End of the line for the field trip

Field trips tend to end with a whimper rather than a bang.  It's because people get tired physically and mentally; you begin to long for the comfort of the familiar, and the ease of you regular day-to-day life although TPP has on several occasions gotten into a new field trip routine where it feels familiar, sort of.  Usually that takes a few weeks.  So tomorrow the troops get packed up and depart. The mud gets washed off the boots and everything that has gotten strewn around gets gathered back up and stowed. How did it expand in size? Everything is heavier because of the humidity. Repacking is rather a depressing thing to do the more so that TPP is suffering from some sort of GI tract discomfort.  Never fun, especially when getting ready to travel overseas.  Another bit of last minute business is to make an order for Costa Rican coffee.  As you may know TPP never endorses anyone, but should you be in San Jose, TPP cannot say enough good things about Cafe Trebol, a 100 year old coffee roasting business located on the Calle 8 side of the Mercado Central. It's top notch coffee at fair prices, and TPP has been buying it for over 20 years now. Coffee is an easy to pack gift being nearly non-breakable. They also have cacoa of several grades.  Time to wrap up a few things for packing especially the plant press. 

Giving thanks for our dinner - a unique version

For a long time this field season has had a Thanksgiving dinner having co-opted the idea of being thankful for things, including their staff, and doing something nice for visiting gringos a long ways from family and friends. They had roast turkey and a most excellent fresh cranberry sauce (anadano rojo) along with potatoes and dressing, and some vegetables, but the really extraordinary part is this magnificent goody table of breads, and sweets, and fruits, and all manner of strange but wonderful treats (coffee-flavored flan, some sort of glazed roasted cheese, salad ala Waldorf?, sweet and savory breads & rolls) and then decorative fruit sculptures.  What a wonderful spread. This image will give you some idea of the extent and diversity of the array of items to choose among, and this is only about half of the spread. As if all of that wasn't enough they even had chicha (a truly wicked brew of Mesoamerican origin). For all of this we were most grateful and thankful for the good company and a most bountiful feast.

What Costa Rica can do it does

Just two days before departing for Costa Rica and the Costa Rican ambassador to the USA (Roman Macaya) visits our campus. He gave a very good luncheon talk while the audience munched on a fairly good lunch. Costa Rica is a very progressive country and is doing quite well for a "socialist" country. Costa Rica does so many things right it's hard to know where to begin, but deciding way back in 1948 to disband their army is a good start. And of course there's all the free education and medical care, and the fact that their country will be carbon neutral by 2021 because most of their energy is coming from renewable sources. In 1993 ecotourism became their number one source of foreign cash passing coffee and bananas for the 1st time. Now it's medical technology that they export that has become number one. You know, the USA is about ready for a new president, and desperately in need of some new ideas. Wonder if Costa Rica can export any of those to the USA? Interesting that the students in attendance didn't seem upset at all that socialism in spite of the continual rhetoric in the USA against it.

Monday morning random bits

FIELD WORK - There's a full schedule of field work this week to harvest biomass from our permanent research plots. At least the weather looks good all week, and although rain is needed, now hope it waits until the "harvest" is in. Biggest problem is a sore back; got to find some of those young student backs to do the heavy bending.
FIRST FROST - Came close to having our first frosts Friday & Saturday nights, but not quite cold enough to really frost things. Very light frost on 2nd night close to the ground so late pole beans survived.
CUCUMBERS IN OCTOBER - TPP picked a cucumber on the 18th of October!  Never, ever had them so late in the year and the reason is that the vines always die of a bacterial blight much earlier in the year. The blight is vectored by cucumber beetles so once they show up your vines days are pretty much numbered. Insect covers help, but when flowering starts you have to let pollinators in. So what happened to the beetles this year? Similarly the Japanese beetles were a near no show and June "bugs" were also near no-shows. And cicadas were not plentiful either. Was all the rain early in the season to blame either by drowning pupae or assisting fungi like milky spore? 
BEST NEW RECIPE - Apple, avocado, blue cheese, & walnut salad! 
CANNA RHIZOMES - The Phactors dug out a bed of landscape cannas, tall ones with purple foliage. Too bad these are not edible plants because the crop of rhizomes they produce is amazing. Oh, wait, maybe they are edible.  Who knew?
TRAVEL PLANS - Got our travel plans today for a rainforest field trip to Costa Rica. TPP used to do this every year with a class of students in tow. Amazing how much less stressful it is when the students become someone else's responsibility. Hope the el Niño weather does not result in a real wet field trip although having some rain is basically a given. Record for one 9 day field trip was over 400 mm.
FACULTY MEETING TO DISCUSS EVALUATION DOCUMENTS - Faculty meetings of any type are bad, but when the faculty are discussing evaluation it becomes especially dreadful. TPP stopped reading his yearly evaluations long before his retirement and became a much happier person especially when the money involved was too little to really matter. This is not recommended behavior for my younger colleagues. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - teeny orchid

