Why are your poems so dark?, by Linda Pastan

Tags

darkness, Linda Pastan, moon, nature poetry, photography, Why are your poems so dark?

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

- Linda Pastan

I took this photograph on the Osa Peninsula. It's the full moon setting over the Caribbean, and the sun is just peeking over the rainforest behind me, so it is just starting to get light...it was pretty hard to capture. Anyway, I thought it fit the poem kinda nicely.

Holiday card data is in!

Tags

affection, geekiness, holiday cards, R, rate of travel, small town effect, statistics

I meant this to be a Friday silliness thing, so you can consider it belated.

Figure 0.1 Examples of holiday card fronts.

I have always firmly believed that there is a point at which geekiness becomes so geeky that it surpasses some arbitrary awesomeness threshold.  I hope this meets that standard.

If you’re not up to speed, I sent about fifty holiday cards in December.  Since I am living in the US currently, most went to the US, but I also sent quite a few overseas, to seven different countries.  They traveled a total distance of more than 6.7 times the circumference of the Earth!  And they all began their travels at exactly the same moment (guaranteed since I bribed the post man with a basket of homemade candies).

Unfortunately, I only had about a 61% recapture rate on the cards (I was hoping for higher) and so 3 of the seven countries dropped out the analysis, and two were left with a very low n (sample size).

Figure 1. Holiday cards traveled at a significantly (p<0.05) faster rate to Australia than to sites within the US.

Are you surprised that my affection traveled faster to Oz?  No?  I’m so predictable. 

Within the US, there seems to be an increasing rate of travel with distance.

Figure 2. Correlation between distance and affection within the US. Note the saturating function, which may suggest a threshold time in the system or a "small town effect".

There might be a threshold time.  For example, a card must spend at least three days in the system before it can be delivered.  However, I am unable to differentiate the confounding “small town” effect.  Most of the friends that are very close to me live in small towns, which might have a different postal system.

Regardless, the relationship between distance and speed of affection in the US is strongly significant according to this simple model.

Figure 3. Generalised linear model of correlation between distance and speed of affection in the US.

And just in case you are still curious and not bored out of your mind, here’s how the distribution of animals in the cards fell out.  There is clearly a bird/cat bias among my friends’ favourite animals, but mammals in general take up more than their share of the pie.   Typical.

Figure 4. Distribution of animal preferences.

NB:  All figures compiled by me in the program R.

Drop bears and numbats, love.

Estacion Biologica Campanario

Tags

biological station, Campanario, Costa Rica, Field work, lowland rainforest, Osa Peninsula

So I told you a little about the biological station up in the cloud forest near San Ramon.  Today, let me take you from the clouds to the coast, from mountain to lowland, from cloud forest to rainforest, from one paradise to another: to Campanario.

Welcome to Campanario!

La estacion biologica Campanario is situated on a remote part of the Osa peninsula, and is accessible only by boat.  It is not far from San Pedrillo, a biological station in Corcovado National Park.

The San Ramon station is in the mountains of central Costa Rica, Campanario is on the Osa Peninsula.  I left a piece of my heart in both places.

In some ways, the two stations are as different as night and day.  And in others, they are very similar.

Neither station has hot water.  At both we eat mostly rice and beans (except for when there are beans and rice).  Both are full of a wonderful support staff of ticos.  They’re smart, funny, and very knowledgeable about Costa Rican natural history.

Ticos are so great.

At San Ramon, for instance, there is electricity that comes from the river.  They have to use some electricity, in fact (something about flow), so a couple of light bulbs are left on all the time.  It isn’t very much electricity, but it is there.

At Campanario, there is only solar power.  That means that there is only electricity when there is sun hitting the roof of the station.  And what little electricity they do have is jealously guarded for the refrigerator, to keep food cold.  Students are allowed to use it between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm, IF there’s sunshine.  For everything else, there are headlamps.

And San Ramon gets quiet, quiet at night (even with all the cicadas, crickets, frogs, and geckos) compared to the incessant ocean at Campanario, which is always rushing and whooshing about.  (Ever notice how the ocean does that?)  It is very difficult to give a lecture on mutualisms over the roar of the ocean!

