Some days are a bit more exciting than others.  Take today, for example.  It’s a regular morning, with the howler monkeys calling on the forest behind the house, their calls reverberating through the trees, echoed by the calls of a separate troop a few hundred meters away.  We woke up to the usual mix of bird songs, oropendolas gurgling softy over their recently completed long-hanging basket nests; a band of parakeets chatter while feeding on the top of a tree; three or four large parrots, quietly forage.  Crested guans softly calli each other from the trees.  Other small birds sing, chitter, warble.  It’s 6 a.m. and all’s well…

Suddenly, all hell breaks loose.  The guans begin to scream, not call, scream, a continuous and deafening whaa-whaa-whaa!  Five or six or more of them at the same time.  The parrots and parakeets start to scream too, joined by every motmot, oropendola, and every single other bird in the vicinity, all screaming at the top of their lungs.  A band of peccaries comes running through the compound towards the forest.  The howler monkeys, close and far, also screech.  It is really a five-alarm fire, an all-hands-on-deck call, all the alarms at full blast.  What the heck?

We’re already outside the house, going to breakfast.  With our binoculars we scan the trees.  Something is up and we don’t know what it is.  Suddenly it becomes clear.  A very large immature Ornate hawk-eagle (Spizaetus ornatus) is sitting on a branch near the house clearing, watching and listening.  Its body is creamy white, fine black barring on its chest, thick black bars across the underside of its slate-gray tail, two black “teardrop” markings drooping from its eyes, and the all characteristic and diagnostic crest over its head.  The cinnamon colors of the adult are barely starting to show, but it is clear it is an immature, huge, even  gigantic when compared to other local raptors.  Its prey consists normally of other birds and mammals, like monkeys or pacas.  It can take prey a couple of times its size.  No wonder the entire forest went berserk!  Claudia scrambles to the house for the field guide while I watch, deafened by the stridency of the moment.  The eagle finally has enough, spreads its wings, and flies off, stealth be damned.  The entire county knows she’s here.

As soon as if flies silently away, it is like someone pulls the sound plug.  Silence.  Everyone is quiet, watching, waiting.  Is it gone?  Is it safe again?  Can we resume our normal lives?  My questions go in the direction of How can a hawk or an eagle make a living with all these neighborhood watchdogs?  How can it catch anything when at first sight EVERYONE starts screaming BLOODY MURDER IN THE WING!  It is tough to be a predator.  It is fascinating to see a disparate assemblage of animals focus as a single mind to warn off a predator.

We go on towards breakfast, distracted, still looking at the field guide for a positive I.D.  I look at the bromeliad-covered stump next to the trail, the one I look at every single day, with its hummingbird flowers, its poison-dart frogs, playing hide-and-seek-the-little-jewel games amidst the mosses, ferns and dead leaves.  I look up at the larger bromeliad and see two fresh exuviae (larval skins) of a little puzzling dragonfly that appears to live within the tiny ponds of water held on the axils of the plant.  One of them is very dark…too dark…Oh my!  It is the whole larvae that has walked out of the water and is perched on the leaf ready to emerge!  Now I will be able to photograph the event, collect the larval skin and the adult and get a positive identification of this rare species.  We go to breakfast, I eat quickly, get a plastic bag for my collection, and rush back to the bromeliad.  The larvae is already coming out!  Argh!  I’m not ready!  Hold it!  I snap a couple of shots with my little Pentax and run to the house to get my good camera.  Then I park in front of the emerging miracle, snapping pictures, looking around for someone with whom to share this special moment.  Eventually people come by, on a bicycle…screech!  “Wanna see something cool?”  Cameras come out, everyone is watching the miracle of birth (well, not technically correct, more like ecdysis and emergence, but close enough for romantics).  It starts to rain.  Claudia gets an umbrella while I stand dripping getting wet, camera and all.  I decide to cut the section of leaf and take the emerging adult to the office to complete the process.  As I am cutting, the little delicate thing falls down and its teneral, delicate wings get crushed, together with my heart.  Ugh!  Still it is alive, it will complete its hardening and will become a positive record and beautiful pictures of this species on the bromeliads.  I see that its lymph, the insect blood that is pumped to the wings to expand them is jewel green, something I would have never seen if it wasn’t for the accident.  Hours later, the adult is full dry, wings defective, but it is walking around my desk.  I won’t be able to release it (it can’t fly) but it will serve a role in science.

Lunch time comes along.  We walk to the dining hall, commenting on things, species we have seen, the strange, sort-of-disturbing smell of some green orchids by the bridge that only smell at night (Epidendrum hunterianum, or Hunters’s Epidendrum, how original…).  Enrique Castro, our Biodiversity Programs Manager, is also an expert on orchids and he rattles off the name.  however, he was not aware of the smell it disperses only nat night.  What is it trying to attract?  Something to find out, of course.  Inquiring minds want to know!  After lunch I go back to the office just in time to hear a call on the radio.  “Please let don Carlos know that there’s a tropical chameleon on the bridge.”  A what?  A chameleon?  We don’t have chameleons in La Selva!  I grab the radio.  “Copied.  On my way.”  Somehow saying that on the radio makes me feel sillingly important.

