We
have been at La Selva Biological Station for the past few weeks. La Selva is
the most productive biological station in the tropics, and it often feels like
an amusement park for researchers. We had the opportunity to work in this
research amusement park conducting our own project. We wanted to investigate
how warming temperatures might affect strawberry poison dart frogs. To do this
we walked around the forest collecting frogs. After we caught dozens of them we
brought them back to lab to see if they had a temperature preference and to
test their jumping performance at different temperatures. It was only after we
had finished our project and written our papers that it really hit me—I had
just spent the past week catching poison dart frogs with my bare hands. This
was something that I would never have thought to do before I began this
program.
I
remember back to January being completely freaked out by our lecture on
Dangerous and Annoying Creatures of the Tropics. The week following that
lecture I would wake up in the middle of the night terrified that there might
be a Chagas bug crawling on me. Chagas bugs are in the family Reduviidae, and
also known as kissing bugs or assassin bugs. These bugs suck your face while
you are sleeping and then defecate on your face. Their poop contains a
protozoan, and if this protozoan gets into the open bite then you become
infected with Chagas disease, a potentially life-threatening disease. Now I am
proud to say that I can sleep through the night, and when I see Chagas bugs I
think, “Oh that would be an easy insect to identify. Let me catch it!” I have
completely gotten over any fears of outdoor creatures I may have had before
this program.
I
now see the forest in a completely different way. Remembering back to our first
field notebook, I was so bored that I had to stand in one spot for 45 minutes.
Looking back at what I had written I realized that I had missed so much—I saw
“plants with leaves”, an ant, and a trail. Now when I look at the forest I see
so much more—palms in the understory with pinnately compound leaves, large Ficus trees, Oophaga pumilio frogs hopping into bromeliads, Atta ants carrying pieces of leaves many times their size, and I
could go on for hours. I have learned to look deeper and better appreciate my
surroundings.
This
semester has taught me so much and changed how I see the world. I would gladly
suffer a million freezing Monteverde showers to do it all again.
Andriana
Miljanic
Emory University