Field Research Update: Wrapping Up!

It's been a busy week since I last posted a fieldwork update! Unfortunately, my camera conked out a while before that, so my illustrative ability will be lower than usual. Fortunately, persistent emails to NIKON finally convinced someone to reassure me that my warrantee will probably cover whatever has happened to it, even if I can't ship it till a few days after the warrantee expires. Probably.

Despite being outside of the U.S., I had a fantastic Thanksgiving at La Selva Biological Station. We had a long field day there, with a 1.5 hour hiking commute and a lot of rain and mud. It rained most of the day while we were out, so when we returned the next day a lot of the lowland trails were flooded. We found an eel swimming down one of our trails the next day! After the long day and a bit of rest, we were treated to a truly fantastic Costa Rican hybrid Thanksgiving feast. About 40 people were in attendance, and there were tables and tables laden with side dishes and desserts. My favorite was a turkey carved out of pineapple! We drank ginger chicha and I my entree was a tomato baked with basil, spinach, and cheese. Short of being with family, it was the best Thanksgiving I could hope for.

La Selva was a great place to look for animals; notable sightings include two Leptophis nebulosis (Oliver's parrotsnake) and a Bothriechis schlegelii (eyelash viper). Very cool! Also saw some unidentifiable bats and a lot of glass frogs.

Bothriechis schlegelii

The following week was the last one available for fieldwork, and we tried to squeeze in as much as possible. At one sight, we had a ball of a time hopping down an almost-too-large river using boulders. Low sightings there due to rain, but I did see my first wild Thecadactylus rapicauda (turnip-tailed gecko)!

Thecadactylus rapicauda

Our last site of the season here, we did a double: day and night surveys in the same day. The stream transects were absolute slogs; we split to either side of the river and I spent too much of the searching time whacking at grass and brambles taller than myself, trying to follow the riparian corridor. We finished early enough to head back to town for a special pizza dinner before heading back out in slightly-damp field clothes for our night surveys. I had good luck catching anoles by hand, something I've been working on the whole trip. It's really, really helpful to do it at night, when they are slowed by sleep and cold! Land transects in the pasture were unsurprisingly unfruitful, but we were on a big beautiful piece of land and had a small audience of horses and (friendly!) cows for a lot of our ramblings.

It was a great field season: I learned a lot about herpetofauna sampling techniques and systematics, Costa Rica flora and fauna, swamp locomotion, dissertation structure, and lots more!

Bucket List: See Sloths

It might not be a good bucket list entry if I've already seen one (does a distant blur in the jungle room of Montreal's amazing Biodome count?), but I am in love with sloths. Like, not so far from Kristen Bell-level in love with sloths:

Well, I'm within a day's travel of this sanctuary. I'm always going to be a little dubious about tourism-oriented "rehab" operations, but if the background research checks out and this is a legitimate rescue and education operation, I am sooooooo interested in going:

Bullet Ant Inspired Experiments at La Selva Biological Station (Video)

Check out this video about a bullet ant experiment performed right at our very own La Selva Biological Station. La Selva, run by the Organization for Tropical Studies, is the home of many of our research sites.

The video has some cool shots of bullet ants, the old growth and late-stage secondary forests we are working in for the herp project, and offers a cool example of what visiting graduate students might do in a visiting course with OTS.

If you're interested in the liquid/solid protein confusion on the part of the bullet ants, here is the publication referenced in the video. InsideScience.org did an explanatory piece that's not behind a paywall.

Stung by a Bullet Ant! All About 'Paraponera clavata' And Why They Are Scary

Well, it was likely to happen. If most of my work here is bushwhacking through the jungle, brushing up against trees and walking slowly and poking around with a stick, I was bound to tick something off. And tick it off I did!

The sting of the bullet ant, Paraponera clavata, is rated as the most painful hymenopterid sting on the planet (more than a factor of 10 more painful than your average wasp sting, according to the Schmidt sting pain index. It contains a neurotoxic peptide named for the genus, poneratoxin, which blocks the voltage-gated sodium ion channels in the muscle and causes slow and extremely painful slow muscle contractions.

I must either have gotten a glancing or light sting (or stung by a sister species?), because what I experienced was not incapacitating; it peaked at an 8/10 on the pain scale. The pain lasted a little over 2 hours, subsided for about an hour, and returned again in a very painful way for about 90 minutes. The surge-and-subside pattern of pain persisted into the night, but didn't interrupt my sleep. The sting site was numb and inflamed on the day, and twinged throughout the next day. I still have a mental twinge response whenever I see a bullet ant crawling around!

And crawl around they do. They generally nest at the base of large trees (the riskiest place to tick them off), but they forage far and wide, including into places that seem like they should be safe (near other ant nests, swamps, streams, bare earth, etc).

These guys are pretty cool, and I'm definitely researching them a bit more on the side. Here's a short video that I took of one doing something with some kind of nematode:

Harvesting the nematode? Being parasitized by nematode? I need better footage and a parasitic entomologist, please!

Additional videos of the infamous bullet ant glove ritual:

End of November Recommended Reads

I link to some of my favorite recent papers and stories from around the news feed.

Territorial poison frogs (like the kind I'm working with regularly) can navigate back home if they're moved somewhere else within a familiar area, demonstrating a type of spatial learning not previously known in amphibians. A useful skill, considering that the males of Allobates femoralis move as much as 180m (a lot for a tiny frog!) to drop their tadpoles off in a water source for them to grow.