I arrive to a crowd on the bridge, tourists snapping pictures, three or four of my staff hanging out pointing, Claudia, a couple of students.  I feel like yelling “OK everyone.  Clear the bridge!  Let me take a look.”  I actually say that in jest to a researcher coming my way, making her guffaw.  I look over the cables, and there it is.  A juvenile bush anole or forest iguana, Polychrus gutturosus, looking a lot like a common green iguana baby, but with an exaggeratedly long brown tail.  It starts to walk hesitantly on the branches, very much like a little chameleon, to which I now see the resemblance.  It goes up and down branches, peeking through the foliage to disappear again, giving me a single opportunity for a so-so photo.  Orlando Vargas, one of the most knowledgeable field biologists I know, and in charge of our scientific operations, explains how rare this is.  In thirty years on the region, he has only seen this species three times.  They tend to live high up in the canopy, coming close to the ground to mate (he saw that once) and disappear again up the trees, where few humans dare tread.

I now sit in my office, looking at my photos, fascinated by the little jewels of biological information gleaned today.  There were more, of course, but these few will make for a memorable day.

Carlos de la Rosa

I stopped the other day on the side of one of La Selva’s long trails and started to take pictures of what was happening on a section of a fallen tree, glued to one sport because there was so much going on.  Three or four groups of people walked by my spot in the hour that followed: two on bird walks (binoculars, spotting scopes, enormous lenses, tripods and knowledgeable guide); one a group of students on a break (water bottles, shorts, loud chatter, not the right kinds of shoes); and one a self-guided tour, (foreign accents, more enormous lenses, photo vests, kaki-clothing throughout, a strong and lingering smell of bug repellent).  Not one of them stop or wondered what I was photographing or observing.  They just walked by, said ”hi” and went on, either looking up for birds or just chatting with each other.  I find that puzzling, mostly because there is so much to see even is a small patch of space, on a tree trunk, under a bunch of wet leaves, along the edge of a trail.  There are many more stories than a bird checklist and I wonder why they are not told more often.

This morning, I decided to go slow-walk on the patch of forest behind the house and look for stories, for drama, see what I could find.  I thought of doing a little experiment: take a small patch, let’s say 10 meter by 10 meter (that’s like ten long step by ten long steps square) and just wonder through it to see what was there.  I spent about 2 hours on this patch, and I couldn’t quite make it all the way through the perimeter, never mind reaching the center or other areas within.  How come?

First of all, this little patch is not simple.  It is three-dimensional, with the height dimension being 40 or 50 meters high.  So as I walk around, things fall from above, flowers, leaves, small branches, feathers.  Frass (a nice way to call “insect poop”) literally rains down continuously.  A small group of caterpillars on a shrub can produce quite a volume of it in a few hours.  On occasion, a branch laden with bromeliads, mosses and whatnots detaches from the parent tree and comes crashing down, veritable “widow-makers” in the forest, and something that researchers and hikers are warned about on some trails near dead giant trees.  Above my head, the bulk of the forest lives and breathes, letting gravity pull down to the ground all of their waste materials and the products of the resident creature’s lives for the soil to recycle them into nutrients again.  The portion of the patch I could easily explore is only a small fraction of the entire “cuboid.”  Without a ladder, ropes or a canopy tower I can only explore what’s on the ground and up to a height of no more than 1.5 meters or so.  That beautiful orange-yellow butterfly that just landed barely 4 meters above my head will escape the prying eyes of my camera or loupe.

But this area, this human-scale cube of forest provides an enormous amount of action, activity, tragedy and comedy.  I notice I walk around in some sort of a pattern: I take a step, watching my feet so as not to step on a snake, a ground-dwelling creature, a poison-dart frog or a pile of peccary dung; then I stop, stand quietly looking around, scanning the area within sight.  Something moves, or emerges from the chaotic pattern, and I stare.  What is it?  Is it alive?  The shape resolves into an animal, a fruit, or an interesting piece of action and I stalk, moving quietly but steadily towards it, camera in position, manually focusing until it is framed and then…

Focus…Click!  Flash!  Wow!  The “wow!” is often part of the reaction, because it is usually unexpected.  A little swaying leaf resolves into an immature praying mantis, its movement an exact mimic of a green leaf moved by the breeze.  Or while looking at one thing, something else comes into the patch I’m watching, like a translucent but brightly colored tortoise beetle landing on a leaf smack in front of my camera.  The “Bio-Files” in my brain make a quick identification (more often than not there’s no data in these files and I’m clueless about what species I’m watching, thus the photos), a package of natural history comes to the conscious level (I recall that the larvae of this particular tortoise beetle feeds on the leaf tissues of certain palms, covering its body with curled strands of its own feces until it resembles a patch of lichen or moss on the leaf), take the photo, shake my head a little (the wow! part) and move on.