Campanario’s front yard

But of course, I am mostly thinking about biology.  Lowland tropical rainforests are a very different animal from cloud forests.

Trails

There are 139 species of mammals, 117 species of reptiles and amphibians, and over 350 species of birds in Corcovado National Park, which has, according to some, the highest densities of jaguar anywhere in the world.

And we spent plenty of time studying in and around the ocean too!  The students seemed captivated by the diversity of the tidal pools.

Okay, I could talk about Campanario for days (and probably will), so enough for today!  Let me know if you have any questions or comments. 

Ed: Woops, you’ll probably be wanting a link to Campanario’s website.

These trees have crabs!

Tags

aratus pisonii, arboreal crabs, Costa Rica, unique animals

Aratus pisonii, an arboreal crab

I’m sorry for the title of today’s post.  I really am.  But remember this post about flowers with crabs?  When I was in Costa Rica, I found arboreal crustaceans, Mangrove tree crabs.

Yeah, I couldn’t help myself.  Cute little guys, aren’t they?

Sorry about the claw, little brother.

We were so surprised to see the first few ones, but as we became accustomed to them (in their ubiquity), they no longer held our interest.

“What’s that?!”

“Oh.  Just another arboreal crab.”

“Boooorrinnngggg…”

But they’re really quite fascinating, actually!  They’re not only arboreal, they’re herbivorous.  For me, totally unexpected.

Hands on

Tags

Animals, conservation, field biology, teaching

Field biologists, at least the ones I’ve known, tend to be pretty ‘hands on’ people.  They like to get dirty, muddy, sweaty, even bloody.  Covered in ticks, flicking leeches at each other over cold beers at the end of a rough day.

This love of going waist deep and all in tends to come with a passion and curiosity for living things.  So, combine the two and you get people who love to hold wild animals.

A student with a blue-crowned manakin (Lepidothrix coronata)

Sometimes I feel a teensy bit conflicted about this.  I have a deeply ingrained respect for wild animals, and I often feel that they should be left alone unless we must bother them: for example, to understand their distributions, population dynamics, or the threats facing them (in short, for science).

Mexican Mouse Possum (Marmosa mexicana)

But the simple truth of the matter is that nothing is quite as touching as, well, touching an animal.  After seeing the looks on my students’ faces when they held wild lizards, frogs, and birds in their hands, how could I quibble?

How can you argue with this face?

Or this one?

Or this one?

I’d like to think that these students will drive future conservation efforts.  Their love for wildlife, instilled in them by their hands on experiences, will be the energy behind the movement to preserve what is left of our natural world.

Without passion like theirs, such an effort would surely fail.  That is why it is so important for us to touch their hearts.  And sometimes you can just see it on their face, that they are touched.

Or at least that’s what I hope.

Oh dear, you have a little something there...on your face there.

Snowflakes, by Jennifer Grotz

Tags

Jennifer Grotz, snow, Snowflakes, winter

We have 27 cm of snow on the ground and it’s still falling.  I’m not a huge fan of snow (makes it hard to run!), but I thought it was high time for a snowy poem.

Snowflakes

Yesterday they were denticulate as dandelion greens, they
locked together in spokes and fell so weightlessly

I thought of best friends holding hands.
And then of mating hawks that soar into the air to link their claws
and somersault down, separating just before they touch the ground.

Sometimes the snowflakes glitter, it’s more like tinkling
than snow, it never strikes, and I want to be struck, that is

I want to know what to do. I begin enthusiastically,
I go in a hurry, I fall pell-mell down a hill, like a ball of yarn’s

unraveling trajectory—down and away but also surprising ricochets
that only after seem foretold. Yesterday I took a walk because

I wanted to be struck, and what happened was
an accident: a downy clump floated precisely in my eye.

The lashes clutched it close, melting it against the eye’s hot surface.
And like the woman talking to herself in an empty church

who eventually realizes she is praying, I walked home with eyes that melted snow.

- Jennifer Grotz

Holiday cards: silly cartoons

Tags

Animals, cartoons, drawings, holiday cards, nerd, rate of affection

This is tangential, do you mind indulging me?  Would you like to see some of the cartoons I did for holiday cards this year?  Oh dear, I’m being very silly.  Well, that’s what Fridays are for, right?