Environment360 breaks news on a report declaring that the U.S. can cut greenhouse gas emissions according to the "80% by 2050" goal using existing technologies.

"As species decline, so does research funding" at LA Times. Dr. Terrie Williams on being the butt of willful political misrepresentation. (via SmallPondScience). Brings me back to when presidential candidate Senator McCain went after the genetic research of the continental U.S.'s largest endangered carnivore as "pork-barrel spending."

Noah Bonsey makes some suggestions to modify the Obama administration's IS strategy in Foreign Policy.

Charles C. Mann argues in this misleadingly-titled Wired piece that space travel is an exorbitant venture that probably must be funded without expectation of recouped costs. "Exploration of distant lands will be a short-lived venture unless it yields something really, really valuable."

Dan Ackerman explains the idea of the "interspecies internet" at Conservation Magazine.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, quantum chemist, and arguably most powerful woman in the world, is profiled in The New Yorker. (via Longform's Picks)

Field Research in a Field: Very Unfriendly Cows, Many Glass Frogs, and a Nice Dog

We recently completed a set of pastures sites attached to an idyllic set of casitas. Arriving on a Sunday, we found a large extended family or two relaxing-- kids in the river, senoritas to abuelitas in the shade of the porch. They were mildly interested in the gringas wanting to look for frogs on a sunny weekend, but not at all taken aback; this land had been used for other studies by scientists before us. After a very steep climb up the hill, we were greeted by fantastic views of just-as-steep neighboring hills to distant mountains half-obscured by clouds. The sun beat down as we headed off in search of our three land and three stream transect sites. Selecting the land sites is pretty easy; we pre-select some well-spaced tree or patch and a random angle to start from and go. We are usually more limited on stream availability; this site didn't have too many, so we spent a lot of time walking around the hills trying to find some streams of consistent size.

Our plans were severely complicated by a few groups of cattle that were, shall we say, not thrilled to see people creeping through their home. Our first interaction with the cattle involved an unyielding bull-- we skirted him and his herd and went on our way, hugging the fence. Later in our expedition, we descended into a valley bounded by a large river. Cattle faces poked over the ridge. The cows and calves jostled each other for a view, the bull guarding them started getting pissy and making some very deliberate eye contact and incremental movements towards us. Then, the herd started meandering in our direction, despite our hoots and hollers. I broke out my garbage bag, waved my stick, made threatening yells and "you're in trouble" sounds that would stop any horse in its tracks. But these cows, they did not care. They approached. The bull glared some more. He swung his head and stomped his hooves. After some hasty deliberations and calculated risk assessment (skirt around the herd to unknown pastures on the other side of the hill?), we retreated into the river and crept along its banks to a cow-free pasture. From then on, we didn't stray far from fences or thick vegetation in case of marauding cattle.

It was a fairly fruitless day; we had started transects later in the day than usual, didn't find much (as expected in day surveys of pasture), and didn't get all of our transects set up due to cow interference. We returned in midafternoon the next day to finish our day transects before dusk and night surveys. We were immediately befriended by two pups, one of whom latched onto us and kept us company the whole time! He was a little guy, white with polka-dotted ears, and looked like the product of an italian greyhound and a jack russel, but with a curly tail. We ate our dinner on a cow-free ridge, and he stole our apple cores and probably scared some frogs away. Something to incorporate into the model! (Every time something changes or goes wrong, I joke that it needs to be incorporated into the model. Models are without limits! Infinite variables means it's accurate, right?)

We had a good night, spotting three species of glass frogs, an unidentified snake, a juvenile Rana warszewitschii, a giant fishing spider, and a marmosa (mouse opposum) that was missing most of a tail! A small swampy area on the side of a hill proved to hold not only tons of frogs but a large population of fish. I wonder how they survive the dry season-- mud burrowing?

"Lithobates warszewitschii" by Brian Gratwicke - Flickr: Lithobates warszewitschii. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Fun Fact: The Term For Ant Forage Is...

In my preparation for an upcoming entry on bullet ants and their habits, I've discovered something amazing:

Harkening back to pirates, many articles on ant foraging refer to foraged resources as... ant "booty."
Teehee!

Neighbors Across the Road: Foals, Cattle, and... a Water Buffalo?

I much prefer to "live like a local" when traveling, as much as is possible while remaining a transient field biologist! A lot of researchers stay at research stations or in communal housing, but for a longer-term project it can be much cheaper to rent a local house-- luckily this is just such an arrangement. The house is a 5-minute drive from a small town and a 15-minute drive from a large town, and with all the tourists seeming to remain exclusively in the handful of ecolodges nearby, I am getting a sample of the real Pura Vida. Our bumpy dirt road is frequented by cars, buses, enormous trucks, tour buses to be parked at the drivers' houses for the night, dirtbikes, people on horseback, wheelbarrows, and bicyclists and pedestrians. Just on the other side of that road:

Yes, that's a water buffalo. From behind it looks not at all dissimilar from a rhino in size and color. No, I have no idea why there's a water buffalo.

