Tag: Robin

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Something funny happened on the way to the lab

A funny and wonderful thing!  Yesterday, our saviours arrived!  When Fish and I arrived at the “lab” yesterday, we walked right through it.  Dragonflies!  A swarm of dragonflies so thick it darkened the sky!  And it stretched all the way from the restinga, back to our house by lunchtime.  The numbers were simply incredible.  It’s what I imagine a plague of locusts would look like – but wonderful beautiful locusts who eat mosquitoes!  They would rest on the bushes and grass next to the path and when we walked by it was accompanied by an uprising of dragonflies in a flutter of wings on all sides of us.  There were millions!  And I would have happily walked through their swarm all day in their shield of protection from the biting insects.

The phenomenon is of course interesting from a scientific as well as an aesthetic and self-preservation aspect.  We had assumed that anything in the tropics has essentially a non-seasonal  life-cycle.  Since there is no “winter” like ours to prevent insects from surviving and reproducing, there would just be a continuous cycle of reproduction and emergence.  But this huge emergence event reminded me exactly of what happens in northern Ontario around July.  The blackflies all emerge in late May, and a month and a half later, suddenly one day, the dragonflies arrive!  They fly in clouds almost as dense as we saw yesterday eating everything in their path, and within a couple weeks, there are no blackflies!  (If only we could hope for the same kind of outcome here…).  The dragonflies here all look the same and we think they might be the same species.  A mass emergence of a population that size of a single species is just staggering!  There must have been literally millions! It would also follow that that kind of event would affect the “seasonal” cycles of several other species (all of their prey, frogs, birds that prey on them).  That is something I didn’t expect from a tropical ecosystem, but I suppose we must be far enough south here for seasonality to play a role.  Or maybe there is some other ecological reason for such a mass emergence, regardless of the environment.

They are still here today, but the swarm has lessened significantly.  And much to our dismay, the mosquito population doesn’t even seem to have flinched.  Whatever the ecological significance and ultimate outcome… it was an awe inspiring sight!

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The Trials and Tribulations of “Tent City”

We have been here on Ilha do Cardoso for 2 and a half weeks now and my first experiment is officially up and running.  I am quite happy to report that there will be no more construction, reconstruction, or ‘tweaking’ of what I have affectionately (or otherwise) dubbed “Tent City”.  As I told Diane right before she left the island, no matter how long I spent planning, visualizing, describing and convincing my committee of this project, NOTHING could have prepared me for what it would be like to construct it.

When we first arrived in Cananeia and started unloading all of the equipment that our Brazilian hosts so amazingly and graciously procured for us, I did a bit of a double take at the huge pile of lumber I had apparently asked for.  These were my 200, 1.5 metre long wooden stakes for constructing my enclosures.  I cannot thank the entire crew, Canadian and Brazilian alike, enough for helping lug the whole pile not once, but 4 times to eventually get it to our field site at the restinga forest.  From there, my tiny, amazingly tough and cheerful , Brazilian field assistant named “Fish” set off into the forest with me with little idea of what we were getting ourselves into.

With a pile of stakes on each shoulder, and dressed in enough clothes to survive a day of Canadian winter field work we set off.  The heat, while sledgehammering stakes into the ground wearing 3 layers to protect against mosquitoes in Brazilian summer is an obvious hurdle.  Needless to say, this contributed quite a lot of sweat to the project. 

What I was less prepared for was how much our study bromeliad, Quesnelia arvensis, does NOT like being studied.  It grows like a waist-high carpet on the ground with spines along the length of the leaves and needle-like spikes at the tips.  This is why most researchers stick to the paths… but Tent City had to extend quite a ways off the path.  Apparently other researchers could hear my and Fish’s exclamations of pain throughout the restinga.  Despite the armour of long layers everywhere and leather gloves, this is what

me in the midst of my masterpiece!

contributed the blood to the project.

After 3 days of this, we realized that if these enclosures are going to stand for a year, they are going to need much more reinforcement to stop the tops from sagging and caving in.  My Brazilian counterpart – Paula, the PhD student who has been coming to Cardoso for years – solved that problem with the brilliant idea of adding a wire “X” to the tops to support the middle of the mesh roof.  Great. Awesome.  We finished the rest of the enclosures with that design, but it meant that the 16 large enclosures we had already finished were going to need to be fixed.  I’m not ashamed to say that after crawling on my belly through a mud puddle, sitting inside one of my enclosures with wire cutters digging into my side and my bromeliad poking me in the eye, the final ingredient, tears, were contributed to the project.

But restinga wasn’t through with me yet.  On the last day, on my last enclosure to fix and to be done with construction once and for all… the restinga called in the army.  I approached my last enclosure only to find it completely engulfed by a seething swarm of ants!  *(see previous posts by me, from Costa Rica to learn my true feelings about ants)*  I trudged back to our makeshift lab defeated, to tell the tale.  Andrew, thank goodness, identified it as a possible swarm of army ants!  He was excited about the prospect of seeing ant birds; I was excited about the prospect of them leaving!  So back we went to find that the swarm was in fact moving on (and Andrew got to see an ant bird!) and I was able to complete my repairs and return triumphant.

