Community Ecology in Mesocosms
OKOK, after these success stories, I have to mention that all my experiments are running now! Nowhere near to beeing completed, but running. I think that’s worth a blog entry too, ey? 🙂 And of course this was only possible with the help of Pitilla’s AMAZING frield crew: Helen, Lisa and Robin! The girls saved me with their never-ending willingness to sort bugs, fabricate nets and cook dinner for the over-worked weary wet postdoc. Thanks so much!
How can you not LOVE ants???? OK, they do bit, it’s nasty, hurts and itches. They crawl into any kind of food, no matter how well you thought you sealed it against them. They do occupy and fiercely defend some of our best bromeliads.
But the again: they are AWESOME! How on earth can they find our food within minutes of putting it down on the table? How DO large ants get into a tightly sealed honey bottle?
And no one who has seen a procession of leaf cutter ants carrying flowers through the forest can seriously hate ants. The most amazing o f all ants, however, must be army ants. They excite the whole forest like a visit by the pope. Small insects try to run, hop, scuttle away by the millions, birds flock to the site, munching up the poor little powerless critters while chanting and chatting and attracting more opportunistic birds and poo-eating butterflies.
And army ants are fast. Man, watch out, they can probably outrun you (at least after a month of Pitilla food). The most amazing ant event occurred yesterday (only briefly mentioned by Robin below): the ant war! Army ants (Robin’s irritation bin number 7) encountered a swarm of tiny ants (number 3) moving house on the deck of the station. War broke out in Petrona’s slippers. The battle was fierce, with large army ants biting small ants to death and carrying them and their pupae away in no time. But the little ones did not give up. They fought back like the bravest of all soldiers and the army ants eventually gave up (or had enough food for the day). After 20mins of super-action, everything disappeared within a few seconds and all that was left was 2 dying army ants…..what an event. (Note: this is not at all related to today’s Remembrance day or to Nicaraguans preparing to invade us only 10kms away, nor do I in any way support the glorification of war!). But it was SOOOOO exciting!
Some of my best Pitilla times were ant times.
So I forgive the ants their annoyingness and deeply admire their awesomeness.
World world world, this isPitilla Pitilla! We are back here at our favourite of all biological stations after testing out another one for a couple of days: Naranjo beach in the Santa Rosa sector of theNationalpark. What can I say? It was awesome! Just check out the pics of our adventure: we waded through 13 kms of mud, crossed dangerous tropical streams, fought the raging ocean and saved a puffer fish and a few hundred baby turtles. Dolphins and monkeys were spotted, as were scissor-tailed flycatchers and apparently a Caracara. Cold beers were consumed (YES, there is a fridge at the station!) and we even learned a few things, e.g. that mama turtles do not like full moons, low tides and 4 girls doing cart-wheels on the beach. Anyway, we did!
So, trip successful! Back to science…..really? Well, we started planning the next “workation” last night: to the active volcano Rincon de la Vieja! More details on this blog very soon…..
Hello from the Santa Rosa dry forest! The Costa Rican part of the lab is on “workation”, i.e. a bit of work today, a walk to the beach tomorrow. It feels weird to be away from Pitilla station. So many iguanas here. And people. And I can sit in front of a house with fridges, icecream and fans (the cafeteria) and have a perfect wireless internet connection while somebody else is cooking lunch for me. Almost too civilized….wait, dew just dripped from the Guanacaste tree above into my laptop. And I am watching birds while working. And the mosquitoes are biting. So not actually civilized. Thank god.
I forgot: the official names for our shiny blue ATVs are Cattinga and Sabrewing! Big bear will be retired soon….