The Research Week in Photos: Coral Snake, Glass Frogs, and Tadpoles in Trees

When out bushwacking in the forest, you have to be careful of vines, thorns, and creepy-crawlies that don't appreciate your intrusions. Here's an ant with cool mandibles that remind me of a hammerhead shark:

A handsome tarantula (gearing up for a fight with a contender a few feet away, actually!). The measurements are from my new best friend: a PVC pipe that serves multiple roles as yardstick for stream- and perch-height measurements, hiking stick, and poking-in-search-of-hidden-animals.

Here is a net-casting spider, which uses web strung between its front legs to ambush prey from above:

We crossed paths with a very graceful, shy coral snake the other day. Gorgeous! Went streaking off into the woods as soon as we noticed each other.

I had the opportunity to check out some glass frogs, too! They are so cool: transparent skin, green bones, semi-visible internal organs.

They lay their eggs on the undersides of leaves that hang over water. Once the tadpoles outgrow their eggs, they fall into the stream below. Check out these unhatched tadpoles:

This is a Norops humilis, a ground anole we catch pretty often. To get their SVL (snout-to-vent length) and some good body-proportion photos, we momentarily press them up against a plastic tray and take a few photos.

A lot of my desk work is using a program called ImageJ to calibrate the scale in this photo to measure the different body proportions of some focal species. When the study is complete, it should yield some interesting data on how the morphology of these species changes over time based on habitat and location.

Environmental Outreach, Our Coffee Snake, & The Squirrel Cuckoo and Other Fancy Birds

Last week, we participated in a big environmental festival at La Selva Biological Station. I made the acquaintance of a bunch of researchers and spent most of the day sitting at our booth, showing young people a handful of frogs, tortoises, lizards, and a very tolerant red coffee snake (Ninia sebae). Here's the little guy getting a drink of water before we released him back home:

It was a great chance to brush up on my Spanish and herp-related vocabulary.
"No, no, este culebra no es venemosa."
"Pueden ver las ranas en esos picturas? Hay uno en cada pictura, pero las tienen mucho camuflaje y estan muy dificil a encontrar."
"Esto es una rana arbórea de ojos rojos."
Repeat ad nauseam, answer questions.

But really. there were thousands of people there, most of them school-aged children with their families. It was great to see such big turnout, and it gave me a good feeling to see a community so interested in their wildlife and local environment.

There was also traditional dancing and bouncy castles, so that was a nice entertainment bonus for everyone in attendance:

We shared an area with a couple of bat researchers, who had a great little setup showing how mist-nets are used. We chatted about techniques and I got to scope out their central american bat books. So many phyllostomids here!

I went on a couple of walks throughout the day.

My first walk, I was lucky enough to befriend a friendly birder on an ecotourism / naturewatching vacation, and he very helpfully told me the names of all the exceptionally fancy birds we saw. I hadn't brought my camera, so I'll have to use wikimedia to illustrate how cool they were. Here are some birds we saw:

The Rufous Motmot:

 
Broad-billed Motmot:

Rufous-tailed Jacamar:

Squirrel Cuckoo:



Collared Araçari:

On a later expedition, I saw a bunch of identified parrots and had a close encounter with an indifferent peccary:

 

Today's Photos from the Field: Howler Monkeys, Intense Cable Bridge, and Being In Streams

The workday began with an intense experience with a wobbly (but seemingly reliable) bridge.

We use the PVC poles to measure stream depth, but mostly to stay upright while wading through jungle mud. The measuring tape is used to determine the boundaries of our transect.

We saw a troop of howler monkeys hanging around on our way home! This is the mom of a super-cute but hard-to-capture infant.

Pretty plants by the road

Morning Commute / Do Something Every Day That Scares You

Night Survey Numero Uno: Toxic Frog, Jesus Lizard, and a KINKAJOU!

We had an enormously productive and enjoyable night survey the night before last. Besides sinking into several patches of swamp and inhaling dozens of unfortunate but at-fault bugs, we saw and captured a good variety of animals, especially for a pasture site.

Some photos:

Leptodactylus savigii, the South American Bullfrog, which exudes a toxic mucous when disturbed that can cause bystanders to cough and tear up. Toxic to other frogs. Note the red eyeshine.

Basilicus plumifrons, one of the Basilisk lizards known as "Jesus lizards" for their ability to run across the surface of water.

Smilisca baudinii, the common mexican tree frog, is darn photogenic.

Ninia sebae, the red coffee snake. We temporarily absconded with this mellow fellow to use as an educational animal for a scientific outreach fair the next day.

One of several unidentifiable frog metamorphs-- part way between tadpole and frog.

I also saw a bunch of medium-small insectivorous bats, and, oh yeah...

A KINKAJOU!!!!

It's been a bucketlist species to see one in the wild, up there with other tropical species like the three-toed sloth. This guy was in an enormous tree in one of our pasture sites, moving around noisily and checking us out as thoroughly as we were him. His eyeshine was almost as noticeable as the racket he was making. We weren't sure at the time (Olingos are pretty similar), but I ID'ed it later by its prehensile tail, visibly lighter belly. and general scampering around. It was too high up and obscured by branches and darkness for any great photography (besides which, I was pretty occupied with staring at the kinkajou!), but here is a video of a kinkajou doing kinkajou things:

First Day: Strawberry Frogs, Sinking Boots, and a Lovely Sharp-Clawed Turtle

Today was my first day of fieldwork on this project, and it was a fun one! The purpose of this project is to examine how herpatafauna community composition varies by forest age, so we will be comparing the herps we find in primary forests, secondary forests, and grazed fields. We will be doing day and nighttime surveys on alternating days to find species that are active at different times, and looking on land and along streambanks. At each site, we will be performing transects: stretching  a cord out to 50m, and counting everything on 1m out on each side.

