| One of Boa’s many projects is to raise field-collected Centruroides sp. and create a large terrarium at this house, where he can shine a black light on them (chemicals in scorpion exoskeletons fluoresce under UV light) and wow some tourists. He’s had two successfully reproducing females. Here’s the latest batch; all of the babies are still attached to the mother. The juveniles of the other (not pictured) have begun to explore on their own. |  |
Rhaebo haematiticus in Reserva Biologica Hitoy Cerere
Boa recently purchased around 50 young-of-year tilapia and is attempting to raise them in this small, concrete tank.
I’ve now arrived in Las Cruces, which is another field station operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies (Las Selva and Palo Verde are the other two in Costa Rica).
The past couple of days, I spent visiting Boa in Pandora (Valle de La Estrella) on the south end of the Caribbean slope. Of course, I have more pictures of my dogs that I could post, but hopefully I’ll get into posting some more interesting and diverse subject… for now, here’s a photo of one of Boa’s four dogs. She’s 6 months old and extremely playful.
One of my students, David, is planning to survey fish communities at Las Cruces. I may build a fish identification page here, but we’ll just start by posting some of what we catch here.
This is a long-whiskered catfish (Pimelodidae) called Rhamdia rogersi. I’ve seen this species in RBAMB and, I think, on La Peninsula Osa.
Yes… weird, I know, but here are some photographs of Neotropical Otter (Lontra longicaudis) sign taken during some field work on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. These are not recent photographs, but throwbacks…
The scat was interesting: lots of pieces and parts of shrimp are included. We encountered several otters in various rivers throughout the Osa, and one hadn’t noticed us as we seined for characids (a type of fish we were interested in collecting) and missed running into my leg in ~4 feet of water by a hair…. But they were always too fast to photograph, so this will have to do…
While in Palo Verde last summer, I met Ramsa Chaves, a graduate student at Dartmouth College under Brad Taylor and UCR licenciatura graduate. She used the OTS station in Palo Verde as a headquarters for her research on insect communities associated with streams in the Guanacaste region. Her and one or more assistants traveled to local streams that varied in surrounding land-use and sampled emergent insects during the day, returning to sort and process the catch in PV in the evening. I helped out one of those days to get a taste of her extraordinary and ambitious research project. From memory, Ramsa aimed to examine responses of insect communities to land-use differences and how these responses play-out in aquatic-terrestrial linkages.
We sampled two streams that she and Jereme had set traps in and around three days prior. In Quebrada Amores (lovers stream) within Reserva Biológica Lomas de Barbudal emergence traps were emptied. The floating, triangular traps, as suggested by their name, capture adult insects as the emerge from the stream to breed and feed in the surrounding terrestrial environment.
Río Pijije drains agricultural and residential land, in contrast to the protected, forested land-use surrounding Quebrada Amores. Emergence traps had settled ashore after a flash flood, and were not sampled, a common occurrence in the rainy season in dry forest areas. Sticky traps (transparent over-head sheets covered in glue, basically) were placed from 10 to 100 m from the stream edge to sample flying insects as they moved from the stream outward into the the forest or, in this case, cow pasture. In addition to sticky traps, we sampled using butterfly nets, which are not pictured here (probably for two reasons (1) I was sampling and (2) I knocked my net into a large paper wasp next and was promptly stung many, many times. It was an extremely memorable event for me). Both sampling methods have hopefully painted a picture for Ramsa showing how insects respond from and to a stream draining catchment with different land-use patterns.
Spilling into the the Pacific north of La Leona Field Station in Corcovado National Park, Rio Madrigal was the only stream sampled that contained Characids, Mike’s fish of interest. The river is relatively large compared to near-by streams and supports River Otter, as evidenced by scat.
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