Independent Research

Since we have returned from our field trip to the Atlantic Coast, we have been extremely busy preparing for and conducting our independent research projects. It has been a long month taking data and writing papers, but it has been so amazing to get the opportunity to conduct research in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

I had two goals for my project: (1) to determine whether hummingbird feeders have an effect on the pollination of a native plant, Stachytarpheta frantzii, and (2) how pollination is affected across a disturbance gradient. 

Some background information: 

Pollinators are super important in the life-cycle of plants. Hummingbirds are one of the most widely used pollinators, especially in the tropics. They have adapted to their role as pollinators with their ability to hover over flowers, which requires a high amount of energy. This need for energy correlates with high flower visitation in order to sustain their energy needs. 

As the ecotourism industry continues to expand in the tropics, hummingbird feeders have become increasingly popular. Tourists love to see the brightly colored birds, and these feeders provide the ideal way of providing this service to tourists. Hummingbird feeders provide a constant and reliable food source for hummingbirds, but this can have a serious impact on pollination of surrounding flowers. 

Stachytarpheta frantzii is a plant native to Costa Rica. It is very abundant and is literally found everywhere in Monteverde - from gardens, next to high-traffic roads, and near secondary growth forest. This plant also flowers throughout the year, which makes it an ideal food source for insects and hummingbirds in the dry season. This plant was used as my study organism, primarily because of its abundance in Monteverde and that it attracts large numbers of hummingbirds. 

Stachytarpheta frantzii being visited by a Scintillant Hummingbird at one of my sites.

Methodology

I established four sites throughout the Monteverde / Santa Elena region. Each site contained two patches of my study plant. One was the experimental patch (with a hummingbird feeder) and the second was the control patch (without a feeder). These two patches were a minimum of 50 meters apart and had a similar number of flowers. The four sites were chosen along a disturbance gradient, with two sites considered "least disturbed" and the other two considered "more disturbed." Disturbance was quantified by proximity to a nearby forest and the amount of surrounding vegetation. 

Here is a map of my four study sites and where they were located around Monteverde and Santa Elena: 

My homestay house, if anyone was interested, was very close to Finca Santa Maria, in the Cañitas region of Monteverde.

Bajo del Tigre is part of the Children's Eternal Rainforest and was therefore considered the "least" disturbed of the four sites. Cabinas Capuliín is a hotel that is within very close proximity to a forest, and was therefore considered a lesser-disturbed site. Both Finca Santa Maria and Cerro Plano were considered the most disturbed sites.

An example, from Finca Santa Maria, of how my sites were set up with the feeders.

The hummingbird feeders contained a 4:1 water to sugar solution, which closely resembles the nectar hummingbirds frequently find in flowers. Feeders were refilled every 3-4 days at each site. 

Data was collected every morning between 7:00 and 10:30 am. I visited two sites per day, and observed each patch at each site for 30 minutes. Sites were rotated every day, and patches within each site were also rotated to ensure that the time of day did not play a role. Flower visitation was used as a means of quantifying pollination. Every time I was at a patch, I took note of the following: (1) hummingbird species (2) number of flowers visited per bird (3) number of feeder visits, but only for experimental patch, and (4) the total time spent foraging.

Results of my Study

So what I found through all of my data collection was that hummingbird feeders actually played little role in affecting pollination of Stachytarpheta frantzii (actually they played no role since I had zero feeder visits throughout my sites). When I just compared control vs experimental patches, disregarding the feeder altogether, there was a difference at Bajo del Tigre in the number of flower visits between patches. The experimental patch had a much higher mean number of flowers visited than did the control patch for this site. When the number of flowers visited was combined for both patches at each site, I found significant differences between the four sites. There was a trend in there being greater differences between lesser disturbed sites, such as Bajo del Tigre, and Finca Santa Maria, one of the more-disturbed sites. This observation helped show that plants in areas more impacted by humans are more at risk for a decrease in hummingbird visits than plants in areas less impacted by humans.

A Little Piece of Panama

Following our sea turtle adventure in Parismina, we continued southward to Panama! After a long day of travel, we reached the border on our bus and spent close to an hour moving the group over the border into Panama. The border was literally an old train bridge with small wooden boards for people to walk over. 