We started with a field site in the daytime today, which meant that a small herd of nervous steer eyed us very cautiously whenever we passed by.

We started with two stream sites, into which Michelle bravely waded up to her waist to drag the transect line. I found a small anole and also a strawberry poison-dart frog, which are a focal species of this study (meaning that we try extra hard to catch and measure them). We found a few more of these guys throughout the day and they are quickly becoming a favorite of mine: not only are they gorgeous, but they are way easier to spot than most sneaky brown species.

Oophaga (Dendrobates) pumilio. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

We waded through our last stream site like a couple of sinking gondoliers, clinging to our measurement poles and using them to keep afloat. We also found a very lovely turtle!

Day 1 -- Preparations

Thank you, thank you, thank you universe for the access to high-speed internet. There may be gecko poop on the floor and a squeaky belt on the field vehicle, but academic research (and staying connected to home) are made so much easier by reliable internet access. We're still waiting on a wireless LAN in the house, but an ethernet cable to the router is getting the job done just fine thus far. Here's why I'm so happy about that: This morning I was able to have a skype interview! After all my worries about meeting with a potential graduate advisor, it went well and we had a better connection that I normally get at home.

After my video call, Michelle and I headed to town to gather some field supplies and run a few errands. I purchased some tall rubber boots (footwear with built-in snakebite protection) and failed to find an umbrella. I spent the next few hours marking out the centimeters on our PVC vegetation-measuring poles and getting to know our acoustic monitoring equipment.

Tomorrow is our first day of fieldwork, which I hear will be a pasture site with some very swampy bits and some stream surveys. I'll follow up more on the process once I get into the swing of things!

Getting There

My trip to CR was a bit of an adventure: I had two flights with an overnight layover in between. On my first flight, I was blessed with the company of Jerry (?), a rather inebriated Brazilian truck driver from Taunton. We chatted for most of the flight before he submitted to a hangover before landing. I also befriended a girl from Boston on her way to CR to spend her vacation volunteering with Sea Turtles, and a nice retired guy in the process of moving to CR. Thanks to some research (shoutout to sleepinginairports.com), I knew that the Orlando airport was not a bad place to crash; after all, I would have to be up and about less than five hours later. I found a nice padded bench in the food court (which was full of people with similar intentions) and zonked out for the night. On my second flight, I sat between some professional cyclists on their way home from a meet and a group of Orlandeans ready to party in Costa Rica. I took a taxi to the bus terminal I needed (I decided to spend a little extra to avoid an afternoon of bus terminal roulette with luggage), hopped on one two minutes to departure, and was on my way to Puerto Viejo! I was a little paranoid about not ending up in Puerto Viejo de Limon (where the tourists go) and instead making my way to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, especially after the ticket clerk acted dubious and triple-checked that I knew where I wanted to go. However, I had boarded the right bus, and was met shortly after my arrival by Michelle, my new boss.

I recieved a driving tour of the surrounding towns as we made our way to the house. It's a very cute little two-bedroom cottage, with tile floors and a papaya tree outside. There is a mare with a young foal just beyond our backyard fence, and I am entirely enamored with them. I unpacked, spent most of the afternoon dozing and studying up the project, had a beer with a researcher friend of Michelle's, and went to bed early.

Alive and at My New Base Costa Rica

Title says it. It's lovely here. Time for rest now, more updates to come.

How to Gain Experience and Employment as an Ecology / Wildlife Biology Field Research Technician

Probably the most frequently-asked question I receive whenever I meet new people or discuss my employment is:

"Where do you find jobs like that?"

The question isn't so much where to find them-- more often than not, it's pretty easy to find job postings for international or domestic field research. The harder part (for most of the people asking, anyway), is getting the basic qualifications that get you in the door.

The primary things that help you get a field research job are:

• Having already completed a field season of research
• Good references (professional references that can speak to your experience and your enthusiasm and character are best)
• Having training in the specific field techniques used in the project
• Having or working towards a relevant degree (pretty much anything in the natural or environmental sciences, or even statistics or programming, will do as long as you have relevant courses that show your interest and perhaps some practical training)

Helpful attributes to get a position abroad include:

• Having already lived or worked abroad in the region
• Having participated in field research abroad
• Demonstrated your ability to work in particularly harsh and unpredictable conditions
• Foreign language skills

This is a pretty difficult field to break into for your first few projects-- no one wants to risk their personal research on a technician that might turn out to be moody, sloppy, indifferent, or generally hazardous! The best way to get your foot in the door is:

Volunteer on at least one project doing something that interests you.

If you are an undergraduate-level student, find a professor that does field research. Volunteer your time and effort for a summer. You may miss out on a paying summer job-- whether you can afford to do that is up to you (I couldn't, as an undergrad). If you can swing it, spend your summers helping professors out.

If you can't find a professor at your university (the personal touch is always a good one), try volunteering for a similar position found on a job board.

