The Latest Wildlife Round-up

 There have just been so many exciting critters to see here in Gamboa over the past few weeks, and it's about time I did a photo dump. In no particular order:

A baby boa constrictor:

A katydid:

Our resident entomologist extraordinaire informed me that that long thing protruding from its tail end is actually an ovipositor, the bit that deposits eggs in the ground. This species needs to get its eggs reeeeeeally deep.

Leptodactylus pentadactylus, also referred to as the Smoky Jungle Toad, with my boot for size comparison:

Smoky Jungle Toad XXX edition:

They make little depressions in the ground to lay their eggs in. (The foam in the photo is egg foam.) We had inadvertently disturbed them out of it in this photo.

Trachycephalus venulosus, also called the milk frog because it exudes a milky slime when picked up:

Scinax staufferi:

Not actually wildlife, but a variety of skirted mushroom  that I've been hoping to see here:

 A praying mantis:

 A baby Bothrops asper, the deadly Fer-de-Lance snake:

Chiasmocleis panamensis, the adorable Narrow-mouthed Toad:

They are flatter than pancakes.

Scinax ruber:

One night, we were out collecting frogs and there were maybe a hundred of these guys all chorusing up a storm in a bunch of nearby trees.

Here's another piece of not-wildlife. Apparently one of the researchers' sisters brought this bunny to Gamboa and then decided she didn't want it anymore. The researcher didn't want it either, so she just turned it loose, presumably hoping it would just quietly disappear. It seems to have surprising staying power, for a domestic, and it now mostly hangs around the lab parking lot, where I worry the humans will kill it before nature will.

The yellow-headed day gecko, which actually has an orange head:

Smilisca phaeota:

Apparently, it's one of the species with paired vocal sacs, but unfortunately this male wasn't calling when I found him.

Here's an orb-weaver spider shedding its skin:

Here's the finished product:

One of the land crabs we get here:

They're in most of the streams here and they kind of gross me out. I don't know why, but freshwater crabs are just weird.

Here's a real treasure:

It's a snake. No really, that tiny little thing is a snake. A blind snake, for that matter. Kudos to my apartment-mate, who managed to spot and catch the thing as it traversed the sidewalk near our house the other day.

You can see the eyes in this one if you look really hard. They're there, they're just vestigial.

Here's some Hypsiboas rosenbergi getting it on in a puddle:

They're also called gladiator frogs because the males have spines on their thumbs.

Some variety of Anolis, expertly caught yet again by my apartment-mate:

This adorable little thing is Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni, a glass frog:

They're called glass frogs because you can see through their bodies. When backlit, you can even see their hearts beating. You can see the internal organs in this one:

We went looking for them by the rivers out along Gamboa's Pipeline Road, a really popular spot for nature watching. We found ones calling:

Guarding eggs:

And in amplexus:

If you look closely, you can see that they both have vocal sacs, because they're actually both boys.

We also found a tiny little Craugastor fitzingeri:

This is a large male basilisk lizard sitting in a tree:

What they're really known for is their talent for running across the surfaces of ponds or streams, earning them the nickname Jesus Christ Lizard.

Here's a baby one!

An emerging cicada:

 This is something really exciting, a salamander (Oedipina complex):

My co-worker found it while we were out frogging last night. It's a really rare find here, so we brought it back to the lab for photographs. It was tiny, probably about as wide as a pencil, with a tail much longer than its body.

Anyway, that's it for now; more later!

Coiba Paradise

The weekend before last (I'm a shamefully slow poster), I took my first real trip outside of the canal zone, to a cute little beach town called Santa Catalina. Santa Catalina is widely renowned for being a great surfing spot, and it consists almost entirely of hotels, boat tour companies, and surf shacks. Of course, I was there because of the town's proximity to Coiba Island and its surrounding marine national park, home to a variety of creatures (including endemic species of howler monkeys and agoutis) as well as a small visitors' station and an ex-prison converted into a naval station.

The trip over was notable for its stop at a migración office, where an officer got on board the bus and checked everybody's ID cards and passports. It's the first time I've ever been asked to show documentation other than at customs and I was really glad I'd brought my original passport, not just a copy. The other thing that happened on the way over was that I encountered a nice American gal on the last leg of the bus and we decided to get a hostel room together. Yay new friends!

I made it to Catalina on Friday afternoon, but there are no boats to Coiba other than around 8 AM, so we spent the rest of the day noodling around town and trying to figure out how to get to the island in the morning. Unfortunately, in such a small town, trips to Coiba are all cut into the same package deal at every tour company and they all cost $50, plus the $20 park entrance fee. $70 was a bit much for a day trip, but fortunately, come Saturday morning, a stroke of luck got me on a boat with some French travel magazine writers. They didn't do as much hiking as I would have liked, but going with them and with a guide who was also from the Smithsonian Institute knocked the cost down to $30. (I got the park entrance fee waived with my Smithsonian ID, thanks to our guide who sweet-talked the park rangers.)

