La Selva Biological Research Station

A couple weekends ago was my first Veritas field trip to a tropical research station in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. Both my Tropical Ecology class and the Ecological Photography class attended the weekend-long excursion. Before we left for the trip, the two teachers divided us all into pairs: one ecology student and one photography student. Our main assignment for the weekend was to help the photography student take ecologically meaningful photos that could be explained biologically. My topic was, of course, insects. Saturday morning, took road 32 out of San Jose directly into the mountain range on the Caribbean side of the central valley. The air became cool and inundated with thin fog. As we climbed, you could see layers of blue hued mountains rising up in the distance- a resplendent wilderness occupied only by remote fauna and a thick layer of tropical montane vegetation. We crossed a bright rusty orange river gushing over large boulders and engraving a valley in the mountains as we began the descent into the northern Caribbean lowlands. We stopped briefly at a line of fruit stands along the roadside for a rest. From there, it took us less than an hour to arrive at La Selva Biological Research Station. La Selva is a private portion of tropical rainforests and disturbed lands purchased in 1954 for research purposes. It is one of the central research stations for the Organization for Tropical Studies and publishes a scientific paper every 72 hours.

Immediately upon exiting the bus, the humidity engulfed us in a thick embrace of saturated air. The heat made me actually appreciate the wind in San Jose. The research station was composed of quite a few cabins nearby a large open-air dining hall next to a river with a suspension bridge leading to more research cabins and conference rooms. Not exactly rustic. While we were changing into proper clothing, we saw a black howler monkey outside our dorms. I looked at him through my binoculars; he was staring directly at us with deep black eyes.

Gecko

We all congregated at tables near the dining hall for a briefing about La Selva and then lunch. The next couple hours were designated “free time.” Michele, Collen, and I walked into the jungle to explore. We crossed the suspension bridge over the slow-moving river, seeing iguanas basking in the trees and bromeliads overwhelming the upper branches of the tallest hardwoods. On the opposite of the bridge was a labyrinth of primary forest, punctuated by thin concrete paths. We followed one path to the left and down towards the river. Along the way, Collen spotted a pair of toucans perched above our heads! We saw groups of peccaries, terrestrial pig-like animals related to warthogs foraging along the forest floor. They were completely immune to our presence. The vast majority of the other animals we saw were insects, although I did manage to capture a mini gecko nearby one of the river buildings.

Green Parrot Snake

Around 2 PM, the two classes congregated to go on a forest walk. We were supposed to stay with our project partners and take detailed notes on everything we saw. Almost immediately, we spotted a green parrot snake slithering through the shrubs near the dining hall. My miniature teacher, Wendy, walked in the front of the group of almost 40 students stopping every few moments to talk to us about some insect or plant. The highlights of the walk were a pair of chestnut mandible toucans, an oropendola, a golden orb spider, green iguanas, long-nosed bats roosting on a building near the river, and a three-toed sloth. The majority of species we encountered in the forest were, not surprisingly, plants. Fortunately that is intriguing to me. By the end of our walk, we had barely penetrated the jungle and it only took us a few minutes to return to our cabins. 

Toucan

After another scrumptious meal, we again trooped off into the forest for a night walk. You could hear the sounds of the forest coming alive in the night: insects calling and frogs croaking. We encountered a massive colony of leaf-cutter ants marching across the forest floor transporting pieces of leaves back to their nest. On the rest of the night walk, we found cane toads, poison dart frogs, leaf-litter frogs, lizards, geckos, preying mantises, cockroaches, spiders, bullet ants, and millipedes. All of us were incredibly exhausted by the end of our hike and I crashed in my bed almost instantly.

green iguana

Some students woke up at 5 AM Sunday morning to go bird watching. I couldn’t quite manage to drag myself out of bed at that hour… and so I got up around 7 AM for breakfast. Afterwards, a couple girls and I found Doc walking down a forest path and followed him. Doc is an elderly professor at Concordia University whose real name is Lawrence Meissner, although everyone refers to him as “Doc.” Walking through the rainforest with him was the best part of the trip. He is a biologist who has been teaching field schools around the world for many years and hence he has a wealth of information to provide. His love for the nature around us was contagious and I soon felt entirely captivated by the forest. We kept quiet while walking through the beautiful jungle, observing everything around us—gaps in the forest being colonized by pioneer tree species, strangler figs suffocating their host plants, old hardwood trees decaying into piles of rich nutrients on the forest floor. We could hear howler monkeys calling high in the canopy and eventually I was able to spot the troop of monkeys climbing through the trees far in the distance. On our way back, we saw more peccaries on their eternal search for food.

Golden orb spider

Leaf cutter ants

Before we packed up and left La Selva, we each had to present our photos and describe them in ecological terms to the classes. Each presentation was relatively brief, thankfully, although I enjoyed looking at some of the beautiful photos from the photography students.

Our journey home was somewhat uneventful and we arrived back in the city in the afternoon. I am returning to La Selva this weekend, and hope to see more monkeys this time!

Strawberry poison dart frog