Tough transition - Tropics to temperate

The tropical to temperate shift is difficult during the winter especially. Going from green to brown, warm to cold, often wet to dry, is a difficult transition psychologically. No wonder everyone just wants to say to heck with it, I'm going tropo. TPP hadn't worn socks or shoes since the 18th so they feel pretty funny. And everything in the rainforest is so green and here the green is gone mostly until next spring. This transition has been harder, deeper into the winter.  And it was easier when the participants were younger, but there you go.  It would be much harder on any native of the tropics to come to this part of the world where they would wonder how people actually live here.  In the dead of winter, TPP sometimes wonders this as well. Then he had a friend from Duluth, which isn't the end of the Earth, but you can see it if you stand on a car's fender. Anyone from so far south as Lincolnland shouldn't complain. So in part it is all perspective. And for us there was no jet-lag to deal with either just a shift from earlier to bed & up with the sun to see 'early birds'.

Rainy day thoughts

This is a rainy day blog. The day started out very early when a bat needed to be chased from out room. A few hours later the day dawned all blue, clear, and beautiful. If it stayed that way the afternoon would be hot and humid. But some overcast moved in gradually, so the day stayed relatively cool, and just as gradually the rain began, first just a mist, then a light sprinkle, then a drizzle, then it rained. It's the kind of rain that gets you wet when you're out in the rain forest even when you have boots and an umbrella. At least it isn't cold rain. Since the front stretches south of Puerto Limon, so it'll rain most of the afternoon.
The big find of the morning was a fishtail palm that had had its frond's secondary veins nipped to form a tent for bats, fuzzy white ewok sort of bats (but Honduran? Sure. Not.). Couldn't get a picture because the tent was low to the ground and back lit, and only later did someone think maybe an iphone set on selfie mode might have done the trick where fancy flash & lens had failed. These are really, really hard to find in the wild. You learn to look for the leaf tents among palms and heliconia. These were most certainly not the bats interrupting the Phactors' sleep.
None of us are cooking our Thanksgiving dinner so no preparations to make. Our modest contribution are 6 cans of cranberry jellied cranberry sauce, with and without whole berries. Since the cran(e)berry is one of the few native North American fruits to be domesticated, it isn't well known or easy to find down here in Costa Rica. The Ticos always regard the cranberry jelly with suspicion, and they like such things sweeter anyways. This dinner is done especially for us gringos, and having been here for this dinner many times, it's most appreciated. The Germans don't get cranberries either, or Turkey for that matter? (Why a European bird for your American holiday feast? Turkey is a native of North America. So why the name turkey? European taxonomists were a bit mixed up about where this bird was from.)
It's fun to not be barraged by the horrible, negative news cycle in the USA, but then you start feeling guilty about not really giving a crap. You do really, but the break is such a relief. Costa Ricans have already asked if we would really even ever consider making Trump president showing that their contact with our fellow citizens is quite biased by mostly knowing the scientific types. This makes TPP think about immigrants and the immigration problem. The thing people in the USA don't understand is that Costa Ricans don't want to move to the USA, while most conservatives think that immigration to the USA is what ALL people want. If you want to fix the immigrant problem, the USA should do things that make people's lives better where they actually want to live and do live. Bullets and bombs don't do that. Think about it; Costa Rica doesn't have an army! How do you think they have the money to afford universal health care and free higher education? 
Just to show you the deprivation TPP endures in the field, here's the view from a coffee drinking perch during the rain.

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.

What is this concept of snow?

Hah! The Phactors got out of Dodge just ahead of the first real winter weather! It's really hot and humid here, and most people here have never heard of and cannot conceive of snow falling from the sky. The whole idea of being that cold just does not compute and that may be why this can of Imperial (La Cerveza de Costa Rica) tastes so good. At any rate all that snow must be cleaned up and melted before anyone here will entertain any thought of travel home. Do you think any of these people believe in snow? No way! Somehow this just doesn't look like the weather news from home. TPP should say that the transition from tropics to instant winter doesn't actually kill you, but there is nothing good about it at all.

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. 

Cure for winter blues - the tropics

It snowed today, the 13th of November, and rather early for these parts. It technically snowed yesterday too. The novelty of this form of precipitation has worn off already. Saw enough of it growing up in the snow belt of upstate New York to last several lifetimes. One of the great joys, and head aches, of TPP's academic career was developing and instructing a course in rainforest ecology, an out growth of his tropical field research. This year's class is busily getting all their gear packed for their field trip to Costa Rica over Thanksgiving break. While walking to campus in the gently falling snow, TPP was thinking maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing to have gone with the class this year.  What the ever-loving-hell is the problem? It's one of the reasons to retire. And yet, here is where TPP is.  Oh, yes, blew all the money on that month long field trip to Tuscany. Nice, but sometimes you just want the tropics. If you readers are curious, or equally desperate, the location from where this image was taken will be disclosed for the right price. You will not regret it. TPP didn't. 

Tropical interlude

Yesterday was cold, today is colder, and tomorrow will be bitter cold; enough already.  Unfortunately as TPP ages, he finds he's more sensitive, or less tolerant, of cold than he used to be, even for a tropical botanist.  The best therapy is a visit to our glasshouse to breath in humid air and smell organic smells. It is very comforting, and there are two nicely placed "lawn" chairs for just the purpose of tropical therapy. 

This episode of very cold weather, the 2nd this month, may help people understand that this is winter, and it's when fronts push down from Saskatchewan in the great white north bringing in that imported Arctic weather, and while the last such front pushed down strongly and deeply, the so-called polar vortex, this event is not unusual nor atypical, but a regular, cyclical event here in the mid-continent.  As a consequence, the only relief that can be offered is to cheerfully attempt to improve your attitude with a nice, idyllic tropical scene from southern hemisphere so you will know that it looks exactly like this right now.  Note the crowds of snow-birds, the commercialized over-development, the evidences of modern e-connected life.  Oh, yes!  See how much easier it is to deal with the cold now!  Hmmm.  There must be a research project that needs doing there right now.  Turn off the internet and pack the field gear!   

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. 

Tropical day

Today would have been typical enough in the rain forest of Costa Rica, but while just as humid, and not all that hot, it was all the misery without any of the tropics. And the mosquitos were already bad around here, now with another 5 cm of rain no decline in their population is expected. It was a good day for weeding, except it was a bit muddy. So a sticky, muddy, sweaty, miserable day for gardening, especially weeding. Good thing friends invited us over for a late afternoon cookout so the Phactor had an excuse to quit yard work early. In the only amusing thing of the day, two young rabbits were chowing down on the top leaves of weeds that had been pulled from the raspberry patch.