Tortuguero

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

            ~ Luke 12:34

Our final field trip stop in Costa Rica was Tortuguero National Park.  The park is known mostly for the green sea turtles that visit the beaches to nest.  To get there, we had to take a bus for a few hours, and then a boat for about an hour, and finally we arrived at the beach!

Del Monte banana plantation

On a boat!

We had fun on the boat

Tortuguero National Park!

Sarah and Heather smiling in the sun

I like this place...

From the porch of our hotel

And of course the ocean!

I think this was my first time going in the Caribbean Sea.  The water was so warm it almost wasn’t refreshing, which was quite a change for the girl from Alaska.  The hotel welcomed us with fresh juice, and we spent the evening walking the beach and playing in the water before our lecture that evening.

One day while we were there we went on a canoe tour of the rivers in the area.  I enjoyed paddling around and looking at birds, monkeys, herps, and sloths!  Floating seeds in the water made great skipping stones.  I would skip one, and then pick it right back up and do it again when we paddled by where it landed!  Here are some pictures from our adventure.

The bird canoe

The party canoe

Caiman crocodilus

Choloepus hoffmanni!!!

The highlight of Tortuguero was most definitely the sea turtles.  We visited the Sea Turtle Conservancy to learn about conservation and research of sea turtles, and also went on an early morning beach stroll (4:00 am) in the hopes of seeing laying turtles or a nest hatching.  Tortuguero is an important breeding ground for green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas).  The creation of the National Park turned the economy from one based on turtle hunting, to one based on ecotourism.  The turtles are protected, and the area earns income through turtle walks and the visitors that come to see the turtles.  Sea turtles spend 1% of their life on land, and yet that is where almost all of the research efforts take place, therefore very little is known about the actual life history of these amazing animals.  Here are some fun facts that I do know about turtles.

1) They can live to be over 100 years old.

2) They have temperature dependent sex determination.  If the nest temperature averages below 29 degrees Celsius, then males will develop, but if it is above 32 degrees Celsius, then females will develop.  Temperatures in the middle yield a more even sex ratio.

3) To find sea turtles laying eggs, you walk along the beach until you find tracks that are heading up towards the vegetation, and are not accompanied by another set of tracks returning to the sea.  On our walk, we passed by 49 pairs of tracks (all from that night) before we came to a lone track heading up to where we found a turtle finishing to lay and bury her eggs.  So cool!  The morning sunrise was beautiful, and on our walk back we found an even better surprise!

Here are some pictures of our sea turtle adventures.

The Sea Turtle Conservancy

All the places sea turtles from Tortuguero go

Chelonia mydas laying eggs!

Making her way back to the ocean

The beach

The ocean

Sea turtle tracks

Baby turtles hatching!

Tirimbina

“He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God”

            ~Psalm 40:3

We stayed at Tirimbina for a couple days.  The highlights were a couple hikes thorough the forest, swimming in a river, and eating chocolate (the fruit!).  Here are some pictures from the trip.

Conical bat tent - bats cut specific leaves to
make a tent that they use for shelter

Walking in the woods.  Richard, our resident bat expert,
is up in the front explaining the different
types of tents that bats make

Giant caterpillar (Sphingid moth)

Sketchy green bridge we had to cross like four times

Above the river that we floated in a jumped off trees into

Heather enjoying my camera

Ectophylla alba (in a boat tent in Heliconia)

Theobroma cacao

Pictured above is a chocolate tree.  The green pods grow directly on the trunk of the tree, which is known as cauliformy.  They turn bright orange as they ripen.  When cut open they reveal hard seeds covered in white, fleshy fruit.  To make chocolate, these seeds are fermented and roasted to make cacao, and then mixed with lots of sugar and milk and other things to form the chocolate that we all love.  The fruit around the seeds is very tasty as well!  And Heather and I collected a couple to potentially make into chocolate, but really just to eat and enjoy.

The basic chocolate making process

Heather with our chocolate fruit

It's kinds goopy

La Selva

“Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?  Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God”
               ~Psalm 42:11

It’s been awhile… Lots of class and homework and reports and studying and what not.  Home-stay is getting better, communication is still a little interesting, but I think I’m beginning to understand a little bit more.  Anyway, here is more about our field trip!

We spent one day at La Selva, a biological reserve where lots of people come to do research, study, and walk around in the rainforest.  We were there for option number 3, and had a great time on our explore the rainforest walks.  The Organization for Tropical Studies is based there, and there was a group similar to ours studying abroad through that program.  It was fun to mingle with some other English speakers for a little while, though their cafeteria food was not superior to ours.  Here are some fun pictures from the day!

Iguana iguana

On a bridge!

Mot-mot!

Here are two fun animals, the strawberry poison dart frog and the bullet ant.  The strawberry dart frogs (Oophaga pulmilio) are pretty sweet.  They are not super toxic here, so you can pick them up as long as you wash your hands afterwards.  Fun fact:  The females carry the tadpoles to individual water pools or bromeliad tanks once they hatch, and she lays unfertilized eggs in the water for food for the baby tadpoles!   Bullet ants (Paraponera clavata) are moderately are terrifying.  The ants are about an inch long and apparently have one of the most painful stings in the animal world, more painful than that of the tarantula hawk wasp (ahhh those do not sound fun either).  Thankfully I cannot attest to that, but some Wikipedia descriptions include “waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours.”  They have been used in initiation rites in Brazilian tribes where hundreds of ants are woven together in a glove with stingers facing inward.  Boys place their hands in the glove for 10 minutes, and have become temporarily paralyzed by the venom and often shake uncontrollably for days.  The venom is thought to have evolved to ward of predators, but it is probably a little over-kill…

Oophaga pumilio

Paraponera clavata

Some other pictures of interesting plants/animals/things to see…

Bauhinia

Tayassu tajacu

Tarzan!

As usual when exploring new places in Costa Rica, we went on a night hike.  The highlight of this hike was a smoky mountain jungle frog (Leptodactylus savagei).  These frogs have a distress call that sounds like baby caimans.  It is thought that the sound is to attract the mother caiman and scare off the potential predators.   We also found a tree frog that I got to hold!

Monch with Leptodactylus savagei

Agalychnis callidryas

By far my favorite part of the day, I saw my first sloth!  It was so cute, just a little fuzz ball asleep up in the tree.  My trip to Costa Rica is now complete; ok I can go home now.

Choloepus hoffmanni

Here is final fun story for the day.  We came upon golden orb spider (actually we found quite a bit of those…).  Their nests have a golden hue to them, which is where they get their name.  The female is pictured below, and she is huge!  The males are quite small and almost parasitic in a sense as they don’t build their own webs and instead rely entirely on the females for food.  They have to be careful though, as they could end up as food if they get in the female’s way.  The males feed and mate while the female is preoccupied with eating to ensure that they don’t become dinner.  These spiders are interesting because, unlike most spiders, they bite their prey before wrapping it in silk (most spiders wrap then bite).  This spider is therefore more tentative, as she doesn’t want to accidentally become prey of whatever is caught in her net.  So to demonstrate (after all this is an experiential learning program), we threw little bugs into the net watch the spider in action.  First we found an ant, but she wasn’t too interested in that one (few animals are), then we threw in a leafhopper, but it was too big for her liking.  Finally we found a cricket and that seemed to do the trick!

Nephila clavipes (and some other bugs)