I drew maybe fifty cards, and sent them around the world (to 7 different countries).  The total distance they traveled was 267, 568 km (that’s 166,259 mi), which is about 6.7 times the circumference of the Earth, depending on where you measure.

I’m accumulating data.  Right now we have about a 40% recapture rate.  After I get enough reports back, I’ll put a plot up in all its nerdy glory, about the differential rate of my affection to different countries.  I predict a saturating increase function with distance, but right now it is confounded by what I like to call a “small town differential effect.”  By which I mean, all of my close friends live in small towns, which have a different postal system, and therefore I can’t tell if the cards are traveling more slowly because of the size of the town or because there is a proximity threshhold.

Oh dear.  Well, here are a few favourites.  Forgive me.

Dragonfly

Elephants

Black Bear

Basset Hound

Chameleon

Flying Fox

Owls

Tell me truthfully, would you like a card like this in the mail?  I hope my friends enjoy them. 

Zombies on high

Tags

Ants, Camponotus, Ophiocordyceps, tree canopy, Zombies

You may or may not have read my very early postings about Zombies in Nature last October.  Keep that story in mind while I tell you this one.

I have always dreamed of climbing into a rainforest canopy where I could bask in the diversity that is invisible from a ground walker’s perspective.  The problem is that there is no easy way to achieve this dream.  Old growth rainforest trees are huge, and the canopies can be 30 metres or higher.

Margaret Lowman published a book called Life in the Treetops (2000) where she describes her pioneering efforts to do biological research in rainforest canopies.  They tried all sorts of things to get up into the canopy: single ropes, pulley systems, canopy cranes (one day I’ll get up in one of those, mark my words!), and even a giant raft carried by a blimp in the African Congo (here’s a link to a description of a similar program in Madagascar).

So you can imagine, when I was told that we were going to take the students into the canopy in Corcovado National Park, I could barely contain my excitement.  Our canopy trip was limited to two platforms, 19 m high, established on mature trees about 50 m apart, and the cable connecting them.  To access the first platform, we climbed a narrow cable ladder and, at the top, we connected our harness to a cable and pulled ourselves to the other platform (and/or pushed off the first tree as hard as we could so that we rocketed through the canopy at high velocities).

Our guide, Daniel, patiently watching a student pull herself along the cable.

I was so excited, I rocketed up that ladder like a squirrel (or a monkey! or a squirrel monkey!!).  Heights do not bother me, and I am if not a skilled, at least a somewhat experienced climber.

Going up?

Our amazing tico guides were Daniel and Josue, who are professional tree climbers and rope technicians (they also work in a theater company where they “make Peter Pan fly around”):

Daniel, looking out for us

Josue (Handsome tico guides are one of the unexpected perks of being a field biologist .)

Josue and Daniel moved so gracefully on the wires!  They were like monkeys.  I asked Josue about it and he called Daniel a “mono cariblanco” (literally a white faced monkey, but it is also the common name of the locally abundant White-faced Capuchin).

I was disappointed that some of the students were not as thrilled as I was:

A student napping 19 m high in the rainforest canopy.

I loved hanging off backwards, with nothing but a single rope connecting my waist harness to the side wire on the platform.  I wanted to see everything.  And guess what I saw (ignoring the Spider monkeys and capuchins, they’re boring right?)?!

A zombie ant!

The fungus is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and it is infecting a carpintero (carpenter ant) Camponotus sericeventris.

The ants are carpenter ants, so they would never crawl out “on a limb” (so to speak, haha), like this without a fungus controlling their brain.  The fungus then makes the ant bite onto the edge of the leaf so that it won’t fall off.  Then the fungus grows out of the ant’s head and spreads its spores over the forest (like snow!).

I contacted the expert on zombie ants (David Hughes) and he informed me that the only other time a zombie ant was found so high above the ground was an ant found 60 m high in a Bornean rainforest.  (me = jealous)

The one I found was the neotype for the fungus (i.e. the fungus was first described on Camponotus sericeventris by Tulasne in 1865) and since that time, there has been some discussion about separating it into multiple species.  It is possible that a separate Ophiocordyceps fungus infects each different species of Camponotus ant.  They certainly have different morphologies!