This morning I repeat that step, stop, stand, scan a number of times, each of them with amazing results.  I really can do this all day!  I see an extremely large bullet ant, a full inch long if not longer, walking an area foraging, searching, doing its own version of “stop, stand, stare” back at me (all it can probably see is a puzzling, very large piece of round glass a few inches away and sudden bursts of lightning from the twin flashes), giving me the best opportunities to examine it in great detail.  A group of large ants (in the 1/4-inch range size) slowly harvest nectar from the tiny, bulbous flowers of a young palm tree, posing aggressively at my lens when I get too close.  Several species of spiders, jumping spiders, a wolf spider and others, carry out their sit-and-wait strategy, waiting patiently long periods of time on flowers or fruits or leaves for the sudden pounce or rush to the net to bite and paralyze its next hapless meal.  I interrupt one of them as she eats an insect and she ignores me.  Flies land and take off from leaves, the sudden stop of their buzzing triggering in me a spider-like reaction of rushing and pouncing, lens first, on my prey.  Click!  Photo.  Under a leaf moved by a tiny breeze, a shadow resolves into a resting land snail.  Click!  A small ant looks up from something it found, little white spots scattered on a leaf, its mandibles ringed with a white chalky substance making me think “Got Powder?”  Click!  Little flowers growing from the trunk of trees…Click!…the fruits looking familiar…Click!…they look like…oh gosh, tiny cacao fruits!  Click, click!  Must check what species this is.  Step, stop…Something looks like a mosquito…stalk…Click!  A midge, one of my dear little chironomids, sitting here, oh so pretty, on a leaf, with white legs, curled up abdomen, feathery antenna.  Click, click, click!

The hours go by, my shirt is sticky with sweat.  I don’t even care anymore about the buzzing mosquitos around my ears.  If they land on my hand or arm I’ll take a photo of them too.  Tiny mushrooms of all sizes and colors; the discarded molt of a growing spider; a swarm of fungus gnats frozen in death within the invisible strands of a spider web; more ants doing their thing; and then a prize.  I see movement on the ground.  A bluish-black wasp drags a similar-sized spider along the ground, seemingly having difficulties.  I kneel on the wet ground looking for an angle and an explanation, trying not to disturb the wasp.  These wasps hunt spiders or caterpillars to feed their larvae, paralyzing the spiders and packing them in underground chambers or mud retreats (among them the famous pipe-organ wasps) sealing the chambers with a supply of live but paralyzed spiders and one egg, which will feed on this fresh food for weeks until maturity.  The wasps are diverse, from tiny ones, about half an inch or less, to the giant tarantula wasps, two or more inch impressive warriors capable of fighting and paralyzing the enormous and invinvible-looking tarantula.  This one seems to be having troubles dragging the spider. 

I look more closely…The wasp lets go of the spider for a second and I see the spider move backwards!  Wait a second!  What the…?  I look closer still…two, no, three ants have a hold of the spider, one ant holds one spider leg, the other two teamed up on another leg, and they are dragging the spider away.  The wasp comes back and tugs, the ants tug back, three against one.  The wasp lets go and goes after the ants.  One of the ants fights back, enemies with similar weapons, mandibles, stingers, the wasp’s advantage its wings, the ant’s advantage: colleagues!  Two ants chase the wasp while another tugs at the spider.  The wasp retreats and rushes back to the spider and starts dragging it again.  It needs a clear path to its burrow, but the ants go back too, each grab a leg, and the struggle is on again, strengths well-matched.  The spider can fly, but not carrying so much weight.  Neither is giving up.  Finally, the wasp uses its wings to add strength to its pull, jerking hard, dragging the spider and the ants down a hole where they all disappear in a tangle of legs and leaves.  I wait to see if they come back out, but the struggle continues out of sight, leaving me wanting, the story unfinished, probably invisible repeated many times in this forest, thousands of times, thousands of hectares, thousands of species.

Later, at home, I look through the images, gathering more detail, recounting the moments, amazed at the details now splendidly magnified in my screen.  There’s no end to this, there can’t be.  Every patch of ground holds hundreds of stories, processes, species, lives, complex, interacting, irreplaceable, in danger.  From us!

This is why I write and take photos.  I can’t be the only one experiencing this rush, this amazement, bear solitary witness, bewildered and puzzled.  I need an army of observers and recorders, kids and students, photographers and artists, people seeking the thrill of discovering the world at our feet.  Then, perhaps only then, these forests will remain, persist and endure.