Study abroad

As an undergrad, I couldn't well afford to take summers off to work unpaid jobs. I could, however, swing a semester abroad where my financial aid still applied. Research your options, talk to your study abroad office. If you want to grow up to do international field research, find a program that specializes in giving undergraduates international field research experience.

I highly recommend Round River Conservation Studies for an immersive, hard-core, research-based study abroad experience. I was able to work on actual conservation projects (see below) in Namibia for a full semester. With the help of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, it cost me and my family less than it would have to keep my at my home university, including airfare. School for Field Studies offers similar (but broader) programs.

Commit for a real period of time to a real project

I see plenty of "volunteer for two weeks and pay our research station $600/week in housing"-type positions. That sounds like a fine vacation if you have the time and money and just want to cuddle orangutans (who doesn't!?), but two weeks isn't going to convince anybody that you're a hard worker, and you could probably spend your money better. Remember that a typical field season lasts 3-4 months, often much longer.

It's quite understandable that a research station might want to recoup some of its expenses on volunteers, but I would expect that a project using me as a volunteer would recoup those costs through my labor and not my money. Be cautious about programs that seem to take volunteers on as a source of income: make sure that you will be trained in the skills you want to acquire and not just treated as a vacationer!

Take note of the skills required for jobs you'd like someday

If you want to work with large mammals, you will need handling and trapping experience, a course in chemical immobilization, possibly some tracking training, and probably some experience with radio telemetry. If you want to work with birds, you will likely need lots and lots of mist-netting extraction and handling experience, experience with visual and sound identification, etc. Pay attention to skills and techniques that you would like to acquire, and select projects where you can be trained in those methods.

List of Job Boards

Here are a list of my favorite sites for seeking jobs and volunteer opportunities in ecology and wildlife biology:

• Texas A&M Wildlife and Fisheries Job Board -- The biggest wildlife job board around
• Society for Conservation Biology Job Board -- A lot of overlap with the TAMU job board, but with some preferential and exclusive posts and a more narrow focus
• AZA Job Board -- Lots of animal husbandry internships, but a research-focused internship or job pops up every once in awhile
• ECOLOG Listserve -- Academic ecology email list, with lots of graduate research opportunities and some research technician opportunities posted frequently.

Recommended Reading

• Prof. Eric Walters' "The Top 5 Mistakes That Biology Undergraduate Students Make When Preparing For Field Positions in Biology"
• "Field Biology Jobs" by Dr. Alan Krakauer

New Adventure on the Horizon

Hello all! It's been awhile since I last updated my poor travel log (which I admittedly neglected a bit during my last project). I'll make an effort to update with  my best photos-- sorting through them all and backing up my favorites has been a very time-consuming task!

My next project is working with herps, a term I'm already informed makes laypersons think of "herpes simplex" before "herpetile" or "herpetofauna." Same greek root, you guys!

Greek: ἑρπετόν, hereton, "creeping animal" [Wikipedia]

Most of my fieldwork thus far has focused on mammals and the herbaceous matrix we find them in, so this will be quite the treat to play with a new taxon! I grew up catching leopard frogs and shuttling garter snakes off the road, so I'll be tapping back into adolescent herp-hunting mode.

And most excitingly, this project is in...

Costa Rica!

Woohoo! This project is a great fit, considering my goals to conduct international fieldwork, work with many taxa, and progress with my passable Spanish skills.

I will be flying out next week (still need to pack and sort out a multitude of details!), and will be back by Christmas. I'm spending this week catching up with friends and family, reformatting and repairing my long-suffering travel netbook, sewing up the holes in my bags, cleaning the family homes, and finalizing my packing list. More updates to come!

First juvenile capture of the season!

Myotis septentrionalis,
Northern long-eared bat

Arkansan Adventures

I am presently working as a bat survey research technician— I am part of a crew hired by a local university which was hired by the Forest Service to look for federally and locally endangered bats. The Forest Service, in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act, is obligated to (and probably wants to) find out whether there are any endangered species in a region before they do any controlled burns, logging, or other sorts of disruptions that could hurt any endangered populations.

That’s where we come in—as a crew of bat biologists and ecologists, we root around designated areas of the national forests to try to find the federally endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis). Because we are trying to find any M. sodalist that might be roosting in the area, we aren’t netting in a grid or other system with predetermined locations, as one might if looking for an unbiased sample of species in the area. Instead, we rely on our understanding of bat ecology, behavior, known populations, topography, and local weather conditions to get inside the bats’ heads and try to find sites where they will be. Bats love partly-covered “flyways” through the forest along trails or roads, and sometimes have to fly long distances to the nearest source of water to drink, for example.

Most of our surveys are two nights per site, so our work day can start as early as 3pm if we are out scouting for sites to set up, or as late as 7pm if we are continuing netting at a nearby site. We net for five hours after sunset, so we close our nets between 1 and 2am as the summer progresses. Quite a lifestyle shift from getting up at 5am to catch rodents in Chiapas!

Catching up

Hello readers! I have a bit of catching you up to do:

- After concluding our mammal / coffee work, we research techs traveled together to San Cristobal de Las Casas, a beautiful and cosmopolitan little hippy city in the mountains of the Sierra Madre. We hung around there for a week, bumming around youth hostels and seeing the sites with lots of new friends from around the world. Week done, my travel buddies flew out; I popped up to see the ruins of Palenque, down to see the regionally famous zoo in Tuxtla Guiterrez, back to San Cristobal, and then to the airport to fly home!

