on the side and removed some layers, and I took off my boots (I had thought cave = hike = boots...well, not so much). And then we embarked on a (barefoot, for me) hike/swim through the bat cave. There were hundreds of bats fluttering about near the ceiling which was, in places, only a few feet above us. There are really no words to describe the cave, it was like something out of a movie. There were definitely some jokes made about Indiana Jones. Anyway, here's the one picture of the cave that I got before leaving my camera behind so it wouldn't get wet.

The view upward from the cave floor which was covered in flowing water.
This was one of the open parts, but much of the cave was covered and very dark.

The Causeway

Near the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal are four islands. Well, former islands. When the canal was built, the islands were connected to the mainland by a causeway which serves as a breakwater and prevents sedimentation of the canal entrance. One of these islands, Naos, is home to a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) facility. This was our destination today.

After a lecture on the role of parasite escape in invasive species by a STRI researcher, Mark Torchin, we walked down to a protected beach with some interesting wildlife. As we walked onto the beach, the most conspicuous wildlife were the pelicans. There were two of them fishing for food.

Scanning the water.

Both of the pelicans and an egret.

The next thing that caught my eye was all the subtle movement along the surface of the sand closer to the water. As it turned out, baby crabs had hatched and were covering the beach.

All those little white splotches are crabs that were scuttling around busily.

Adjacent to the sand beach was a rocky area with tide pools and a few mangroves. There were lots of snails, limpets, sea urchins, small fish, and crabs in the pools and it was fun to scramble over the rocks and explore the tide pools. There was also a cool flock of birds that was flying in tight formation, turning together on a dime with a flash of white as they banked and their undersides suddenly angled towards us.

The flock.

The white flash of the same flock.

Interestingly, before the building of the canal, the island was used to quarantine victims of malaria and yellow fever. Some of the pillars of the buildings still remain out on the rocky area near the tide pools.

It's been pointed out to us that it is particularly interesting to study parasites in Panama given the history of malaria and the Panama canal. When the French tried to construct a canal through Panama from 1881 to 1889, they failed in part because so many workers died due to malaria. The identification of the role of mosquitoes in the life cycle of malaria, however, helped in the implementation of appropriate preventive measures. (Which also means that malaria isn't a problem here and I don't have to take hallucinogenic malaria medicine, yay!)

The last two interesting sightings of the day were up from the beach in STRI's protected area. First, was an iguana:

One of my classmates tried to feed it a flower (which we saw it eating), and it moved remarkably fast. Then, as we walked out of the protected area we saw a two-toed sloth hanging upside down in a small tree. It was doing some interesting gymnastics and was very cute.