Carlos de la Rosa

Photo album for this story at:

What do you do at the sight of danger?  I guess it depends.  If you think you can deal with it, you make a stand and prepare to fight.  If the odds seem against you, you look around and take off running for safety.  If the danger is coming at you from above, you duck.  If at your feet, you jump.  We have all kinds of responses, made in a split second, some evolutionary and quite automatic.  No one really teaches you to duck if something is coming straight at your face.  Some of these reactions are also learned and, depending of the degree of danger, very effective or totally ineffectual.  In the movies we see so many people freeze and stare at the T-Rex coming towards them while our brains scream Run!  Run!  We could write a whole essay about why people react the way they do when faced with danger or a threat.  But what about simpler creatures, like insects?  I always walk around the forest with a camera.  I know, for a fact, that I’m going to see something I have not seen before, a species, an event, a behavior, a rare combination of all of the above.  So, my camera goes with me everywhere and I have been able to capture some very interesting, beautiful and even inspiring moments.  But then, after the pictures, out comes the finger…

After all the photos are taken, the observations made, the notes written down in my tiny notepad, and I’m at that moment of pure, plain and simple observation, I touch.  Gently, carefully, softly to see the reaction.  I have to, I can’t help it.  Sometimes, the creature jumps, which happens often with crickets, grasshoppers and katydids (obviously!), some beetles (like the click-beetles, which add to the jump a surprisingly loud Snap!) and frogs.  Other times, the creature falls down, suddenly and very purposely.  Small beetles do this a lot, as do some caterpillars, which often curl, wiggle and freeze before losing or letting go of their grip and dropping to the ground.  Butterflies and moths tend to take off in flight, but some freeze and drop, as if stricken with an electric charge, staying in this “I’m quite dead” stage for quite long periods.  Some creatures flash, false eye spots, patches of intense color, usually a warning color like red or yellow, brightly-colored underwings, or a feature of their anatomy intended to surprise or scare or simply distract.  The interesting thing is that, given the enormous diversity of animals out there, one is never quite sure what its reaction is going to be.  Which is, of course, the whole point!  That second of surprise, that moment of revelation that makes the attacker pause and wonder “Should I be worried about this?” gives the defending individual perhaps the critical instants it needs to escape, hide or deflect the attack.  It is, truly, a matter of life and death.

Some animals go well beyond the simple behaviors and adaptations.  Some of the “Freezers” use extraordinary camouflage to support their behavior, like the leaf-mimic katydids.  They have taking this to an art form, imitating colors, leaf venation, rot spots, fungus, lichens and mosses.  Add to that, body position (if you’re going to be a leaf, stand like a leaf!) and movements (some sway as if moved by a soft breeze, like some walking sticks).  And if all else fails, they jump or drop or twist or pretend to be dangerous.  My absolutely favorite, my hero of disguise, is a species of hawk moth of the genus Hemeroplanes (Sphingidae) that has taken the mimicry strategy to unbelievable lengths.  I have encountered them in the forest and, after the obligatory photos and observations did the finger thing.  I knew what was going to happen, I was prepared for the spectacular change, I had the whole thing predicted and expected, and still…

The caterpillar looks like a normal, big, fat, healthy thing, going about its business of eating leaves.  Upon encountering a disturbance, such as a bird or a prying human finger, first it freezes, pauses in its activity and waits.  If the perturbation persists, it suddenly transforms, uncannily, unbelievably and extraordinarily, into a very credible viper.  Its body twists so the underside (legs and belly) shows up; its legs gather together to form head scales; its head hunches down to form the tip of a nose; its thorax (the front part of the body) swells in the shape of a pit viper’s head, suddenly displaying two large, menacing, very natural looking pair of eyes, piercing, even with the expected “eye shine” or reflection of true eyes.  Your heart skips a beat at the sudden transformation, but the caterpillar doesn’t stop there.  It swings, jerkily, from side to side, “striking” like a viper would.  My hand jerked backwards, well before I could even think of doing anything else, my reptilian brain taking over and watching out for my survival, saving me from my own stupidity of sticking my hand in front of a viper, pretend or not.

This is one of the most impressive, unforgettable displays you can witness in the tropical forest (and believe me, there are many!), one that will linger in your memory long after the embarrassment of having been fooled, again, every time, by a simple, wonderfully adapted, extraordinary hawk moth caterpillar.

Carlos de la Rosa

Many smells encountered in the forest are expected: the smell of fresh, wet soil, warm and earthy, for example.  Or the smell of the rain evaporating form warm surfaces, carrying with it the essence of the soil, the leaf litter and the vegetation.  Often, walking on a trail, one encounters a perfume, a delicate scent of a flowering tree, usually hidden somewhere within the foliage, its perfume permeating a small patch, carried by soft, imperceptible breezes and diffuse air currents.  Often too, the smells are more like odors, like the pungent, lingering tang of a passing band of peccaries, disturbingly close to the smell of ripe (very ripe) human sweat.  Orchids produce aromas that remind us at times of bouquets, or a hint of vanilla, or perhaps a scent that seems familiar but that we can’t quite recognize.  Ripe fruits carry with them sticky aromas, sugary or syrupy, attractive in a little sick way, like an overripe mango.  These smells attract wildlife of all types, from mammals to butterflies, birds and flies.

