2006 July « Antlab in Panama

Each star is a setting sun.

July 18, 2006 at 2:20 am (Risa Walters)

Tonight I’m not feeling particularly poetic, so this post may be lacking flare and pizzaz in respects to avoid sentiment or emo-talk.

It’s our last night on the island. Matt is scraping up the last of his data, I’m staring at my $5 bottle of white wine, counting down the minutes until I pop the cork and put my feet up. It felt really good to type in all my data I collected from Litter Piles 2006. I’m anxious to get back to the lab, pull out the scope and sort my whirl packs. I hope I will have significant results.

The trip started with me reading “On Becoming a Biologist” by John Janovy Jr., which Mike bestowed upon me before the the trip. This book is an honest and blunt interpretation of being in academia as a biologist, and delves a little into the mind of a biologist:

” With the recognition of desire as a driving force, we begin to get a clue as to what motivates satisifed biologists: They love what they are doing. More often than they will admit, their love is for the organisms themselves.”

- John Janvoy Jr., page 36

I have learned at least three very significant aspects of field biology from this trip:

Experience designing experiments and learning from errors with design.
How to cope with monotonous and repetitive lab work, and focusing on the gold pot at the end of the rainbow: DATA
Developed a love for an organism, a desire to know, an urge to explore.

Since I am at the beginning of my journey towards graduate school, I keep my senses alert for a topic of study. I knew before I came that fungal parasites interest me, but I didn’t have a clue what I really wanted to spend a large portion of my life masticating. Now, I think I know: FUNGI. I love how it digests externally by spewing out enzymes. I love how you can only see it when it’s reproducing. I love the wide variety of fungi and the unique fruiting bodies that result. I love how it has applicable uses for human health. I love how it hides in leaves as an endophyte, grows tall, hard fruiting bodies on decomposing logs on the rainforest trail, manipulates and uses arthropods, and how it can even be a parasite on another species of fungi.

One thing I anticipate may prove to be a road block is proving I am as qualified to be a successful scientist as my male counterparts. In last Friday’s Nature, a commentary was published criticising three scientific hypotheses that women are handicapped inately by our brain structure; this is why women are trailing men in science. Ben Barres draws from three scientists: Peter Lawrence, Larry Summers, and to my surprise, Steven Pinker. Although, I do believe there are differences between men and women, they are not brain related as much as hormonal. I am just as competitive, intelligent, ambitious, and dedicated as any male can be. (so there!)

If you are contemplating an education in field biology, my advice is to stop thinking and start doing. It’s the only way I was able to conceive what this type of work entails and develop an understanding of the type of life I would be chaining myself to for the duration of my scientific inquiries.

Bon voyage!! I really had a killer time.

5 Comments

From one chord to another…

July 13, 2006 at 10:44 pm (Jon Shik)

As a student at The Ohio State’s summer “Soil Acarology Course,” this has been my state for the last week:

“Dorsosejugal scissure with 3 arches. Octotaxic system reduced to 4 pairs of very small saccules. On palptarsus eupathidium, acm and solenidion on large apophysis and strongly curved…………….Rostrozetes”

A couplet from a key. The mite course goes something like this. Arrive at lab 830AM. Identify mites until 1030PM. Pretty intense. This is precious knowledge. Only a handful of people in the world know how to look for and look at these tiny arthropods that cover nearly every surface on the planet. Today, we will nearly be finished learning the families of Mesostigmata. We even sorted through July 4th fireworks–granted many of the folks in the class are not Americans–but still, we could hear pounding of the stuff in the sky outside the windowless room.

I realize this note postdates my time on BCI, but I am a night writer and my nights on the island were busy. No, not in that way! I was taking care of ca. 60 ant colonies as part of research investigating why tropical litter ant colonies mature at such small sizes. Amazingly, tropical forests are home to some of the world’s largest (the leaf cutters and army ants) and smallest ant colonies. As a lover of small things, I have become fascinated by twig inhabiting colonies of ants that approach densities of 5 colonies per meter squared but would never be observed while casually hiking.

An ant colony experiences periods of growth, during which the queen produces sterile workers. At various periods during its development, the colony reproduces as the queen produces sexual winged males and females that fly away and mate with sexual ants from other colonies. While many colonies in temperate zones often do not approach “sexual maturity” until they contain 1,000’s of workers, tropical litter colonies routinely reproduce with only 50 workers! By raising colonies in captivity under various levels of resource availability, I sought to understand how food limitation influenced colony life histories (e.g. growth rates and size at maturity).