- I had almost four weeks to fit in some serious R&R, visits to friends and family, and then cleaning and packing up for my next adventure project! The weeks flew by, and as is usual for these short visits home, I was left in a hurry to see as many people as I could and to get everything on my to-do list done.

- I spent three days to drive the twenty-four hours from my family's home to the Arkansas Ozarks, a beautiful and hilly/mountainous region that greeted me with deluges of rain and a very chilly first night. I managed to set up my roomy living-out-of-my-car tent before sunset, had dinner with my colleagues who had arrived at the public campsite before I, and snuggled into my sleeping bag under several layers of clothing for a very, very early night.

More on what I'll be doing here in AR soon!

Fieldwork Blog: Seafood Wars, The Papaya Incident, and On Being Digested By A Jungle

We are well into our final session of mammal diversity surveys! It is a bittersweet but bustling period: everyone is rushing about, securing post-project employment and planning flights home and for travel within Mexico after we wrap things up at our home base.
 
For our past "weekend" between sessions, we headed to the beach! It was our first time heading east of Tapachula, the largest nearby city and our source of groceries and other supplies. After a half-hour's drive past the familiar neighborhoods, in which we passed scrubby fields full of construction projects, scorched grass, and one with an assortment of brown Shetland ponies, we ended up in lovely Playa Linda. It was the off-season, and our vehicle was immediately surrounded by waiters, trying to get the lone beach visitors on a winter Tuesday to visit their seafood restaurant. After promising to return and make a selection in a few hours, we headed to the beach. The sand was scorching and the water warm and heavenly. It was fantastic to get out into the open air and smell the ocean after so much time in the mountains; growing up in New England has spoiled me for prolonged inland living. After swimming, sunning, reading, and (in my case) getting moderately sunburnt despite sitting in the shade wearing sunscreen, we headed back to the main road for lunch. Fortunately a few tourists had rolled in, and a lot of the pressure from the eager waiters had abated. We lunched on refried beans, guac, tortillas, real-sugar coke, and a variety of very fresh seafoods; all very good! After lunch, stuffed to the gills with gilled creatures, we staggered to the nearest superstore to load up on the next week's groceries before heading home for naps.
 
The day after, we visited a nearby farm to scout for contiguous forest to serve as our control sites. The manager there greeted us warmly as we explained our project and what type of sites we were searching for. He sent for a truck to convey our team, our guide, the manager, and his assistants and guides from the farm up the mountain. A shaggy white dog napped under our car. Several nearly-identical shaggy white sheep grazed nearby. While we waited, the manager broke out a giant papaya. Our guide informed us, conversationally, that for a guest to refuse a gift was bad luck and would mean they might not return again. Our group exchanged glances. Several members had previously discussed their hatred of fresh papaya; I had only once tried a slice and wasn't impressed; none of us liked them. Of course, we enthusiastically accepted the heaping, dripping slices of papaya and each of us began to scarf down bites of segments larger than a liter water bottle and containing about as much liquid. The flesh was sweet, and as someone inconveniently pointed out, tasted strongly of cheddar cheese. Juice rolled down my arms and dripped off my elbows. Tim's beard was full of the orange pulp. Mandi looked sick.  Looking over at our guide Philippe, I saw that he and the other locals were eating the papaya as neatly as one would an apple. I studied them as they ate. No trick was apparent. I resigned to be a papaya slob. I am proud to say we all finished our massive slices; by the end, the taste was actually growing on me.
 
Our search at that farm for sites within contiguous forest was not successful; apparently all of the forests in the nearby area have been thoroughly fragmented by farms and development. We fell back to our original plan, sites in forest fragments relatively near our home base. The day after was spent hiking around, reestablishing our site selection within the forest fragments. It was slow and adventurous work, bushwhacking along invisible trails we originally bushwhacked two months ago. Burrs and thorns were abundant, as were well-camouflaged ditches and mysterious drop-offs. I was in my element, and had a lot of fun navigating the highly challenging terrain.
 
By the next day, we had ironed out a plan and placed and baited our traps in the forest. This, too, took some bushwhacking and adventurous vine avoidance. There is a particularly spiny vine shaped a lot like a churro that has become my nemesis. I love navigating through the forests, which involves a lot of ducking, dodging, backing up to unwrap branches from ankles, and getting hit in the face with branches that definitely weren't there a moment ago. It's a challenge that keeps each moment interesting. I compare all the getting ripped up, poked, prodded; climbing, sweating, squeezing, slipping, and getting very dirty in the oppressive heat to being digested by the jungle. I also maintain that by that the end of this session I will have passed these trials of the jungle, be at one with the forest, and be able to phase through its matter like a nymph and summon the small mammals to our traps with a song. I will report back on such developments, of course, for science.

More Mefloquine Dreams

Dream one:
I succeed in catching a chicken. Just as I remember, chickens are very warm and feathery and deceptively light. I am able to show coworker Stephen the amazing ability of chickens to keep their heads still, independent of their bodies' movements. All the chickens of the area hear that I am holding chickens. They crowd around and wait patiently at my feet for their turns to be held. We are all delighted.