Many smells are definitely not pleasant, like the unmistakable smell of decaying flesh, arising not only from dead animals (where you would expect this smell to come from), but often from flowers, or plant tissues, which attract flesh or carrion-eating insects and creatures that get fooled by this most unusual but logical adaptation.  Smells like those produced by insects, like stinkbugs, can also be highly unpleasant, clearly geared towards interrupting a potentially deadly predatory attack from a bird, or a small mammal.  Nothing like a spray of caustic, horribly smelling liquid into your mouth to take the hunger pangs away, completely.

And then, there are those unusual, unique, rare and often hard to explain smells, those produced by numbers, behaviors, or by processes.  Like the overpowering smell of tens of thousands adult caddisflies emerging at once from a river and swarming around your head at a light trap.  Or the scent (if it is even a scent) of pheromones produced by insects and other animals, that trigger behaviors in potential mates that take over their entire beings, a drive to reproduce at all costs.  Or the often talked about “smell of fear” not really knowing what that smell is or even what it is like.  I’ve felt it a few times, in myself and in animals, while in the forest, at night, often alone, exposed to a sudden other smell that trigger a fear reaction.  Once I ran unexpectedly into a browsing group of peccaries in the forest while walking downwind of them.  When they realized I was there, they went off into a frenzied and noisy scape through the understory vegetation, crashing and snorting, leaving behind a trail of runny feces and a persistent pungent smell, stronger and longer-lasting than what they normally produce.  My reaction, also of surprise and no small amount of fearful shock , sent a sudden shot of adrenaline into my system, which sharpened my senses and prepared me to run, a typical fight-or-flight ancestral response. 

But more poignant and effective, also in similar circumstances, was the perception of a smell that reached even deeper into my human condition.  Working on a patch of forest, next to a small stream in the northern Costa Rican province of Guanacaste, distracted by the work at hand (picking aquatic insects emerging form the stream attracted to a bright set of fluorescent white and black lights) I suddenly detected the strong smell of a wild cat.  Blinded by the hours-long staring at the white sheet illuminated by the lights, I turned towards the forest, stepping closer to my bubble of light, the hairs in my arms and neck standing on end, sweat beading on my forehead and dripping down my face; my armpits itched and sweated, my whole body flushed with adrenaline.  Thoughts were not necessary.  I didn’t have to think about what I was feeling or about what I was going to do.  I wasn’t even thinking at all, just feeling the primitive thought of something out there that can kill me, something that thought of me perhaps as food, perhaps just curious, perhaps not, and the increasing desire to bolt.  That something caused my ears to buzz, my heartbeat to accelerate and pound on my eardrums, my gut to soften (which, in retrospect, explains at least a little the physiology of the panicking running peccaries and what they left behind), and the unmistakable sense of being at a serious disadvantage in someone else’s territory.  It was terrifying as it was thrilling, primal, atavistic, animal.  My body reflected all of these sudden changes, quickly enveloping my senses with a different smell, one that mixed with the now fainting smell of predator.  I smelled my own scent, pungent and sudden, the smell produced by a body in distress, a system on alert, a predator turned into potential prey, dread and alarm.  The smell of fear.

I often think that our senses are puny compared to those of other animals.  We don’t have a great nose, even though we can distinguish and discriminate subtle nuances in wines and perfumes.  Many other animals can do much, much better.  A moth can detect a single molecule of scent from a female of its species and follow it to its source; another can follow the plume of scent of a night-blooming cactus from over a mile away.  Us, we’re nose-blind in comparison with these champions.  However, we can still be overwhelmed, excited, paralyzed, enchanted, puzzled, scared, enthralled and delighted by the scents of the forest on a warm afternoon hike after a rain.

Carlos de la Rosa

This is a link to my ongoing photo-posts on facebook, chronicling flora and fauna found at the La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, where I now live.  Let me know what you think!

Carlos

(1) La Selva Chronicled

I’m walking down one of the narrower trails at the La Selva Biological Station, in Costa Rica.  On either side of the trail there is a literal wall of vegetation, a range of greens going from the pale lime tones of fresh leaves on the tips of shrubs, through the pea-shaded smooth leaves of vines and their paler tendrils that curl relentlessly on anything they touch; to the jades and olives and emeralds of older leaves, mosses, grasses and even swaths of bark.  Within this riotous vegetation, a comparable—if not larger—palette of browns cover the gamut from the deep dark tones of wet soil, through the umber tones of rotting leaves, the hazel shades of different barks, the whimsical corky wings of vines thick as a baby’s arm, to the fawnish tones of fallen leaves, carrying with them the brighter tones of yellows, oranges and reds.  Through gaps in this wall, a dark, dripping and richly scented forest beckons, a place to get lost easily, ensnared in its incredible biological wealth.

