Ants! Cats!

Ants! You really do have to admire them! Although tiny they function as a super organism, and when you've spent any time in the tropics you begin to appreciate their ubiquity and diversity.  The field station where TPP does research and teaches claims upwards of 500 species live there.  Up here in the temperate zone they aren't quite so plentiful, or so diverse, but we do seem to have lots of them around, and you forget their corporate determination.  Unfortunately one of our kitty girls is both a nibbler and a damned messy eater, so lots of little crumbs are left even if you have a member of your household staff watch over her bowl constantly.  Now the trick will be to find the chink in our stucco armor, actually more like finding which chink in the stucco is the problem area; so it is with old houses.  Actually just so identified the location and it's half way around the house from where the ant problem is manifest. These are little (1/8th inch long), black bitey ants and based on the traffic pattern a nest of a few billion jillion ants probably resides beneath the stucco where it has somewhat detached from the lath beneath (the problem is on the house entropy list, but maybe needs to be moved up), but finding a stucco person, a good one, is not easy as the craft has largely disappeared.  The houses last pretty well, but nobody builds them this way any more.
And then to buy some time you decide to relocate the cat dining area just a few feet, to remove the attraction of food, and put down a nice place mats for messy eaters and not quite so messy eaters, and what a problem you create.
You want us to eat where? But I eat over here, where I am now. In unison: Which bowl is mine (although relative positions and distance were maintained)? Where did my bowl go?  Why? Why? Why? Ants? What ants? Gads, somethings are in my bowl!  This is intolerable!  Who runs this place?
Cat confusion and indignation knows no bounds when it comes to feeding time, and place. Good thing it wasn't new food to boot.

Leafy passion for phony eggs

One of the best things about rain forest when you're teaching or studying rainforest is the myriad of interactions among organisms. You just see them everywhere. The leaf above is from a vine found growing on top of a clump of Heliconia near our cabina. It's a passion vine, Passiflora biflora. Notice the 8 conspicuous fake eggs on the leaf. Butterflies that specialize on Passiflora vines for their larvae to feed on see these fake eggs and decide not to add another egg to a leaf where other larvae will be feeding first.  But these fake eggs are also nectaries on the back side, glands that secrete nectar and attract ants that will defend their nectar source thus providing another protection from herbivory. Indeed the back side of this leaf had several ants on board.  Note that the top of the 2-lobed leaf is oriented upside down in this image with the apex, a tiny tip pointing down

Ants! Equals Tropics! Aargh!

One of the more distinctive and typical features of the tropics is the inordinate prevalence of ants. This comes to mind because one little fellow just a few seconds ago, a critter only 2 mm long, just crawled out of my laptop's keyboard and stung TPP! What sheer affrontry! No where else are there so many ants, both in terms of numbers and diversity as in the tropics. At our location there are hundreds of species of ants (a colleague says over 500), mostly harmless, and a few real nasty critters, like the inch long black "bullet" ants, to some miniscule ants way less than a mm long that were found in a flower. It's pretty amazing that a 2 mm long insect can sting an organism several orders of magnitude its size, and while not debilitating it still hurt and you don't want the number a swarm of ants can deliver. But what the heck was it (TPP tends to think of an ant colony as a super-organism) doing? The answer is simple: foraging. Your first thought upon finding ants like this is to find the attractant and get rid of it ASAP. Several potential attractants were sharing the table in our cabina, some cookies, some lemon & salt plantain chips (wonderful! try them!), but not much else, and having had experience with ants in several tropical locales, all these goodies were safely being stored inside zip lock bags, a field work necessity for many reasons including excluding ants. But these bloody little ants were everywhere and they seemed centered on my laptop, and then the reason was found, a scent line had been laid along the charging cord! Not that they found anything making this foraging worthwhile, so eventually they would have left, but not before being very annoying. So first you clean off the cord, and then the floor around the cord, and then you shake out your laptop and clean under it, and of course they are coming from under the baseboard, and then you clean off the table and wipe everything down. TPP only got stung another 10 times or so in the process, and a few lingering trouble makers may get him some more. Hmm, forgot about the 3 or 4 stings to the toes. Ouch! Earlier today, a foraging trail of army ants wasn't noticed until quite a few were on TPP's boots. This particular column was raiding a wasp nest, and the wasps were swarming about helplessly while the army ants cleaned out their nest: eggs, larvae, young, trapped adults. Army ants can bite pretty hard, not scary hard, but they make up for that in sheer numbers and the speed of their over whelming attack. So best to watch out. It wouldn't be a tropical field trip unless something like this happened. This is where it would be great to have a graphic of an ant crawl up your screen.

