Panamania Just another Weblogs at Harvard Law School weblog

I am sitting at my dining room table in Cambridge writing this, and marveling how little anything changes when you leave for a year.  I am really happy to be back here, and excited about living in Cambridge again, but am still feeling a bit alien.  The weather is gorgeous (for October in the northeast) but still feels too cold for me if I’m not in the direct sun–I’m going to be trouble when it actually starts to get chilly.  After a year and a half of hiking around the jungle on most days, I’m also feeling hugely under-exercised.  I have this urge to walk that is making it difficult for me to sit still–so yesterday I exhaustively cleaned the kitchen as antidote–how weird.

I’m even beginning to miss watching the capuchin monkeys.  Because I was working with so many monkeys in so many social groups, I don’t really have the sense of knowing individuals the way a lot of primate field people do, but capuchins have a certain mischievous air which is endearing, and very funny to observe.  As boring as watching monkeys for 8 hours a day can be, I’m going to miss the lifestyle, and the very funny moments (like the juvenile capuchin swinging a baby coati by its tail) that make the long days worthwhile.

BCI was also a really exciting place to live if you like cool animals and plants–there was something new to be seen every day.

Christoph and an owl that got caught in his canopy mist-net.

A huge bug–I know, I should know the name, but. . . .

My alarm clock–I can’t really say I’ll miss them.

A cool moth outside my room.

Red-eyed tree frog

Isn’t this rhinoceros beetle amazing!

The webs of these Nephila (golden-orb weaver spiders) were so strong you practically bounced off them when you ran into one in the forest.

You’d think if you were a bird nesting on the ground, camouflaged eggs would be a better idea than bright blue eggs.  With Tinamus, it is the male who sits on the eggs, and I wonder if the bright blue eggs aren’t a way for the female to coerce to male to stay put.

I think these vine snakes are so beautiful–although less so when they are stuffed with bird.

I managed to get through my time in Panama without being stung by a bullet ant.  My friend who was stung described it as feeling like her hand was being slammed in a car door, every few seconds for about 6 hours.  I only had one run in with Paraponera–I was watching capuchins, leaning against a tree, and started to hear this angry buzzing noise. I was looking around for a hornets nest, and when I looked down at my feet, realized I was standing in a Paraponera nest, and about 20 of these guys (the biggest ant in the world, about an inch long) were swarming up my boots.  I squealed and went dashing off desperately trying to get them off my legs.  No bites–thank god for knee high rubber boots.

Sloth–or lazy monkey in Spanish.

A baby turtle, with a huge tick.

My last week in Panama, I went mist netting with my friend Christoph who studies bats.  He works insane hours–4 pm until 8 am.  I don’t know how he does it–it ruined me for days.  I had a great time though, and saw a lot of cool bats.  Christoph also gave me some photos of other bats he has caught:

Diclidurus albus–the ghost bat.

Ectophylla

This is Vampyrum spectrum–the falsevampire bat–not a bit scary looking!

and this boa wasn’t supposed to get caught in the net!

BCI was also a great place to learn about tropical forests.  There are so many people working on different aspects of the forest on BCI, that you can find someone to answer almost any question.

As part of my project, I had to identify a lot of fruit

and was perpetually amazed that not matter what I brought him, Oswaldo Calderon could help me identify all of it.  I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with many of the people on BCI.  This especially includes Vilma Fernandez:

Vilma on the right.  (Ok–I’ve gotten a lot of emails correcting me on this.  Robyn Hoing is on the right, Vilma is on the left.  This is a manifestation of my left/right dyslexia, not my inability to recognize my friends).

Daniel Obando and Pablo Flores

I’m really going to miss everyone from BCI–We had a lot of really good times.

So, I’m done watching monkeys for the moment, and as a friend so helpfully pointed out “now all you have to do is write 200,000 words”–friends are such mixed blessings.

My project is over, and I am leaving Panama in so few days it can now be reasonably counted in hours.  Vilma and I are done following monkeys, counting fruit on trails, scraping pulp off of seeds, and are now packing up our lives.  It is astounding the amount of stuff we’ve accumulated, and the things I was looking for several months ago, and finally found.

The real end of the project was Sept 10th, the last day of our last round of monkey darting.  Earlier this year, we darted 15 monkeys fitted them with  radio-collars, which we had to try to recover. 

For this final round of darting, I decided that it made sense to collect biological samples to conduct a health analysis.  Once again, Bob Lessnau came down to dart for me, but this time, his colleague, Terry Norton, a wildlife vet came as well.

Darting to recover collars is much harder than darting to put them on.  First of all, you are aiming for a specific individual rather than any monkey of the right age/sex class.  More importantly, every monkey you are trying to catch has already been darted in the butt.  I had begun to think that maybe capuchins weren’t really as smart as everyone says–they rehabituated to Vilma and I so fast after being collared, and would hang out several meters from us without the slightest sign of being concerned about us.  It seemed like they hadn’t really learned anything from the experience of being darted–how wrong was I.  In fact, they were smarter than I gave them credit for.  Vilma and I were not percieved as threats.  One look at Bob, and a collared monkey that had been feeding calmly, down low and out in the open, was all of a sudden 40 meters up in the canopy and a half a kilometer away. 