My project was not without its struggles. During my first BCI month, I refined my culturing techniques—learning what conditions my ants liked and emphatically disliked. For instance, one night after about a month of painstakingly establishing colonies, I made the fateful decision to change their diets to cold-cut turkey. This attempt to standardize supplemented protein unfortunately initiated a bacterial outbreak which killed half my colonies over night. I experienced something a bit beyond chagrin when I saw the last of the living ants writhing in agony. Some times fungi overtook the jell-o diet I had lovingly prepared, while at others, escaped ants searched the lab table for suitable habitat.

Last summer, I sampled insects from meter squared plots in leaf litter, extracting critters in alcohol and then spending the next 6 months sorting them dead under a scope. This summer, I was determined to “get to know” the soil organisms in a more dynamic way. It was wonderfully pleasant to spend late nights in the soil lab, watching ants actively behaving. Each colony, as a “superorganism,” seemed to have its own personality, and as a scientist, I had to refrain from assigning them names! Some routinely foraged en masse, while some subtly sent out major workers. Some organized their garbage into neat piles while others left detritus haphazardly strewn about the brood chambers. They all seemed to wage pitched battles against fungi, and I took it upon myself to serve as their maid, frequently cleaning out their homes.

The island seems a bit distant now, as I have immersed myself in this mite business. Soil mites are a bit frustrating to identify through morphological characters because, being basically blind and tiny, visual cues are not part of their lives in the peacock feather sense. Mite specimens are also usually mounted as crushed pancakes on slides, with heads as fragmented pieces. To the patient observer, however, they are beautiful variations on armored themes. To litter ants they are thought to be breakfast lunch and dinner! But such dynamics will remain fodder for future versions of my research…

Best of luck to Matt and Risa who are still on BCI. I hope they drink a beer on the balcony for me!

2 Comments

A week is all we have …

July 13, 2006 at 2:43 am (Risa Walters)

My family is already counting down the days until my return. E-mail messages with subject headings of homecomings and last-minute summer activities. I suppose I have missed out on a big block of baseball games, mosquito bites, 100 degree weather, tornado warnings and friendly get-togethers. With a week left until my return to the United States, I am feeling the tolls of long days in the field, late nights reading, socializing and computing data.

Today I made my last long trek into the BCI field, heavy bags in hand, to harvest my transects. I sifted 40 transects and set up 54 Berlese funnels before dinner. I felt sad, as if a long hike up a hill had suddenly plateued into a misty haze, as if collecting isopods, watching them scurry across filter paper — my frustrated eyes willing them towards apples — my desires abruptly fell into alcohol … it’s almost over and I wonder if I’ve achieved anything with my efforts or simply skipped down trails and gazed in amazement. It’s also discerning to think I have developed a compassion, attachment, maybe … love for little crustaceans who occupy the litter with snap-jaw ants and white hyphee decorations simply to watch them expire into quantified data.

Tomorrow Laura will return to Holland, tonight a small portion of BCI bar babes will send her off, and I will try not to imagine myself in her place on the last boat leaving the island for a new destination until next week when I will see the balcony from a distance, slowly becoming more desert as summer field season 2006 comes to a close.

2 Comments

Stardate: July 11th…

July 12, 2006 at 3:06 am (Matt Dowling)

The great decomposition experiment on the Gigante fertilization plots has all been picked up. Risa and I are busy in the throes of washing all the hemicellulose and lignin so it can be dried and later weighed to determine decomposition rates in the litter over the last month or so.

The island has been getting more and more quiet in the last couple of weeks. Many of the scientists and students who arrived after we did have already left, but for us the work continues. It’s actually pretty nice. Tonight on the lounge patio a group of five spider monkey males ambushed three of us as we sat sipping beers. They evidently thought there might be food in the trash cans and had come to check it out. Finding it empty, the left quickly, but for me, the day had been made: accosted by spider monkeys–this place is ripe for great stories. One of the ‘long-time’ student residents, Mariah Hopkins, left the island for good this evening. Having finished the field portion of her Ph. D work on howler monkeys, she is returning to Berkeley. Laura, Christian, and I sent her off on the late boat with a pathetic imitation of a howler monkey chorus–god it must have been awful.

Risa and I both need to harvest our field work towards the end of this week. Since last Saturday, the work here has been a large ‘mop-up’ action: data is being gathered, harvested, and cataloged so we can return to Oklahoma. Perhaps, as we finish next week, someone will give a rousing send-off with…an ant-like…something…

Time is of the essence.

