Day 12: 9/6/09

We got up early this morning to travel to Barro Colorado Island (BCI). We met Steve at the docks near the entrance to Pipeline Road at 7:45 to sign in and reserve our spots on the boat. The boat left promptly at 8am and took a half hour to travel along the canal channel to the island. Along the way we were able to see the huge freighters moving along the channel as well as see the expansion work being done on the canal shores to widen it.

We arrived at the docks and immediately started our hike up from the compound into the island itself. After about two kilometers, we reached the summit and then headed to Steve's plot to do work on the fisher's alpha. Along the way we stopped to observe the many insects and plants, including huge garden spiders and a variety of interesting trees that Steve pointed out to us.

When we reached the plot, each of us headed out in different directions from the trail to begin collecting samples. The process was much easier than on Volcan Baru because all we had to do was record the tag numbers in our notebooks. We all were able to complete 35 samples each.

As we headed back down to the compound, we spotted howler monkeys and capuchins, as well as agouti's and even a coral snake!

After the longest hike during the trip in hot and humid weather, we were all relieved that lunch was being served right as we returned to the compound. We all replenished our stomachs and then explored around the compound until we had to leave at 2:30.

After a long, tiring, but eventful day, we returned to Steve and Patti's house in Gamboa to work on our individual presentations the next day. Needless to say, after we finished preparing our presentations, we all slept very well!
(pictures coming very soon!)

Photos from all around Panama

Some of the wildlife we saw:

Photos from Volcan Baru National Park:

More pictures from Pipeline Road:

Sorting plant samples for Fisher's Alpha in Boquete:

Other pictures:

Day 11: 9/5/09

This morning was slow for most of us, 5 late risers stayed in bed until 8am. Doug the early bird got up and walked down to Pipeline Road while we slept. His proverbial worm turned out to be a troop of Capuchin monkeys, who rustled branches and displayed aggressive postures to assert their dominance over their territory. Steve later told us that he had once challenged a branch-wielding Capuchin by shaking a stick he was holding, only to be rushed by the monkey.

We spent the day doing some of Teri's mini-projects. Jenna and Andrea placed bowl baits to watch Drosophila copulation (to no avail), Joel and Doug keyed flies we collected in El Valle and Boquete, and Katie and Alec calculated Fisher's alpha for data sets that Teri sent us. We were also assigned the topics for our presentations, which we will give to the professors on Monday.

Dinner was at Los Lagartos, a restaurant with a deck overlooking the Chagres River. Four guys were throwing bread over the railing and turtles swarmed the water below. Before we ate, we found a crocodile hanging out at the bank of the river so we threw bread bits to a nearby bird in hopes of luring it to the croc (again, to no avail).

We wrapped up the night with Steve giving a talk about the Barro Colorado Island (BCI), which we'll be visiting tomorrow. The whole thing was pictures of adorable animals and a hilarious story about he and a colleague being chased into a tree overnight by hoard of snarling, chomping peccaries. Tomorrow should be amazing, there will be tons of pictures!

Day 10: 9/4/2009

Today began with all of us waking up in the morning and eating breakfast at our apartments in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's (STRI) housing building in Gamboa. After meeting up for some healthy granola and fruit, we all headed over to our own personal research facility, a.k.a. Steve and Patty's house. After some quick announcements about the weekends events, we all began to examine the flies collected from the previous two days. After only looking at two of the over 20 vials filled with flies, Doug and Alec encountered a group of male flies that could not be identified using the keys we normally used for identification. Teri, who is the fly expert of the group, couldn't positively identify them either, and so we took some pictures and sent them to the Drosophila Stock Center back at UCSD to be identified. This was extremely exciting because it may mean that we have encountered a very rare, unknown, or completely new species.

We all went back to our apartments at lunch time to make some quick sandwiches and prepare baits for hanging that afternoon. Taking two cars, we ventured into Pipeline Road much further than we had the previous time we went. We crossed narrow wooden bridges over small murky rivers and drove through narrow roads so thick and lush with plants that we could not drive without scraping the car along palm fronds and foliage from trees that lined the side of the road. After about six miles, we turned around and began trying to find suitable places to hang baits.

We soon realized that placing baits would be the least of our worries. Alec noticed at the first bait hanging stop that the front right tire on one of the cars was making a loud hissing sound and leaking air. We continued to drive to see if we could make it back but it became clear that the tire was loosing air too fast to make it back. We had to stop on the small dirt road to change it....

Luckily, Alec had some experience in changing tires. Working under an increasing darkening and thunderous sky, he worked with Joel and Doug to quickly jack the car up, remove the bad tire, and replace it with the spare. Just as we finished, it began to rain. We all got back into the cars and drove back down the road. Our luck changed at the end when one car heard the loud calls of howler monkeys over the sound of the rainstorm. Although we didn't see them, we had more confidence that we might see some monkeys before the trip ended.

