Hand reads...

As I write this, the La Selva experience is far away, mentally and geographically. I obsess over Garage Band, and my new found power (not ability, metal is all about power) to be done with artistic collaboration and create Plasmodium, a solo band composed of four bass guitars. My notebook is full of bass tabs. I have finally resolved to learn to play Black Sabbath's Iron Man. I am writing some fantasy. My wife and I make hot chocolate. I have rediscovered tea. I must remember that I lecture in a few moments. My world is frozen, urban, and dormant. This is not bad, just very far away.

The blurry frog is Dendrobates pumilo. They are very abundant at La Selva. My guide the first day described them as "happy" because it was raining so consistently, and they were mating.

The blurry flower is a banana plant, volunteer, a pest in Costa Rica. The Trigona bees are a very common species, whatever they are, and are robbing it of nectar. This species never really reproduces sexually, as far as I know, so this is a case of bees robbing a structure which is superfluous to the plant itself.

The bridge crosses the Rio Puerto Viejo, and divides the two halves of the La Selva compound. To get to the rainforest from lunch, or from where most people sleep, a person crosses it. It wobbles magnificently as foot traffic passes.

Super Liquorea Cisneros is along the highway to San Jose. A lot of Costa Rica looks just like that...logged, tropical, and with a strange aesthetic that has its own internal logic.

Thursday.
Lycaenidae. A messy howler monkey. A cricket nursing its brood. (I looked this one up, the genus was Anurogryllus, one of the few crickets that provides parental care. This genus is widely distributed in the Caribbean and Central America...the particular species was one of the flightless ones. It nursed a very large brood of nymphs under a rock, one of the only rocks I turned over while I was there). A great tinamou, the bees are attempting to rebuild their nest.

I was very excited about the discovery of a Trigona colony at Cuerva, the curve in the path to my cabin. Workers of a second species, black, possibly a halictid and possibly another Trigona, were entering and exiting all morning, unmolested. It looked like a case of commensalism. I shared my ideas with the staff here, prematurely. In the afternoon, guards of the more common, yellow species, were giving the intruders hell. Much repair was being done in and about the entrance tube. Still, it is a fine nest, inside a Naustitermes colony, and the process of sharing my completely erroneous idea brought me back to the gazebo in the botanical garden. I don't know how I missed it earlier, but nest boxes hang beneath its roof, three of the four are full of stingless bees. I stayed for a while, watching a cloud of workers of the common, small, species hover aloft in the sun as foragers returned from pollen runs. There was as second species, black, larger, building no nest-entrance tubes, and more sullen. Their guards sat motionless...all business. It had an interesting pronotal shield. I have no idea as to the identity of these two species, or the large banana-raider, or the medium-sized brown species in the fallen nest. I am not collecting specimens on this trip. They might not all be Trigona, even.

I saw my first snake this morning, after Lil'Hateful chastized me by email about being careless about walking about in the dark. It was small, brown, immature, probably about 14 inches long, and might have been elaphid. It looked like a dark brown garter snake. Could have been anything though, even a colubrid.

An impressive basilisk. Green Honeycreepers. Clay colored robin, woordcreepers, orioles, parasitoids. Going to miss this place.

Friday-12/21

Amegillia foragers at mid-tree stratum in morning, nests in banks, keystone pollinator, Trypoxylon present, another story here, is politum or leucotarsae (this species was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. The story is that politum, and the nests looked like politum nests, is not supposed to occur there. It was not T. monteverdeii, as far as I could tell, which is supposed to occur there). Was sad earlier, woke for birds.

Hand reads
Wren, white tail, woodpecker, mantis, striped anole, doves, unafraid bird (a black headed trogon), striped wren, a halictid, ground doves, other hummingbird, varigated squirrel, kingfisher, parrots, etc.