On the Road Again - Rain Forest Ecology Field Trip

Today, tonight, tomorrow, all night, all day, that is starting about midnight the travel begins and with luck 18 hours later the Phactor with a bunch of students in tow will arrive at a field station in Costa Rica to study rain forest biology for the next 2 weeks. The wi-fi connections out there in the rain forest have always been a bit dodgy, but every attempt will be made to do a series of blogs directly from the rain forest. Weather has not been good in Costa Rica lately, but the heavy rains and land slides have been more of a problem on the Pacific side than the Atlantic side where the field station is located, which is always pretty wet. The record for one of our field trips was 18" of rain fall in 8 full days at the field station. As one of the students remarked, "Well, it is RAIN forest." Travel with students, overseas, is terribly stressful and demanding, even with the NO WHINING RULE in force, and it would not be worth the effort if the outcomes were not so educationally rewarding for both parties (both students in the picture are smiling!). And of course after the field trip the Phactor shall bestow prestigious awards upon outstanding members of his class: the monsoon mud monkey award to the person most at one with mud, the atad award for the student most confused by their own data (one awardee never got the joke!), the cryptic researcher award for the student who most resembles or acts like their research organism, the teflon award for that particular student that just never seems to get dirty, the closest encounter of a dangerous kind award to the student who has the nearest miss with disaster and giving their instructor more gray hair or causing more of it to fall out (those pit vipers are so well canouflaged, crocs have moved into the swimming hole, and so on it goes). Truly winners all.

Travel is always an adventure

To study tropical rain forest temperate zone folks must travel & to get from Lincolnland to the La Selva field station takes about 15 hrs door to door. This year the trip was successful and we arrived starved just in time for dinner in spite of a coach driver with the wrong time and day, severely delayed flight, bad weather, terrible traffic, mountain road accidents, & tardy students (also wrong time and day)! What an adventure, but once here everything awful about the travel is soon forgotten. Sharing the excitement of students discovering rain forest makes all the grief worth while. Isn't that just a great looking tropical scene? Enjoy!

Jade vine - Another ludicrous flower to enjoy

The jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys) is a tropical liana (woody vine) from the Philippines. If you know your plant families, you’ll recognize these flowers as beans/legumes right away (1 standard petal, two lateral petals, and two petals forming a keel housing the stamens and pistil) except what a color! This pale blue-green color is very unusual flower color, but it shows up well in dim light against a dark and green background, which abounds in the rain forest understory where the Phactor works.

Each individual flower is about 2 inches long. And like wisteria, which the Phactor is told flowers, his own vine providing no evidence of this at all, the inflorescence hangs upside down, so each flower twists 180 degrees on its stalk to present itself right side up. Some tropical fruits have a similar pale blue color, again to show up well against a dark background, and the Phactor promises to show you one soon.

The inflorescence of flowers is a foot or two long and hangs down from the vine on long cord-like stems. And this combined with the color tells me that the pollinator is a nectar foraging bat! A similar bean (Mucuna holtonii) grows in the neotropics, but the flower color is just a pale greenish, however the upper petal of this bean’s flower acts as a sound reflector to bounce the bat’s sonic signals back at them (research conducted by Dagmar and Otto von Helversen; you meet the best people while doing field research.). Jade vine is now fairly common in conservatory collections at botanical gardens, like the New York Botanical Garden which is where this picture was taken (eat your heart out GrrlScientist).

The flowers work by lever action. The weight of the bat pushes the keel down forcing either the pollen laden anthers or the stigma out the tip of the keel to make contact with the bat’s body. Unfortunately never having seen bats and the jade vine in action, I don’t know how exactly the two interact, and very unfortunately, the native habitat of both are threatened by deforestation. It’s depressing to know that someday such organisms may only live in cultivation. At least this Asian import won’t escape into the wilds of the Bronx.

Everyday should be Earth Day

The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day in 1970; he was a senior in college and that does date him even if he was a bit precocious. Unfortunately it did not receive as much attention that year as it should have because there were so many distractions that revolved around anti-war protests (Vietnam), trying to graduate, and thinking seriously about a long-time girl friend.