Dream two:
I am eating an ice cream sunday at an airport bar. Anthony Bourdain slides onto the seat next to me. He orders a $3000 bacon-based cocktail. He says that it is fantastic and that I should order one, too. Unwilling to disclose my vegetarianism to such an outspoken stranger/celebrity, I instead disclose that I cannot possibly afford such a beverage. He laughs, downs his drink. "Tough cookies, kid," he says.

Updates from the Smithsonian Mammal Survey Field Crew: Waterfalls, mean geese, and broken boots

Our team wrapped up our last sampling sites on coffee farms yesterday. To date, we have completed our combination of study sites in sun, shade, and bird-friendly shade coffee farms; our final session will complete our surveys of forest sites, which will serve as a control to the coffee agroforesty systems we have been investigating.

After we spent a sweaty and very stinky morning clearing moldy bait from traps, our team took a break with our shade-coffee farm guide Adaberto. He led us on a side trip to see some beautiful waterfalls, which were quite a steep and sweaty hike away! The 50m falls we sent up huge plumes of spray; between the wet and the gusty valley winds, I was colder than I've been since leaving home to begin this trip! We lunched on bean salad, rice, tortillas, and hard-boiled eggs at the foot of the falls, and then spent a few hours scrambling on the slick rocks and watching white falcons circle the sky.

My poor boots have been separating from their soles for about a week; at the peak of our hike, they ripped free of their improvised wire stitches and started flapping free. Not good, when scrambling up and down mountains through thick vegetation! I wrapped them in gorilla tape and stepped carefully for the rest of the day. This morning, I ministered to them with more aggressive wire stitches, more tape, and melted paracord as glue. They have only two and a half critical weeks of fieldwork left to make it! I'm rooting for them.

After our waterfall adventure, we descended the mountain and spoke briefly with a solemn-faced old man who was curious about our car (a rental, labeled with a coffee-tourism slogan) and purpose in his village. A very fuzzy white dog was napping under our car, and a small flock of chickens refused to move out of the way. They reminded me of the angry geese at our sun coffee farm-- two large, aggressive characters that like to bite our tires as we drive past. Sometimes we hear the sounds of them tormenting passersby drifting up on the breezes to our study sites.

After returning home, we had a brief coffee break before delving into possibly the grossest (though very satisfying) task involved in mammal surveys-- trap cleaning. The 300 Sherman traps, after 11 trap nights, are full of rat stink, moldy bait, mud, and feces. We blast music and make it a party, everyone scrubbing away with toothbrushes or running traps around the house to dry in the sun. All of the traps laid out on the concrete look like a futuristic glistening solar array, in miniature.

The day after tomorrow, we begin site scouting for our last session! We are hoping to find forest sites less fragmented than those we surveyed in our first session. Wish us luck, and many mammal captures!

Photo: Marmosa vows revenge

Coffee blooms and boot scorpions

Greetings from Chiapas! We are wrapping up our third of five sampling sessions. More than halfway through the field portion of the study, hard to believe! Although tired and having a rough week with insect bites and stings, our collective will is as steely as our new and improved leg muscles.

Coffee blooms for only a few days in a season, once or twice a year. Luckily, I was here to see the mountains erupt into bloom this week. Each breeze brings the scent of the blossoms, which smell fantastic-- very similar to lilacs. That each coffee plant is covered in blooms also makes it a challenge to find the flagging marking our traps! Our "bajo" site in particular is like the Bermuda Triangle; although set up in a typical 5x5 grid, it takes even the most familiar person a few minutes extra to find their traps to check or rebait.

The first day of coffee blooming was quiet, but by the second day, the fields were literally buzzing with honeybees, small through massive bumblebees, and a variety of other pollinators. Although disconcerting in its volume and intensity, the buzzing hopefully implies both a healthy bee population and a healthy coffee crop next year.

The Mexican word for popped popcorn is 'palmonitas,' literally "little doves." I like that a lot, though I was unsure as to how to describe the actual tiny doves browsing by our road a few mornings ago.

This morning, Mandi stopped to shake some gravel out of her boot, only to shake out a scorpion! She had shaken out her boots as normal before putting them on, but apparently to no avail! Luckily she escaped without a sting, and the scorpion escaped without a smash and scuttled off into the garden. It was almost as big as the scorpion which lives in the pipes of our bathroom sink, who I have dubbed The Basilisk Scorpion.

We closed one of our sites this morning, saying goodbye to our regular captures. Some mice come back every day, which implies that they find the bait more rewarding than our probing to be traumatizing. I get to know these regulars pretty well. Farewell to Sam and Juvie the Heteromys, BlueBalls the Marmosa, and Excessively Pregnant the Handleyomys! Good luck with your delivery, and please may it be soon.

Photo: Reithrodontomys capture

Someone doesn't understand human nature at all...

... Or else wants to unleash some chaos.

Image depicts sign: "NO TOCAR" ("DO NOT TOUCH.") Sign appears above large, highly visible, bright red button.

Photo: Reithrodontomys capture

Photo: Coffee Farm Study Site

Smithsonian Mammal Study Blog Update

More updates on the study from the Smithsonian blog:

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/scbi/migratorybirds/blog/?id=338

Photo: Marmosa mexicana

Useful Spanish Phrases, volume 2

Pa'same la salsa de soya, por favor.
(Please pass the soy sauce.)

Hay un correo acerca de aqui?
(Is there a post office nearby?)