After relaxing back at the apartments, we headed over to the house in Gamboa at 5 pm to hear an interesting speciation lecture by Teri. She discussed the current thoughts of how the process in which new species are created, as well as filling us in with projects worked on by her and her lab. We then discussed a research paper by Sarah Pipkin about two Panamanian fruit fly species. After a long and eventful day, we returned to our apartments to get some much needed sleep.

Day 8 & 9: 9/2/09 & 9/3/09

Day 8:

Today was a very productive day! We accomplished the drive back to El Valle from Boquete and still had time to collect most of our baits. We were thrilled to find that each one of the baits in the pine area had more than all of our previous baits combined! We took our time walking through the tropical habitats, hiking up a river lined by ivy and moss covered boulders. We were all jealous of Andrea’s rainboots as she walked effortlessly through the river; we grasped weak vines for support on the shallow banks, observing brightly colored dragonflies and trying to catch lizards. Absorbing our surroundings, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves as we collected our remaining baits.  

  

We brought our specimens home with us and took turns aspirating, taking a food break in the middle. We enjoyed Peruvian cuisine with the professors for lunch and patronized an Italian restaurant called Bruschetta for dinner. Bellies full, we returned to our flies at home, some of us staying up until 1am aspirating them into vials. Some of us are increasing our tolerance for that fermented banana smell and taste. Yum, yum!

Here are some photos of our view from the pine area in El Valle:

 

Until our next adventure,

STRI techs of Panama

Day 9:

We had a wonderful morning. Excited to greet the El Vallan Drospholids first thing, we collected the baits around the hotel that we had placed 4 days prior. The flies put up a fight, but we aspirated them into vials and left our homey B&B for the market. We all enjoyed seeing the handmade crafts, especially watching one man intricately paint a giraffe onto a bird feather. We quickly bought trinkets for family and friends at home (hola familia y amigos!) and some produce for the drive ahead of us.  

Through the rain and pink lightning, we arrived in Gamboa and settled into our Smithsonian housing. Spoiled at two per apartment with stocked kitchens and full bathrooms, we only find ourselves grumbling about the lack of air conditioning in 80% humidity.  No complaints though, we're having fun!

Terri took us to an amazing market filled with both local treasures and cheesy tourist buys. Need a hammock? Pick a pattern, any color, varying qualities. A panama hat? What size my friend, we have every size. Elaborate wooden carvings of exotic fauna, tradition fabric weavings, miniature nativity scenes whittled into giant seeds... We shopped to our hearts' content and left in search of food. We finally arrived at a truly authentic Panamanian restaurant. After consuming our big macs and mcnuggets, we returned to our housing and settled in.  

Tonight we discussed a 1993 Journal of Animal Ecology paper titled "A life history trade-off in Drosophila species and community structure in variable environments" by Sevenster and Van Alphen. Over our nachos and card games, the students theorized amongst ourselves about the advantages and disadvantages of characters like development time and opportunities for reproduction.  

Write to you tomorrow!

-The coolest kids in Panama

Day 7: 9/1/09

Most of the work done today was about concluding all of the projects set up around Boquete. We started out the morning with a drive up Volcan Baru with Professor Hubbell and Professor Gowaty to the entrance of the national park where we hung the baits on Sunday. The drive up the hill was as bad or worse than the one on Sunday; both of the cars ended up getting stuck at some points. It looked as though some of the more solid parts of the trail had been washed out by yesterday's rain, leaving large holes among the rocks that made up the trail.

Before taking down the baits, we made another collection for Professor Hubbell. He instructed us to separate and each take a bag into the forests off the path to collect the leaves of 20 different woody plants. We took these leaves back to our cottage and separated them out, identifying them morphologically as species, and then counted the number of each type. From this data we calculated the fisher's alpha value for woody plants in the area to be 15.8, indicating a high level of species diversity.

As for the baits up on Volcan Baru, we were able to collect six out of the seven baits; one of them was missing. We think that it was probably taken down by someone walking by, rather than being taken by some animal, because the bait, string and flag were all gone. Of the other six traps, two of them had no flies, and the other four contained very few flies, much less than in the traps set in Gamboa.

Once we collected the baits, we came down the mountain, dropped off Professor Hubbell and Professor Gowaty and then went down to the Chiriqui river to collect the baits set up there. Of the four traps hung down there, only three remained. One of them had been taken down by someone passing by. Though the other three were still there, only one of them had any substantial number of flies.

Sorting and keying flies later that evening.