In trying to think of something profound to say, I find myself simply saddened by the state of the Earth. The whole panoply of environmental issues always ends up being argued from a political perspective, but the ecological perspective is quite clear. Our species has exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment. Humans began the path to the present day when they stopped living as gatherers and hunters and shifted to making a living via agriculture. This is not an indictment, just history.

My own particular role in this has been the simple, but not always easy task of helping students understand how nature works and the place of humans in all of this, so that they may use that knowledge to make wise decisions. Of course the flaw in that is the assumption that knowing something is important to making decisions, which often has not been the case in politics. When ideology trumps knowledge it all goes out the window.

A great deal of the Earth’s natural communities have been altered, damaged, or destroyed, but there still remains a resilience that gives the Phactor some hope if we can abate the rate of destruction. Unfortunately so many people are so estranged from nature, from their food and resources, it creates an ignorance or indifference to the natural order of things. People just don’t know, care, or understand what living their lives is doing, insulated as they are by human technology. In the words of Porky Pine penned for Earth Day by the great Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Being ethical demands that our actions not harm others, and that principle must be extended to actions that do not unduly harm the ability of our environment to sustain us. So be mindful of the full impact we make, both on our own personal little hummock, and elsewhere, and try to help others know why it’s important to have a "green" ethic, otherwise you become an enemy of people.

PS Many people attribute that quote to Pogo because of an Earth Day poster made by Kelly a year later, but he didn't say it in the original cartoon.

Curtain Call for an Old Friend

This magnificent tree is called the curtain fig; it’s huge and may be several hundred years old. Curtain fig is not the common name of the species (Ficus virens), but the name of this specific tree. It’s a strangler fig, a type of fig that starts growing in the canopy of another tree. Its roots grow down and around the host tree, and its canopy grows upward, and ultimately the fig can engulf, kill, and take the place of its host. In Central America strangler figs are called matapalo, tree-killer. This fig apparently grew vertically killing its original host tree, and then fell against a neighboring tree, subsequently taking it over as well. Roots dropping from the diagonal trunk produced this curtain of roots that rises about 18 m from the forest floor, and from this emerges an immense crown of branches above the rainforest canopy.

Curtain Fig lives in a patch of rainforest near Yungaburra on the Atherton Tableland in northern Queensland Australia. I first saw this tree over 25 years ago, and shortly there after I met the fellow in the funny red felt hat at the lower right. And he in his own right is a magnificent fellow. I am thinking about this because I just learned this funny-hat-wearing fellow, my friend and colleague Tony, is dying of lung cancer, a rather ironic fate for a confirmed non-smoker.

Tony and I teamed up twice to conduct field research on the reproductive biology and beetle pollination of rain forest trees, and I spent months, some of the best times of my life, at this side working in the rain forest. I, even with the PhD, was the rain forest student, and Tony my learned mentor. Tony is simply one of the best field biologists ever. His keen eye for observation, and his equally keen intellect made him a largely self-schooled guru of field biology and rain forest natural history. And his attitude was even better than his knowledge. Tony approached his life and work with simple joy; he did biology just for the sheer pleasure of doing it, so it was just a bonus that the Australian CSIRO paid his salary.

He has a sly sense of humor. His almost child-like air of innocence and his often feigned naivety allowed his wit to prey upon those who thought themselves sophisticates or his educational betters, but , it was never mean humor. In fact there was nothing mean about Tony. Oh, and did I mention his singing voice or his rain forest tucker? No, and with good reasons, but I was often serenaded exuberantly and fed anyways. And who else would drive an hour out of the rain forest, at night, to the nearest civilization just to satisfy a sudden urge for ice cream? Only a wonderfully crazy fellow in a floppy, red felt hat, would think such a pilgrimage for an ice cream bar perfectly reasonable.

Tony played hard and worked hard, and his physical life took a toll upon his body; parts just wore out. That together with Parkinson’s has brought this great bear of a man to a near halt. The cancer will merely deliver the coup de grace. His life used up the rest, but it was used very well. My life is richer for having Tony as a friend and colleague, and it is with immense sadness that I write this reflection.

Curtain fig lives on, but for Tony, it’s just curtains.