End of the semester ups and downs

TPP's email inbox is bulging. That can only mean one thing, it's the end of the semester and this is the last ditch chance to submit all those assignments that were due all semester.  Students who have paid little attention to what was going on are now want to know what is going on as if it will make a difference.  For many such students semesters end in a whimper, sadly fading away, with nothing like a triumphant finale or celebration.  But not our rainforest ecology class: bright, hard-working, positive attitudes, well-behaved, good company, cooperative, eager, observant, so they'll have a final get together, and TPP will host a dinner of Costa Rican food and a picture party.  Everyone submits their best photos (up to 30) for a visual sharing.  There will be awards for the best organism picture, the best landscape picture, and the best in-the-field selfie (a new category).  Awards will also be given for best projects and presentations. Other awards will make light of tropical field work like the teflon award for the person who just never seems to get dirty, or the peccary award of personal hygiene (only if applicable), and monsoon mud-monkey award for the person who just seems to be a mud magnet, and so on.  This will take place after final exams so people can unwind.  It's their reward for not whining, whinging, or wailing.  Now, find the student in the rainforest.

Rattan palms

Has the Phactor ever told you about rattan palms? Probably not because they bring such painful memories to mind. Rattan palms are scandent vines which means that they climb by sort of draping themselves over other plants; they don't twine. The pain comes from the extremely spiny stems (actually spiny leaf bases sheathing the stem) and the modified inflorescences, long, thin whips constituted out of piano wire, armed with recurved fish hooks along its length (visible in the upper right of this image), a perfect structure for garroting unsuspecting botanists in the dim understory of rain forests. To move through some of my study sites required you to have a pair of pruning shears in hand constantly to clip yourself free of these restraints. Still you and your clothes got shreaded. The palms climb by grappling tree bark or other structures and the weight of the palm sets the hooks. These memories were awakened by a request to review a manuscript on the reproduction of rattan palms. So the Phactor is quite sympathetic about what the authors put up with to conduct their research. Such nostagia erupts about rattans when ever the Phactor happens to sit upon someone's patio furniture made from rattan palm stems.

Rainforest Field Trip - Unrelenting Green

Rainforest is next to impossible to envision unless you have experienced it personally. Every now and again you locate a rare spot where a photograph captures some small sense of the rampant diversity, the density of the vegetation, and the sheer unrelenting green of a wet tropical forest. Understand that this is not maudlin sentimentality; pausing long enough to get a camera out of its water-tight case and take a picture attracted a cloud of mosquitos large enough that the Phactor wondered if they would obscure the image, and it took some control to hold still while being drained of blood. Usually a professional field biologist like myself keeps nice juicy students nearby to act as bait.