The bridge we used to cross the border into Panama
Photo courtesy of Google

Once we all got across the border (along with our bus), we drove for about 45 minutes to a port town in the Northeast corner of the country. As we were driving through the countryside, it was interesting to draw comparisons between Panama and Costa Rica. The mountains of Panama were not severely deforested like those of Costa Rica. I'm assuming it's because they don't have as much of a history with agriculture as Costa Rica. It was so much prettier to drive through the mountains of Panama - more trees to look at :)

Once we arrived at a small port town, which would be where we caught some boats over to the island where we would be staying. The name of the province we were in, which I forgot to mention earlier, is Bocas del Toro (mouth of the bull). We were staying on an island in the Archipelago de Bocas del Toro. We specifically stayed on Isla Colón.

Archipiélago de Bocas del Toro. We stayed on Isla Colón (the big one on the left).
Photo courtesy of Google. 

Loading into the boats!

It was a pretty long boat ride from the port to Isla Colón, but it was so beautiful. The wide open ocean, beautiful scenery to look at - absolutely breathtaking.

So our home for the 3 or 4 days we were there was a cute little beach house type place! It was super cute and it was so fun to have an entire house to ourselves. The house was about a ten-minute walk to the restaurant where most of our activities and meals took place. 

Minus the first day (spent doing species reports), we spent just about our entire time in Panama snorkeling around the islands. We had some lectures (of course) on marine diversity and bats. While snorkeling, we saw so many fish and corals and it was really just amazing! I don't think any words could describe how great of an experience that was. I don't particularly enjoy swimming that much, but I had so much fun! One entire day was devoted to snorkeling. We had lunch at this really cute restaurant right over a small reef! It was super cool to just sit on the dock, eat lunch, and see all of the fish swim underneath you.

One afternoon, we took a boat ride out to "bird island," which is where birds nest offshore. There were hundreds of brown boobies and red-billed tropicbirds flying around. That island was so pretty and the birds were amazing!

Bird Island

Red-billed Tropicbird

The following day was our last in Panama, and so we spent the morning snorkeling some more, and then headed into town for lunch and the afternoon. The town is called Bocas del Toro, and is actually the capital of the province. It was a really cute town, with some really good restaurants, too! A few of us went out to a vegetarian place, which sold pizzas and sandwiches and all of that. I must say, their food was amazing! We spent the next hour or so doing some shopping in town before we were meeting the rest of the group to go to a bat cave! This was super cool, as the bat cave is actually a religious site as well as being important biologically for housing numerous species of bats.

Entrance to the bat cave

There was a small stream that ran through the bat cave, however, there was one part of the bat cave got rather deep. For a handful of us, "deep" meant mid-waist. So some of us got a tad bit wet.... 

Nonetheless, Panama did not disappoint. The people were beyond nice, the food (though not my favorite) was good, and the experiences were absolutely one of a kind and an amazing way to end our second field trip.

Here are some random pictures accumulated from our boat rides / time in Panama:

Susan with our adopted puppy

The puppy!

View from the restaurant we stopped at for lunch during our day of snorkeling

Horse who lived across the street from our house

Parismina

So after we left Tirimbina, we drove to a place called Parismina. This is a small town located on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica. It was a fairly long afternoon of traveling (remember we didn't leave Tirimbina until late morning). We drove through some pretty areas, as well as others dominated by banana plantations. They were everywhere - Chiquita and Del Monte, primarily. We would be driving down a road for easily 10 minutes without seeing anything but banana trees.

The Chiquita banana plantation we passed on our way to Parismina. Soil erosion, massive chemical inputs, and human health risks are all environmental problems associated with large-scale banana production. 

Each banana tree had a plastic blue bag over the fruit, which prevents flies from laying eggs in the fruit and thus creating the perfect bananas that every American desires, of course with a few strings attached. Those bags contain many pesticides to prevent bugs from attacking the fruit. They are also used just once and then thrown away, creating a tremendous amount of waste. Each of the two plantations we passed contained massive water-tower-looking tanks that actually contained all of the pesticides and herbicides that will be used on the plants. It was amazing how large those tanks were... 

After a few hours driving through nothing but banana plantations, we finally made it to Parismina, or at least to the dock where we would load into boats that would take us to our hotel in Parismina. Basically, the area we were staying in was an island (man-made), which was one of the results after the creation of a small canalish-thing. 

It was a short boat ride to where we were staying (I wish I could remember the name of the place). It was super cute (and had a pool!). We stayed here for only 2 days, but those were some pretty amazing days (well, nights actually). 