On the boat out, we got a great surprise as we were surrounded by a pod of spotted dolphins. There were a ton of them, including several babies, and they leapt out of the water in a variety of acrobatics. I didn't get any super exciting shots, but here's a back.

Our first stop was on the island of Coiba itself, where we hiked a short trail called Sendero de los Monos. We had arrived a little later than we were hoping to and our guide mentioned that due to the time we probably wouldn't see much wildlife, but after only a few minutes she spotted a male howler monkey alone in a tree. She began making a squelchy kissing sound with the palm of her hand and pretty soon, he was hooting and calling at us. Her speculation was that he might have been alone due to illness or injury, but later we heard the rest of the group of howlers not far off. Later in the hike, we stumbled across a white-faced capuchin monkey which was also a little ways off from the rest of its troop. Unfortunately, I couldn't get photos of either of them because they moved away from us too quickly and were too hidden by the dense canopy.

After the hike, we went to a few other small islands to swim, snorkel, and take glossy magazine-quality photos of places seemingly untouched by human activity. The snorkeling was great, with sharks, huge schools of fish, fish almost as long as me, giant sun starfish, pufferfish in crazy colors and patterns, all sorts of stuff... At one of our stops, there was even another STRI station, way out there, in the middle of the cluster of islands. Here's their front yard:

They get forest AND beach? What am I doing in Gamboa??

After the island hopping, we went back to Isla Coiba to pay our park fees and check out the facilities, but we left fairly soon after, for one more island and then the trip back to the mainland.

Here's the guesthouses on Coiba:

And the beach:

And a fasciated tiger-heron:

There was also a weirdly large number of large black vultures hanging around the station.

On our way back, we saw couple of ships stopped in the water and our guide knew they were up to something. Upon checking out the scene, we found two adult humpback whales and a calf, all of whom were very calm and swam quite close to our boat--maybe within 15 ft at times. The adults were huge and surfaced repeatedly. I don't think I had ever seen whales before, so I was pretty exhilarated to see them and took as many photos as I could.

Here's a snout:

Here's a shot with part of the boat frame in it because the whale was so close at that point:

After we got back, we all got dinner at an overpriced beachfront restaurant. I wish I could have had more time on Coiba itself, but I had to leave early the next morning to make it back in time for work Sunday night.

Adventures in Panama

I've been doing small things on the weekends here (even though, as a general rule, I try to work every night including weekends), so I feel like I should finally get them all mashed together to share to people.

One of my first adventures was discovering that my backpack, which had been stashed in my closet, had developed a delightful patina of mold growth. It's not the first time I've discovered that one of my things has gotten moldy, so I guess it's just one of the things to get used to living in the jungle.

My first real adventure (this was two Saturdays ago) was a trip to the local zoo, Summit, with my roommate and her labmate. The zoo is a small affair with a variety of local animals housed in enclosures scattered around a small park. Here's some of the highlights. Unfortunately, all the animals were behind chain link, so there's blurry fence patterns in most of the images, but oh well.

A blue-headed parrot. His plumage was a little scruffy, but the colors were still beautiful!

A keel-billed toucan, equally colorful and beautiful:

The zoo's new harpy eagle, interrupted in the middle of chowing on a dead rabbit. It's the national bird of Panama and its recent unveiling made quite the splash.

Collared peccaries, something I'm a little surprised I haven't seen in the wild yet.

A playful female jaguar. Despite her moderately small enclosure and relative lack of shade, she seemed remarkably content in her environment. Actually, it seemed like all the animals were surprisingly content in their pens, even though some of the large cats' seemed to me to be a little too small and too spartan for them.

Some equally playful puma cubs:

A lovely and yes, playful, female ocelot. She excitedly stalked a butterfly while we were watching her, leading to allegations that the felines at the zoo might all just be on catnip.

A mono araña (spider monkey). I love their thumbless hands and the wistful looks they get on their faces.

One of the zoo's three Baird's tapirs, illustrating the walk-up nature of the enclosures. Most of them didn't have anything to prevent visitors from sidling right up to the fence and sticking hands through to the animals except a sign saying, in English and Spanish, "Do not hit or scream to the animals."

After the zoo, we went to see one of the Panama Canal's three sets of locks, Miraflores. The canal has three sets of locks, total, two on the Pacific side and one on the Atlantic, and Miraflores is by far the one built up into the biggest tourist attraction. The lock complex contains a museum, viewing decks, and a 3D movie theatre which plays the most ridiculously overdone ten-minute movie ever.

The canal is fascinating for a number of reasons, but one of the things that really stood out to me was the way its relationship to global and Panamanian economic development has changed over the years. When the Americans ran the canal, they managed it without commercial interests. On December 31, 1999, control of the canal passed to Panama, and things changed. The canal museum unabashedly discusses and awkwardly tries to tout the extensive financial benefits Panama receives as a result of the canal's new management strategy. It's true, too, that the canal contributes a huge percentage to Panama's GDP--the figure 40% rattles around my head, but looking again for its source on the internet, the closest I could come was the assertion that the "services sector" (which includes a variety of things in addition to the canal) makes up between 70 and 80% of the GDP (Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook).

