La Selva Life

With the end of the semester rapidly approaching, it's hard to believe that I've been in Costa Rica for three months! Life here at La Selva has been so busy, I really didn't have the time to stop and ponder the fact that my time here is almost over. 

Classes have pretty much ended for the semester, but we still had one more field trip before we jumped into final projects and exams. We actually got to tour one of the banana plantations in the area that is owned by Dole. In this area of Costa Rica, bananas are key to the economic stability of the area. It was fairly obvious that there's a bunch of money behind the whole operation (banana republic, anyone?), and they definitely catered to us as "tourists" during the tour. But it was still really interesting to see the behind the scenes of banana production. As one of my friends so notably stated after we saw the processing: "The curtain had been lifted."

Walking through the plantation.

The processing plant.

It's a little weird that classes are essentially over now, but we've still had a lot on our plates to do. We've been working on a couple projects led by invited faculty that have been really interesting. I was a leader for one of these projects here in La Selva, meaning that I and another student got to work with the invited faculty, Ignacio Escalante, to design an experiment. We ended up doing a really interesting project comparing how symmetrical and asymmetrical leg loss can affect the behavior of daddy long-legs. In the end, we found that surprisingly, walking speed is not affected by leg loss, but behavior of the daddy long-legs is. It was actually a really fun project, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on it with Ignacio- he was really fun and also helped me to not hate Microsoft Excel as much (which is actually a huge task). 

The past week has been devoted to working on our second independent project. I had a blast working on this project, mainly because I was working with two of my really good friends here. In addition, we were able to work on a really interesting topic too. Our project focused on the idea of mimicry in Lepidopteran larvae. A couple people have proposed that some larvae could be mimics of coral snakes, so we attempted to determine if a coral snake pattern (a very conspicuously colored organism) or coral snake coloration could be a successful defense mechanism for Lepidopteran larvae. Essentially, this meant that we got to make a LOT of clay larvae (~500 to be exact) and hang out in the forests all day. It was pretty great. 

...We may have made a giant caterpillar out of all of them in the end. 

We didn't find a difference in predation between the two models that we made (coral snake pattern versus our control model). We're hoping this suggests that a larvae looking like a coral snake doesn't make you more likely to be predated, blasting through any suggestions that larvae could mimic coral snakes. But it's more likely that we saw equal predation just because both models were novel to the area, and predators are more likely to attack novel prey items. But a scientist can dream. 

We also finally had a free day today, meaning that we were able to go and do a little exploring today.  This had some benefits (including riding a trolley over the river!), and was a great way to blow off some steam: 

Yep. Could get used to this. 

Despite the independent projects being done, we still have a lot of work to do. Remaining on my list to do are exams and a rewrite of a paper. But following that, my time here in Costa Rica will essentially be done! We'll be visiting one more station following La Selva as a detox for two days before we head back to San Jose to leave for the States. I hate to say this, but look for the wrap-up post in a week or so!

And here's a picture of a basilisk just because.