Check out these different Ophiocordyceps morphologies on different carpenter ants (all of the following images are from Evans et al 2011):

On Camponotus rufipedis, Evans et al 2011

On Camponotus balzani, Evans et al 2011

On Camponotus melanotici, Evans et al 2011

On Camponotus novogranadensis, Evans et al 2011

Pure beauty is a Euglossine bee

Tags

beauty, cineole, Euglossine, Orchid bees, photography

Remember how I had that post about the less humble bee?  The orchid bee, of the tribe Euglossini?  Remember how I have always longed to see one?  Well, in Costa Rica, I set up a cineole bait (one of those aromatic volatiles) and drew in not just one, but tens of Euglossine bees.

Oh my, Euglossines...

I stood there next to the bait with my mouth hanging open, with a cloud of beautiful, beautiful buzzing gems all around my head.  I was in total standingoutinmyfield heaven.  You could read the rapture right on my face; a big goofy grin from ear to ear.

And then.  And then someone let me borrow a ring flash.

See how long his tongue is? It dangles out between his leg when he flies.

See his massive hind tibia? That is where he stores scents for the ladies.

These are all male bees, and they’re all looking for another sweet smelling compound to add to their lover’s cocktail.

Then we had the great idea of tying the bait to my backpack, which resulted in a tiny horde of confused suitors following me around the jungle for 45 minutes until the bait diffused.

Pura vida, baby.

Pura vida

Tags

biological station, cloud forest, Costa Rica, estacion biologica, margay, teaching

Wow, Costa Rica, just wow.  Honestly you are heaven on Earth for a biologist.

What can I say?  The field course I taught in Costa Rica was like a fantastic dream come true.  I have longed to go there since I was eight years old and read a National Geographic article on Monteverde’s cloud forests.  And now I have gone, and I never wanted to leave.

I have so many new stories to share, too.  I figured I could spread them out over time.

We spent our first few days in a cloud forest very close to Monteverde, but without all of the tourists.  The Alberto Manuel estacion biologica or Rodolfo Ortiz Vargas estacion biologica (also known as the San Ramon biological station) was founded in 1975.  The acronym is ReBAMB.  (I don’t know why the station has so many names…probably because it is so awesome).  The altitude at San Ramon was between 800 and 1600 m.

The front door to the biological station.

There are 22 families of mammiferos (mammals), 30 especies of anfibios (amphibians), 36 especies of reptiles, 233 especies of aves (birds), and 1,150 especies of plantas in the reserve, which is threatened by illegal dam building, hunting, and removal of plants to be sold as ornamentals worldwide.  Many classes of international students are taught at la estacion.  As we were leaving, a new class was coming from Kent State University.

There were a lot of beautiful (and slightly treacherous with slippery rounded boulders) rivers and streams around.  We went for a swim in a waterfall, which I thought was rather pleasant, but my students complained was frigid.

Some of my students sampling aquatic insects in a stream.

A cloud forest, if you’ve never been in one, is a unique ecosystem.  You are almost constantly in a cloud, which makes photography, among other things, a bit challenging.  You are never dry, which is typical for a rainforest anyway.

Students exploring the cloud forest.

Cloud forests have tons of mosses and epiphytes (plants living in the canopy) which survive only on the water provided by the clouds.  You can see that the tree trunks in these photos are completely green with life.  I really enjoyed sharing my passion for ecology with these students.  I loved to see their wonder and appreciation.

A student admiring a long horned beetle (Cerambycid)

We also went on a lot of night hikes while we were there, so we had a chance to enjoy the night life.

Katydid camouflage

Norops biporcatus (an Anole lizard), sleeping

Ta da!

Mexican mouse possum (Marmosa mexicana)

 

And, perhaps most thrillingly, we saw a margay (or caucel)!

Margay (Leopardus wiedii)

The reserve is a real refuge for these cats, as well as jaguars, pumas, and ocelots, which we saw many tracks of, although we did not ‘spot’ the cats themselves.

And I loved the ticos (Costa Ricans) who worked at the reserve.  I didn’t get great photos of them all, but they are all lovely people.

Jose and Hugo

More stories to come!