We’ve been here In Costa Rica for almost six
weeks now. In that time we’ve been to three wildly different field stations,
gone on countless walks through the forest and surrounding areas, and had
classes on everything form the banana industry to many of the families of
Coleoptera (beetles). Yet these widely varying topics remain relevant and
applicable to where we are because they’re about these very places. The history
happened on these soils (we even went to a nearby banana plantation to hear
their side of the story and see the processes happen in real time) and the Scarabidae
beetles can be found even in our classrooms. Learning in the context of where
you are has been an eye-opening experience.
There’s something about learning how
to identify a palm tree not by pictures and diagrams but by actually looking at
a palm tree, a palm frond, by holding the (for some) binately compound leaf in
your hands, turning it around to see every angle. There’s something about
learning what a wasp in the Ichneumonidae family looks like not because someone
told you but because you found a wasp and matched its distinctively shaped
thorax and white-striped antennae with the descriptions and dichotomous key in
the lab. There is something about holding what you’re studying in your hand,
examining it, and trying to understand it in its tiniest details as well as
within its broader contexts.
By familiarizing ourselves with the
goings on around us, we are finding reasons to connect to the world (natural and
man-made) on a deeper level. For example, every schoolchild in the United
States has learned about deforestation. They can recite for you the rate at
which it is happening, the world’s biggest culprits, and the negative consequences
it holds. That is not the same as stepping foot in the very forests that once
were—and sometimes still are—at risk. It
is not the same as experiencing the unique biodiversity that is in danger or
seeing a farmer rebuilding the ecosystem around him.
Early in September while at Las
Cruces, we learned about an unusual pattern of activity of sloths: they only
defecate once a week. Every seven days, give or take, they slowly descend from
the treetops to the forest floor to take care of business. To make things even
more intriguing, there are species of moths that live exclusively in the fur of
sloths who depend on this habit to complete their life cycle: when the sloth
defecates, they lay their eggs in the dung. Organisms and their cycles are
dependent on this famously slow and lazy creature that can’t even bring itself
to defecate more than once a week. As if this hadn’t amazed me enough, one
night some classmates and I were walking back from the Academic Center of La
Selva back to our dorms when we passed by a mother sloth and her baby on the
bridge. This time they weren’t climbing on the top of the bridge cables like we
had seen before, they were climbing on the handrail—one foot away from us.
Seeing this living, breathing creature so close, caring for her baby perched on
her tummy was entirely different from learning about them in the classroom.
Watching her hold tight with one arm while slowly swinging the other, looking
for more branches to cling to and usually ending up finding the same metal rod
to hold onto as before stirred an incredible amount of sympathy from within me.
She wasn’t just a sloth but also a mother and also a home. I found myself
wondering about the moths we had learned about: Were they there? Right in this
moment, in her fur? Was she returning from defecating and unintentionally
bringing new life into the world in the form of tiny moth eggs? How long would
it take her to get back to a comfortable tree branch? Hands on learning is
truly the best way to spark curiosity.
Sofi Lopez
Bowdoin College
Hi, Sofi: Wonderful blog. I too have experienced that connection when seeing wild animals intersect our paths, and wonder myself many times abut their lives, how long do they live, what secrets do they hold. How do they find each other and mate? How do they protect themselves from predators? How are they born and how do they die? The more I look, the more questions I get, and that is the beauty of living and working here.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I enjoyed reading them.
Carlos