BioDIVERSITY

We're well settled in the Wilson Botanical Garden area of Las Cruces Field Station by the time of this posting. Natural History orientations, lectures on writing scientific papers and bird families of Costa Rica are only a few of the topics we covered throughout these days, but of course the best teacher is still personal experience. Today was our first opportunity to do actual fieldwork, and we pseudo-bushwhacked through primary forest to count the number of ferns, woody plants, herbs and palms along our 25 m transect. I learned something very important and shockingly obvious as a result of this experiment...
People too often think of a 'forest' as nothing but trees, and we overlook the smaller aspects of it, such as undergrowth and abiotic factors. This, along with our lecture on Restoration Ecology today taught me, above all else, that there are so many factors to consider when trying to 'save' an area. There's more to just planting trees. And yes, this should be common knowledge, but think of a forest right now... What do you imagine? I'll bet the first things that comes to mind are sweeping green canopies and sturdy trunks. If not, I'd like to know, because I'm still trying to add that layer of undergrowth to the forests in my mind. This course has made us question and find the answers for ourselves. Among a handful of articles we have to read, one is about the 'value' of Biodiversity, from an ecological standpoint and an economic one. I can go on and on about this, and I plan to during our discussion on Sunday, but I strongly believe that you cannot put a monetary value on any life, or combinations of lives that create our ecosystems.

Anyways, besides all the intellectual overload, let me share with you some rare moments that I've been lucky to capture on camera, or just creatures that are too beautiful for words:




I forgot to mention that the Wilson Gardens contain "over 1000 genera in more than 200 plant families," taken from all over the world. This is a certain kind of bamboo from Japan, and for it to reach this height of... a 3 story building at least... took one month. One.











Oh, and at the base of one of the stalks were these two lizards duking it out. I was able to get close enough to take this macro shot.






And then there were these two Bird-Eating Snakes mating by our cabin, spotted by yours truly. Captured on camera, too... what could be better?















A video, of course.




This is the view from inside a Strangler Fig structure... Imagine a typical, HUGE rain forest tree. A strangler fig is a vine that slowly but surely wraps around its host tree and eventually... well, strangles it to death. When the tree rots away, the fig vine still remains. And this thing is ginormous... the only thing that gives away the fact that it is not a tree is that it is hollow.










We went to look at a blacklight sheet (used to attract insects) tonight and before long we realized we were standing in the way of a swarm of army ants. Imagine the very ground beneath you *pulsing* with ants, ants with large pincers. I was lucky enough not to be bitten but a few of my peers were. I later went back and dropped a moth into the swarm and watched it get completely engulfed in a matter of seconds. The ones pictured here were pulled off of my socks.





And I have a lot of great pictures of moths and beetles from the blacklight, which I visited again after the swarm cleared, but I won't bother you with all of those shots. Here is one that a girl showed to me as I was writing this blog though. Beautiful. Here, you can't escape from the wild, not even when you're inside. And that's just how I like it.