View of the hammocks and gardens from the dining pavillion

The cabins we stayed in

From the boat (canal view)

We arrived in the afternoon to Parismina, and had most of the afternoon before dinner to settle in (for most that meant taking a dip in the pool). After dinner, we had a lecture on sea turtles! After lecture, probably around 8:30 or so, we piled back into the boats and took the short boat ride across the river to Parismina (the town). We were greeted by three members of the local Turtle Rescue group, who were going to take us on a typical night patrol along the beaches of Parismina. We were split into three groups (one per guide) and took our separate paths down the beach. Unfortunately after 3 or so hours of walking, we didn't spot any turtles (which was okay - we already planned on coming back the following night). 

So the next day, we left in the morning after breakfast to go on a boat ride on the canal, mostly doing bird watching. We saw some pretty amazing birds, along with some White-Faced Capuchins and lizards. 

Egret

Riding through the canal in Parismina (Atlantic Coast)

We spent all morning out on the water and returned to the hotel for lunch. Later that afternoon, one of the turtle patrollers, Jerry, came and gave us a talk about sea turtle conservation, particularly in Parismina. He and a few of his friends started the program nearly 15 years ago. He explained how Parismina (where he grew up) was primarily a turtle eating town. Starting a turtle conservation project did not initially go over well with many of the residents in the town, but they continued anyway. Every night they would go out and patrol the beaches. Eventually, they got a website set up and were able to start recruiting volunteers to help  protect the sea turtles. Each volunteer pays $27.00 per day ($17 goes towards their homestay family and the other $10 goes towards paying patrollers at night). In total, this conservation project releases 10,000 baby turtles a year. Sadly, only 1 in a 1,000 of these babies will survive to adulthood. Most threats to sea turtles are human-caused, such as climate change, beach erosion, bleaching corals, destruction of nesting sites, light pollution, hunting, and fishing. Plastics are also an important factor, as the turtles can mistake them for jellyfish (their main diet).

Jerry talked for a while about the importance of conserving not only sea turtles, but wildlife in general. One thing he said really stuck with me, which was that one of the biggest ways people can help is to reduce, REFUSE, and recycle. Refuse to purchase harmful plastics, refuse to participate in the industries that cause the most harm to wildlife. It was a very interesting, and rather brilliant, twist on the famous saying. Anyways, after the lecture, Jerry took us over to the beaches by Parismina to show us the hatchery they are building. It is a 3m x 15m area of sand to put clutches of turtle eggs in. To "build" the hatchery, they have to sift through all of the sand in that area to remove branches, plastics, and bad sand - a process that can take many weeks to complete.

Jerry talking about the hatchery

Hatchery in progress

After looking at the hatchery, we went to a local craft fair in Parismina. This fair has jewelry and other crafts made by people in Parismina. 90% of the profits from this craft fair went to the locals, with the other 10% going to help protect the sea turtles. It was an amazing experience, as we not only got to interact with more locals, but a portion of the money was going to such a great cause!

We got back to the hotel later that afternoon, and after dinner we were on-call for turtle-watching. We went later in the night to look for turtles (I think we left closer to 10:15). We split into three groups again, and split up down the beach. Not 20 minutes later, we got flashlight signals from the group ahead of us that they found a turtle! We power-walked down the beach and got to the site of the turtle. At first, it was so dark that I couldn't even make out the shape of the turtle. But when Jerry took out his flashlight, I saw the most beautiful, gigantic sea turtle (about 1.8 m long).

This isn't anyone from our group (creds to Google), but just so you can get an idea of the size of these turtles. We weren't allowed to bring cameras because it was a) too dark and b) flash would affect the turtles

By the time we reached this turtle, she had already finished laying her eggs and had begun to bury them in the sand. Her flippers are huge and incredibly strong and powerful, and we watched her move the sand and make her way back to the ocean. While she was heading back to the water, the patrollers and volunteers started the task of digging up her eggs from the nest. They do this with every nest they can find in order to prevent poachers from finding them from the turtle tracks. They have very little time from when the eggs are layed to move them, as doing this too late could kill the babies inside. 

After we watched her go back into the ocean, we split back into our groups and started heading back towards the entrance to the beach. My group was the first to leave, and we ended up finding a second turtle! This one luckily had just gotten to the beach, and we got to watch the entire process. We watched her dig the hole with her back flippers, as well as lay the eggs! It was an unforgettable experience! 