Friday again?  Were did the week go? Here's a great fabulous flower that TPP just happened to notice in the greenhouse the other day. But it's easy to miss even though it is one of the few really orange flowers in our collection. This is an orchid, and contrary to what most people think, most orchid flowers are fairly small, if not tiny, although the smallest orchid flower is a ridiculous 2 mm tall. In comparison this orchid, Pleurothallis guanacastensis, is a whopping three times bigger at 6-7 mm tall. When you see flowers like this, obviously providing a visual display, you do wonder what type of little critter is attracted to them and pollinates them? Whatever it is you can see the little space they fit into between the labellum (lower center petal) and the column above housing the stigma and pollinia, a space which is all of 1-1.5 mm. In the tropics such little puzzles abound, organisms about which we know next to nothing. It's been named, it lives in lowland tropical forests as an epiphyte in Costa Rica. And that's about it. 
And congratulations to my Tico friends for their big "football" win over the USA. 

Monday, monday

Monday started early when a cat woke TPP to tell him that a thunderstorm was approaching, a fact he would find out himself in another 10 to 15 minutes. She's got good hearing and is a little afraid of thunder. The morning news confirmed that here in Lincolnland politics particularly the state's gerrymandered election districts were not going change because a political hired gun of a legal persuasion managed to convince a judge that the half a million signatures, more than twice the total needed, were invalid so the voter initiative would not be on the ballot. Democracy in action. Yeah, sure. BTW you only need 5000 signatures to become a candidate for governor. And then SCOTUS amazes us with the contorted legal logic they use to empower corporations at the expense of individuals. This after the most buffered branch of the government decides that women entering clinics don't need any spatial protection from the friendly counselors attempting to harass and intimidate them. SCOTUS needs a good dose of their own medicine.  Actually some of the justices just need to get out every year or so and see how people actually live and behave. On the good news front, more rain fell and Costa Rica won at the world cup. Ole mis amigos. Maybe the cat has the right idea; find a quiet place safe from thunder boomers and go back to sleep. 

New discovery of something old in Costa Rica

TPP has been going to Costa Rica for research and teaching for 20 years, so discovering completely new things outside of the rainforest happens a lot less frequently.  So it was with a bit of surprise to find La Sorbeterade Lolo Mora, a rather small ice cream shop buried in the middle of San Jose's Mercado Central warren of aisles and shops.  Far from being something new, this shop has been serving their "traditional ice cream" in all its many flavors (1) for well over 100 years.  The ice cream was unlike any other and best described as "a heady mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and vanilla with a granita–like texture".  Yep, spice ice cream that's sort of icy, but make no mistake, it's wonderful. And getting it in a cone would be a mistake; it melts pretty fast. Generally my students only get to spend an afternoon and evening as tourists in San Jose, and in the past, it was a Sunday, and most of the Mercado shops were closed.  However, Sunday shopping, including grocery stores like Super Mas, early Christmas, and even black Friday sales have all come to Costa Rica.  My dear Ticos, let TPP apologize for our cultural exports and the invasion of our fast food too.  Please do not let a DQ open anywhere within two kilometers of the Mercado.  Protect your national food heritage. 

