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: