Barro Colorado Island

On Monday we had a "long" day of lectures, supposedly the longest of the next 4 months which therefore was really not that bad :).

We went to Barro Colorado Island for two days. Barro Colorado is in the middle of Gatun Lake, it was artificially created when the River Chagres was flooded to complete the canal in 1914. This hotspot for tropical diversity is home to many scientists. It became a natural reserve in 1923 and is now administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We stayed at their permanent research center for the night where we ran into quite a few scientists that were more than happy to discuss their work.

View from the boat taking us to BCI

This part of the course was dedicated to understanding the processes that influence tropical diversity. Tropical forests characteristically have many tree species and low density of adults for each species, compared to areas in North America that have less diversity but a higher abundance of those few species. In fact, there are more species of trees on the 15km2 of Barro Colorado than in all of North America!

We went for a night walk in the jungle, hoping to discover some crazy tropical mammals. Though we didn't see as much as we'd hoped (apparently due to the full moon and the lack of fruits this time of year), we did come across bats, howler monkeys, and way too many tarantulas. We also had ñeques (agoutis in english) hanging out in our plots while we were sampling seeds for our project on seed predation.

An agouti! (Photo Credit: Caroline Morrow)

These two days were intense but did give us a quick snapshot of what life in the field doing research is like (which among other things includes waking up way too early to avoid the day's heat and to see the most animals). It was great to actually get out and actually test models we'd learned about in the classroom.

Today, Isobel, Tanya and I met with one of our internship supervisors to continue to learn more about potential projects we could work on for the semester. She works for the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (similar to the Environmental Protection Agency in the US) and explained to us some of their general goals. We will be working near Pedasi in the Pablo Barrios Reserve, but we are not too sure yet how we will help out.

We will be going next thursday and friday (5 hour bus ride) and will stick around over the weekend to go surfing!