Return, re-entry, and readjustment

Returning from the tropics to the northern temperate late fall is not a good idea, just a necessity.  At the coffee shoppe this AM the friendly clerk asked if it were still warm outside?  It was 40 F.  How a particular temperature feels depends a great deal upon what recent ambient temperatures you have been experiencing.  So, no, it's bloody damp and cold.  As much as TPP would like to gently and gradually adjust to regular academic life, the re-entry plunges you directly into the deep water since there are only 3 days left in the semester.  At one of the last class meetings, a student asked if there was a lab scheduled for today.  No, no lab, but there will be a regular 50 min lecture.  Apparently about half the class tuned out as soon as TPP said, no lab.  This will certainly help the teaching evaluations as the situation guarantees half the class will be pissed no matter what you do.  Since there is no jet lag, you wouldn't think the change would be so bad.  However without the constant white noise of the rainforest at night, or in the rain, TPP finds it hard to sleep.  Guess that sound track needs to be packaged up and sold, and with the additional gimick that you can set a wakeup time, and then a recording of howler monkeys greeting the day will be inserted.  And no really ripe, succulent pineapple for breakfast.  Such a downer.  Good thing TPP got a couple of kilos of dark roasted Costa Rican coffee to bring home, which set such a good example that the class cumulatively brought home well over 20 kilos of coffee, so much that a 5% discount was given.  "Do you have anything to declare?"  Just some coffee.  "How much coffee?"  Just two kilos.  "Where is it?"  In that big blue duffle bag.  "What's in the bag with the coffee?"  Just more coffee.  And yet it's good to be home. 

Field trip packing

The only thing worse than packing for a field trip is repacking everything for the trip home.  All the careful packing has degenerated into near chaos as students have pursued their projects, and then revised their projects, and then punted, and then finally succeeded in wringing a bit of information, some data, some new understanding, out of the rainforest.  Now all this stuff has to get put away.  You figure out that biologists use way too much plastic; what would happen without Tupperware and zip lock bags?  Biological progress would grind to a halt. But you get real pragmatic on the way home and you have to make room for some Costa Rican coffee, a lot of coffee, 40-50 pounds of coffee (it's 15 people after all).  If you get to Costa Rica, do visit Café Trebol on the Calle Ocho side of the Mercado Central. Getting everything clean including your boots is difficult; getting it all dry is next to impossible especially as it is pouring buckets outside.  The troops are sorting everything on the veranda of their cabina, so it continues.  Unfortunately, the students don't/won't pack for their instructors.  Go figure.  Monday the trip will start at 5:30 AM bus loading to reverse the trip down.  Too bad all that coffee is packed away and inaccessible. 

Thanksgiving in Costa Rica and with young people

Costa Ricans, Ticos, are some of the nicest people in the world.  They prepared a 1st class Thanksgiving dinner for us gringos, a dinner that was good enough and fancy enough and pretty enough to impress almost anyone, especially at a rainforest field station. And everyone had to really work like dogs (the station manager was washing dishes!) to do so because 44 hrs earlier a kitchen fire in a warming oven came very close to putting the kitchen out of commission.  If you didn't know otherwise, you would not have known anything was amiss to see the results. Simply amazing!  What great people! 

Among our students there was much discussion of Thanksgiving traditions and how they differed.  And what foods they liked and dislikes (marshmellows and sweet potatoes - yikes!).  Yes, TPP has a Thanksgiving tradition in answer to their query, he always listens to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. A gallery of blank looks. One asked if Arlo was related to Woody because she'd learned something about an inherited degenerative disorder he had in a genetics class.  Yes, they are father and son; both folk singers.  More blank looks.  Folk?  Ah, well. No need trying to explain.  No one had heard of This land is your land either.  Anyone want to listen to the Alice's Restaurant song?  How long is it?  Probably about 25 mins.  No. And no need really because a protest song about a war they probably don't know about would not make much of an impression.  Makes you feel old.  Did TPP mention that they did clean up and dress up nicely for the dinner?  Still TPP was thankful, so he retired to his casa and listened to some Sidney Bechet recordings.  Who?  (Sorry can't provide the link to an earlier blog about Sidney; search function isn't working.)    