I am sustained by the idea that if Tent City remains standing for the full year, the potential for interesting and amazing outcome of this project is huge.  Then all the blood, sweat, and tears will be worth it!

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The end is here… for now.

Here I sit in Liberia, on my last day in Costa Rica. That means that field season #1 of my PhD is done!  8 weeks and 2 successful experiments later.  

I think sometimes that I must be due for a disaster. (Not that I want to jinx myself by saying it…) The general impression of grad school is that your first field season is a write off. It’s a trail run so that when everything fails and you end up with nothing at the end, you’ll know how to fix it next time.  So far I have yet to have said “trial field season”, because everything has gone more or less smoothly and I always come out with some kind of data.

Lets just hope that the people with successful field seasons are just less vocal about it.  So, all my inverts are counted, all my leaves are weighed, all my data is inputed and next on the agenda is putting it together in some recognizable form for our upcoming Bromeliad Workshop, and prepping for field season #2! 

I leave for Brazil in 2 short months, thanks to the rest of the lab who has been able to plan while I’ve been hiding out in Pitilla!

That’s it until Vancouver!  Pura Vida!

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On the matter of ants.

Some people come away from the tropics with a deep awe, respect, and passion for ants. E.O. Wilson is a great example of this. I believe I will take the low road and leave the tropics (for the second time) with a profound…dislike for ants. I hesitate to say ‘hate’ despite the few choice words that they have elicited from me, in the spirit of being a tough field biologist. In that same spirit, have I categorized the ants into ‘irritation bins’. These may or may not repeat species and I’m sure they miss quite a few, but it is only based on my lowly observations.

  1. Sugar ants. When the ratio of ants to sugar gets too high in our little Tupperware in the kitchen, we know we’re low on sugar. I don’t know if I’ll ever lose the habit of scrutinizing every teaspoon of sugar from now on. These tiny ants are also usually seen on the inside of every package of anything in the cupboard.  Ew.
  2. Research-thwarting  bromeliad ants. We are constantly on the lookout for new large bromeliads to use in our research. Large ones on the ground, near the station are in particularly high demand. At least 3 of these choice bromeliads have been taken over by nests of huge red ants. They are at least the length of my first index finger joint and have mandibles wider than their heads, which they do not hesitate to use on said finger when we are trying to either remove leaf litter or insert experiments. These big un-used bromeliads are just sitting there laughing at us because their army of killer ants is keeping us at bay.
  3. Tiny biting ants. These ones also live in bromeliads, but also live every. where. else. In the grass, under the sink, on every leaf and twig we brush past. They are miniscule and even their miniscule mandibles pack a punch. Quite a few choice words were elicited by these guys, especially when, hours after being back from the forest, I’m still being bitten.
  4.  Honey-ants. Much much bigger than sugar ants, but also inhabit our food cupboard and more or less form a collar around the lid of the honey. Ew.
  5. Flagging-tape-ivore-ants and experimental-mesh-lid-ivore-ants. My next research project may be to investigate the nutritional value of flagging tape, and Nytex mesh. Who knows why but the ants love it. Every day we are cleaning up little bits of orange from the forest floor around where there used to be a useful marker. The mesh lids, designed to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, also seem to be a favourite food. One day I found one chewed nearly in half. Useful, guys. Thanks a lot.
  6.  Finally, in the only non-irritating bin: Leaf cutter ants. These guys are actually pretty cool.  Our trails are criss-crossed with their highways and once in a while we stop to watch. Sometimes the highway is coming from a flowering plant and we step over parades of flower petals coming down the trail. Sometimes the parade is bright green leaf bits, and if you look closely there are usually a few lazy ants hitching a ride on top.  I don’t have a problem with the leaf-cutter ants. Unless they in fact turn out to be the flagging-tape-ivores or the mesh-lid-ivores. In that case, it’s war!
  7. I almost forgot about army ants! Also a little bit cool. We have seen a few swarms in the woods, and one war on the deck of the station! But the biggest one was across our path to our dorm in Santa Rosa. It must have been a metre wide – picture the 401 with 500 lanes of traffic! It was insane! But still, I don’t have much of a problem with army ants. And yet… did you see the scene in the newest Indiana Jones movie where the swarm of giant ants carries the bad guy away and drags him into the ant hill…   blech!!
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bromeliadThe search continues! We are searching high (literally) and low for more bromeliad invertebrates to finish off our experiments. One week to go until I add the remainder of my communities and then 2 week until I find out if any of this actually worked! Jana is at the same point and would like me to ask if anyone has any larvae of Dytiscid beetles lying around? She still needs for and we think maybe they’re on to us and have all jumped ship!Lisa and Helen are absolute life savers – staring into trays of sludge from dawn until dusk helping us find what we need! Jana and I don’t know what we would do without them!Tomorrow is the start of a bit of a break from science – we’re heading to Santa Rosa station for a night and then trekking the 12 km to the beach at Naranjo. Lots of people, cafeteria, remote beach, and sweltering heat… here we come!