Within this extraordinary setting flowers unfurl like gaudily lit ornaments, reflecting all shades of red, yellow, blue, purple and white, loudly making their silent calls to the insects and animals that will get attracted to them and which, in the process of getting a reward of nectar or pollen or both, pollinate them.  On top of leaves, creatures sit still, camouflaged, cryptic and even invisible, as if waiting for something to happen: a mate to find them; a predator to avoid; a food source to exploit; a moment to hatch or a violent instant to die.  Everywhere you observe closely, you find evidence of one of two processes: eating or reproduction.  Out here in the forest is all about food and sex.

On top of a mossy leaf, a slight discontinuity calls my attention.  It is barely perceptible, almost like a bump on the leaf.  Upon close inspection, a fairly large immature katydid sits motionless on the leaf, legs stretched behind it, antenna twice as long as its two-inch body lying like hairs along the leaf’s central vein.  The patterns in its developing body (still showing wing buds, tiny facsimiles of the adult wings that will soon develop) matches with uncanny perfection the patterns of the leaf it sits on, mossy, licheny, irregular, but so exactly matched.  I aim my camera and flash at it, struggling to find it in the viewfinder and worse, focus on it, and then, after the explosion of light, an interesting phenomenon reveals itself.  Lit by the light produced by the flash, the katydid is quite obvious and differently colored than the leaf it rests on.  So much that I do a double take from the camera’s screen to the leaf and back again thinking I managed to photograph a separate katydid than the one I was aiming to.  The camera’s flash reveals a brightness, a reflectance, and even shades of color not evident under the natural light of the forest.  The katydid is invisible only under the organic, green-tinted light of this special place in the forest.  Any other place, under any other kind of light, the insect would be evident, glaring even, exposed and, thus, prey.  Eaten.  Dead.

Another leaf, another bump.  This time, a caterpillar lies motionless along the mid-rib of a green and brown pockmarked leaf.  The caterpillar blends in by matching color, tone, shape and even the brown spots seen in the surrounding leaf.  How long did it take it to find this perfect match?  How does it know it has achieved a perfect blend?  The questions emerge unfiltered, anthropomorphic at times, unsolvable except by the universal rules of nature.  Given the forest dweller’s remarkable abilities to blend in, to be concealed, inconspicuous and veiled produced by the shaping forces of natural selection, how do creatures find themselves to mate, to prey upon, to avoid being preyed upon, and to reproduce?

The forest is in constant motion, all its inhabitants, plant and animal, engaged in a seemingly random symphony of action, orchestrated in shifts, diurnal, nocturnal, crepuscular, summer, fall, winter; with defined and often reversed roles of predator, prey, mate, contender, challenger, enemy, sibling, parasite, scavenger; all species with special tools to survive, even thrive, within incredibly tight energy budgets, where mistakes are paid in blood, lymph, or sap; where success is measured in nutrients, nectar, pollen, flesh, tissue, or simply by the ability to survive and live another day.  Creatures intersect each other’s lives and feed or hide, crawl under or fly through, capture or avoid, copulate or perish unfertilized, bursting with the primal instinct of being.  The rich budget of the forest and its teeming diversity appears to endure, in spite of all the lives seemingly cut short, the eggs that don’t hatch or get eaten; the larvae that fail to pupate, gets parasitized or feeds a bird’s nestlings; the seed that gets consumed before it germinates; the sapling that starves before it reaches the life-giving sun; the tree that falls and brings down with it an entire living ecosystem, now lost and rotting in the soaked horizontality of the forest floor.  Every demise engenders life and directs back into the system energy and nutrients.  The symphony of life prevails.

The characters of the forest find each other by their sheer numbers, by their highly developed senses, by their specializations and their adaptations, by their synchronicity and their timing, by sight, and sound, and smell, in a bewildering sensory range that spans the sub-levels to the ultra-levels.  We wander through this rich landscape with our own limited sensory range, like half-blinded explorers, seeing a lot but missing most of it.  So, one answer to the initial question is, slow down and smell, touch, hear and see, taste and feel the forest around you.  Eventually, if you wait long enough, you’ll find each other.

Carlos de la Rosa

09 April 2012

Don’t Step on the Leaf-Cutter Ants

You get used to it. Walking about on a mossy, wet trail (the equivalent of a sidewalk at the field station) you encounter a diagonal line of little bits of leaves, sticks and fragments of flowers crossing the path in front of you. They move jerkily but unwavering, going from the source—a tree or shrub that can be dozens of feet away—to the inconspicuous entrance to their massive subterranean labyrinth. There, the leaves and flowers and other organic mater will be chewed, mushed and tenderly placed on a special chamber to serve as the growing bed of a nutritious fungus, the ants main source of food. You step over them carefully and hope everyone, all those busy researchers, students, staff, cleaning crews and others also see them and avoid squashing them too.

In the forest, you walk with a similar care, at least I do. I watch where I step, avoiding branches that snap and make sharp cracking noises, give berth to solitary ants that roam through the leaf litter or the inconspicuous insect whose defense is to stay still to avoid detection; or even the very conspicuous frog, strawberry red and azure blue, that moves in the nick of time as your foot heads towards it. Life abounds, crawls, slithers and rests in every crevice, nook, cranny and pocket, and it is up to you to interact with it gently and with care.