Rainforest birding in Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a hot bed for birders, and the La Selva field station is a hot bed for Costa Rica.  Over 400 species of birds have been recorded here.  TPP is not a very good birder (that's Mrs. Phactor's arena); birds do not hold still so you can pick them up and look them over.  However every now and then a bird cooperates in such a way that even yours

truly can make an accurate identification.  So while looking for passion flower vines for a student deep within the darkest rainforest, this bird happened upon us.  Apparently a nearby fig tree had fruits just ripening and it was beginning to attract all sorts of attention.  Now in spite of its diminutive size and great distance the characteristic markings of a great curassow were unmistakable.  Quite simply TPP would not grab this bird even if he could.  The males (shown here) do some elegant courtship dances and offer their potential mates food treats.  So lots of birds have been seen but so far nothing new for the personal list, but then again, over a 20 year period of visits you do get to see quite a few species even if you aren't a very good birder.  How fortuitous that a curassow shows up so conveniently close to Thanksgiving!

Castilla rubber

One of the trees that is fairly frequent along water courses here on the warm, wet side (east of the mountains) of Costa Rica is the native rubber tree (Castilla elastica – Mulberry family).  It’s not really very impressive and students who just go ga-ga over some little lizard look upon trees dully and fail to understand the importance of these rubber trees in ecology and in history.  Castilla rubber was an important rainforest product for Costa Rica about a century ago and the source of all those rubber balls the Aztecs used for sport.  However para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis – Euphorb family) became the predominant rubber of commerce, and castilla rubber sort of faded into history.  So to give the troops something to remember, TPP tapped a tree by puncturing the outer bark (hard) into the softer inner bark that has lots of latex secreting cells.  The wound was small but the amount of latex that oozed out in just a few minutes was quite impressive, and when it coagulates, it is quite elastic.  On to chicle. 

Just hanging out in Costa Rica

Not!  Walked several kilometers today just doing natural history of rainforest organisms with a very observant and knowledgeable naturalist, one of the best and certainly the most modest. Seriously, these are some of the best naturalists in the world in terms of how well they know their home turf.  At any rate our students really benefit from the expertise of these local naturalists.  Some of the highlights include seeing both two-toed and three-toed sloths (Do you need to have it explained how to tell them apart?) because sloths are hard to observe in general.  Broad-winged hawks were migrating south and large flocks could be seen overhead.  The river was clear so the fruit-eating fish were easy to see too, but no one had a banana to sacrifice (in pieces) to see their aggressive behavior.  Students got their first taste of a tropical shower, especially those who had not brought along an umbrella (Yes, they were told it would be a good idea.).  Here's a couple of green iguanas, a male and female, (easy name, although not very imaginative - Iguana iguana) that were just basking on this tree that had fallen along side of the river.  The male is probably at least 2 meters long although a lot is tail.  This is somewhat how TPP's chair views what happens on field trips.  Just wish it were true. 

Botanical field work and snakes

Mostly TPP has a laissez-faire relationship with snakes: if they don't bother me, TPP won't bother them.  For about a decade, a great deal of TPP's field work was done in Queensland, the wet tropics in the vicinity of Cairns (one of my study sites can be seen from the city's harbor, in the distance).  If there's anything you need to learn quickly in Queensland before venturing into its rainforests, it's that virtually every snake that isn't a python is poisonous and certain bushes and trees have vicious stinging hairs.  So when an Aussie field hockey player tries to remove a snake from the field and gets bitten in the process, and dies because it's one of the truly dangerously toxic venomous snakes, you have to sort of wonder about where he was brought up.  Dang, TPP had just one encounter with a taipan, and an image of this sleek snake was burned into his skull after shooing one out of the parking area behind his QLD apartment.  His study site was alive with the common brown snake, another top 10 venomous snake (see linked article for a top 10 rundown), but a rather shy and rather easily intimidated snake.  Good thing!  This makes TPP's current study site in Costa Rica relatively safe what with only fer-de-lances lurking everywhere in the leaves.  There are lots of other little vipers around: eye-lash viper, hog-nosed viper, and the not so little bushmaster, and in spite of nearly stepping on a hog-nosed viper on his first day at this field station, TPP still feels safer than when in Australia. So what was the field hockey player's big, and fatal, mistake?  Not wearing Wellington boots!  Hey, got any field work volunteers out there? 