Lleno, por favor.
(Fill it up, please.)

Dios mio, quien se tiero un pedo? Fue Tim?
(My god, who farted? Was it Tim?)

*Note that my electronic device refuses to let me use correct accents over letters. Pronounce with caution.

Useful Spanish Phrases, volume 1

Mande? / Como?
(What? or Huh?, if you did not hear or understand)

Que hay para la cena?
(What's for dinner?)

Por favor, traeme un limo'n verde para el guacamole.
(Please bring me a lime for the guacamole.)

Hay un alacra'n en mi ropa sucia.
(There is a scorpion in my dirty laundry.)

*Note that my electronic device refuses to let me use correct accents over letters. Pronounce with caution.

Photo: Trap Cleaning Day!

A Day in the Life of a Mammal Survey Research Technician

This loose amalgam of a week is pretty representative of an average day, though a truly typical day sure hasn't happened yet.

5:30 - Wake up, wake roommate with poetry (optional), apply sunscreen, check field equipment, breakfast of: oats and yogurt, banana and/or peanut butter and/or milk and/or cinnamon; coffee.

6:15 - Sunrise, bird chorus begins. Last gear check, groups meet on the porch and put on boots, check radios.

6:30 - Two groups leave for different field sites, sometimes via car, mostly via feet. Roads in this rural area are a mix of cobbles, dirt, and a sprinkling of concrete or tarmac, so driving is only marginally faster than hiking, albeit much cooler. Smile and say buenos dias to everyone you pass, mostly coffee pickers and road workers working much longer days than you.

7:00 - Begin checking traps for mammals. One team member is in charge of handling (holding the animal), the other processing (weighing; recording notes; measuring lengths of body, tail, ear, and hind foot; swabbing mouth for DNA; tagging ear with ID number; and taking lots of photos). If at site 13, my favorite, do try not to fall down the mountain: channel your inner mountain goat and dash across the steep sandy rows of coffee.

10:00 - Complete checking traps. Everyone is famished. Second breakfast time! 1-2 peanut butter sandwiches and a boiled egg with crackers per person is typical. Check in with the group at the other site by radio, compare captures and give brief highlights of cool or unusual stuff caught.

10:30 - Time either for veg analysis, or a brief veg out. Each site has an array of vegetation info to be collected, from IDing all the trees to counting the heights of vegetation intersecting a transect line to measuring and photographing the coffee plants. If finished with all our analyses and have no miscellaneous projects to work on, find a shady trail and read, chat, or play cards.

13:00 or later - Begin baiting the traps, using a special mix of wetted dog food, vanilla, oats, and peanut butter. A small thumbnail-sized ball should do it. Firmly tapping the top of the trap should trigger the door to close; do this to make sure the sensitivity is right. Don't forget to bait the camera traps and switch out the ID cards!

15:00 - Head back to base. Some days end earlier, some later (if we are driving to the city for groceries, we will wrap up in the late morning; a full day of veg analysis with lots of captures will add on a couple hours). Take of the grungiest of your field gear off outside, leave equipment trash in the specified baggies outside the house, unpack the rest of your gear, shower, and meet everyone in the kitchen for a much-desired snack. Afternoon tasks are rotated, and include equipment-checking, data entry, sorting camera trap results, and bait making. Everyone works on IDing species and sorting through photos. Side tasks like dance parties, letter-writing, Spanish lessons, and recreational food preparation are strongly encouraged.

17:30 - Dinner prep begins, directed by the master chef of the day, who is assisted by one to all of the hungry crew.

18:30 - Dinner time! Favorite dishes so far include lentil and black bean burgers, peanut noodles, beans and rice with tortillas and fried eggs, pasta primavera, and veggie bread pudding.

19:00 - Rotating dish-cleaning duties, finish up daily jobs. After, we will often play cards, watch a movie, or just hang out and have a reading party before bed.

Opportunistic Nonmammal Observations

Nonstudy species captured so far:

- Muchos muchos hormigas (ants), divided into three nontaxonomic categories:
a) Sugar ants -- these tiny guys mob the bait balls and suck out all the moisture, leaving only dust and peanuts. Pleasantly harmless.
b) Small ants -- these jerks mob the bait and then bite you when you check the Sherman traps. They will run around between bites, employing a scatter technique to achieve maximum surprise and irritation.
c) Big scary ants -- I haven't had the chance to compare bites between these guys and the small ants, but considering their mandibles, I don't particularly want to. Well, I kind of do, for science, but I'm not looking forward to it.

- Crickets

- Wolf Spiders

- Lizards. The guys love eating all the ants that love the sandy soil of intensive coffee farms, and will follow them into the Sherman traps and scare the bajeezus out of biologists by suddenly flailing, surging out of invisibility from under the floor panel of the traps, or just leaping at their faces. It seems like they need to be medium-sized to trigger the trap doors, so our accidental captures have averaged ~20 cm long.

- Small birds, only one caught so far. Zoomed out seeming no worse for the wear of being caught for a few hours between trap checking and baiting.

On camera traps: dogs, plantation workers, many sassy sassy birds (the larks seem to like to pose and are always coming back for more), and an abundance of candids of techs wandering around looking for the camouflaged little buggers.

Photo: The Most Important Meal of the Day

Photos: Site Scouting

Photo: Lunch Break at the Office