The commercialized system relies on a series of increasing tolls based on ship size and cargo capacity. (It also occasionally auctions off first passage slots after a closure for repairs and such, for an order of magnitude over their standard price.) Those long rectangular cargo containers you always see are charged by the unit--$72 if they're empty and $86 (or $84, I forget exactly) if they're full. For the largest size of ship, called "Panamax" (which fits through the locks with a 2 ft leeway on either side), these fees generally add up to around $300,000 to $400,000, and it needs to be wired to the Panama Canal bank two days in advance of passage. It seems like a huge overhead, but when you think of how many items you can stuff into one of those containers, I suppose that the extra cost evens out. Where the canal is really expensive is with small passenger ships, which are charged by length. Boats under 50 ft (the smallest class) receive a minimum charge of $1300. Again, it seems like a huge amount for a small passenger ship, but then again, if you can afford a yacht trip around the world... I suppose I don't have the best perspective on this.

Nevertheless, it's clear that the canal is making a killing off everything it ships through--so much so that it's often even cheaper for large ships to unload their cargo containers onto trains and have them shipped that way across Panama, then reload them on the other side and just pay for the ship itself. Wow. And to enhance the killing that they're making, Panama has started an immense project, supposed to be complete next year, to add a third lane of locks to their current two-lane system. The important bit is that these new locks will be huge--70 feet wider than the current ones--and able to accommodate a class of ship capable of carrying three times as many containers (up to 12,000 vs the current 4500).

Anyway, here's some photos from the excursion.

The locks themselves, full:

They're 110 feet across and the doors are as deep as a seven-story building. They also weigh 690 tons each but operate with 40 hp motors.

We arrived at a great time, because we got to see one of the Panamax-class ships go through. Here's the Maersk Batam, lead and followed by a fleet of six silver mule carts which help keep the ship on course through the locks. (As I mentioned, it has 2 ft of space on either side of its hull.) Due to the width restrictions, Panama is the only canal in the world that doesn't let people drive their own boats. Instead, the captain relinquishes control to one of the canal's specially trained captains, who navigate it through for them.

It takes eight minutes for one set of locks to drain to the next level of water, and the mechanism is entirely gravity based. Apparently, both the filling and draining of the locks are somehow accomplished via gravity, but I'm not enough of an engineer to figure out how...

Once the water level is lowered, the doors slowly open to allow the ship to pass.

Back view of the Maersk Batam. In the foreground, you can just see the bump in the canal walls from the higher canal level to the lower canal level. On it, the mules move along their tracks at a 45 degree angle.

Here's an interesting find from the museum--an old dredger. If you can't see it well in the photo, it has a loop of buckets that pass through a hole under the hull, scoop up canal bottom material, and then dump it into (I assume) a holding compartment in the belly of the ship. Weird. It never ceases to amaze me that stuff like this actually worked.

Nowadays, most of the dredging is suction-based, but I did find this other gem:

Its like a long flat boat with a cat backhoe attached to one end... How does this thing not just tip over in the water?

In addition to my adventures close to Panama City, I've also headed to the other side of the country (a mere two hours away by bus) to check out the shopping at Colón's Zona Libre, the second-largest free trade zone in the world, after Hong Kong. I was hoping to get a pair of nice headphones cheap, but surprisingly enough (to me, anyway), the selection was fairly poor and only included the newest models. It's a good place to go if you want to get stuff like perfume, jewelry, and the newest smartphones for cheap, basically an oversized and  grungy version of any international airport's duty free store, plus stuff like clothing. It wasn't much to look at and I was a bit worried about reports of really high crime in the area, so I didn't take any photos.

I did have an interesting experience there, though. On the bus over, I picked up a tour guide, a guy who worked as a middle man supplying retailers with stuff he gets from the wholesalers in the Zone. While we were there, he picked up a case of watch batteries. I asked how the prices increased as the thing changed hands and he told me that he paid $20 for the case of 100 batteries and would sell it for $35 to a retailer, who would then sell the individual batteries for $2-3 each. So a $20 case of batteries ends up being worth $200-$300. Not bad. Surprisingly, one of the other things he moves around, cheap watches, only see a mark-up of a few dollars, from $8 wholesale to $9-$12 retail.

And finally, here's the most recent animal photo round-up.

Everybody's darling, the red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas):

Dendropsophus ebraccatus, the hourglass tree frog:

Possums, also known as chucha. They're very common here and are the same species as in the US. This one was missing part of its tail.

And here's a baby caiman. These are fairly easy to find, both in their baby and adult forms, and crocodiles aren't too uncommon either, although I have yet to get a decent photo of one of those.