Storming in the Tropics
By now, y’all may have picked up on the pattern but a new site means new projects! The birders (Clay, Adam, and Caroline) got their start at 5:00am. In second place came the insect team (Alex, Matt, and Porter + MT who joined them to set up trail cameras) that woke up at 5:30 to set out their traps.
Everyone else woke up on their own for 7:00am breakfast. After breakfast, your favorite ecologists split up into 2 groups to go on a guided walk around La Selva. One group was entertained by spider AND howler monkeys as well as a bat and plenty of poison dart frogs. The other group saw 3 eyelash vipers, a few poison dart frogs, and a wild researcher named Diego who told us all about his amazing soil climate science (you should have seen how his face lit up when talking about his work).
After the walk, we had lunch before tackling our Gentry transects. At lunch some members of the group got into a passionate discussion about the best music, with both Porter and Jeremy agreeing that heavy metal is the best genre. The rice and beans did their duty and fueled us through four transects in ~2 hours, our personal best. This feat was made even more impressive by the fact it was pouring rain. The rain was so strong (tropical rainforest, am I right?), Porter and Alex almost dumped out their whole insect samples.
After dinner, Ron Coleman gave a fantastic presentation about fish parental care! We learned so much about such a unique topic most of us had never thought about before. Parents reading this can sleep easy knowing their children are actually learning something! This was the perfect night cap to a long day, and everyone was ready for a well-deserved night of sleep ( a short night unfortunately because everyone had their early wake ups all over again the next day). Here at La Selva, we are all working on research projects we proposed during the semester in addition to our other projects. We have a lot of work to do during these next few days, but everyone is excited and ready to do some real science!
Warmest regards,
The blog squad <3
YAY love it! go science!