….and the boss was still here.
Stand back, I’m going to try science!
Not only is the Costa Rican life pretty sweet – work actually gets done too! My two experiements (Leaf packs to measure decomposition rate, and communities to measure effects of diversity on predation and decomposition) are all up and running! I’ve claimed nearly every bromeliad within a 1 km radius of the station to stick experiments in. Now back to searching for more critters so I can replenish things in 2 weeks.
I was going to include a picture of my experiment, but it actually looks identical to the header photo of this blog! A common site here at Pitilla – bromeliads with plastic tubes with mesh hats sticking out of them. Field ecology is weird.
ALSO – I’m very curious about what is happening back in Vancouver! Have Jana and I suddenly become the sole members of the Srivastava lab?? Where are the posts from home?
THE RAIN IS HERE!!
Just a quick note to say that it is now actually the rainy season! We’ve had a couple of good nights of rain and the bromeliads are less bone-dry! Woo! Unfortunately that now means working in the rain some of the time but it’s worth it to actually have the critters live!
Speaking of critters – we’re gearing up to put our experimental communities together in the next couple of days. Today was a final push to find the damselfly larvae we need and we found 36 in one day! Woo!
And as a final note – I found the cutest snake you will ever see in a bromeliad today. A little Imantodes sp. (blunt headed snake) that was about 20 cm long and curled up on my hand. His name is leonard. Pictures to follow.
Pura Vida!
Who stopped the rain??
Here it is, a week into our field season in the rainy season in Costa Rica… and we’re in the middle of a drought! While it was nice for a few days to have sun and beautiful weather for working, it is becoming concerning. Even the rangers at the field station say they have never seen an October like this! All of our bromeliads are drying out which makes finding our aquatic insect larvae challenging, and we are having to actually go and water them to hopefully maintain some kind of community.
Hey, maybe if I can incorporate “climate change” into the title of my paper I can publish in Nature! 😛
Names for the beasts
I forgot: the official names for our shiny blue ATVs are Cattinga and Sabrewing! Big bear will be retired soon….