The Modern Marvel of Travel

Always ask the students what country in South American they would hit if the traveled straight south from Chi-town. It's a trick question, but most of them fall for it. (pause for your response) You miss S. American altogether. North and South America tend to be rotated clockwise so they fit better on a rectangular page, so that's the source of the misconception that S. America is directly south of us. In the Atlanta airport, they had a new mosaic set of tiles that took us awhile to figure out; it was a narrow slice of the Earth's surface at the latitude of Atlanta GA. We passed the geography test that most people didn't even notice.
From start to finish our trip from the upper midwest to a field station in north eastern Costa Rica took 10.5 hours. That is still pretty amazing even by today's standards. In the old days when the roads were worse and the route more circuitous, and you had to boat upriver to the field station, it could take 7-9 hrs to get here just from the San Jose airport. The weather was expected to be wet, but it's actually pretty hot and dry, and very, very humid. Hey, it's the tropics, and rain can be expected at any time really, so an umbrella is part of your kit that never leaves your side. The dinner was pretty good Costa Rican food, rice with nicely stewed lentils, fried fish (corvina?), some steamed green squash that wasn't chayote, cucumber and tomato pieces, and a small custard. And there wasn't much in the food department today, so everyone was pretty hungry. Got the usual safety talk: don't mess with big black ants, watch out for pit vipers, carry your umbrella and flashlight. A small gecko is barking, but this is an invasive species native to SE Asian. Some cicadas are piercing the night with their calls and a river of leaf cutter ants is moving along our sidewalk. A swarm of some other ants already forced 3 students our of their room, but by tomorrow it will probably be theirs again. Glad this year's group of students seems pretty relaxed about such things; one fellow from the past woke up screaming that ants were crawling all over him. They weren't but he was a basket case who thought nature was out to kill him.
The wi-fi has definitely improved. Along the road, saw lots of heart-of-palm and pineapple plantations, not so many bananas. Coffee grows on the other side of the mountains; cooler places. Hope that have some orange papaya for breakfast. And now for a decent sleep. 

Gardening joys - ants & magnolias

As a tropical biologist, TPP has a lot of experience with ants, and while fascinating creatures, a lot of these experiences have not been good.  Generally temperate zone ants are much less aggressive and if a bit aggressive, then not nearly as common.  So it was with mild surprise that TPP found his left hand and arm swarming with nasty little biting ants shortly after he grabbed a wheelbarrow to move some soil before planting a new magnolia (you never can have too many magnolias).  In the tropics, having ants swarming over you is not all that uncommon especially if you work in forests that have ants that build leafy nests. While working with my great friend and colleague Tony, this happened routinely because he was always charging along through the forest, and he's smack into an ant nest and keep going, and then TPP, who was always bringing up the rear, received the ants' wrath.  Tony found this highly amusing. But being swarmed by ants seldom happens in the northern temperate zone especially at our latitude. This particular ant is the worst around, small, but nasty, and while lots of ants bite worse, they are annoying, and this time the ants had built a new nest inside the left tubular handle bar that extends down under the barrow to an open end.  The small hole in the end of the plastic hand grip was being used as an exit to ward off annoying pest (meaning TPP) who wanted to move their nest's location.  Wheel barrows also don't function well one-handed so an impasse ensued until the right sized twig was found with which to plug up their upper exit.
But on to the magnolia.  As you know TPP has a thing for magnolias, and what with a whole new front bed to landscape following removal of old spruces, the opportunity to add another specimen presented itself, so a Magnolia x. soulangiana 'black tulip' was added to the collection.  The flowers are large, dark pink-purple, and the tree has an upright-growing, rather columnar form so rather good for a smaller space. Don't you just love this! 

Ants in your pants

Gardening and field biology have some common ground; both make you get outside and interact with nature.  So TPP was replacing a rather sad juniper with a more shade tolerant shrub, and like most of our gardening, one thing has to be removed to make room for planting.  Now this was not a large or well-off juniper so you don't expect much resistance, but from the very first shovel thrust a great protest erupts.  This particular colony of ants was quite irate about the removal of their shrub or at the very least the overall disturbance generated in the process.  What fun when they rush right up the shovel handle.  Fortunately while this ant swarms aggressively, it doesn't sting very much, and in case you didn't know, one of the worst insect stings in the world belongs to the bullet ant of Central America.  Phase one complete, TPP went to harvest some compost for phase 2 the planting of a new shrub.  Digging into the bottom of one of our composers and filling a bucket with nice rich organic material, TPP began to notice a series of stinging sensations.  It was an extremely irate colony of ants registering their annoyance with my disturbance of their nest in the compost bin.  This was a much smaller species of ant but with a rather nasty little sting, and worse they were everywhere, yes everywhere!  As a tropical biologist TPP has dealt with ants, red ones, black ones, green ones, army ones, all kinds and in all sizes, so even little bitty ones can get your attention when they attack in large numbers. To add to the fun, several hundred were transported to the planting site so that they could continue to harass the gardener.  Fortunately our climate is too cold for any really nasty ants, but these were quite annoying, and you know, there are times when you just don't want that much interaction with nature.  Anyone want to trade an anteater for some bunnies? 

Wonderful world of ants

Insects are very interesting, especially those that interact with plants, but no question about it, ants are amazing in their biological diversity, their ability to act almost as a super organism. As those of us who've spent considerable time in the tropics can attest that 1. ants are everywhere and 2. you'd better known which ones to watch out for. At the field station in Costa Rica where we teach rainforest ecology there are over 500 species of ants. Among the coolest are leaf-cutter ants, bullet ants (be very careful), army ants (Rule: don't walk through them in tevas), aztecas, and tiny fire ants. Here's a link to a nice little slide show about ants that promotes what is apparently a popular book called Adventures among the ants. Sorry, haven't seen the book, so can't say how good it is. This little fellow is a bullet ant (Paraponera), about 2.5 cm long, and it's sting packs a real wallop that was once described as the single most painful NON-lethal thing you could experience, but how would you know?