Wildlife in Bocas del Toro, Panama

By Genevieve Valladao

           My favorite thing about the Tropical Biology OTS program that I’m currently in Costa Rica is the diversity of habitats that we get to see and learn about. I’ve visited a cloud forest, a páramo, a tropical dry forest, a premontane forest, and have even spent a few weeks in the concrete jungle of San José. However, up until last week, I had yet to see the Caribbean coast of Central America. Lucky for me, however, my course includes a marine unit that visits Bocas del Toro, an island archipelago off the Caribbean coast of Panama.

            A favorite way to kill time on my program is to watch the Planet Earth episode of the habitat we are visiting before we visit it. So naturally, the night before we headed to Panama we watched Planet Earth - Islands. The episode begins with a pygmy sloth searching for a mate amongst a mangrove forest. I was already excited for my trip to see the ocean creatures but when we looked up the location of the sloth scene and found it was Bocas del Toro, I realized that I would be seeing a lot more than just marine wildlife over the next week.

            The trip to Isla Colón, the island that we would stay on, started with a long bus ride from Costa Rica across the Panama border and culminated with a 45 minute boat ride out to the island. The last stretch of the boat ride went through a natural canal formed in a mangrove forest just like the one we had seen in Planet Earth. As soon as we got to the field station, the presence of one creature was immediately evident - frogs. The calls of the diurnal poison frog seemed to be welcoming us to Panama. Oophaga pumilio, also known as strawberry poison frogs, are abundant across the Caribbean coast of Central America. They contain alkaloids that are toxic to many predators and are brightly colored to warn of their toxicity. Many different color variations of the species exist and the frogs look different on each island of Bocas del Toro. On Isla Colón, the poison frogs are yellow and green with black spots.

            Poison frogs weren’t the only creature that vocally alerted us that they were there. My first morning on Isla Colón I was woken up before my alarm clock by another call that I have become familiar with over the past two months – that of the black-mantled howler monkeys. I would continue to be woken up by the howlers for the rest of my time at the research station, but the howler monkeys weren’t the only arboreal animals we got to see. One day the station director interrupted us at lunch to let us know that a three-toed sloth had found its way to the grounds of the station. The sloth was crawling slowly across the grass when we approached it to take pictures and it responded by taking up the defensive position that sloths use to try and scare of predators - sitting back and raising its arms in the air. It sat starting at us with its arms up for fifteen minutes.

            Although the terrestrial wildlife that during my week in Panama was amazing, it’s excellence was rivaled by that of the marine life we encountered. The faculty-led research project that we worked on in Bocas del Toro studied fish, so we spent most of our time in the water. From the moment we entered the ocean, we saw amazing creatures. I swam past cushion sea stars and jellyfish my first morning in Panama as I took my swim test. Each day we would go out to work on our projects, I would see something I had never seen before. During our first afternoon of data collection, I saw a burrfish perfectly camouflaged to the seafloor. Minutes later I saw what I thought was another burrfish, until I swam at it to take a video and it opened its small pectoral fins into beautiful bright blue wings – it was a Flying Gurnard. I saw many stingrays throughout my week in Panama, including one with a body over a meter long – a Caribbean Whiptail. But my favorite ocean encounter came on my last day in Bocas del Toro, when I found a group of Caribbean Reef Squid. There were about ten of them, and they lined up in perfect formation as I swam toward them. When I got too close for their liking, they began to swim away completely in sync. Throughout the rest of my day in the water, I would unexpectedly come upon the group of squid and would follow them around to watch how they would move together symmetrically through the water.

            I have seen amazing wildlife at every location that I have visited during my OTS program. As I begin my time at the last field station of my trip, I know it will be hard for it to beat the wildlife of Bocas del Toro. However, I have heard they have lots of monkeys and felines!