Deep in the forest, the places we leave our literal footprints are even more important, lest you step on something that bites you back or gets permanently harmed by our substantial biomass. You avoid the tender seedlings struggling in deadly competition for the meager sunlight that barely reaches the forest floor; watch for the splashes of delicate tiny fungi, like small gray buttons balancing on wire-thin stems; anticipate the small salamander or frog that rests under a small pile of leaves, never knowing how close you could have come from squashing it. At night, the light of your flashlight illuminates a square foot of surface at a time, wavering, searching, not lingering at any spot for more than a second, until it encounters a reflection, an eye-shine, an anomaly. Then it focuses its harsh beam to allow our meager night vision to define what we could only briefly decipher.

I watch for these things when I’m in the forest. I swerve around seedlings for they may one day become the giants of the forest; I dodge the large hanging palm leaves for they may be the shelter to a wasp nest or a small colony of snowy-white bats; I step over a rotting log for I know it harbors a small world of interacting creatures. I’m retraining my eyes to see again, to decipher and resolve, to focus and distinguish what I once knew by heart but is now semi-lost in the recesses of my memories. The large immersive blob of green ad brown biomass that greets the first-time visitor to the tropical forest slowly comes into focus with recurrent exposure. With time, the details become clearer like a lifting fog, your eyes adjusting, sending better and better signals to your brain which accumulates, sorts and catalogs your sights. Your ears become attuned to the sounds, their direction and their source. Smells become names, shapes become species, colors become warnings or attractants, movement is focused on instantly. Your peripheral vision expands and sharpens, and eventually, often taking oh so long, you become a naturalist, a person that can recognize and visualize what is invisible to most other people. You master a new language made out of sounds, shapes, colors, scents and textures, and this language spills volumes of information into the canvas of the primary forest. Learning this language can take a lifetime, but how much wiser we become once we master the native tongue of the forest.

Carlos

 07 April 2012
La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica

Long Hike, Short Distance

I just can’t help it.  I start walking down a trail and within a few seconds something moves, shimmers, rustles, calls or sticks out and I have to investigate.  Camera in hand is a great way to experience the forest for me.  Every encounter possible gets recorded, photographically and in notes, to be analyzed, studied, identified and shared later.  And these are only the ones where I can actually get a decent photo.  The majority of the encounters are fleeting, high up in the canopy, far in the distance, or too quick to register on film (digitally, I mean).  Today Claudia and I set out on one of the main trails into the preserve, the Stream Trail.  Even before we started, we discovered a group of poison-dart frogs hopping, calling and interacting with each other on an old, moss and vegetation-covered rotting stump, right on the mowed yard near our house.  What can I do?  I spent the next 20 minutes crawling around on the soft, wet ground, looking for best photo angles, watching, chasing (without disturbing), and photographing these tidbits of natural history, thinking of all of the accumulated knowledge on this species that I have and how that would make an essay (nee, a book) on its own.  Add to this that this species is the subject of a project right here at the station, where they are discovering and testing amazing theories on this species’ reproductive behaviors, and I’m hooked.  The stories are endless.

On our short hike, we enjoyed being immersed in the morning normal activities and sounds of the forest animals.  The nearly deafening trill of thousands of cicadas recently emerged from their years-long underground lives, ebbed and changed in intensity as we moved along the trail, at times almost too loud to allow conversation.   Howler monkeys foraged high up a fruiting tree, surrounded by the gurgles of oropéndolas, the chatter of toucans and toucanets, and the small rain of debris coming down as a product of their work.  Within the forest, a low “whoomp” sound, diffused and mysterious revealed itself later to be the call of the male curassow.  There was a lot happening high up in the trees, and we, ground-bound creatures, could only look up against the bright sky and see the shadows and hear the sounds.  It was like watching a very fun party through a glary window from across the street.  Peccaries crossed the trail undisturbed by our presence; butterflies zoomed past us like flying swatches of bright color in their apparently purposeful journeys; a bullet ant foraged across a fallen log unperturbed by a column of termites moving across an open space, something you seldom see; a dead frog on the trail became a dining hall, carrion beetles carousing, feeding and even mating in the smelly gore, flies of several kinds and even a small golden bee partaking on the rotting feast.  Nothing will be wasted.

I lingered in several places, observing the activities around me.  On a fallen, rotting log, a bubbling slime covered the exposed inner section of the trunk, creating a slick and smelly resource for fruit flies, butterflies and other insects.  Smelling a bit like a slightly off brewery (hopsy and alcoholic), I imagine a few drunken creatures nursing tiny headaches this week.  On top of the fallen log, a veritable garden of mosses, small seedlings, tiny flowers, pockets filled with moisture and decaying leaves, miniature “swamps” populated by its own special fauna.  A medium-sized fly with beautifully patterned wings displayed and danced to a smaller and shy female that watched the show mesmerized from under a fallen leaf.  The male turned this way and that, tracing semi-circles in the miniature clearing in front of the female, beating and flexing his wings like a minute bodybuilder or a dancer.