Leatherback Sea Turtle
(Photo credit to Google)

From Pocosol to Tirimbina (with La Selva in between)

After our lovely stay Eladio's, it was hard to say goodbye but we had to venture onwards to a station called Pocosol (yes, that means little sun). We left Eladio's promptly 15 minutes late (we're on Tico time down here), so 8:15 it was. It was another 15-16 km hike out of Eladio's to our next destination of Pocosol. This hike I thought was a tad bit harder than the first part, mostly because it was ALL UP HILL. So yeah that was a fun hike. Still one of the most beautiful places I've ever been - the Children's Eternal Rainforest definitely did not disappoint. It was absolutely stunning. 

So with this second hike, we had the added task of having to cross a river. And this wasn't like any old stream we had been crossing on previous hikes. This was a real river. The rangers, Moncho, and Johel used a bamboo tree as a barricade to prevent the rest of us from getting swept downstream. It was actually really fun to cross it, though it was a bit deep...

About to get really wet...
(Photo creds to Carson)

Once we all crossed the river, we were able to continue along at our own pace until we hit the top of the tallest hill for lunch at around 12. After lunch, we all continued on to Pocosol, which was a really cool place tucked away at the other end of the Children's Eternal Rainforest.

The building where we all slept - my room was the bottom right

View from the balcony of the main building

We only spent 2 nights in Pocosol, mostly doing bird diversity. The first morning after our arrival, we went bird watching at 6am and saw some really cool birds! My favorite is still the Oropendolas, which nested in one of the trees right outside the main building.

Chestnut-headed Oropendola

You can see their nests hanging from the tips of branches around the birds

That day we spend doing other species reports around Pocosol, and then that afternoon we were given a lot of free time, so I went with many others to a waterfall that was maybe a 30-45 minute hike down some trails. It was really pretty: 

Waterfall, Pocosol

Then later that afternoon we did some more lectures and did species reports on many birds, such as the Black-mandibled Toucan, the Great Kiskadee, the Clay Colored Thrush (national bird of Costa Rica), and others. After dinner, we had a statistics lecture to introduce us to some tests we may use for our independent projects.

The following morning we left Pocosol. A truck came to collect all of our equipment and bags, and then an ex-military truck came to pick us up and bring us into town to meet our bus. 

Leaving Pocosol in style!
(Photo courtesy of Susan)

Once we were all boarded on our bus, we headed out to La Selva Biological Station (yes, THE La Selva). So for those of you who don't know about La Selva, it's located in Braulio Carrillo National Park. According to their website, La Selva is, "recognized internationally as one of the premier sites in the world for ongoing research in lowland rain forests." So basically it's a big deal. Basically envision dropping a really small university in the middle of a rain forest, and you have La Selva. It was weird, and none of us were really a fan. All of the paths throughout the park were paved, which is just odd and seems really unnatural. But the rangers were all super nice and gave us a tour of the trails after we arrived. Our group saw some cool bugs and birds:

Sleeping Peccari

Baby Fer de Lance (very poisonous snake)

Black-Mandibled Toucan

Snowy Cotinga

Upon arrival in La Selva also meant laundry for the first time in nearly a week (we had been wearing the same 2 pairs of clothes for that entire time). Laundry was welcomed with open arms, along with clean clothes brought by Kathy when she met us at the bus after Pocosol. 

The only lecture we had in La Selva was on Tree Fall Gaps, so we all hiked out to a gap in the park and sat on the trail while Alan lectured. We then did a small activity showing how different species of trees can grow in the gap, and how it can be decided randomly. We did this by dividing into 3 groups (representing a species of tree), all determined by the type of party hat we were wearing. I was in the princess group, and there was also the Elmo group as well as the High School Musical group. The way the game worked was Moncho would draw one of our names from a hat, and that meant that we as an individual died and we left a gap in the canopy. Then Moncho would pick a second name, and whatever species that person was, was the species that would regrow in that gap (so the first person would change party hats). It was a really interesting way of showing how in many cases, a tree fall gap is filled randomly.

We spent only 1 night in La Selva, but it was a very cool experience to see where many famous experiments have been done in the tropics.

After La Selva, we took another road trip to a place called Tirimbina, which is located a little further North of La Selva. We stayed here for 3 days. This place was adorable, and the place we stayed was located at the opposite end of the main part of the reserve.