Speaking of snow - and soccer - and Costa Rica

TTP has spent a lot of time in Costa Rica doing research and teaching, and every now and then just being a gringo tourista.  Snow days here in the upper midwest are no big deal really.  But some things, just like dogs and cats together, are just unnatural.  So when TPP saw this soccer game the other day, it was just plain wrong, a crime against nature.  Soccer is one of those games that is played under diverse field conditions, but this was not right.  Cold, OK. Some flurries in the air, OK. But when the ball can't roll because of snow accumulation, this just isn't right.  You can't play the game the way it was meant to be played.  And then there's the whole Costa Rican thing.  They love soccer way more than the USA loves soccer.  It's their love and their pride at stake.  So you take the Costa Rican national team and you ask them to play soccer in a form of precipitation that they have never, ever seen before, a form of precipitation that most Costa Ricans can't even imagine, and it's just plain wrong.  Most of them probably cannot believe even still that they were playing soccer under such conditions, and then to lose late, by one goal; outrageous!  Never has the weather conditions been so stacked against one team before.  Their protest is most appropriate, and hopefully it will be upheld. 

Rainforest Field Trip - Thanksgiving in the Tropics

Thanksgiving is of course only a holiday in the USA. Here in Costa Rica at the field station they have begun putting up Christmas decorations and shops have decorations and gifts prominently displayed, so the Christmas calendar creep is not just a North American thing. Some of our students have never been away from home on a major holiday before, and the field station in deference to all the gringos makes us a pretty fancy Thanksgiving dinner. It was a hot sunny day this morning, now cooled off by some afternoon downpours; at home a wintery mix is falling, and nothing can explain this to our tropical hosts. How could it actually be that cold? The Phactor, thinking well ahead, brought cranberry jelly/sauce, a true North American contribution to the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Amusingly, the Costa Ricans are as suspicious of the cranberry sauce as our students are of new Costa Rican foods. Unfortunately some things just don't translate very well; some how salsa de pavo just doesn't seem the same as gravy, but what else are you going to call it? And what will the Phactor miss the most? Well, that's so easy it isn't even a contest; Mrs. Phactor is a world class pie maker and the most difficult choice you will ever have is pumpkin, apple, or pecan? Readers, care to chime in?

Attractive display for dispersers of tropical plant

It's been awhile since blogging about the tropics. Those of us who study flowers are used to seeing diverse displays to attract pollinators. This is also true for fruit displays attracting seed dispersers. Now of course both of these are floral displays, but at different times in the flower's functional life, and most people just aren't used to thinking of fruits as flowers at the time of seed dispersal.

What is truly unusual is to have the same display being used for attracting both pollen and seed dispersers because they are almost always at different times and for different organisms. This a member of the Gesner (African violet) family from Costa Rica, Columnea purpurata, and the leaves are arranged to make a flat array along a stem forming a canopy over its flowers and fruits. So this is photographed from below as this branch extends out over your head (it grows as an epiphytic shrub). Both the flowers' persistent calyx and the subtending bract are bright orange and hairy, and the entire cluster of flowers, at both dispersal stages, produces a single display. At the right hand end of the cluster you can just see a yellow corolla tube and at the left hand end an orange berry is visible (arrows). The reason one display works for both dispersal stages is that birds are the dispersers of both pollen (hummingbirds) and seed (diverse frugivores), and such a large, bright display is needed in the shady understory.

Rainforest reality might be dangerous

The Phactor is as familiar with and as comfortable in the rainforests of Costa Rica as anyone in Lincolnland. So learning that the former 1st lady of Lincolnland was “in reality camping out” in those same rainforests fills me with concern. She’s a city person, and a great many dangerous organisms live in those rainforests, more snakes, especially very well camouflaged pit vipers, live there than any place I’ve ever visited, and I’ve visited many. The 1 inch long black bullet ant (seen here) is reputed to have the most painful sting of any stinging insect, and those unfortunate enough to have experienced it leave me convinced. There are lots of thorny, spiny plants too. Stilt palms seem specifically designed to trip you and mangle your falling flesh. Both puma and jaguar prowl the depths of the rainforest (their tracks tell of their presence), and that may be why the peccaries, when startled, let loose a cloud of skunk-like odor that brings tears to your eyes. And before you jump in a stream to wash off that smell, do look out for crocs.

However the source of my great trepidation is that all these innocent creatures have no adaptations for dealing with the lying, cheating, back-stabbing, name-calling, back-room-deal-making, pay-to-play, corrupt politicians of Lincolnland, or their equally conniving spouses.