Everywhere I looked there was something to be observed and recorded.  A helicopter damselfly of a species I had not seen before fluttered in its special slow way and finally landed on a leaf, the apparent weight of its slender and long body pointing to the ground.  Stealthily I got to within a couple of inches of it, taking pictures, admiring its colors and stripes.  It flew off and started foraging, hunting little spiders between the thick tangles of vegetation.  Again, my mental library on overdrive, I reviewed in high speed all the knowledge I have of these species, and as usual, I’m left wanting, curious, puzzled and hungry to learn more.  Another species, a dragonfly this time, landed on a small branch and began to clean herself.  Blue eyed, green stripped thorax, brown and black abdomen with a deep yellow spot near its caudal end, the specimen was a veritable color palette among the brown tones of the forest floor.  And then another species landed nearby.  It went on like this for hours.

These nature walks, armed with a camera, binoculars and a few other accessories, are not just a pleasure and an adventure, but for me they are a necessity.  Sweating profusely, holding still while a mosquito buzzes and lands on my ear, resisting the innate survival instinct to swat it off my face while waiting for the right moment to snap the photo is something I forced myself to learn out of the simple love for capturing and telling the stories.  It is what drives me and thousands of other scientists, naturalists, and outdoors people.  In a world overwrought with ugly human affairs, politics, mayhem and failing economies, global crises and wars, these natural places, these refuges for biodiversity must, should and could play a more important role in our lives.  They were our past, our origins and our habitats; they have the potential to be an important part of our future, as our pharmacies, classrooms, and source of intellectual wealth.  Today they are threatened to become relicts, only to be studied by a few, enjoyed as an exhibit by others, and valued as not much more than  a large pile of lumber, dirt and as places to grow meat, crops and buildings by a vast majority.  But within, inside and around these wild places, there is a breadth and depth of natural history that simply blows our small minds, filled with potential and possibilities.  As humans, we need these places to survive and to thrive.  My job now is to make sure more and more people learn this simple but powerful lesson.  And, truly, we could have a lot of fun learning it too!

Carlos

05 April 2012

The new routines are starting to set in.  We go to breakfast in the dining hall, on the other side of the suspension bridge, a short, 5 minute walk across the well-tended grounds of the La Selva Biological Station.  It is a short walk with a specific purpose, from the house to the hall and then back across the bridge, making a left on the trail, and heading around the clearing to the old lab where my new office is.  Birds call from within the trees, fleeting blurs of movement and color, the scarlet streak of the red-rumped tanager; the yellow shimmer of an unidentified little warbler; the iridescent flash of a hummingbird.

But the little walks are also characterized by changing smells, bits of biology and physics mixed together in small, tropical olfactory puzzles.  The collared peccaries that nonchalantly roam the grounds of the field station looking for fruits, seeds, insects and just about anything else edible, smell like a bad case of BO.  It is their normal, distinctive smell, the one that makes you think “the piggies are somewhere close” well before you see them.  In areas where they are hunted, they flee at the sound or sight of humans, leaving behind a powerful trail of stink that lingers well after the crashing sounds of their escape fade away.

Then there are those hard to describe smells of certain plants, whiffs that hit you as you walk by and make you pause, digging into your memory for a trace of recognition.  They smell somewhat familiar, a little disgusting, vulgar even, almost recognizable but elusive.  You walk on, looking around, sniffing the air like an ancestral creature, nose up in the air, resentful of your meager human olfactory resources, wishing to have the nose of a hound or a pig.  Many plants carry smells well beyond the scent (or stink) of their flowers.  There are flowers that smell like rotting flesh, attracting flies and other decaying-tissue feeders, tricking them into a spate of pollination and perhaps frustration for the visiting insect.  Other flowers, like orchids, range in scents from the pleasurable to the disgusting, all geared towards attracting a certain species of insect or other creature, for which the smell is a powerful incentive to visit.

The forest is filled with smells and scents, perfumes and fragrances.  Some are accidental and rather purposeless, like the smell of wet soil and leaf litter, musty, earthy and pleasant; others redolent of old times, childhoods spent hiking and camping in the tropics experiencing for the first time the independence of home and parents; the miasma of a small swampy spot, its stagnant water thick with algae, rotting vegetation and bacteria.  We trek through this forested stage somewhat as aliens (perhaps returning aliens) long detached from the essential skills for survival in this environment, filled with puzzling atavistic memories, fears and instincts kicking-in in surprising ways.  It is yet another way to connect to our roots, to the environments that nurtured us and gave us food, medicine and shelter.  I only wish I had a Smell Camera, so these essential pieces of the forest could be recorded and shared like we do photographs.  For the time being, I’ll have my nose, my memories and my words to record and share the scents of the tropical forest.

Carlos