Saving Grace: Panama

“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

~ Luke 19:40

Ok time to finish up the recount of field trip number 2 so that I can move on to more recent adventures. And since I am currently in a procrastination mood and relatively on top of my work, I am choosing to blog. It is a blustery morning, a little misty, unusual for a morning in the cloud forest, but if I close my eyes and lift my face to the sun I can almost pretend like it is fall and that I am actually closer to home than the equator.

Anyway, the final week of our field trip we spent in Bocas del Toro, Panama. This is a very popular snorkeling site, and also a great place to just hang out on the beach! The water was so incredibly warm and clear, and class consisted of beach walks and snorkeling expeditions at 5 or 6 different reefs. Here are some pictures of the adventure!

Directions are always a good thing

The beach!

This picture reminds me of fall,
though the scorching sun did not!

Carludovica palmata

The above plant is in the Cyclanthaceae family. Look familiar to anyone? The new shoots (in the foreground of the picture) are the “palms” used around the world for Palm Sunday! It’s a little funny because this is not actually a palm (palms are in the Arecaceae family), but I still thought it was really cool to see this plant in the wild after all those years of waving it in church!

After our typical species walk we all got on a boat and took to the sea to observe a bird rookery. We found lots of tropical birds! But I was fooling myself to think that I could look through binoculars on a boat in the ocean and not get sick… I resolved to just look with my eyes, and we were still close enough that I don’t think I missed too much.

Brown Pelican

Brown Booby with a chick

Magnificent Frigatebird

Red-billed Tropicbird

Me and Sarah on the boat!

The following day was Marine Diversity Day and consisted of snorkeling pretty much the whole day. This was our one cloudy/rainy day, which made some of the boat rides a little chilly, but probably saved us all a bit of sunburn. My favorite part of snorkeling was finding five squid! They are very social animals, and I chased them around for a good ten minutes. They could cue off one another, and moved in a line or strange formation almost all the time. Here are some cool pictures I was able to get with my underwater camera!

Echinoderm

Jellyfish!

Sea cucumber

Rhizophera mangle above the water

Rhizophera mangle below the water

Ctenophore (they change colors!)

The boat

Giant sea urchin

Coral!

Our stop for lunch
You could jump right off the deck into the water!

The water is so clear...

Hemidactylus frenatus

Fish!

Nurse shark

Our final day in Panama we went into town to explore a little and spend some more time on the beach. It was probably the most touristy area we have been too, which was kind of nice as more people spoke English. One they way back from town we stopped at a bat cave. The first cave we went to have hundreds of bats! The second cave had fewer bats, but was more of an adventure caving experience. We were wading in water sometimes almost to my hips, and in the first 10 feet past the entrance we found a very nice sized whip scorpion… At that point I was a little freaked out, and was glad we didn’t see the wolf spiders (they are huge!) till we were exiting. We also found some vampire bat guano, as well as some sort of blind snake in the farthest corners of the cave.