We had a tough week–lots of running after monkeys who were being very uncooperative.

Bob even smoked his good luck cigar early in the week.

Our lives were made harder by the fact that the capuchins were eating Doliocarpus olivaceous–a liana fruit that tends to be really high up in the canopy, and that a couple of the collared females had riding infants, making it impossible to safely dart them.

In the end, we ended up capturing some animals for the health analysis, and to train Claudia Branderis, a vet from the University of Panama, in wildlife health techniques.  We failed to recover any collars though.

The group of people who helped me dart this time were amazing–it was a real pleasure to work with them.  In addition to Bob and Terry, Robyn Hoing came down to help again.  She was here for the first round of darting as well.

Sheryl Straaden, a large mammal keeper at the Jacksonville Zoo also came to help.

Their experience and expertise working with animals was such a help.  I am truely appreciative that they were willing to take vacation time to come down, slog through rainforest, covered with ticks, chiggers and sweat, get totally dehydrated (once again, I had Robyn puking on the side of the trail on the first day–I’m amazed she is still willing to speak with me, let alone work with me again), and be good sports about the whole thing.  It was a really great group, and I had a lot of fun working with them!

Vilma and Robyn, hard at work

Collecting yet another fecal sample.  The first monkey we worked with completely freaked us out because her feces looked like this:

We were worried it was blood, but it turned out that she had just been eating a lot of Trichilia tuberculata, which had turned her feces bright red.

One of the cool things that happened with this round of darting was that we captured a juvenile with ambiguous genitalia–a pseudo-hermaphrodite of sorts. 

We aren’t sure if SheHe is a male or a female–it will be interesting to see if we can figure out what it going with him/her.

So, depending on how you define success, the last part  of this project was either a complete and utter failure, or a moderate success.  I prefer to think of it as the latter–we put in our absolute best effort, had fun with the work and with each other, and have some positive results from our efforts!

So, extra big thanks to Bob, Robyn, Terry, Sheryl, Vilma and Claudia! 

It has been a hectic summer, finishing up the field work for my dissertation, playing with friends, traveling in Panama, and giving my first real talk.  It has really started to feel like home here in the last few months, which is typical since I am leaving in less than two weeks.  One of the most amazing things about having done my field work at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is the community of scientists that work here.  People here have such a diversity of interests, and the cross-pollination of ideas that occurs at Gamboa BBQs or over beers following one of the weekly talks is really exciting.  This was really highlighted in a symposium in June, where about 20 different people working at STRI gave talks on their current projects.  I gave a talk on some of the preliminary results from my project. . .and once that was over, was really able to enjoy hearing about all the other interesting research that is going on down here.  

If you are interested in a brief synopsis of the talks, there was one reporter in the audience:

http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_11/issue_15/science_02.html

One of the talks I enjoyed most was given by John Christy, a STRI staff scientists who works primarily on  fiddler crab behavior. (He is one of the few STRI scientists who works on animal behavior, in fact.)  His talk was about breeding synchrony in fiddler crabs and limpets.  It is often assumed that the advantage to breeding synchrony is that predators get swamped and aren’t able to eat all the eggs or larvae, some of which are therefore able to escape and develop.  Another possibility is that synchrony occurs because there are certain environmental conditions that are optimal for offspring survival.  Individuals are all cuing on the same set of environmental factors to time their reproduction, and synchrony is a byproduct.  He concluded that the latter of these possibilities explained the reproductive synchrony he observed in both the fiddler crabs and the limpets he studies. 

After the symposium, I talked to John quite a bit, and he invited me out to  Naos (on the causeway in Panama city) to see his research site and study species.  I was joined in this little field trip by two post-docs from Australia, Jess and Stu.  We had a great time watching (and digging up) fiddler crabs:

We also went down to the rocky intertidal (which looks out to the Bridge of the Americas and all the ships lined up to enter the canal) to see the limpets John has just started working with.  They are a really neat story, since they appear to be socially monogamous, simultaneous hermaphrodites.  How’s that for a strange breeding system!

I have to say, after a year of peering through the canopy, trying to figure out what a monkey 20 meters above me is putting in its mouth, the fiddler crabs hanging out on a perfectly flat sand beach in plain sight had quite a bit of appeal!

I’ve also spent some time this summerexploring  Panama a bit more.  My friend Susy came down to visit me before she headed off to Africa for a year to do her dissertation research.  She came and spent a few days with me on BCI

and then we went to the San Blas Islands with my friend Titoche. 

I spent a lot of time in a hammock, reading and sleeping

Basically, the San Blas is a place where you can swim, snorkel, lay on the beach, read and sleep–which is pretty much what we did.  There were only two other guests at our hotel, a very nice Swiss-Italian couple, and since Titoche is Belgian, french was the most shared language, so Susy and I struggled along as best we could. 