View from our room

Humans in the Tropics - Forestry

The first of the three days spent in Tirimbina was a Humans in the Tropics day. That day focused on forestry, and we learned about many different stages and types of forestry. The night before we had a lecture as an introduction, so here is a brief summary of what I learned:

- Earth loses 20,000 Ha of forest per day
- Major drivers of deforestation include: agriculture, wood, infrastructure expansion (mostly roads)
- Some other factors: economic, institutional, technological, cultural, demographical
- The Amazon Basin is nearly 20% deforested / already, mostly because the construction of roads leads to more roads and so on
- Overall, deforestation has slowed down in Brazil, but other countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Guyana, and Colombia still have significant deforesting of the Amazon
- 89,000 acres of rainforest were logged to complete New York City's boardwalk, as an example
- On average, we lose 380 species per day

So we went on a field trip to look at different types of forestry. Our first stop was a nursery. This nursery promotes plantations in the area. It's owned by families and produces 400,000 - 500,000 plants per year, 40% of which are for production. Many of the native species grown here are for reforestation, as well. Clients are usually landowners who buy around 8,000 plants. This nursery also gives away many plants for protection purposes. They grow 40 different species there, and the most abundant species varies per year. The native species stay around 4-6 months while exotic species stay anywhere from 2-7 months.

So after the nursery, we went to a couple different types of plantations: one was solely exotic species while the second was all native species of trees. There was a very clear difference, as the native species plantation looked "more" like a forest than the exotic plantation. There were epiphytes growing on the trees and more life in terms of bird species and animals in general.

After lunch, we stopped at a farm which has an intact forest on the property. There we learned about Reduced Impact Logging. This process is basically when a landowner can go through this long process of having certain sized trees removed from their property every 15 years of so, done so in a much more sustainable way with minimal damage to the environment.

So that night after dinner, we watched a documentary called Raids in the Rainforest. It talked about illegal deforestation in a national park of the Amazon in Brazil. Specifically, it talked about how one woman, with the help of her team, go about protecting the Amazon from deforestation. I would highly recommend watching this film, as it very clearly illustrates the daily problems conservationists face.

We had a discussion afterwards about the documentary, and I'm not going to lie, it was a tough one. We were all in a state of disappointment and there was a mutual feeling of hopelessness in the air. It's so hard to be so passionate about saving the environment when there seems to be little hope in saving it because a vast majority of people don't care. The solution is not simple by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many factors that go hand in hand with deforestation - economic, education, social. It was made clear in this film that poverty does not excuse people from their crimes. We don't excuse people from robbing a store because they are poor, so we can't excuse them from cutting down trees to make money, either. But the other layer to this problem is that many of these poor people are hired by wealthy people who hide behind the laborers of their small industry. Those are the people who need to be caught, not those who do the dirty work, as they are easily replaceable for those wealthy people.

Alan brought up a really interesting point that I want to highlight for all of you reading this:

Costa Rica and the United States both had to lose over 80% of their land for the general public to realize it needed to stop. Do we wait for over 80% of the Amazon to be destroyed before people realize we need to stop, or do we learn from our mistakes and change our ways before it's too late?

Some other ideas brought up during the discussion:
- Offer incentives to people to not cut down the trees
- Don't even bother with "sustainable" timber farming - pay people the $300 to stop cutting down trees (that's the amount people usually make with Reduced Impact Logging, on average)
- Put international pressure on Brazil and other South American countries to stop deforesting the Amazon

So think more about deforestation and speak out about making a change. Because if we lose all of our tropical forests, then we will have a lot more problems on our hands...


Back to Tirimbina

So on a more positive note, the rest of our time in Tirimbina was incredible. We went on a decently long hike from our station to the main part of the reserve, which took us 4 hours because we stopped to do species reports along the way. Towards the end of the hike, we had to cross a super long bridge and it was soooo cool!

It was a suspension bridge that extended over a river and through part of the canopy and ended at the main part of the reserve
(Photo courtesy of Dan L.)

So after lunch at the restaurant in the reserve, we had a quick lecture and then had the option to go swimming in the river (which was about a 30 minute hike). That was a lot of fun, and we stayed for an hour or so until returning to the reserve. We took three vans back to the station where we were staying, and then after dinner we had a lecture on bats from Richard Leval. 

The following morning was our last in Tirimbina, and they gave us the morning off before we left at around 10:30 to explore. So I went on a walk with Vian down the road to the farms. On our walk, we ran into some chickens and their chicks, and we played with them for a bit and they were just so cute!

Momma made sure we didn't get tooo close

Just look at that little face!