Home Sweet Gamboa

Well, I promised a fuller description of my job and life in Panama, so here goes:

The project I'm working with is one that's been around for like thirty years or something like that, so it's pretty well established and has seen a lot of interns come through over the decades. Our PI, Mike Ryan, is really famous in the world of animal behavior for this extended work, but this summer he's working on scanning various populations in Panama and Costa Rica for the presence of chytrid fungus, so we don't actually see him that much.

The job they have set aside for interns is fairly simple: every night we go out and collect pairs of mating frogs, then bring them back the the lab and run them in various tests. Collection involves driving around the back roads of Gamboa to various sites around 7:45 PM, then scanning the banks of puddles and small streams for amplexed pairs. Each one gets plopped in a tupperware for the trip back to the lab, then stuck in a cooler until they're tested. This is the fun part of the night, since it's when we're out and can see animals and stuff. Unfortunately, frogs breed in the same places mosquitoes do, so some of our sites have them really bad. They're also gigantic and at times my headlight just shows a flood of giant bugs around me in a swarm.

The cooler is mainly for sound-reduction; the testing room itself is kept around 27 degrees Celcius, which is outside temperature (pretty warm) and designed to keep the frogs as comfy as possible. Tests involve playing recorded frog calls and synthesized calls from speakers in various locations around a soundproof chamber and seeing which ones the females of the pair will go to after being separated from their males. Which ones they choose show various aspects of their understanding of the calls, what makes the calls attractive, how they choose mates, etc. The experiments are really quite clever and, after 35 years or so, have been refined to ask very finely detailed questions. After the phonotaxis experiments in the chamber are completed, we toe-clip all the tested females and take them back to the places we found them, wash all the tupperwares out, and usually end around 5-6 AM.

Recently, the moon has been very bright at night so there have been fewer frogs out and the number we've been testing has been lower. We also spent a few days constructing soundproof boxes for some different experiments, which also involved working during the day for a change. That project is still technically being finished up and yesterday morning we arrived at the lab to discover that it was barricaded by a swarm of wasps which had been attracted to the fumes of some painter/primer being used on the doors to the boxes. Well, I guess that's jungle life for you!

Another aspect of jungle life is seeing a huge variety of animal life, even right in our backyard. Twice now while I've been in the kitchen I've seen troops of Geoffrey's Tamarins bounding through the trees behind our house. This is one of them:

Although there's only maybe six or seven primate species which can be found around Gamboa, they often show up in interesting places, such as around the necks of ladies in the small grocery store here. Turns out she works for the local zoo and nurtures orphaned animal babies, like this baby spider monkey, who was taken in after her mother was shot for bushmeat.

The other night while we were out collecting frogs, we spotted this tamandua, or lesser anteater, climbing a small tree by the side of the road. (Unfortunately, most of my night photographs are pretty bad, especially since they're all taken with my small camera and generally with only the light of my headlamp for illumination.)

There's also a ridiculous variety of bird life here, including everything from the black-bellied whistling duck...

...to the blue-crowned motmot. See how its tail looks like it has a little circle attached to the normal part of the tail? Apparently, they sculpt their own tail by pulling out little bits along the length to give it that special appearance.

The same amount of variety can be found with insects. A lot of them are really interesting, like this large golden beetle I stumbled across outside of the lab the other night. It was maybe half the size of my hand.

A few days later I saw a grub that was itself maybe three inches long and will probably turn into something very much like that beetle.

Here's something I always wanted to see: a caecilian! Like frogs and salamanders, it's an amphibian, but it mostly lives underground or in leaf litter and is generally only above ground when it rains enough to saturate the soil. One of my roommates found this one dead on the sidewalk not too far from the house, which was pretty lucky.

I'll leave you with one more terrible night photograph, this one of a nine-banded armadillo. I've seen them a couple of times now, but this one was conveniently snuffling right outside of the lab.

There are also a huge number of species that I haven't gotten photos of, including some really awesome ones. I generally leave my camera in the truck while we're out collecting because it gets in the way of my working, but it means that I am only able to photograph things like the tamandua, which stick around long enough for me to run back to the car and retrieve it. Last night was a great wildlife night and I saw both a paca, which is a spotted rodent about a foot high, and a Panamanian night-monkey, which is a really rare find. I got a great view of both, but especially the night-monkey, which was just hopping through some low trees, so it's definitely a shame I didn't have the camera on me, but it was great just to see them nonetheless. Among the other things I've not gotten photos of are a capybara, an opossum, a baby iguana, red-eyed tree frogs, a multitude of other frogs, some snakes, most of the area's birds, bats, numerous gigantic water spiders that I've had to wade around while searching for frogs, the leafcutter ants which form a virtual carpet in some places, and no doubt a variety of others that I've forgotten. There are also a number of interesting things that I've heard but not seen, like an owl and a troop of howler monkeys. Hopefully I'll continue to get more photos to put up here, though!

For now, here are some shots of my current house:

Here's my bedroom, which I share with a gal working on endophytic fungi. My bed's on the left:

Living room:

Kitchen:

The light makes it look greenish, but that's just a reflection of all the foliage outside. I also should definitely have taken a photo of the outside of the house, so you could see the backyard and cement stilts that the house is built on to deter termites. All the buildings here are built in a very particular style... American colonial plus an extra story of elevation. I don't know how effective the elevation is at reducing termites (our lab building, for example, is getting fumigated for them on Tuesday), but they certainly aren't effective at keeping out ants, which swarm over ever surface in our poor kitchen and are starting on the bathroom. They're harmless, though, and ended up as just another extra ingredient in my last box of cereal, since I didn't do a very good job of keeping them out of it. It's just part of living here, along with making spaghetti in a metal coffee pot and slicing cheese with a vegetable peeler. Honestly, our half rough-shod, half American life is really quite charming, though, and I'm enjoying life in the jungle. More later!