After getting back to Panama City (far to early in the morning), we ran into a bunch of riot police at the bus terminal.

Not unlike the US, Panama’s social security programs are bankrupt and in desperate need of reform.  The current government just recently passed legislation that raised the retirement age to deal with the problem.  This lead to weeks of protests and rioting.  The University was shut, streets were closed, and people were on the streets in both peaceful and not so peaceful opposition to the changes.  It made me wonder whether US citizens would react similarly to a raise in the retirement age, or if we are all too apathetic to even bother protesting anything anymore. 

Susy and I met up with my friends Vilma, Frauke and Ben, and we headed north to the cloud forest in Chiriqui.  The Cerro Punta side of Volcan Baru is my favorite place in Panama. 

We stayed at the ANAM ranger station at the head of the Quetzal trail.  It was amazing to feel cold–

It tended to rain pretty hard in the afternoon, so we would hike in the morning and then read or play games in the afternoon.

“Meg and Susy”

There were a couple of kittens that we also played with:

which turned out to be a very bad idea, since everyone but me got ringworm from them.  (Doctors at the Mass. General Tropical Disease clinic tried to scare Susy to death by telling her it was leishmaniasis 5 days before she was supposed to leave for Kenya.  Reassuring they couldn’t tell the difference between ringworm and leishmaniasis).

This trip was at the end of June, and only two months later, I was back in San Blas, on vacation again!  (I swear I was working really hard in between trips!) Frauke was going back to Germany, and she, Vilma and I  wanted to take one last trip together. 

I wasn’t wild about going back to San Blas (it isn’t my favorite place in Panama), but neither Frauke nor Vilma had been, and both really wanted to go.  I’m glad they talked me into it, because we had a great time. 

We stayed at a place I had never been before, near the community of Playon Chico.

The hotel itself was called Hotel Yandup–just two cabins on a beautiful coral reef island.

The owners were incredibly friendly, the food was amazing, and the beaches they took us two were breath taking.  We had a great time snorkeling, saw some really cool thing

and just generally had a great time.

It was great to spend some time with Frauke before she went back to Germany, and the trip provided much needed rest and relaxation because pretty much as soon as we returned to BCI, Vilma and I had to start monkey darting–but more on that later.

My friend Patrick lent me his recording equipment last week, and this
is one of the recordings I made of capuchin vocalizations. 
Mostly, what you are hearing is juveniles, but there is one adult “lost
call” (quite far away) at the beginning of the recording.  I’ve
been playing around with the idea of trying to run a playback
experiment to tease apart the effects of location and group identity in
intergroup relationships.  It sounds like a lot of fun, but I’m a
little worried that side-projects sounding this much more appealing
than my main project is symptomatic of a certain stage of dissertation
research, and I should resist the temptation to dabble.  We’ll
see, I guess.

click on:

capuchins calling

to play the recording.

    In the middle of March, my parents and
friends of ours, Steve and Shelley Fein, came to visit me in Panama. 
It was my first real vacation since being in Panama,
and I really wanted to use it to get outside the Canal Zone,
and see some of the rest of the country.  I convinced everyone that the
best plan would be to rent a car, and drive up the Inter-Americana,
stopping  at various places along the way.  And so, I dragged my
parents from one end of Panama to the other (well, not quite, as we didn’t make
it to the Darien)–I think they’ve forgiven me, now that all their chigger
bites have healed and they’ve found and removed the last of the ticks. 

I really liked our time in La Rica because it was such a completely different
part of Panama.  Panama seems to
be divided into the Canal Zone, the beach, Kuna Yala,
and the center.  I’d never seen “the center” and really enjoyed
getting to see one of the isolated farming towns that isn’t accessible by car
and doesn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing.  We all enjoyed eating
traditional Panamanian food and talking to Santos,
who had a lot to say about how Panama
was changing.  We also enjoyed the slow pace of breakfast at 7, hike, eat,
swim, siesta, eat dinner at 4, be in bed, asleep by 8.

I loved our vacation, and I don’t think I traumatized my parents too
badly.  I’m amazed at how few tourists seems to come to Panama. 
Pretty much everywhere we went, we were either the only tourists, or there were
only a few others.  The national park system is stunning, but poorly
utilized.  I’m really looking forward to visiting some of the other parks
that we didn’t get to on the trip later this summer!

It seems like a really long time since I’ve posted anything here, and
there are so many cool things I’ve done in the last couple of months
that it’s hard to figure out where to start.  Time seems to be
speeding up now, which is a sure sign that I’m closer to the end of my
time in Panama than the beginning.  Supposedly the dry season is
over and the rains are on their way.  It certainly seemed like
that two weeks ago, when just about every afternoon seemed to end in a
downpour and I became reacquainted with the meaning of “soaked to the
bone.”  Now, however, the weather gods seemed to have changed
their minds.  This week has been beautiful, sunny, summer
weather—and I’ve been stuck inside writing a paper and staring out the
window longingly.