July 6, 2006 at 12:44 pm (Risa Walters)

Since Mike left, I have been making the best out of the BCI experience. I went on a recreational trail walk with Betsy Arnold where she pointed out some of the rainforest’s treasures. We almost stepped on a coral snake, held a frog that looks like a leaf, and gazed at the Panama Canal from a clearing at the end of the trail. Early one morning, before the sun gracefully showered through the canopy, I accompanied a spider monkey researcher on the hunt for urine. I saw tamarinds, peccaries, howlers and learned when off trail, anything looks like it could be a trail.

This weekend my lab mate Matt and I will cruising to Gigante to battle uncertain weather to pick up the last of Mike’s decomposition experiment. We will inevitably disappear from the social circles of BCI, cleaning, drying and weighing until Harry Potter’s adventures are exhausted and my entire iTunes collection has become as exciting as opening the last present on Christmas morning in 1985. However, watching the outcome of this experiment unfold is what I look forward to most. I especially enjoy observing the many types of fungi that choose to grow on the filter paper and popsicle sticks.

Soon afterward, we will be leaving the island and returning to reality. This is a place most young scientists dream about while brainstorming experiments and refer to often when hitting the books, taking exams, and driving their cars to work. But before that time can come, I must complete the experiments I have set out on the trails. A couple weeks ago I set up an experiment where I alter the litter depth to observe what elements change. The experiment came to mind while searching unsuccessfully for isopods. I noticed the areas closer to the lab had relatively shallow litter depths and isopods were rare. I thought if I raked up a pile of litter, maybe they would come to me. I was about to set out to do just that very thing when Mike stopped me from half-hazard experimentation. He worked with me to design a transect system where the control and litter pile plots are randomized and running parallel, stretching more than 40 meters. In about a week I will sift the 1/4 square meter plots and Berleze the risidual. The arthorpods collected will be sorted and counted. This will not only give me an idea of how many more isopods are located in contrast to the control plot, but it will also give me a good idea of arthropod diversity in comparison to the two types of plots.I think altering the litter depth will also have an effect on decomposition; although, that waits to be shown.

Earlier I set up a pilot experiment on Fairchild. This mini experiment showed a vast increase in the amount of isopods per a pile plot. I also saw changes in seedlings, fungi, and ant colonies chose to make their home in the leaves. I think Litter Piles 2006 will have an interesting outcome.

In addition, I have a small experiment running in the ambient soil lab. I’m feeding leaves with endophytes to isopods. Recently, I was informed of a bacteria living inside the leaves with the endophytes. It’s unclear yet if the bacteria is a parasite, symbiont, or simply mutually present. I’m curious if the bacteria will be harmful to the isopods or if they will even attempt to munch on endophytic leaves. Even more so, I am absolutely fascinated with the possibilities of the findings of this bacteria and endophyte. There are so many more questions that can arise with the results. It’s also unclear if the endophyte is a parasite; possibly the endophyte is releasing a chemical that makes leaves fall prematurely so it may take over the leaf’s resources sooner and reproduce. I hope to at some point discover my own answers to questions dealing with fungi. In fact, I have already started reading and seeking the answers. I think it’s best to behave like a Ph.D. student now and a get a head start on the game.

Time is on our side…

July 6, 2006 at 12:40 pm (Matt Dowling)

Last summer was my first on BCI, and in many ways it will never be the same here as in that first field season. As a newbie, I wasn’t privy to every inside joke of the island, and much of the social craziness that seems to accompany this place slipped by me unnoticed. This year, I’ve felt more in touch with the people, as I more and more think of this place as a small town where everyone knows your name…and your business. My business this summer has been about ants. I think this is the summer that I’ll look back and say “I knew I wanted to study ants one summer on BCI when…”

Has everything been perfect with my research? Not exactly, but I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I’m one step closer to being ready for a great graduate school experience. We recently finished a harvest of half of Mike’s great field project this season on gigante. I also spent a day in town getting a boat license to operate a boat on the Panama Canal. Risa and I both have sample plots and transects to be tended, and an outdoor laboratory of fungi experiments. I’m also collecting pilot data for a project involving Azteca ants. In my experience, life in the last two weeks on BCI can be really hectic, but I’m trying to remember to stop a smell the roses, figuratively. A recent heavy rain brought out the toads and frogs in masse, so I grabbed a headlamp and headed up to Kodak house. In back, there is a small frog pond, where I finally spotted some red-eyed tree frogs. It felt good to first identify them by their call, and then to finally spot them. It was also good to pause and reflect on how much I enjoy just stopping to look at the forest.

I think I’ve made a new observation on the army ants here (Eciton burchellii) that hasn’t been seen before. If so, it’s a good reminder that I’m doing what I’m supposed to here in the forest: keeping my eyes open and making observations. I’ll keep the observation secret for now until I talk it over with Mike and consult the literature. You never know, it could be the next big thing.

1 Comment